“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” —Mario Savio

In Kosovo,

On a dusty street, an Albanian girl in a bright dress and shiny shoes with ribbons in her golden curls spits at a Serbian girl on her way home from school. Next door, a Serbian woman comforts her dying Albanian neighbor by giving him water to drink and food to eat and blankets to keep warm.

In a cramped and cold room a father and son drink vodka and argue politics. Dad shoots his son with a shotgun. Seeing the mess he’s made, he pulls the pin of a grenade and waits for the end.

In the wet snow next to a frozen creek, a sergeant with the elite 82nd Airborne Division rapes and murders an eight year old girl, and is proud of it. But in the moonless night, a soldier gives his life so others may live.

I didn’t understand any of it. I hid under my helmet and behind my machine gun and American flag and, with smiles and hand shakes, re-enlisted for three more years with the military police corps.

And then in America,

9-11-01 with its crashing planes and falling buildings and bumbling president reading My Pet Goat while fear and confusion swept across his face. The world is shocked and mourns. “We are all Americans today,” a Paris newpaper proclaims.

Then the facade of a right and just nation crumbles like those two towers on March 20, 2003. I drink lukewarm beer and watch the green bursts of light in Baghdad on CNN and wonder what the fuck went wrong. The barracks erupt. Soldiers flow into the parking lot. It’s a party. There’s drinking and singing and dancing under a waning moon. I want to crawl into a deep hole and never be found again.

Bush and Cheney et al promised us an easy war with an easy victory. They paraded visions on Sunday morning talk shows of Iraqis dancing in the streets with American flags, beautiful women welcoming the strong, bright-eyed Americans with kisses and flowers.

I left the army six months after Bush declared “Mission accomplished” and urged the insurgents to “bring it on.” The war was a disaster. Instead of flowers and kisses and American flags, soldiers were greeted with riots, snipers, ambushes, IEDs. And nobody knew how to fix it.

I ended up in Iowa City lost and confused. I had wanted to be a cop for so long I didn’t know what else there was to be. I decided to study literature at Iowa. The scales fell rudely from my eyes and nothing has been the same since. I saw how governments shape and control their message. The people of Belgium thought King Leopold II was bringing salvation and civilization to the savages of the Congo. Conrad painted a much different, much more accurate picture in his much misunderstood “Heart of Darkness.”

Iowa’s campus is quiet as King George II surges more troops into a failure. Bush isn’t ignorant, he just pretends to be. He’s controlled the image of his war by banning the photos of flag-draped coffins being off-loaded from cavernous cargo planes and embedding journalists with the military to control their reporting and refuses to allow members of his administration to testify before congress about his “intelligence failures,” his lies. We’re all monkeys pulling on the levers for our bananas and scat. And no, I won’t keep a civil tongue in my head. Not anymore.

Who will expose our heart of darkness?

The U.S. war machine operates smoothly, its gears are well oiled with apathy and gluttony. We go to class and turn in our assignments. We drink and dance the nights away at Brother’s in ignorant bliss while American soldiers and Iraqi civilians are torn to pieces. We don’t dare raise our voice. Who will hire us then?

The University of Iowa during the ’60s was a much different place. Students boycotted class, shut down buildings and filled the Pentacrest. They wouldn’t be moved. Even as police encircled them and the air was tinged with the sweet smell of tear gas and pepper spray. They threw their bodies on the gears and wheels of the machine. They were being drafted and sent off to fight an unpopular and unwinnable war. The machine would not be allowed to operate any more and the owners withdrew from Vietnam.

The owners learned their lesson. What ever you do, do not draft college kids to go off and fight in a distant land for unclear reasons with no idea of what victory looks like. Institute an all-volunteer force. The poor and minority can go off and fight our wars while college kids are kept fat and happy and safe. If they’re safe, the logic follows, we’ll be safe. And holy shit were they spot on.

So bring back the draft! Desperate times call for desperate measures. American soldiers, our brothers and sisters, are fighting, dying and killing in Iraq. Most of them have been sent there twice. Many are on their third or forth deployment. This just isn’t fair. But they are soldiers, they cannot protest. They suck it up and go out on patrol because they joined the military. It isn’t their fault some megalomaniac wanted to avenge his daddy while we voted for the next American Idol.

You better rub the sleep from your eyes and take look around. King George II is rattling his saber and is going to need all his people to drag the middle-east into freedom. The army’s battle dress uniform has nowhere to put your iPod. The M-4 carbine doesn’t come with a cellphone. The MK-19 grenade launcher cannot access Facebook. And the Armed Forces Network doesn’t show the Real World regularly. You may want to take to the streets and end this while you still have the opportunity. It’ll be too late very soon.

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I am not a religious man. Many many years ago, maybe. Not any more. So I think it’s strange I started all this off with a Biblical verse. But I was struck by its appropriateness.

“Fratricide” is a story based on an actual event. The actual event ended with less blood, but just barely.

