Tuesday, January 29, 2013

An Attempt At Understanding Why So Many Veterans Commit Suicide: From THE YELLOW BIRDS: Kevin Powers


From THE YELLOW BIRDS: KEVIN POWERS (PP. 143-47)



On returning to his home town after a year of the Iraqi War:

“Small lines wound their way up and down the surface of the stump on which I sat.  They were intricate and gouged out or termited into a pattern that struck me as oddly orderly.  Luke (a high school buddy) and the rest of the boys and girls still splashed in the water, taking turns diving from the broad gray rocks into the draft of the current that swept them ten or twenty feet down stream like an amusement park ride.  They were beautiful.  I had to resist the urge to hate.

I had become a kind of cripple.  They were my friends, right?  Why didn’t I just wade out to them?  What would I say? “Hey, how are you?”  They’d say.  And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something.   Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it driving me crazy.”  Right.

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too so you say, What are you gonna do? , but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? And Where is all this fucking trash coming from?  And even back home you are getting whiffs of it an then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddam country down, you want to burn every goddam yellow fucking ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so w why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice  got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of  you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you like to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to  go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ‘em all.

I started crying.   Through my tears night had fallen.  The girls in the hot summer night were toweling off and laughing, standing on the darkening rocks beneath the soft light of the lampposts on the nearby train bridge.  I got up and followed a path that skirted the banks of the river and I followed it aimlessly.  At the edge of the river, I waded in.  It was hot then, but the river cooled me, and the moon above the trees on the hilltop, blocking the streetlights, kept the river flickering softly, and I felt myself calmly fading in it.  As I leaned forward and floated, I drifted a little, a little down, a little to sleep.

Goddamn the noise.  The yelling closed in.  Them yelling.  “Get him out.  Goddamn it, get his ass out.”  I shocked awake and spat up water from the river and they banged on my chest until I spat out more and I lay on the bank, drunk and smiling, looking out at the strange faces gathered there.  I lay for a little while half in and out of the water and it ran over my feet, lapping up and down and cooling them, shallow enough to be safe where I lay.  I smiled absently and thought of the old palomino nuzzling me as I came around around.  Whatever.  They called me in the lamplight.  Night now. “

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