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Maxine I. J. Filcher
A Soldier’s Constant: The Wicked Ways of Warriors and Women
Soldiers dread many things, but the words, forced march, hold a special place; grams
equal ounces, ounces equal pounds, pounds equal pain, becomes an adage to exist by. Reaching
this point in life has seemed like a constant forced march, one where I don’t seem to learn from
the pain of continually stopping to pick up pebbles; my body and mind now bare the years spent
dutifully as a good soldier, as what Robert Kaplan calls, “an Imperial Grunt.” I was in Jr. High
School, when I first read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”; I was still in my years of
innocent naivety, to the horrors of the impending future. Reading the author’s words now, I see
that the imagery has been with me for years, comfortably simmering in the back of my calloused
psyche, slowly becoming my own story about the extreme environment of distant battlefields.
O’Brien taught me how to cope with death, and love while locked in a mundane struggle for
daily survival against the madness that exists between hope and despair -- those eternal sparing
partners. He spoiled the surprise of heartbreak and loss, and what would be my own war-time
forfeiture of youth in the name of American imperial ideology. The men under First lieutenant
Jimmy Cross’ command were my first comrade-in-arms; my first patrols were spent alongside,
slogging through a jungle that was as much the enemy as those firing upon us. Only now, with
years of retrospect are the parallels between not just his characters and their ghosts, but with
O’Brien himself, becoming easier to recognize and declare.
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Pain is felt in many ways: the most unbearable is often symptomatic of desire and
passion. Regardless of the conflict or corner of the world, affairs of the war-time heart are a
complicated emulsion of love felt only as the longing of two hearts separating, and stagnating.
LT. Jimmy Cross knows that self-inflicted fantasy of detached attraction all too well, with his
“letters from a girl named Martha” (O’Brien 1476). I too carried letters from a girl back home;
the paper would smell of her sweet perfume and sincerity to hopefulness. O’Brien writes of how
Cross becomes crushed by the weight of command, compressing his morals, and how he finds
mental self-preservation by means of projection, preferring to be “…buried with Martha… under
the jersey shore” while Lee Strunk explores a maze of dark desperation just beneath the young
lieutenant’s feet. My mind would occasionally wander to a place far from the new life I had
found there in the sand, back to a lonely girl writing letters to a lost love and pleading with her
heart not to shatter. Never the less, my love slipped from her, replaced by the ache for another
day of life, and the means with which to ensure it. Lt Cross’ fantasy becomes a liability after
Tom Lavender “…dropped like so much concrete…” (O’Brien 1479) he subsequently removes
that place from his mind and “…dispense[s] with love…” (O’Brien 1498), finding meaning for
existence in the duty of leading his men through the uncertainty of combat. What illusions were
left of my fickle fantasy were devastated by the words “…I’ve—I’ve been seeing Carl…” In my
helmet: a sweat stained picture of two young faces in love, the smiles peering back at me from an
alternate reality behind the field expedient lamination of clear tape; her strawberry blond hair
caressing my cheek, gently promising tender lies. O’Brien mentions “Almost everyone humped
photographs.” These are items of designed masochism and disturbed salvation, never-the-less
essential in maintaining the visage of sanity. In our heartbreak the young LT and I share a
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conclusion: There is no place for the emptiness of hope in lands where truth is commodity, and
danger is stockpiled.
More so than the weight of emotion, soldiers often carry physical items beyond those
issued, usually practical only to the individual who deems the hump of such extras as essential.
O’Brien tells of the many different things men under Cross’ command possess: “… weapons…
helmets…body armor… ammo… knifes…” all the practical paraphernalia of conquers on
campaign and specific to each warrior. As the machine gunner “Henry Dobbins carried the M60… and fifteen pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest…”( O’Brien 1478) I was
much the same: in command of no one, a lowly private, my only purpose in life to operate
Medusa, the mounted M2 .50 Caliber; keep her clean and fed with fresh ammo, do this, and she
would always hold my hands as tightly as I held hers, riding the Iraqi roadways proclaiming our
love for each other from the top of our HMMWV, keeping safe those behind us who too dared
seek a glorious destiny. Medusa and I spent hours staring through each other’s eyes, she would
whisper “You and me, we’re unstoppable kid.” “Fuck the rest, hold me right and we’ll rule the
battlespace.” I can only imagine what my mother thought seeing images of her adopted child,
holding the black metallic mass of an M-249 named Morgana, who she was told spoke, and
carried blessings from, ancient Mayan ancestors, while long belts of brass and lead embraced my
torso like processional robes of annihilation. Her arms must have wanted to live vicariously
through the links of ammo swaddling me from the cold grasp of life’s conclusion, calming any
fit of transcendent clarity.
No matter what pain we may be able to toss aside, the weight of combat is carried
forever; the places we fight in become a part of our being. We never forget the smell of smoke
and destruction; we will always have the taste of foreign dirt on the back of our tongues. Even
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when the “freedom birds” (O’Brien 1487) took us from those lands and, as O’Brien puts it, we
could all proclaim “I’m sorry but I’m gone,” the war didn’t end. O’Brien writes that after Tom
Lavender goes “boom-down,” Kiowa “…wished he could find some great sadness…but the
emotion wasn’t there…” I’ve struggled with guilt for many years, at first not consequential to the
action itself, but the lack of empathy for a man whose life became permanently entangled with
my own, after sharing only a fraction of a second in passing on a cold Iraqi morning, just north
of Al Khalis. That man never knew my name, nor will I his, but his face haunts me every
morning as I’m sure my blank, eyeless figure haunted his last precious moments; his blood
spatters across the inside of my mind like the windshield he sat behind, contaminating thoughts
of morality with the permanent stains of murder in the name of commercial interest, and our
imperial states of America. O’Brien warned me, soldiers “…all carr[y] ghosts,” but those words
read in my youth held little sway in the face of indoctrination and the desensitizing nature of
battle. A life ended with the squeeze of my index finger; in a dark irony, a similar motion is now
used in typing a vicious confession to that foggy morning on highway 2.
Bewildering boredom, an ever fleeting sense of sanity, immersed in the senselessness of
violence, the peace of mind that comes with lying to yourself about reality, and the true nature of
love, these are a soldier’s constant; these are the wicked ways of warriors, the people they
become and the ones they allow to populate their distant hearts. Tim O’Brien came home and
wrote of the experience he shares with those who fought before him, and after. Now, I’ve come
home; now, I’m writing to forget and writing to remember, all with the same keystrokes. After
all the sweat drenched glorious despair, I’ve traded the sun baked steel of a .50 Cal, and knowing
every tick and click in her head-space-and-timing, to the uncertainty of clicking and ticking the
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words into the thoughts of those who might be setting down that timeless path of profound pain,
and passionate patriotism.