From hell with love...

Words flowing in the holy sweats of the night

Apocalyptic fevers scorching the inner eye

The rhythm of silence ravaging the flesh

Truth's unforgiving stare piercing the false protection of will...

With the exception of a mormon church a couple weeks ago (a friend from the band asked so nicely we couldn't say no), I have not been to church since basic training. While at basic, I went every week. I even went after a weekend out in the field and on three hours of sleep with no promise of more. Not because I'm good like that, obviously, but because I was desperate. I clung to the tiniest fragments of beauty those nine weeks - the sunset every morning during PT, the shape of Tom's handwriting, the smell of soap - and sitting in a small, darkwood sanctuary with priests in clean vestments and no yelling for a whole hour...well, it was enough to get me through a week looking towards it. My secret reason for going was it was the only place that the noise receded enough and I felt accepted enough to write anything. I've read the daily (almost) letters I sent to Tom from those nine weeks and I can still feel the stifling brace like breathing underwater, but that was lifted for one hour every week. It would just be a few lines and they would be as simple as those above, but I could feel the words pooling somewhere dark, somewhere hidden, and then I would let a few onto paper. Perhaps my friend was right in her scathing judgement that I went to "pretend" I was "holy". The thing is, I didn't feel holy, I just felt taken care of. For one hour, I felt something holding me and the craziness would hold its peace for just long enough.

I can now write when I want without the threat of punishment or even of being disturbed. I have a quiet place whenever I want it and all the acceptance in this quiet house anyone could ever ask for. Outside these walls, I still have the occasional feeling of panic around those who have power over me, but theirs is generally a subdued and controlled contempt. The funny thing is that the abuse of that place almost a year ago made the words so much sweeter in their getting. To know that I had one hour only to connect or not and then it was back to the biting haze. God knows I would never choose to go back, but there is something so exhilerating about suffering. No one's supposed to admit it but think: have you ever seen the unadulterated pleasure on someone's face that has clearly not known pleasure before? There is no guilt or questioning in it. There is no wishing that it would go on forever without changing. It seems enough that they have felt it just that once and now they have something to remember. And do you not feel envy when you see such a person? You who has so much but doesn't know what it feels like to accept good as good. Well, I have wonderful memories piling on top of themselves and yet it took two months in a mild form of hell for me to feel even a shadow of the sweetness of it. And how quickly I have reverted to demanding my life of uninterrupted comfort back. It begins to seem to me that if I had any wisdom, I would choose the discomforts and the inconveniences or else just let my soul lie on its pricy pillow. It is no wonder that the poor are the favored of God for they have only Him to gather around themselves. And I mean the truly poor. The people who do not know what it feels like to be full. The people who do not have the luxury of calculating futures because their future might only include tomorrow. But aren't we all fools in our castles and gold if we do not realize that our own futures may not even reach tomorrow. We are living what can at any time be It, and yet we behave as if we will never have to answer for any of this. And I can feel so passionate about this and rant beyond anyone's patience who might read this, but in a couple minutes I will go to sleep and I will wake up very tired and very early and I will join the race for comfort again. And I will hate myself for it. I just hope that every now and then I remember my precious hours in a church a long time ago where I felt the acceptance I could not give myself. I pray that my visions of a God judging me infinitely more than I can even judge myself will give way sometimes to the vision of a God that sees it all and loves me. All of me.

Food glorious food...

Let it be known that food is the singular comfort of basic training. Certainly letters from loved ones feed the spirit and it would seem death without them, but three times a day was the concrete comfort of calories rushing the blood stream. It would be reckless to take it one day at a time in a place so depressing, but living from meal to meal became a stabalizing pattern. Breakfast determined the forecast of the day. If the eggs were fresh and there were honest to god muffins on the fruit bar and there was time given to mash it all into your mouth and swallow before being herded out the doors, the day was hopeful of being tolerable. If the grits were too fresh, however, and burned with every hurried bite, it might be time to start worrying. They loved to work us the hardest in the morning, oftentimes smoking us directly after breakfast, so it was vastly important to consume as many calories as possible as quickly as possible. The worst morning I can recall due to the fiasco breakfast became was our first day of rifle training. PT went much longer than usual because of a new female drill sergeant anxious to prove her mettle. Therefore we ended up nearly an hour late for breakfast and, as an added benefit, we were more than the usual exhausted from our organized smoking. The yelling continued from the PT field back to company area, "MOVE! YOU BETTER FUCKING MOVE! IT'S TIME TO GO TEN MINUTES AGO!" I almost laughed thinking that all these adults were trying to make us feel guilty for the lateness that they themselves had caused, but my yearning for a breakfast I knew we wouldn't get enough of kept me anything but smiling. True to form, we had three minutes to sit down and cram and heaven help you if you were the last person seated trying to swallow whatever was in your mouth.