Individuals aren’t important to the army. We were all just cogs in a lumbering machine. Numbers on a report in a Pentagon desk. But I still thought that we mattered to those directly above us, the officers and NCOs of our units. Surely we were unique to them.

But that night when he finally snapped and they sent in the SWAT team—a drunken SWAT team who taunted him before shooting him—to bring him out, I knew they didn’t care. The lengths they would go to to keep the machine running horrified me. If you were broken, they wouldn’t waste time and resources trying to fix you. They would simply replace you.

I left the army about a year later. I should have left the next month, but King George II had started his Wars of Conquest and everyone in the army was told to stay put. Stop-loss. Calling it getting-fucked-in-the-ass was too obvious, I guess. That’s what we called it.

I was stop-lossed for ten months. It was supposed to be twelve. Who knows? And I fled into the night like an escaping East German—four in the morning, black out drive, paranoid that they were right behind me. I drove without stopping to Iowa City with no idea of what came next.

I had been a cop for eight years when they finally let me go. I spent my last three years at Fort Knox as a Traffic Accident Investigator. I drove around an unmarked police car writing tickets and arresting drunks. Up until “Fratricide” I wanted to be a cop. Now I wanted nothing to do with it. I felt like I knew something but had to find it out for myself.

The first semester at Kirkwood I took two classes that would lead me to the English major and on to a writing MFA program. Intro to Lit: Fiction and Composition II. In Intro to Lit I learned what a story can do. In Comp, I learned I could write.

My writing teacher recommended I read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

“Do you know Vonnegut?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We read a story of his in my intro to fiction class. Science fiction writer, right?”

He scoffed. “Not really.”—I would learn later Vonnegut hated being called a science fiction writer because people took him less seriously—“He was a prisoner of war during WWII. He was in Dresden when the city was firebombed, and,” he trailed off, shaking his head.

“Dresden?” I asked. I never heard of Dresden. And I had lived in Germany for a year and a half. I thought Slaughterhouse-Five was some kind of slasher novel.

Slaughterhouse-Five was the first book I read as a writer. It was actually the first book I ever really read. And it blew me away. The way he wrote. He didn’t follow any of these rules I was learning. He shifted tense, point of view, time and setting at a whim. It was the only way he could tell about something as bad as Dresden must have been. And through fiction, he taught me about an event I had never heard of. He taught me what fiction is for. “The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead” (227).

I’ve read a lot of Vonnegut since. I appreciate his outlook and how he can always be funny. I also like his rule for writers: “First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college” (A Man Without a Country 23). But this one is much better: “You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it” (AMWAC 20). Especially in fiction—the art of lying truthfully.

I always thought this word truth was easy, its meaning clear. I am a product of American grade schools and a Catholic High School. I was in law enforcement for eight years. I didn’t see any gray. Everything was right or wrong, sober or drunk, truth or lie. Now I know there’s no such thing as Truth. None of us are objective.

After earning an AA at Kirkwood, I transferred to Iowa and studied under Peter Nazareth for a year—African Lit and Conrad. I learned even more about writing. About writing a novel on a roll of toilet paper in a cold, crowded jail cell. About being beaten and killed for writing. About how dangerous writing can be to a system. Not our system of course, we’re all fat and giggly voting for American Idol while soldiers are being torn to pieces on the other side of the world.

One day at the end of a semester, I brought in my military police badge to show him. He looked at it and laughed and told me, “It is important, that after you find out you’ve been lied to your whole life, that you don’t become one who thinks everyone is lying to you. You’ll go crazy.”

The English department is adding an undergrad writing program. I don’t think this is a good idea. What will one do with a BA in Writing? Just because people come to Iowa because of the Workshop and are then disappointed to learn they’re not in the Workshop is no reason to add a writing program. And trickery is a good lesson for any writer to learn.

T.C. Boyle, a Workshop alum, gives advise to aspiring writers: “Read, read, read, read, and then read.” And Flannery O’Connor, another Workshop alum, replied, when asked if writing programs discourage aspiring writers, “It doesn’t discourage enough of them.” I love Mary. Despite what Martin Roper may believe, writing cannot be taught. Sure, everyone can write, I’ll give him that. But that doesn’t mean everyone should write.

Here’s what I’m getting at: the English BA is more than sufficient for any aspiring writer. There are plenty of writing classes offered through the program and by covering the period and subject requirements, I was given a breadth of knowledge I didn’t even know was out there. These have been years of absorption. Of reading and learning stories. And I finally feel like I can tell my stories.

My stories are about the army. It worries me, all these flags waving and yellow ribbons stuck on cars. The army is a whole world onto itself. Other students tell me my army isn’t authentic. That a soldier just wouldn’t be drinking a beer in front of a sergeant. But it is authentic. The army, when I left, was breaking down. I want people to know soldiers are people. We have all the same dreams and hopes and faults and ugliness as anyone else. And we have to deal with the crushing bureaucracy that is the Department of the Army.

