Now, nearly three weeks later, the frigate is a thousand knots from the Syrian coast. The captain drains the flask’s final drops into our cups.
He says, “And what of you, friend—a toast?”
I consider. “Well, Ernest Hemingway once wrote, It’s a fine world and worth fighting for. There was a time when I only agreed with the second part.” I tip the cup back, swallow, and stare out into the darkly cycling sea. “But now I’m pretty much in total agreement.”
The captain claps me on the back. “You are a good man. I will see you in the morning.” He stands, legs wobbling slightly, and disappears belowdecks.
When I was young, fifteen or sixteen, I used to think war was the Great High: I’d thumb the pages of Soldier of Fortune, those grainy black and white photos of Special Ops soldiers with their faces smeared in greasepaint, legs shoulder-width apart, rifles crossed over their chests; or that famous snapshot of an unidentified unit cresting a hillside at twilight, their bodies silhouetted against the setting sun, their posture bowed but resolute as they passed into enemy territory. And all I was thinking then was yeah, gimme some of that shit. It was about kicking ass and taking names, killing ’em all and letting God sort them out, living hard and going out in a blaze of glory.
But, after a few Tours in ’Nam, I came to see war as the Great Lie: your country wanted something and their country wanted something and everyone was feeding lies and misinformation to get what they wanted. And all the memorials and the monuments and the medals and the American flags waving outside shopfronts on Veteran’s Day—that was all part of the lie. Those things only shrouded the one stone-cold fact, which was this: some soldier, some fucking kid, dying alone in the middle of a rice paddy or a shallow trench, this kid who was playing high school ball and chasing tail six months earlier now dying with parts from the inside of his body strewn about the outside of it, dying in the mud and the shit and the sick-fucking-twist of it was that he had no idea why he was dying, no comprehension of the forces that had brought him there, far away from home, to die. All he knew was he was cold, and in pain, and that once, at some far-off time, he was deathly afraid of being thought a coward, a boy who’d refused to do what was best for his country. Look into the face of any man dying in a combat zone and all you’ll see is confusion. This what the fuck am I doing here look—because it is then, and only then, that they’re able to peer beyond the ropes and the pulleys and the scaffolding and see war for what it really is: a horrible, stupid lie.
But now I know differently.
War is not a lie.
War is Truth. The purest Truth in this world.
War is the truth of human nature. The basic law of man. The truth of life. It’s a fight, man against man, and if you are going to defeat that other man, defeat him completely. Leave him there, dead, on the ground. The laws of beasts and the laws of man are interchangeable at their most basic level—they are the laws of the jungle, survival of the fittest. The refinements of civilization take us away from that basic truth, but war pulls us back. It reaches deep inside and grasps at the roots of who, and what, we really are. It is jungle law, primal law, a law that calls for winners and losers and leaves no room for compromise. It is war’s ability to tap that fundamental state of mankind that gives it so much power; of all fundamental human endeavors it goes deepest and, in going deepest, goes the furthest toward the truth.
And now I know.
War is Truth.
But there is no beauty in this truth.
It is a cold truth, a hard truth, an ugly truth, and I want nothing to do with it.
I walk to the ship’s bow. The wind and the booze and the lack of toes combine to unsteady me and I reach, blindly, for the railing. My fingers catch the metal rail and I pull myself up. Christ, I feel so feeble. Weak and infirm, an old man where a young man once stood. Doesn’t matter. I’ll be strong enough when the time comes.
Bluegills ride the wave of water pushed by the frigate’s shovel-shaped prow. Their bodies are lean and tapered, resembling ballistic torpedoes. They move just below the waves, quicksilver flashes, leaping out of the water occasionally, tails flickering, droplets of water spraying. They don’t care where they’re going or remember where they’ve been. They are content to be moving. Content with the simple pleasure of forward motion.
I am a born leader. Give me a unit or a crew, five or six men, and they will follow me anywhere. And I think war—Chaos—needs me, and men like me. We are the enablers of chaos. The spark. When a young man is going into a situation where he could lose his life or take the life of another, he is not thinking about the inspiring speeches of photogenic statesmen or the safety of the free world or the red, the white, and the blue. All he is thinking, then, is how scared he is, and how lonely, and how far he is from home. He looks to me, or someone like me, for strength. And I give it to him in the form of a reassuring hand on the shoulder and the words, “You’re going to pull through, son. You’re going to make it. Just go hard, bear down, don’t look back.”
