soldiers
there's just something clean about soldiers, isn't there? we train them to kill on command, and to let nothing but being killed stop them from killing until we give the counter-command. and damn! they do that! and of course, we mess it up. we can't stand that cleanness, that simplicity. but partly they mess it up too. they are way more complicated than kill or be killed. they are at just the right age so that if we hadn't trained them to be killers, they would be sex-hunters. not that we acknowledge that. but it's true even if we lie about it. and they're at that strange age when they decide - I don't know how - that they need an education or that they don't need an education. I'm not talking about the foolishness we fed them for twelve years. if they're going to get an education, they have to unlearn that and learn what's really so. if they're not going to get an education, then they choose to accept that foolishness as a real description of the real world. yes, their civilian counterparts are making the same decision, but without the simplicity of kill-or-be-killed. I guess what I mean is that that simplicity, that purity, gives them a nobility the rest of us don't share. (maybe resenting that nobility is the reason we treat soldiers so shabbily when they become veterans.) hail soldiers! thank you for living like you do. thank you for doing what you do. thank you for being who you are.
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