But I’m glad I joined. I wasn’t ready for college at 18 and would have only been wasting time and money. And it gave me lots of stories to tell.

I’m not going to have the gpa to graduate with honors. I’m not really worried about that. Titles are meaningless. I’ve had amazing opportunities in the English Honors Program. Small classes with top professors. And working with James McPherson is something I’ll never forget. I was writing this story. He told me what it was about. But I’m going to wrap this up. Writing about writing makes me uncomfortable. And I’m still not sure what this essay was supposed to be about. But I wrote a story. I hope you liked it.

The Reading List

Dos Passos, John. Three Soldiers. 1921. New York: Dover Publications, 2004.

Dos Passos follows three American soldiers through the First World War. Dos Passos, in the stripped down language of post WWI, tells of the horror of crossing the U-Boat infested Northern Atlantic, of the monotony of cleaning a barracks day after day and the uncertainty of waiting. Three Soldiers, with its grim stories and unheroic characters, shows a different side of war. The reality of war. The war that’s never shown in the movies.

Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Hemingway is widely regarded as the founder of a new style and his first collection of short stories established him as the new American voice of literature. His short sentences, stripped to the bare minimum of words while retaining a world of information and description, revolutionized writing in the post-war era. Living in Paris, Hemingway writes about Nick Adams and his adventures in Michigan. “Soldier’s Home” explores shell-shock and soldiers not wanting to talk about war. A phenomenon Kurt Vonnegut later bemoans as romanticizing war.

—. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Hemingway’s classic novel about the First World War. Lt. Henry, an American serving in the Italian army as an ambulance driver, serves on the Italian front, is wounded, falls in love with a British nurse, sent back to the front, and witnesses the Italian retreat after the Austrian Caporetto offensive of 1917. Henry is pulled out of line to be shot for retreating. It is this novel that Hemingway writes about the meaninglessness of words like honor and valor when talking about muddy and bloody hills.

—. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. New York: Scribner, 2003.

Famous and bored, Papa heads to East Africa with his wife for a month of big game hunting. While Africans flee famine, Hemingway shoots strange animals and avoids savage lions trying to tear him apart. At night, after a few drinks, looking into the clear African sky, he offers advice and thoughts on writing and writers. “Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle.” And, “That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely…” There are worse people to take advice from.

O’Brien, Tim. If I Die in a Combat Zone. 1975. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

Shifting gears to the Vietnam War, this is O’Brien’s war memoir. O’Brien was drafted into the army in 1969 and served in Vietnam for a year. His memoir is a dismal look at a broken army losing an unpopular war. O’Brien calls himself a coward for going off to war, calling it the easy thing to do. What’s harder, he observes, is standing up for what you believe in and facing the consequences.

—. The Things They Carried. 1990. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

These are O’Brien’s fictional stories about his time in Vietnam. But it’s hard to tell that. This book reads like a series of essays. The protagonist is Tim O’Brien and the book is dedicated “to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Narman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.” All of these characters die in the following pages. Is this book fiction or nonfiction? Only O’Brien knows. But one thing is certain, we shouldn’t trust any war story to be telling the truth.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

O’Connor’s stories have the quality of making one feel comfortable for a moment, of thinking one knows what’s going to happen and that everything is going to be all right. But then she’ll twist everything around and a grandmother is being shot to death in some ditch all because of her cat. Her stories are compact, there’s no time wasted, and they knock the wind out of you.

Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. 1928. Trans. A. W. Wheen. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1982.

Remarque’s novel about the German experience on the Western Front of WWI shows that there’s no such thing as us/them. The German boys fighting and dying in their trenches were no different from the French or British soldiers dying in theirs. This is easy to forget. And we always forget it.

Swofford, Anthony. Jarhead. New York: Scribner, 2004.

Swofford’s chilling memoir about being a Marine sniper during the first Gulf War. It’s a war book without a war as Swofford and his cohorts sit in the desert waiting for a war that’s over in a few short hours without firing a single shot. He shows how the stress of boredom mixed with the inanity of the military can break people.

Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got His Gun. 1939. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.

Trumbo’s classic anti-war text became very popular during America’s involvement in Vietnam. Trumbo writes about an American soldier who is hit by a shell. He’s conscious, but that’s it. The soldier has lost his arms, legs, face and ears. He eventually communicates by tapping his head in Morse code. He wants the army to take him on tour. He believes he can end all war by letting everyone see what war does. The army, of course, doesn’t take him up on this.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 1969. New York: Random House, 1999.

Vonnegut’s famous tale of kidnapping aliens, being unstuck in time, cities and civilians being destroyed. The first book I read as a writer has taught me so much and teaches me more every time I read it. Vonnegut sadly died while I was writing this thesis and is up in heaven now. So it goes.

—. A Man Without A Country. Ed. Daniel Simon. New York: Seven Stories Press,
2005.

