At Hell's Gate (eBook)

Chapter 1: The Seeds of War

Imagine for a moment that you are standing outside in the rain. What do you typically think and feel as rain falls around you?

For me, every time it rains I walk through war. For two rainy seasons I experienced very heavy fighting. During the monsoons in Vietnam, the tremendous volume of water leaves everything wet and muddy. Now when it rains, I am still walking through fields of young men screaming and dying. I still see tree lines disintegrating from napalm. I still hear seventeen-year-old boys crying for their mothers, fathers, and girlfriends. Only after reexperiencing all of that can I come to the awareness that right now, it's just raining.

For lack of a better word, let's call these events flashbacks. They are a reliving of experiences that I have not yet come to terms with. I could be in a grocery store, reaching up to take a can of vegetables off the shelf, when I'm suddenly overwhelmed by fear because I think that the can might be booby-trapped. Rationally I know that this isn't true, but for one year, my tour of duty in Vietnam, I lived in an environment where this was a realistic fear—,and to this day I am unable to process that wartime experience.

But this is not just my story. This happens every day all over the world. Every day there are people reliving war—, reliving their own experiences of violence, calamity, childhood trauma.

Before we can get to a place of peace, we have to touch our suffering—,embrace it and hold it. This is something I have been learning in recent years. But for many years before that, all I learned was how to make war.

A conditioning to violence
For my first seventeen years almost all my experiences watered the seeds of violence in me. War was everywhere. I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania. My father, like most of the men in my town, had served in World War II. When that generation talked about war, they didn't speak truthfully. Unable to touch the deep and profound wounds that war had left inside them, they talked about war like a great adventure.

So when I turned seventeen and my father suggested that I go into the military, I didn't question him. I also didn't know much about politics, it wasn't part of my life. Now I understand how important it is to know what is going on in the world. Though no long-term solutions to our world's problems are achieved through political ideologies, I am impacted by them, as is each of us, and a dear price is paid because of this kind of ignorance.

Today I understand that my father and the men and women of his generation were filled with illusions and denial about how deeply they were affected by their military service and war experiences. Having come home as the victors, they were thrust into a role: They became the protectors of our culture's denial about the profound and far-reaching impact of war—,not just on those who fought, but on all of us. This cultural myth obliged my father's generation not to talk openly or directly about the reality of the individual war experience, and in a sense, for many of them, their inner lives had to be abandoned. Speaking truthfully wasn't encouraged in them or in me. But something unusual happened during and after the war in Vietnam: Many of us could no longer deny reality.

I volunteered to go to Vietnam because I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't understand the nature of war or the nature of violence. Three days after I was in-country I began to understand. It was insane. It's difficult to describe what I saw. I could and can still taste and smell it and see the emptiness...