On war
by Steve Brambach

It usually starts with a rumor. There will be wars and rumors of wars. The Nam dragged on so long I thought it was gonna get me. All of a sudden college didn't look like such a bad alternative. Damned thing ended barely two years and two monthes short of my High School graduation. Scary. By then I wasn't as brave as a seventeen-year-old is supposed to be. Long before the all volunteer army and well after the indoctrination of the John Wayne generation had been supplanted by the credo of the Man With No Name.

No, we must time warp back even farther, to the Beats, to a book, Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me by a Richard Farina, who died right after it was published. He fell off the back of a motorcycle in California, though I don't remember if it was on Mullholland or up around San Francisco, I know it happened in '68 or '69. Smoking laudanum, drinking and chasing women, ditching classes and listening to jazz, talking exempt status, welcome to Cornell in 1959.

A nation builds its freedom on war.

If we could tackle our societal problems like we do war--with such zest, man--what a dream land we would enjoy here.

Know why we're so smart? So humble? Cause the G.I. bill allowed millions of returning service men to go to school and get degrees in unromantic things like engineering. The application of stress created in war feeding the machine--later with their own children if they couldn't help it and the funny thing was that during the Depression, they had turned away the masses of World War I vets, in the thousands, empty handed.

The difference being after all the years of social unrest in the 60s, and the fact that there were something like fifteen or sixteen million men coming home from Vietnam--many of whom knew how to fight--unlike the paltry two or three million of the first great war. That's enough bodies to start an armed revolt of quite epic proportions, and the funny thing is they created the über-consumer society and it ate them up.

Why worry about a dictatorship when you already have an evil oligarchy? My Gramps came back from the invasion of the Phillipines, you know,a bunch of jungle islands way out to yonder--yonder Asia way. Our former colonies, like former beauty queens, just you gotta watch out and be careful of disease.

He had to shoot a Japanese point blank. Under the moon on the hot deck of his ship in the heart of Manilla Bay.

He survived malaria, several amphibious landings, dysentary, sewed patches for extra cash, clean up detail in the Zig Zag pass and came home after two years to find his oldest son runnin the streets, his youngest son in an orphanage and his wife in an asylum--and he pulled it all together.

>DD>Combat makes you tough or dead or insane or a combination of all three.

Gramps told me more than once as the toll of the years took him, "I saw men die of less than a scratch, and I saw men live and recover the most frightening injuries right next to me, and I have come to believe that you will die when it's your time. When your time is up, your time is up."

Mark my words, war is coming. China has the neutron bomb, and Russia is falling into dangerous pieces. Europe will draw closer but Russia will not be allowed to join NATO for the very reason that most of it's people are way West of Siberia. China sits just South of this icebox which is vast, underpopulated and containing one fifth of the worlds uncut timber, one eighth of the worlds natural gas, oil and other resources as China upgrades, modernizes and expands its Army.

Meanwhile, back in the original old world, more petty dictators, strongmen and zealots use their oil money to dabble in all the black arts--nuclear, chemical and biologic spells of mass evil death.

See the world now before it gets eaten by a Disney Village or vaporized by fallout.

Yeah, we need a real sun in the eyes, sweat runnin' down the forehead kind of war. A real get your ass shot off kind of affair.

While the Bhudda cry out for desire, prophets sing for the Jihad, and the sage stumble about in the humblest of attire, the ultimate rush is throwing your life into the fire.

What separates the men from the boys is simple, after all. Harmonics aside. It's a matter of Belief.M

Time to head off to the third world. The only real war here, the battle between the sexes, has lost it's luster.

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