The other problem with food was waiting in the chow line. Platoon by platoon, we were herded through a series of chutes that eventually delivered us to the food line itself. Eventually. Generally we had a good thirty minutes to an hour of waiting in formation, in silence, with the drill sergeants coming up with whatever their mood dictated for how we should pass the time. We would be peppered with trivia questions pertaining to the chain of command, properties of the M-16, army values, and, Drill Sergeant Morton's favorite, the soldier's creed. On a good day, they would ask us questions to genuinely help in learning what we were required to know. But what fun is that. Much more often, the drill sergeants opted for the entertainment of asking us questions we hadn't even thought to consider. Trivia that a month studying the "smart book" might finally afford us if we were lucky. And we were most unlucky most times. If the drill sergeants got three wrong answers (and wouldn't you know they would always call on the people that always got the questions wrong during these sessions) then we would "owe" them later. Which meant we would be seeing a lot of pavement with our faces as soon as we were done eating. I soon realized they didn't take the medical advice to digest food before strenuous exercise very seriously. Again, what fun would that be. Drill Sergeant Morton usually pulled out the soldier's creed before dinner. Now, we had to say the creed every morning before PT in a loud and thunderous voice and as a company, but that's not how Morton wanted to do things. He would have us split in half so there was a pathway in the middle for him to pace and scrutinize our faces turned in on him. Whoever was the least successful at hiding fear would always be chosen. Morton would have the frightened individual stand in the middle of the pathway and attempt to say the creed as he screamed abuse in their faces. Apparently this was meant to prepare us for the certain fate of being captured and called upon to recite the creed to our enemies. Anyway, I was surprised at how long I made it before being singled out for the drama considering that my face has never been good at hiding anything and I was certain he should find fear there. Still, while much later than expected, he did eventually see me and order me to the designated area. "The Soldier's Creed!" he shouted triumphantly. "I am an American soldier...," I began, waiting for the screaming. But he didn't scream. He simply stood with his toes touching mine and his face within tongue's reach, and he made as if sniffing various parts of my chin and ears and cheeks, all the while keeping his wide dark eyes fixed accusingly on my own. I almost laughed at him. What a serious misreading of my character for him to think I would find this worse than screaming. How many times had I sat alone on a stage with dozens of eyes fixed on the smallest details of my body - my fingers, my face, my feet - and had to maintain the poise to perform such difficult and minute motions as playing Chopin or Beethoven or Rachmaninov. "What a fool," I thought. I kept my eyes focused on a piece of brick on the wall just past his shoulder and I recited the damn creed, and only later felt shame at what pride I had felt in performing well for something and someone so mindless and without value. Such were the poisoned victories of the place.

Shampoo...

We didn't have fire drills too often but it was usually in the scanty hours set aside for showers and sleep. I should have known as soon as I had such a warm and unusually luxurious shower and after I put on the fluffy army sweats that I love in spite of my deep hate for the army itself, I should have known that something must ruin the relative joy I felt. And, of course, something loud and obnoxious, unwelcome and unnecessary certainly did. Fifty girls groaned as one when the alarm began. Feet in shower shoes and then out the door. The nights were beginning to have quite a chill to them and the comfort of the shower was soon lost. The smell of the shower was not however. Imagine twenty-five recently celibate males smelling not the sweat crusted dirt of training that had become stamped on all of us, but rather flowery shampoos and soaps and hair glistening with cleanliness. Female bodies in sleepwear and not in combat boots and fatigues as they always saw us. The spaces in our formation tightened as each male drew near the freshness of it all. One by one, each girl found some reason why she had to let her hair down and swish it around a little and refasten it, this time in a loose-hanging pony-tail rather than a smell-encloistering bun. That must have been the signal because suddenly every male felt it acceptable and advisable even to step all the way up on these girls and bury their noses in the freed strands of bliss. It was surprisingly erotic considering there was only the slightest physical contact between nostril and hair, but the stiffness of sexual alertness was as palpable as the wet smells overpowering the air. Although I did not join in the hair tossing and my hair was too short to be let down or put up, I didn't mind when a couple of the guys put their noses in my hair too. I did not feel the tingle of nerves along my spine and down my legs as I was guessing many of those around me were, but I felt some twisted sense of charity in not protesting at the slight invasion of my personal space. It even gave me pleasure to see the younger girls remember their claims as goddesses and the males bowing over and over in acquiescence. In the face of such constant desexing, it was refreshing. That is except for watching Collins.

