May 30, 2001

  • All that I could be: my own army of one?


    What I felt whenever I got off-duty was what Mel Gibson proclaimed as Wallace in the movie Braveheart:


    FREEEEEEEE-DOMM!!!


    Now you might think: Was I deluding myself? Pretending to be free from the gripping constraint of an organization to which I was conscripted simply because I was afforded time off, off-time which could be retracted anytime, off-time that could disappear forever in the crunch of an emergency?


    Ha!  I was free alright, but the freedom I was seeking wasn’t from duty but the freedom of being allowed to transcend duty.  Indeed, I truly saw my free time as freedom to fulfill my destiny as a warrior beyond the constraints and piddlings of the Army’s bureaucratic organizational routines. 


    As I saw it, the Army wasn’t keeping me fit enough—it wanted to feed me and primp me, but I wanted to run.  The Army wasn’t challenging me to embrace the world around me—it was encouraging me to work stated hours and then party and lounge, but I decided to push always the envelope of discovery well beyond that provided by the organization’s leveled horizon outlook. Essentially, my self-determined mission as a warrior in every way exceeded that organizationally proscribed for me.  I needed my freedom because I was fashioning myself into a modern techno-ronin and the organization was serving de facto to keep me down.  So I did what I had to “militarily” (as a “model” soldier, I got early promotions, positions of “honor”, and I always max-ed my physical training tests), and then stole away to complete the rest of my quest. 


    The core of this quest was tantamount to running like a fool (but pre-dating the example of Forrest Gump!), at least again, in outward appearance.  So instead of eating lunch and bulking at the mid-section like many of my colleagues, I'd typically strip to my running shorts at noon in the 90 degree/100%-humidity clime and streak for the jungled peak of my little mountain refuge.  Yet as I ran bodily-enthralled and unbounded, baptizing myself in the steam and mist and dripping humidity of the jungle, my mind held still.  Though indulged by barracks life with months and months of incessant respiration of some of the best weed available in central America, I had come to master all my physicality—all action—as a heightened trip with attentive meditation.  So as I ran, I also watched myself running.  I watched myself flow and fuse with the jungle—becoming one with the huge blue butterflies wafting around my head, one with the poisonous snakes that I’d have to leap as they passed underfoot, one with the terror of torrential downpours that could suddenly ensue.  I flowed, I fused, I hid, I merged.  Then I re-emerged with all the secrets learned therein. 


    It is with this previous body/mindset that I left my completed CQ duty behind early on Saturday evening, took the rich Columbian gold that I had confiscated from the careless girl, and advanced upon my little jungle mountain scattering the weed in little handfuls like a faerie would scatter dreamdust while I was again yet running like a bat out of hell.  Oh yes, I scattered the seeds, too—and some did grow.  Did I waste the weed?  Oh no—I simply did not greed the weed.  I no longer needed it in that form.  My organizationally-bestowed high and its predisposition for imminent psychic involvement was set.  I wasn’t sure what awaited me, but I sensed, I seemed to know, that I was fulfilling my destiny.  And as such, was good to go.


    (...to be continued)


    ...End of Part III


    Part I: What Kind of Holiday Was That?


    Part II: Holding the Vision


    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 II: Holding the Vision


    Part III: All That I Could Be...


    Part IV  Polistrophy (political catastrophe)
     

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