A collection of essays written for a Chicago newspaper. Vonnegut talks about the modern age and why we’re all going to die. In this collection Vonnegut gives a writing lesson no writer should miss.

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I spent six weeks this summer in Dublin. Living in Rathmines, just south of the canal, I attended the Irish Writing Program led by Irish writers Martin Roper and Mary Morrissy with seventeen other students from across the U.S.

I hated Dublin. The canal was full of piss and trash and Dubliners stumbled the streets at night shouting at everyone walking by. It was like Iowa City except for the tourists. Jesus the tourists. They clogged the sidewalks while trying to figure out which McDonald’s to eat at on Grafton Street. Dubliners hate Dublin. The only people who like Dublin are Americans. Americans who only spend a week or two there. And Dubliners make fun of them for their troubles.

But I liked Ireland. We spent a weekend in Northern Ireland, maybe went through Monaghan County on the train but I can’t be sure. Spent two nights in a bed and breakfast on the northwest coast and watched the ocean crash into the land. It was postcard Ireland–green grass and violent cliffs and charming boats in harbor. The last day in the north, we toured Belfast. We ate lunch in private booths at the Crown Pub and wondered about strongly worded signs banning all football jerseys. After lunch, it was time for the black cab tour of the “trouble” areas. Visiting Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods, we saw a land torn by religion and hate. Terrorists and killers are heroes. So are the innocent who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A wall divides the city like old Berlin, instead of dividing East and West, Communist and Capitalist, it divides Catholic and Protestant. A chain-link fence had to erected on the top of the wall because firebombs could still be thrown into the houses along Bombay Street.

But it isn’t all drama in the north. After leaving a Protestant neighborhood with the Union Jack and white and red flag of Ulster flying defiantly from every light and electrical pole, our cab driver told us a story about where we had enjoyed lunch.

“Remember the pub where you had lunch?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“A husband and wife used to own it. He was Catholic, she Protestant.”

“Really?” I asked. “How did that work.”

“Well, times were changing. But at the same time they weren’t.”

We drove past a building with a huge mural of three masked men pointing assault rifles out.

“That’s our Mona Lisa,” he said, pointing to the mural. “No matter where you stand to look at that painting, the barrel of the gun follows.”

We laughed nervously. “Why would a Catholic name his pub after the Crown?” someone asked.

“Well,” he said, “that was the wife’s idea. If he was going to run a pub, it had to be named for the Crown.”

I smiled and looked out the window. Two children were climbing a giant pile of pallets to be burned on July 12th, Marching Day. Usually the most violent day in the north as the Protestant Orangemen march through rioting Catholic towns.

“The husband capitulated, but he had a condition.”

“What was the condition?” I asked.

He smiled and we drove past the most bombed hotel in all of Europe–a strange claim made proudly. “Did you happen to notice, walking through the front door, the crown on the floor?”

“No,” we answered. Who looks at the floor of a place?

“That was his condition. He would name his pub The Crown Pub. But he would put the crown on the floor for his friends, for them to spit on and piss on and step on the Crown every night.”

I laughed. “And she let him do that?” I thought the Crown would be akin to our flag.

“Of course,” he said. “She had to. He agreed to her condition, she to his.”

That night, back in Dublin, I slept and dreamed of nothing. I never want to go back.

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I was dreaming about warm beaches and smiling women in bikinis when Jones shook me awake.

“What? What?” I sat up and looked around. White walls shone even in the darkness of night. Hawaii faded like a soft mist. I looked to my right. Jones stared at me.

“Herring?”

“Yeah?”

“Hey, man, the commander’s going out.”

“What?” I blinked hard and looked at the red numbers floating in the air. 2:08. “Fuck. Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jones said. “But he’s getting dressed and wants to roll out ASAP.”

“Okay,” I slurred. I swung my legs over the side of the cot, my bare feet rested on the cold wood floor. “Can you wake the rest of the team up?”

“Already on it, man.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

***

Sunny beaches a distant memory, I stepped onto the snow-covered Kosovo ground and walk to the operations tent. Outside, I started the massive Hum-vee to warm the engine and walked into the brightly lit tent. The night operations sergeant sat behind a wooden table. A giant map of our sector criss-crossed with colorful lines and circles hung behind him.

“What’s up, sergeant?” I said.

He looked up. “Hey, Herring,” he said and looked down to the papers in front of him.

I walked behind him, grabbed the safe key, took my bullets out of the safe, grabbed my rifle, and went back to the truck. The escort team was there, their truck idling just outside the tent. The driver came up to me. “Where’re we going?” he asked.

“Don’t know.”

“No?”

“Nope. Jones just woke me up. I’m waiting on the commander.”

“Okay,” he said and went back to his truck.

My gunner and interpreter were in their seats when I got back. I drove for the commander of a Military Police Company–four platoons, around 140 soldiers–stationed in Germany and deployed to Kosovo for peacekeeping. The company had been in Kosovo for about four months and the Balkan winter had set in. Cold winds blew from the north and the whole sky turned gray and the earth died. It was rough.