And they do.
So you see how I give chaos a recognizable face and a familiar name and all the force of conviction. A front line agent of chaos, if you will. I possess the ability to lead men into the unthinkable, again and again. In this way I am every bit the instrument of Chaos as any of those creatures I encountered in the woods of northern Canada. A monster. The realization sickens me. And yet it is who I am, who I have always been.
A monster.
I am reminded of the old parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion needs to cross a pond, so he says to the frog, Take me across on your back, because I cannot swim. The frog says, But you’re a scorpion. You’ll sting me. No I won’t, the scorpion says, I promise. Halfway across the pond, the scorpion stings the frog. Why did you do that? the frog says as the poison works its way through its system. Now we’ll both die. I’m a scorpion, it replies, and you knew that when you picked me up.
Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself who you are—the scorpion or the frog.
Sometimes you’ll find you’re both.
And, like the scorpion, maybe I can’t help what it is I am. Except this one time.
I see it, in my mind’s eye. Answer. Chaos. See it squatting in a filthy Iraqi bunker, surrounded by bones and blood and shit. Waiting for me. It is dark in the bunker but candles are burning, hundreds of them, in every corner, on every ledge. Things are moving at the periphery of my vision, beyond the light of the candles. Darkness prevents me from giving them a name or a species. I don’t believe they are human. I hope they aren’t.
Chaos squats naked in the swimming light of the candles. Its body is half human and half beast, and this seems perfectly right to me. One of its legs is humanoid, but withered and lacking muscle tone—an invalid’s leg. The other is that of a quadruped, a stag or elk, heavily furred and tapering to a cloven hoof. Its remaining eye is huge and compound, a miniature disco ball; candlelight arcs off each individual facet. Its hair is red and curly, a feature that feels at once so right and so totally wrong.
“Here I am,” I hear myself saying.
“I knew you’d come,” the creature says. “You are my finest achievement. You and others like you.”
“And I have come. But not for the reason you think.”
Does an expression of unease flicker across its face?
I think it does.
I say, “I know what I am.”
Then I part my jacket and let it see what I’ve hidden inside. Watch its septic red eye expand in recognition.
“But that doesn’t mean I like what I am.”
Beneath the cot in my cabin is a crate. In that crate, beneath a layer of dried hay, are sixteen sticks of dynamite. I picked them up in Macon, where I stopped to visit Deacon, the man whose life I saved by taking the life of another. Deacon, an ex-demo expert, knew people who knew people and in this way I laid my hands on enough explosive to level half a city block. I purchased a nylon vest, the kind fly fishermen wear. At night,
sitting here on the deck, I have carefully sewn sixteen long, narrow pockets onto its chest and back. The dynamite fits snugly.
It fits.
Questions, questions, always questions.
Can I kill it? Can Chaos die? What would the repercussions be? Can the world exist without Chaos? And most terrifying: If I do kill it, what might appear in its place?
Doesn’t matter. My mind is set. The score needs to be settled.
I am unwilling to bend on this. Do I always have to answer violence with violence, take an eye where one was plucked? Am I incapable of turning the other cheek? Maybe so. In the end we always return to what we are. In the end, we find our truth.
Embrace it, I say.
Embrace it, hold it, never let it go. If we are defined, as individuals and as a species, by those deep-seated drives that make us who we are, then it is only a fool who fights that definition. There must be love. But there must be hatred, as well.
And there must—must—be vengeance.
The ship carries me forward. I go willingly. Like the fish swimming below, I relish the simple pleasure of forward motion. Soon the Syrian coast will come into view.
Yes, people can change.
But sometimes the old ways, the true ways, are the best ways.
And I am coming.
Coming to show you the truth inside the lie.
— | — | —
Patrick Lestewka is the pseudonym of Canadian writer Craig Davidson. The Preserve is his first book. He has a collection, Rust and Bone and a novel entitled The Fighter.
New Title 1 Page 28
