The Clock is Ticking

Sadness. Gut punch. I just learned three of my veteran friends passed. One died over three years ago and I was unaware. The other two died last year and I was unaware. Time got by me. I let the relationships wither and never got to say words I should have said to brothers in the struggle against war and injustice. We struggled together to end wars. Not just Nam but the following wars since.

Until the toxic, vile narcissist came. Then, I think I lost hope and let my ties with my old vet friends go. I tired of the endless and fruitless fight to end the senseless killing men seem to relish. And I do stress the word, men. Because it always seems it's men who continue to throw the young people into the killing fields of war. Men, who can't harness aggression and testosterone that war is steeped in.

Now, I am alone except for my wife and a distant son and grandkids. I'm isolated by my own choice and those who once felt the comradery for me are gone. I let them go. I am now inside my own head and dislike myself. I live in a world of crap television watching, crap sports watching, crap food binging and crap relationships with people.

Maybe it began in October 2022 when I received the call my son died of the inevitable drug overdose. Then hearing he had actually died a month earlier in a portable out house on a golf course less than a mile from my home. Unidentified. Maybe that was the end of my hope.

Maybe it began in 1968 when I was an 18-year-old grunt in a Quang Nam rice paddy trying to revive a squad leader who had died instantly from a sniper's bullet into his brain. The day the nightmares began and never ended.

I thought I had turned things around with marriage and kids, but it didn't stop the rage or the nightmares. It only made them casualties of my war.

Becoming an activist, being one of three vets to organize VVAW in Denver, helped mask things. Helped displace the rage and betrayal. Helped atone for my participation in the crime.

New brothers came of it. Brothers with the same sense of morality and passion against what we knew was wrong.

We marched on DC. Threw our medals in protest over the temporary fence around the Capitol. A fence made to keep us out of exercising free speech.

The brotherhood lasted decades as decades of new wars, new outrages came from our government. New brothers came together along with brave sisters we had failed to recognize. Our masculinity finally accepting our sisters had suffered as much and more than us.

We faced hostility, threats of violence, violence and hate. But we persevered. We knew our cause was just. Some became casualties because their demons haunted them too much to carry on. Some left us by their own hand reminding us how fragile our lives really were. They became more deaths that should have been added to The Wall but never were.

We struggled to hope. We fought for hope. Without hope we risked falling into the abyss. But finally, hope seemed to seep away from me. The dark cloud of the past returned. It didn't matter anymore. All the treatment, the motivating anger and desire for a moral world escaped me.

I lost my discipline. I lost motivation. I lost HOPE.

The world is on the brink of extinction. Humans have chosen to allow leaders without morality to dictate their demise. The tipping point of environmental extinction has long passed and we're on the clock that is about to stop. Wars and corruption thrive. Humans do not.

And maybe, just maybe things like losing touch with old friends, brothers and sisters in arms are part of the reason why. Maybe a large part. Maybe my failure in keeping the faith, keeping hope came from failing them. Failing to be part of the eternal fire of hope they kept lit.

I hope not.