War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing. Say it again.

I was riding in the back of a small white bus, but it felt like a scene out of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I was playing the part of Jack Nicholson. Crazy Jack. Smothered with a pillow by a big Native American after a lobotomy. That's what it felt like. There wasn’t enough air for all of us to breathe. We were drowning due to memories that pulled us underwater like ballast. We were suffocating.

The lack of oxygen and the heat caused beads of sweat to form on my brow, and my breath to come in gasps. The bus had no shocks to speak of. The rear metal ramp clanged with every minor bump. It seemed an intentional thing, or maybe symptomatic of the ridiculous cutbacks we encounter everyday. I may have been the only one with good hearing. Besides, I reasoned, why buy shocks for a VA bus when you're short ten million dollars for a Cruise Missile? The vets won't feel the jolting, they have had so many jolts nothing can faze them. Just get them to Building 18, where they can have their transplants, though memory transplants are what they need.

I was hoping the bus was an illusion, like most of my recent life. I scanned the rows of sixty-year old and over longhairs in front of me. Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman were nowhere in sight. Maybe it wasn't the bus from Cuckoo's Nest; maybe it was more like The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, or a Grateful Dead reenactment tour. Yes, that was it. We were all wanting to go somewhere else on the Further Bus. Maybe I was being haunted by the ghost of Ken Kesey. It was a long, strange trip. The only thing missing from the script was Nurse Ratched.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrYr6jP81g0

It was the last of a string of searing summer days; the weather people had promised thunderstorms, but the broiling afternoon sun proved them wrong. Most of the people on the bus were Vietnam War era vets. They looked old and maimed, their bodies testimonies to what war and homelessness in America had done for them.

On the bus speakers a flurry of 1960s songs played. As we pulled down the road to the Vancouver VA Medical Center, Jim Morrison was singing, “Break on Through To the Other Side.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbiPDSxFgd8 Some of the men’s baseball caps bobbed to the music. So much time had elapsed; their bodies were prematurely old. Some were missing teeth, two were missing limbs. A half-dozen sported silver ponytails and beards, as if those were proclamations of freedom from what the war machine had done to them. It would have been a perfect time for aliens to turn back the clock to 1967. It was as if the bus itself was a cocoon, a time machine, and we were all about to be changed into the idealistic people we once were. But it was all in my head. Bombs, Agent Orange, Napalm, and tracer rounds had already done their work.

I did not go to Vietnam. I was late for the party. In 1967 I was still playing little league baseball with my younger brother. My two eldest brothers went to Vietnam. One was safe on an aircraft carrier; the other was in the jungle south Saigon, shooting at the phantom enemy in the night; watching his buddies get blown apart.

Each of my brothers were affected, but my eldest brother was the one who did not come back entirely right. It is bad form to speak ill of the dead, so I won’t. He died of cancer that may or may not have been related to his war experience. I will say that I saw the effects of what the war did to my brother, in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. It used to be the most famous beer hall in Germany. That’s where my eldest brother lost it and got in a scuffle with a college age guy over nothing. My brother pinned the man to the wood seat of the booth, screaming a stream of crazy consciousness about the man being a dirty Vietcong. It was a time of confusion in America, not so different than now. Then the war had been over for nearly two years; Nixon was out of office. Many of the war vets on the bus had begun their long journey back to normalcy. Some never made it, others thought they until their lives collapsed around them. Some war wounds never heal. A missing leg is a constant reminder of what had happened, and what shouldn’t have happened. To anyone.

I had traveled to Vancouver from the Portland VAMC to meet with a veterans’ representative to discuss my resume, goals, and what he might do for me. In my mind we were discussing why my life went south, and what could be salvaged from having too much talent and too much age bias on the part of employers. The representative was a nice enough man. I asked him if he knew my younger brother, who had worked for the VA for a decade. The representative said my surname seemed familiar. He was about my age. He had probably missed the Vietnam war. He had a comically dry way of speaking, similar to Ben Stein’s Clear Eyes commercials http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcH-3d-BZn4

Finding the representative in Building 18 was delayed because I entered the building on the wrong side and found myself walking down a long hall with many rooms for transplant patients. Small erasable boards were next to the doors of each room, showing when the patients had begun their recoveries. It was a pleasant enough building. It had multiple day rooms, a laundry, and kitchen. But all I could think of were the people behind the doors, and the book titled Stiff, by Mary Roach. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylWdN7dBLsc

In the lobby of the main hospital building, where they do the dirty work on the bodies of veterans, was a tabletop strewn with dog-eared paperbacks. No explanation was forthcoming for how the books came to be lying on the table in the foyer of a building where people are dissected and put back together. Had they been held by the dying? Probably. A handwritten notice on a pole by the table indicated the books were free so I scanned the titles for something of interest. My eyes fell upon a book by William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies, titled Pincher Martin. This is the story of a man on a ship that is torpedoed during WWII, and how he survives on a rock in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a marvelously told story that is representational of the human experience: kill or be killed. Survival at all costs. Darwinian survival of the fittest, but not of the best of our kind. The good usually do die young. Not all of course. Nothing is certain in life. Bad things happen to good people every day, and God doesn't come forward with an explanation, so we wiggle about in our little mud-puddle unaware and unwilling to accept the simple fact of our demise, until there is nowhere for us to swim.

Death comes in many forms. The death of dreams is far worse than our actual physical death. We want to live forever. One day we may. They will have body banks then. "I'll take that one there," you'll say. Then you can try life again and get it right. But now we're stuck, unless we're Billy Pilgrim and coming unstuck in time. Death is hot on our heels. We don’t need any help meeting the Grim Reaper before our time is up. 

Like, war, for example. What is it good for? As the song says, “Absolutely nothing.” Though some wars are inevitable. World War II for example. War often is a money game for people and corporations far beyond the scope of our understandings. War is big business and it will always be a money carnival, with the money going to people who don't deserve it. The veterans don't get what they deserve, and the people behind wars never serve. 

Bullies must be banished. When there is a bully on the playground, often the only way to stop them is by standing up to them instead of cowering in fear. But I am no fan of war. And many of the men on the bus probably would echo the same thoughts. 

War creates technology to make us better killers. Kill or be killed is a philosophy that has been with us since the first humans crafted stone spear points and knives. Technology that is used to help us kill our fellow human beings, is often used for good in the aftermath of war. It can be a deterrent to our enemies. Having the bomb made us kings of the world for a while, until everyone else got it too. There is no doubt that war ruins human beings, and exposes what we are beneath our civilized appearances: brutal apes. Will there be a revolution in America? Maybe. But my guess is that the powers that make war and veterans of wars, will keep hauling in the gold until we all get wise to what is going on. Then there will be carnage, but it will be against the ones that control this world and where it is going. Meanwhile, the veterans ride the buses back and forth, while thunder clouds that offer no rain hover overhead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbHodyV0nCg