vacancy

watching last weekend's Winter Soldier II i was struck by how distant i am from knowing, in any profound or visceral way, what it is that a soldier, any soldier, suffers. i've not been there to watch my comrade get shot to death or have his arm blown off. i've not been there when the machine gun in my hand severs the head of the 'enemy' while his son looks on. i've not been there arriving home, stepping off a bus, looking into the eyes of family, friends, loved ones and feeling that they can never comprehend where i have been, what i have seen or what i have done. i've not had my humanity trained out of me, dehumanizing and demonizing 'the other'. i've never know the screaming pain of having my leg exploded by a roadside bomb, my face acned with shrapnel or my mind lost in the paranoid nightmare of PTSD. i never will unless Jamaica Plain is invaded and i take up a butter knife to defend my old lady's railroad apartment. i sit stunned in front of the computer screen as i listen the story of the father who takes his 22 year old son's body into his arms and lifts him up out of the garden hose noose he had used to hang himself. i collect with other in the rain for an anti-war vigil by the JP Civil War Monument. we are few. cars honk by in the drizzle. our quiet assemblage is not noticed by anyone who has the power stop this war. my out of Iraq now sign blurs in the wet and assuages no one hurt or destroyed in battle. i fear this unknowing on my part although i am grateful to have never known the hot hell of war. i ache for those who cry out, but my pain is nothing compared to theirs. i 'think' - god bless you, but i don't know who or what god is.