SOLDIER’S DREAM

I was at a Gandhian nonviolence conference a couple of years ago. An American veteran of the Vietnam war began to speak to a packed room. Very soon, the man began to sob. For a full hour, he choked his way through the story of his initiation into soldiering and the work he was now doing to heal from what he had experienced. On his first day in Vietnam, an officer took him up in a helicopter and flew him over a rice paddy. Looking down, they saw a lone farmer. “Shoot him!” the officer commanded. The soldier hesitated, and turned to question the order. Shoot a lone, unarmed civilian? The officer told him that the farmer, anyone, could be Viet Cong, probably was. So, just to be sure…. Again the command, “Shoot!” It was his first killing. For the rest of the war, he remembers nothing else, no other battles or killings.

At the end of the war, again, an officer took him up in a helicopter. They saw a water buffalo. Again the command, “Shoot!” Again the hesitation… Incomprehension. “Water buffalo are essential to the enemy for his farming. Kill the animal, destroy the enemy.” The soldier remembers that he pulled the trigger, and ‘turned it into hamburger.’

He went on to become a professional airline pilot, as many vets do. He married, raised a family, had a successful career. After he retired, he began having a recurring dream. In it, he saw the water buffalo’s face very close. He said it’s eyes were docile, loving, almost Christ like. Night after night, the same dream and the same conversation:

The water buffalo asks, “Do you want to meet them? Do you want to meet them?” The soldier answers, “But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know who they are.”

Night after night, always the same. He would wake up in a sweat and a panic. Other dreams ensued. His life came apart. His wife left him. He stopped paying taxes so that none of his money would go toward war. He was sent to prison. He had a nervous breakdown. In time, he understood that to clear his heart he had to share his story. He had to shed his tears for all to see. And there he was weeping and talking to us, complete strangers, at that conference.

I came to the end of the story. I wasn’t even sure why I had told it. I turned to Bethelson and shrugged. He had an odd look on is face, as if he were somewhere else. Then he said, “But I just remembered something. I remember! I remember!”

“The first time I killed… I was a young recruit in the Liberian national army. There had been a failed coup and the officers responsible, a general among them, went into hiding. I was selected to go with a small reconnaissance party to look for them. And we found them. They were hiding at the edge of a swamp, deep in the bush. The general came out waving a white handkerchief. He had been gone several weeks and I think they were starving. He was very thin and very weak. So he came out with the handkerchief. My commanding officer ordered that general to kneel. Then he handed me a gun and said, “Shoot him!” Can you imagine? Me, a private, shoot a general? And they had surrendered. The man was on his knees. I hesitated. My hand was trembling. My commander told me, “SHOOT!” So I pulled the trigger. The man’s body just toppled over. There was blood everywhere.

“That night I got very drunk. I started drinking heavily, in fact. I became an alcoholic. I started using all kinds of drugs… I wasn’t to myself. This is the first time since that day that I remember it. My first killing. I had forgotten for 37 years.”

THE SOIL REMEMBERS 1

The soil of Liberia remembers the taste of the ancestors whose placentas were buried at birth under the trees, uniting the bodies of people with the trees and the land. The trees and the rain remember the taste of a land that could not be bartered or sold, paved or mined or moved away from. It is not the same as the taste of dismemberment and grief, of sewage and fear, not the same as the empty soil where birdless trees are struggling. In this soil are the nephews that were sacrificed to ensure peace, buried alive, one in a generation, an offering from people whose word for sacrifice means to give more than you can. The offering is not meant to placate an insatiable or bloodthirsty Spirit. It is an offering of themselves to each other that delivers them into the hands of the mysterious forces that keep them indivisible and safe. How then, can it recognize these children forced into it at the point of a gun or a knife, their blood drained and stolen for purposes never intended or demanded by the gods? The soil remembers the old times when the villages that sacrificed a nephew were not touched by war. Because of this, a boy whose name we do not know, in a small village not far from the capital, may have kept the killing at bay. They say the story is true, that it really happened.

Here is how I imagine it: On the day of the offering, at the center of the village, is the mother of the boy. The whole circle watches, hushed and humbled, terrified by their gratitude as the silence swallows him on their behalf. They say that everyone in the village – except the mother - helped to dig the grave, even the toddlers who are too small or the ones who are too old to understand exactly what is happening. They say that each person removed one shovelful, or one fistful, and added it to the common pile, until they had opened a chasm that was wide enough to hold the end of a life, all the days that lead up to it and all the days that would never come after. Perhaps this is because everyone knows that in order to meet the magnitude of the offering, everyone must recognize that they are responsible. This is why the grave became a sacred spot in the center of the village, where the people built a sacred palaver hut so the councils of elders can gather and, before they speak of weighty matters, they remember where they are.

What are the appropriate questions here? Are they: Who, exactly, was that child? What actually happened? Was it foreseen? How did the dreams inform them and what did the animals know?

Each person watching knows that boy and must now relinquish who he has been to them: The young men offer their companion, the child who was their playmate, with their memories of playing marbles together in the late afternoon heat before the fireflies appeared, a game played in the last light, and the way he became so absorbed in the game that the world fell away as they watched him move noiselessly on his haunches, fast as a shadow, artfully flicking his marbles into the dust.

The town chief offers the lanky, quiet boy who used to loiter by the teashop, listening to the men as they worried about the war, deliberating whether their Christian god could save them or if He had brought it upon them, and, if so, for what reason? Had they offended Him? Or had they offended the ancestors? Did they offend one by honoring the other and did the honoring of one inevitably mean the other had to be destroyed? Who or what could they call upon to solve the riddle of such suffering? What were they to teach their children about the order of things in a world such as this?

The uncle offers the memory of the boy learning to prepare the council tea for the elders: the small cup that barely fits in the palm of one’s hand. The ancient kettle, smudged and dented, as the uncle lifts it from the fire and fills the cup. As he has seen his uncle do countless times, the boy raises the cup above his head and tilts his left hand until the tea flows out in a long, steaming curve that disappears into the cup held in his right hand. Then the right cup up and the left one down. Raising one, pouring into the other, now closer together, now farther apart, shrinking and stretching the thick brown arc of sweet, scalding tea, never spilling a drop, not even at first, as if he had been born to pour this tea in this way, as if could conjure it even without a kettle, a young Zeus practicing with tea until he can pour lightning between his hands. Teacup to teacup, palm to palm, he pours the possibilities back and forth until the tea is ready and his mind is made up. As he offers the first cup to his uncle, he informs him that he wishes to be the one who is sacrificed, buried alive for the sake of the village, in the center of town, as it used to be done before, for peace. Is this how it happened?

What are the questions here? Are they: What actually happened? Did anything change afterwards? How do they speak of it now? And, Is this real or is it a story, and what’s the difference? Whether it’s a story or it really happened, what do we make of this?

The boy’s mother does not offer her consent. She does not give her permission and refuses to relinquish a single memory. The mother can only bring herself to take a pinch of dirt form the pile and sprinkle it into the pot of rice that she must cook for the common meal. She will force herself to swallow just one bite so that she can carry a grain of him inside of her always.

Even the birds must relinquish him, the echo and answer conversations of his boyhood. The dog he has secretly been feeding will expect no more rice. The shaman who dreamed this is secretly begging the spirits, and God, that he will never again receive such a vision in this lifetime.