Since the commander was the commander, his gunner got to sit in the back seat. Her normal position would have been sticking out of the roof behind a machine gun with the wind and snow blowing in on us. But the commander was from the south and wanted nothing to do with wind or snow. So she sat in the back seat sleeping mostly.

My interpreter was a funny guy with a big nose and black, serious eyes. He was Albanian, could speak Serbian, Albanian, English, and a couple other languages, I think. He was Muslim. Fasted during Ramadan, loved looking at the Playboys I would buy from the PX. He wore his helmet pushed back on his head and looked ridiculous in our baggy uniform.

The commander poked his head through the passenger door. He rummaged around with a small flashlight silently. He closed the door and went into the operations tent. The air was crystal clear, a full moon hung in the sky reflecting pale light off the snow, making the night glow.

“Vitina,” the commander said, climbing into the truck.

We rolled out softly on the fresh snow and headed into the country. After a twenty minute drive, we pulled onto the narrow roads of Vitina. We drove through the quiet town and past the UN police station. Dogs lounged on the sides of the road, they lifted their heads lazily, watched us pass.

The only place in town with electricity, the 82nd Airborne Division’s compound, was lit up and buzzing with activity. I pulled the trucks up next to a white building with no windows.

“Wait here,” the commander said and disappeared into the building. I got out of the truck, walked back to the escort vehicle.

“We’re waiting,” I told the driver.

“Okay,” he said. His gunner was in the backseat now wrapped up in a sleeping bag.

“You alright, man?” I asked him through the driver’s window.

“Oh yeah,” he said and smiled.

“What the fuck are we doing out here anyway?” the driver asked.

“Fuck if I know,” I answered.

“He didn’t say anything on the way down here?”

“Not a word,” I said and looked around. I saw two C.I.D. agents go into the building. “Hmm.”

“What?”

“C.I.D.’s here,” I said.

“What?” he said and tried to turn his helmet-laden head to see. “What are they doing here?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Look, it’s fucking cold out here. I’m going back to the truck.”

“Herring,” my interpreter said after I closed the heavy door, “what are we doing out here so early?”

“Fuck,” I sighed. “I don’t know, man.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nope. They don’t tell me shit.”

He laughed. “It’s three in the morning,” he complained.

“No shit,” I answered. “I know what time it is. You’ll be able to sleep tomorrow. He won’t be going out after this,” I motioned to the commander’s empty seat.

“Yeah,” he said distantly, already on his way back to sleep. “But I was already asleep.”

I laughed and looked out the window and took my helmet off. The warm air blowing from the vents in the dash felt good. I was ready to go home. Kosovo wasn’t really dangerous. It was tedious. And I was ready to be back in garrison with a soft bed and dry clothes. I longed for the world of patrol cars, traffic accidents and bar brawls. I was tired of loud, leaking trucks, weapons checkpoints and ethnic violence. I wanted to be sitting on the side of the road, listening to music, my radar gun aimed, the soft dash lights the–

“Herring!”

“Yeah,” I looked over. “Yes, sir.”

“Let’s go back.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I put my helmet back on, put the truck in drive, and slowly moved away from the compound making sure my escort was following.

***

The next afternoon after waking up, I went to see a friend in supply.

“Hey, man,” he said when I walked into the tent. “Did you hear what happened?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just woke up.”

“Some sergeant murdered a little Albanian girl,” he said.

I looked at him. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“No, really.”

“How the hell do you know?” I asked. “You never leave this tent.”

“Bryant was by earlier. He told me.”

“Who?”

“Bryant,” he repeated, looking at me pleadingly. “My buddy up at Headquarters.”

“Whatever.”

“Seriously. In Vitina. Yesterday.”

I looked at him closely. “Vitina?”

“Yeah, man. Vitina.”

“I was just there last night.”

“What time?”

“Around three.”

“C.I.D. brought the guy here around five this morning,” he said.

“Whatever,” I answered. I was hungry and tired of listening to him. “Ready to eat?”

“Yeah,” he said, putting on his hat. “Let’s go. You just getting up?”

***

Later that afternoon, I sat in the operations tent waiting for dinner. The operations sergeant had a copy of a report.

“Want to see this, Herring?” he asked.

“What is it?”

“It’s the M.P. report from last night.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let me see that thing.”

It told a brutal story.

A staff sergeant in the 82nd Airborne. A squad leader. In charge of twelve soldiers.

Late morning, the staff sergeant goes out with a truck and a junior soldier. The sergeant orders the private to stop on a secluded trail next to a frozen creek. The sergeant jumps out of the truck, picks up a bundle, throws it into the back of the truck, orders the private to drive back into town. Once in town, he tells the private to stop. A large apartment building stands next to the parked truck. The sergeant grabs the bundled blanket and runs into the building. Back in the truck, he tells the private to drive to their compound and orders him not to say anything about their “secret” mission.

