"For the Day I Retire my Rifle"

by Michael Perrone

 

 

My path is selfish but honest; crude but empowering; bleeding but healed; skeptical but free. It carves itself into the sharp rocks of unpaved roads. Holds itself to a standard my soul must judge.

 

It's a path shaped not only by its smoothest passages, where past happiness feeds the nostalgia of an aged soul, but also by pits as deep as the cratering charges I've been trained to set off. Holes as deep as the foxholes I've dug. Voids I have found purpose in. Voids I must fill not with the trigger of my M16 but with the words I type.

 

Not freedom protected with chains and ignorance. Freedom protected with questioning, with thought, with skepticism, with passion enough to discover the humanity buried not in the lure of blinded ideals, but in the depths of my soul.

 

I'm a US Army Officer. I joined to serve. With sadness and concern, I reveal that the words I write here are of a greater service to freedom than the institution I joined.

 

I express my thoughts to plead with the ghost of our humanity slowly vanishing.

 

My purpose is to live the message I express here in everything I write.

 

Which brings us to malevolent contradiction. In a society claiming to be founded on the principles of democracy, freedom of expression, independent thought and initiative, and the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the very institution that has been put in place to defend these principles is a harbinger of their demise.

 

Our humanity is poisoned by fear and materialism. Compassion gives way to skepticism and hate. We are losing track of what it means to be human.

 

The US Army is a microcosm of the country this country is becoming; crippled by violence and inequality; deformed by shallow pursuits; afflicted by perversely vicious thoughts, which once justified by ignorance, are mistaken as ideals... It's a microcosm of the humans we are becoming. Selfish. Bored. Insensitive. Numb. Our house is not simply divided. It's poisoned.

 

The US Army as individuals is no more evil than individuals themselves. None of us are black and white pillars of good or bad. We're soldiers. We're sons. We're daughters. We're imperfect. We're human.

 

The US Army as an institution has no room for humanity. It makes a conscious effort to appeal to our basest instincts and brainwash us. It's a business; a mafia of death. It cannot truly fight for peace. Peace hurts its bottom line. It holds a legitimate interest in keeping our people afraid and ignorant. Freedom of expression, individualism, compassion, the constitutional rights it has sworn to defend... the modern Army sees all of these as a child's fantasy. It sees the world as a cruel place where saints vanquish demons. Any belief to the contrary, especially within the institution, means facing a mob of cruel judgment.

 

Human history, rather than enforce the idea that things are the way they are, with no hope for change, should bring to light the stubborn severity of the mistakes we're repeating. We make the error of believing we're doomed to repeat history's vicious cycle over and over again; of believing the consequences can be no greater than they've been up to this point.

 

But an antelope can only run in a circle so many times. At some point, he has to take a leap in a different direction if he's to avoid being devoured.

 

We're on the verge of being devoured by greed and laziness. Our repeated mistakes, exacerbated by the increasing polarization of society and the technology available to us, might be taking us to the verge of humanity's extinction. By that, I don't necessarily mean human beings as physically present beings, but rather our shared soul. We're on the cusp of rupturing the ligaments of our essence, of bringing about consequences beyond grasp.

    

We must move beyond the notion of a “country's interests.” I don't seek to discredit the idea that everyone must look after their own. Rather, I wish to point out how distorted our understanding of “our own” is. Our own's not just our back yard. It's not just our country. It's every human being.

 

There's a time for war, unfortunately, just as there's a time for all things. It may come. When it does, we must fight not to win, but to end it. Not to kill the enemy, but to save our brothers. Not to bestow freedom, but to realize no freedom can come of it. There's no freedom in war. No freedom in a society that thrives on it.

 

When our guns remain permanently raised, our view of life becomes trapped in the imprisoning limits of the sight picture. Nothing but the circle and the iron sight.

 

Our thoughts become consumed in gun shots. Our soul becomes consumed in artillery explosions.

 

We're systematizing mass killings.

 

We must lower our guns and think, lest the saints go marching out.

 

My purpose is to always forgive myself just enough to move on. Serve my time as a soldier until my oath is fulfilled. Hopefully come out of it all alive and with the sanity to be honest with myself. Dare to be myself rather than chase some societal, mass media influenced fabrication. Write. Write until the right words come out. Write until my soul's blood flows through every letter of every page more than the blood flowing out of war torn bodies. Write something that speaks. Too much self help-spiritual-cliched-uplifting-drama out there. Not enough raw emotional honesty.

 

Where's the soul? Where's the art? Where's the suffering, the love, the Armageddon? Where's the chaos, the melancholy, the drama? Is it lost in your congestion of social media and texting?

 

I want to find a way to start living as me. To start writing as me. With a pen mightier than a sword. With all the horror, self-destruction and unhappiness it may entail. Rebellious and selfish. An individual untamed. Scarring the paper with my ink. Rendering it docile to the might of whatever I choose to sing. Trusting that out of the chaos and experimentation, unpretentious and honest, will burst forth my voice clear with character, no longer escaping from myself, no longer chasing the phantoms of doubt. 

 

To choose the suffering of being me over the comfort of being someone else; over the conformity of choosing a world in which I must die to be alive. Moronic oxymoron. A lot of us want to believe we're doing the right thing, choosing the selfless way, the mature way. Maybe you are, yet maybe you're lying to yourself. Maybe waking up at 4 AM every day, putting your uniform on to the perfect standard, and doing what you're told's the easy way out. Who's to say being an individual's wrong? Or easy? It's what the Army tells you. But maybe that's because individuals aren't as easy to manipulate. They don't wake up in the morning and shoot people in the face as if it were a matter of fact. They don't numbly obey orders to kill.

 

Being an individual requires thought and suffering; taking an honest look at yourself outside the realm of what Fox News and Hollywood has fed you.

 

I have a point, and that's all anyone has. You have to find your own point.

 

In the mean time, I write the way a wife smells a bouquet of flowers on her anniversary. I write the way a lost soul slits their wrists to feel pain. I write the way a soldier downs that last drop of whiskey before closing time.

 

I write because besides the life I have now and the eventual death to come, it's the only certainty of my existence.

 

I write for Bohemia's lost souls and free spirits. May they escape the traffic and stay lost on the exit to her magnificently bittersweet sanity.