Collins was the young married girl I had met at MEPS, my battle buddy, the one that never left my side from the first moment to the last. I had met her young husband and I had seen them cry as if life were ending when they had to say goodbye. I had heard endless hours of him and of her love for him. According to the stories she told me, it was the purest, fairy tale kind of love, although it quite often sounded spoiled and naive in the way it translated in my head. I'm sure my perceptions were informed strictly by what I had seen in her since living in basic training with her. Regardless, she wanted it to be the story at least that there was no purer heart than hers and no deeper love than her husband's and it would take the life out of her when he left for Afghanistan not two months after she got home from training. And I had believed her in the last point at least...until the night of the fire alarm. She saw the single girls undoing their hair and the males practically wagging their whole bodies in anticipation and desire, and she barely hesitated before unlocking her long and beautiful, still-wet tresses for them. She let the hair cascade slowly down her back just like the classic dames of the fifties. And then she shook it slightly to release the kinks left from the tight bun her hair had been in. Instantly she was surrounded and she was giggling with pleasure. I felt cold hatred crystallizing and I knew it would never melt.

When we returned to our bunks shortly thereafter, I knew I would not sleep well as righteous anger frothed in my chest. I feel I should explain the anger somewhat. Collins had entered her own particularly righteous phase a couple weeks beforehand, judging everybody, especially myself, for our vulgarity and unkindness. She took offense to us unashamedly discussing sex (out of marriage?!) and illicit substances. She would sit tight-lipped and prim as Anderson and I talked about the boy she had fucked at MEPS right before leaving. And she hated the quick way most of us adopted the harshness of this place, cussing more than any of us used to and more than she claimed to have ever imagined. We were not encouraged to feminity in that place and we did not retain much, which she also frowned at and tried to set the example by persisting in lotions and zit cream. But let us get particular. She apparently considered it the Christian way to go to great lengths to stay away from the mildly retarded Connors as long as she didn't say anything mean directly to her face. Of course, if Collins happened to be talking loudly enough that Connors could hear her "accidentally", how could that be helped. After seeing Connors crying on her bunk more than once after an indignant soliloquy by Collins about the horrors of having to go out of our way to keep Connors "squared away", I began to believe that something evil lurked in Collins' soul. Especially considering that I myself had many times had to be the last in formation (the worst possible thing in basic training) just so Collins could put lotion on her hands and I had to wait for her since I was her battle buddy. Whenever I protested, she would magically become tearful and question my claim to Christianity. She manipulated every situation to get the best possible outcome for herself, quite often at the expense of the well-being of others, and would throw little, quiet, tight-lipped, Christian temper tantrums if she did not find the comfortable position she desired. She managed to get e-mail priveleges and would even have me sit next to her as her beloved battle buddy as she e-mailed family and friends and I seethed with the despair of days and weeks of outdated mail with Tom. She watched my eagerness every evening for Tom's letter and how I would be crushed if there was not one and she watched my quick devouring of every word. She listened to my stifled sobs at night and she knew what caused them. But when I asked her for two minutes to write to him when she was finished, she primly shook her head and told me she did not want to get in trouble. Not to mention that I stood by her as her "battle buddy" when she asked the unpredictable drill sergeants to use the computer in the first place. Not to mention that the sob story she fed them was a bloated form of the truth. I could go on, and I'm sure I will, but back to the particulars of clean hair and the encouragement of lust from one who claimed virginity even in marriage (spiritual virginity is forever she liked to say).

She felt me staring at her back as she redid her hair into a bun before going back to bed. The bun that she always wore and never took down except for showers. Finally, she turned around and looked at me with a smirk. "I was having fun." Unapologetically and with the impunity of a child not used to being corrected and not used to being denied. I wanted to ask her if she would have found it so fun if her loving husband had been witness to these events. I wanted to ask her if she was looking forward to fun the eighteen months she would be deprived of her husband as he went to war. I wanted to rub her face in her own shit. Instead, I let the crystals turn to opaque stone in my soul and I reveled in my hate.