That night, the private can’t sleep. Something isn’t right. After midnight, he wakes his lieutenant, tells him what happened earlier, about the secret mission. The Lt. takes a squad to the building. They find her in the basement. Military Police are called.

***

A Staff Sergeant in the famed “All American” 82nd. A squad leader. In charge of 12 elite Infantry paratroopers. Raped and murdered an eight year old girl.

And we expected the country to explode.

But it didn’t.

Three days later, the American commanders gathered their vehicles to convoy to the funeral. The girl was with us. We brought her back for forensic tests, her body now a crime scene. We were driving the evidence back to her family.

My interpreter was in his seat. “So, what do you think?” I turned around and looked at him. “Will there be violence today?”

He stopped humming and dancing his head and looked at me. “Violence?” he asked, his dark brow furrowed. “Why?”

“Because of the girl.”

“Oh, her,” he said and looked out his window towards the snow-capped mountain looming over Southern Kosovo. “No,” he answered. “The people here are used to this. They hoped the Americans would be different, but they didn’t expect you to be. No one will riot.”

I turned around and looked out the windshield. The girl’s small casket was loaded into the truck in front of me. I watched the snow fall on it, turning the bright pine wood dark–that made me shiver, that made the day very cold. We drove into town, buried her, gave the family some money, and left.

What more could we do?

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A tall man with a drooping face came out of a white building. He wore the Army battle dress uniform–splotches of green, black and brown thrown together by a hyperactive painter–and the brown round, or Smokey the Bear hat, of the Army’s Drill Sergeants. Here we go, I thought sucking in my breath.

“Welcome to the Army,” the man said congenially. “Get in a line and follow me in through the glass doors.”

He moved off and we clumsily followed. This isn’t too bad, I let out my breath. I was expecting the movie, the tall, muscular drill sergeant with a red face and straining neck. Where was all the yelling, all the abuse?

Our scraggly line waited silently in a large hall flooded with light. Looming over us was an impossibly large painting of a WWII Military Police soldier with a whistle in one hand and another hand pointed straight ahead with a raging battle burning at his feet and the MP motto “Of the troops and for the troops” emblazoned across it.

“If y’all will just follow me into the classroom,” the Drill Sergeant said, “we’ll get your paperwork squared away and get y’all some chow.”

Jesus, I thought as the line moved slowly into a cavernous room with rows and rows and rows of desks stretching out like rows of corn. This guy isn’t too bad. He told us to open the envelopes we received early that morning, to pull out the paperwork. It was a thick stack. Insurance forms, next of kin, station preferences, shoe and shirt size, religious preference. We sat in the room fighting sleep for two hours before being led into a small lounge and given crackers and warm juice for dinner and then sent off to bed.

I didn’t sleep that night. A sick yellow light shone through the window and I lay on top of a scratchy wool blanket. What have I gotten myself into? I had no idea what came next and longed to be in my cool, comfortable bed in Des Moines.

The next morning we were woken before dawn and led down to a gravel pit and stood where a different man told us to. There were more people here. Some already wore the gray Army physical training uniform, others the battle dress uniform. I felt out of place with my civilian hair and civilian clothes. We marched roughly to the chow hall for a surprisingly tasty breakfast of eggs and sausage and bacon and juice. After breakfast I walked back to the barracks with another private and waited until nine, when we were supposed to meet up again.

This was only the reception battalion. It wasn’t basic training. That wouldn’t start for at least another week. Reception was being filled with the next group–about two hundred privates–to go down range. The people in uniform had already been here for a few days. We new arrivals were in a group of our own. We spent that first day filling out yet more forms. We were issued “smart books,” a small white book we had to carry everywhere and read whenever we were standing in line, and the males got our hair sheered off. I felt even more out of place with my cue-ball of a head still wearing civilian clothes.

Over the next few days the routine stayed the same. Wake in the morning, march to chow, and meet back up at nine for processing. We were issued our uniforms and equipment, dog tags, given lots of shots, gave lots of blood, and took classes on how to balance a checkbook and drink water. “Drink water” would become a familiar refrain over the next sixteen weeks under the beating Alabama sun. We became comfortable, lounged around our barracks at night with nothing to do but shoot the shit and call home.

After five days of relaxing on the government’s nickel, the first group was sent down range. Fifty of us packed up all we owned, a large duffel bag and whatever other civilian bags we brought, and sat lazily on bleachers in the shade waiting for the buses, worrying about what would happen next, eager to get started. Two buses pulled up ominously and the cadre at reception battalion marshaled the group up and marched us onto the buses.

After a short ride we stopped in front of a space-ship looking building with a long, wide sidewalk leading to it. Drill Sergeants milled about like sharks waiting to make a kill. A short squat man with a Hitler mustache climbed onto the bus.

