FORT HOOD
The war never stops trying to kill you.
Those words fell out of my head a while back, and they still haunt me. Partly because I know that the bell tolls for me, but also because I know that the bell tolls for the thousands of men, women and children who have had their lives affected by the various wars we have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Case in point: the horror that unfolded in a waiting room at Fort Hood, Texas. An Army psychiatrist drove himself crazy worrying about whether his upcoming service in Afghanistan would drive him crazy. At some point he received his marching orders from central command and Fort Hood became the latest addition to the dolorous roll call of places forever marked by tragedy.
Some of the victims were soldiers who had been deployed and were back home between shifts. In a very real sense, the war was waiting for them when they came home and took another shot at them.
That's what I’m saying here. The war never stops trying to kill you. It insinuates itself into the neural networks of everyone who partakes of it, a parasitical infestation as deadly as malaria.
Beyond that, the war creates its own energy field that amps up everything inside it. You can't know what I am saying unless you have been there. Sufiice it to say the war is the ultimate adrenaline rush, a rush you ride 24/7 from Day One until Day Over. That's not something you just walk away from.
One last thing. I don't for one minute believe that this had anything to do with terrorism, at least not in the conventional sense. I think that he externalized the beast in the archetype he knew we would most easily relate to, the Arab suicide bomber. But I think that was his trip, his dying declaration.
November 7, 2009
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