Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day)--what kind of holiday was that?
What kind of holiday is it when the tiddy bar is closed? Yep. Got there and couldn't believe it. So I did something equally decrepit instead: I ran. Let's see: only about 24,985 miles left until I get back home... Great! I'm right on schedule for year 2017.
Do you think I’m making light of a holiday dedicated to remembering the war dead? Well, damn it, I celebrated by buying a new car! What could be more American and patriotic than that? Oops--didn't buy American...but bought in America and am paying gobs of sales taxes and future homegrown financing. Hell yes, that was a perfect consumptive celebration! But...
The dead. What about the dead?
I honor them. I am their brethren. I once joined the service for the explicit purpose of fighting a war, dealing with death, and possibly dying.
But I was denied.
Guns for hostages, drugs for guns, whatever you want to call the dark Contra political dealings of Reagan's initial administration as scapegoated by Col. Ollie North, an imminent conflict was averted. The Iran hostages came home, war plans faded into Central American irregular operations, and I was left…high and dry?
No—merely high. Though I wanted to fight and possibly die, the government instead just got me high. Literally. Sent to Panama, I found myself as a battleless warrior enwrapped in great oblivion: mindless, unending drug intoxication. And none of it was my volitional doing. Really not. No, I was, like Lancelot, at that time, indelibly pure. But I, nonetheless, sustained in my barracks daily massive exposure to seemingly incessant clouds of smoked cannabis. More than just a “contact high”, the interlacing haze of grass was the permanent atmosphere. Breathe in, breathe out—breath after breath, day after day, month after month, dope for a full two years. Seemed like nearly everybody else (25 of 27 troops on my floor) smoked and nobody, including officers, non-commissioned officers, and military intelligence—just two barracks over, gave a damn. Seemed like it was, in fact, an unspoken de facto plan. Seemed like indifference ruled. So much just seemed back then. So much just drifted and spiraled like wafting smoke to the heavens....
And higher and higher, by virtue alone of intense contact, did I ascend, remaining emboldened as a warrior, into a psychic realm—a realm of visionary realizations unveiled that provided me more critical intelligence about some things than that conventionally available to the military. For dope was never for me an escape or recreational substance, but always a magical herbal ally, a door to dream. And dream I did. Right out of time. But to observe me by exterior facade alone, I remained clearly one of the fittest and furious-looking hombres wearing jungle fatigues to be found. Clearly from a military perspective, I appeared most commendably soldierly, even as I hovered, while in, yet out of body and beyond the constraint of ground.
...End of Part I
Part III: All That I Could Be...
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