“On behalf of the United States Army, the Commanding General of the Military Police Corps and the Commanding Officer of Alpha Company, 787th MP Battalion, I’d like to welcome you to Fort McClellan and basic combat training,” he started off nicely enough. “My name is Senior Drill Sergeant Davis, you will address me as Senior Drill Sergeant, and”–a little rougher now–”I’ve served in this Army for fifteen years and I’m the meanest motherfucker to ever piss between a pair of combat boots. Now,”–blazing face, spittle flying out his angry mouth–”you maggots have thirty seconds to get off my fucking bus and twenty-eight of them are already gone!”

Holy fucking shit.

We all jumped up at once, tried to climb over each other getting off. The Senior Drill Sergeant didn’t move and we had to scurry past him and down the steps.

“Don’t fucking bump into me you nasty privates.”

“Hurry up, hurry up. We don’t have all fucking day.”

“Shit son, you look tired. Are you fucking tired already?!?”

I didn’t look at him and stumbled down the steps heavily with my duffel bag strapped awkwardly to my front. Drill Sergeants harassed our every step until we made it on to the CTA, or company training area, a concrete floor with the building built over it. They put us into lines, our first real formation, and started walking up and down it yelling at everyone.

A Drill Sergeant stood in front of us giving us instructions while his comrades moved through the ranks screaming at whoever caught their fancy. We were told to put our duffel bags down, with the opening facing the left, and don’t let your stinkin’ civilian bags touch my fucking CTA. We didn’t do it right the first time, or the second time, or even the third time. Finally, we either got it right or they decided we needed some water. Sweat poured down my face and through my uniform.

I followed my squad to a table where plastic cups of water sat. We were instructed to pick up two cups and walk back to the formation. The glasses were filled to the brim and my hands were shaking from fear and muscle fatigue.

“Don’t spill any water on my CTA,” Drill Sergeant Johnson hounded me. “Do you hear me private? Holy shit private. You’re spilling water on my CTA! What the fuck are you doing?!?”

Back in line I drank the two cups down while Drill Sergeant Johnson continued admonishing me for fucking up his CTA.

“What’s your name private?” a familiar looking man asked me.

“Senior Drill Sergeant, my name is Private Herring Senior Drill Sergeant.”

He jumped over my bag and into my face. Wrong guy.

“Holy shit private. Are you fucking promoting me?” Drill Sergeant Williams yelled. “Hey, Senior Drill Sergeant. This private just promoted me. He must not like you.”

“Is that a fact?” Senior Drill Sergeant Davis moved quickly towards us, elbowed his way between me and another private. “Did you forget who I was already. Jesus fucking christ. I just introduced myself to you not five minutes ago,” he spat in my ear. “Are you demoting me?”

“Senior Drill Sergeant, no Senior Drill Sergeant.”

“Then why did you call me Senior Drill Sergeant?”

“Drill Sergeant, I don’t know Drill Sergeant.”

“Holy shit. Where are you fucking from private?”

“Senior Drill Sergeant, Iowa Senior Drill Sergeant.”

He made some crack about potatoes and moved on after a few more insults and I relaxed just a little bit. I panted in the heat, my uniform was soaked through now and spots flashed in my eyes.

We were ordered to pick up our bags and followed a drill sergeant up a narrow stairway to our home for the next sixteen weeks. A long bay with bunk beds lined up interspersed with large wooden wall lockers. The drill sergeant assigned us to wall lockers, had us stand in front of them.

“Take off your fucking headgear when inside,” he bellowed. “Drop your duffels, get the lock off it, put it in your wall locker and lock it.”

I moved to my wall locker. Something was bent. It wouldn’t close. Everyone else was standing at the foot of the beds.

“Private, what’s going on down there?” he moved quickly and was standing behind me.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Drill sergeant, the locker won’t close drill sergeant,” I answered.

“Front leaning rest,” he called out to everyone, “move!”

We all moved into the push-up position. Some people started doing push-ups.

“I didn’t tell any of you fuckers to start, did I? Stay in the front leaning rest.”

His mirror black boots moved away, moved down the corridor as he yelled, instructed, berated. I looked down at the pool of sweat forming on the floor. My arms shook and my chest was going to explode. I had been with Alpha Company for only thirty minutes.

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The collection was published in 1990, almost twenty years after his war memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and O’Brien has had a lot of time to think and write about his war experiences. He seems to being blurring the line between truth and fiction, to be asking the question: What exactly is the truth? O’Brien sometimes inserts himself into the narrative telling the reader how to read a war story, how to write a war story. In one story he kills a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade and in another it was a different soldier who threw the grenade and yet in another story nobody threw a hand grenade and the soldier kept on walking.

O’Brien tells the human side of a war, a war different from what is often seen on the movie screen where heroic battles are fought by heroic soldiers. War is folly and when a bunch of kids are thrown together to wander through dense jungle with no clear sense of what’s going on it becomes an epic tragedy. The title story focuses on the platoon leader Lt. Cross. Lt. Cross is still just a boy. He carries a picture of a girl who will never love him. When he digs in for the night he reads her letters and imagines what she’s doing. He carries around a rock that she sent him, in his mouth, “tasting sea salt and moisture,” imagining her bare feet in the sand. His mind wanders while his soldiers are off getting stoned, reading, sleeping, just marking time.

Lt. Cross is brought violently into the reality of his situation when one of his troops is killed by a sniper. Cross decides, while watching the soldier’s lifeless body being loaded onto a helicopter and the rest of his platoon smoking pot, that a change is needed. That night he burns all the letters, all the photos of Martha, pulls out a map, and gets ready for the next mission. He’s changed. A mistake like this won’t happen again if he can help it.

The most powerful story of the collection is “On A Rainy River”. O’Brien, the protagonist, has received his draft notice ordering him to report to induction and then on to Vietnam, a war he strongly disagrees with. O’Brien, knowing he can’t go off and fight a war he doesn’t believe in, flees to the north of Minnesota just a few miles from the border with Canada. He wants to cross the border, but something holds him back. His family, his sense of honor, doing what’s right. But what’s right? He doesn’t know.

O’Brien finds a quiet cabin that is used during tourist season and stays with the owner Elroy. Elroy knows what O’Brien is thinking, can see it in his eyes, and one day he takes him fishing. O’Brien is savoring the cool air and is excited and frightened when he realizes they passed into Canadian waters. Elroy stops the boat only a few feet from land, from Canada and starts fishing, whistling softly. It’s decision time and O’Brien stares at the land, at freedom, at peace, and thinks of everything he would leave behind, thinks of the shame of running away, of not being a man. In the end he tells Elroy to take him back. “I was a coward, I went to war,” O’Brien laments at the end. As strange as it sounds, a coward going to war, O’Brien didn’t stand up for his beliefs. He did what was expected of him.

O’Brien’s stories are maddening to read. What’s the truth? Is there a truth? With one of the protagonists named Tim O’Brien a reader could be forgiven for believing the stories at face value, as non-fiction. A friend once told me that the stories are non-fiction but O’Brien labeled them as fiction because they were so crazy, so unbelievable. I don’t buy this. O’Brien has deftly woven fiction and non-fiction together in a blend meant to confuse the reader over and over again.

O’Brien also gives writing lessons, indeed some of the pieces feel like essays on how to write a war story. He doesn’t make it easy. He goes back and forth over what is the truth, what is the truth in how things happened, how they should of happened, how they did happen. In twenty years a lot of things can change. O’Brien tells us that he killed a man and turns right around to admonish us that we’re not paying attention, that he never killed anyone. Have we not been listening, have we learned nothing? It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. Who can we believe to tell us a war story, a real war story. O’Brien wants us to believe no one. There is no truth, only different versions of it.

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is, according to Stewart, “the most trusted name in fake news.” But in the angry world of cable news, Jon Stewart is actually one of the most trusted names in news. He is certainly one of the more genuine people you’ll find delivering the news.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Stewart and his band of marauding reporters could be found everywhere. They asked tough questions at the debates, stalked the halls of both party conventions and wrote America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. Shortly after America was released, Stewart appeared on CNN’s Crossfire. But instead of promoting the book, Stewart took the two hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, to task for failing their “responsibility to public discourse.”

Begala and Carlson expected the Jon Stewart we all know and love–the goofy guy making snarky comments on the day’s political and media happenings–but instead had to deal with a smart, pissed-off American. Stewart opened by pleading with the two to stop hurting the country, calling them “partisan hacks” who, instead of holding public representatives accountable to the public, are responsible for the poisonous atmosphere surrounding politics and government.

During Gulf War I, CNN proved the viability of 24-hour news by its continuous coverage of that war. Especially awe inspiring were the neon green anti-aircraft tracer rounds being fired into the night and the bright explosions of Baghdad against the dark desert. Entrepreneurs and advertisers saw these images, these live action shots straight from a movie, and thought of all the money to be made. They moved quickly and now we’re plagued with a plethora of these all day, every day “news” channels.

An all day news channel provides an excellent forum to delve into the major stories of the day. Instead of relying on press releases for their stories, journalists could actually go investigate leads and find their own stories. But this kind of in-depth, investigative coverage costs money and isn’t guaranteed pull in the viewers. At the end of the day, we want to be entertained.

In this era of entertainment news we get five minutes of two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum yelling talking points at each other instead of explaining and detailing their positions. We get a sensory overload with dazzling graphics, grating breaking news alerts, multiple screens, news tickers and color-coded threat levels void of detail. We get reporters asking inflammatory and leading questions, anchors shouting down anyone they don’t agree with. We get a circus and come away from each encounter with it a little dumber.

Jon Stewart may be the anchor of a comedy news show, a fake news show, but he is an astute observer and critic of the media. During the recent controversy between James Frey and Oprah Winfrey, Stewart and his writers put together a segment that highlighted the differences between our world and Oprah’s world. After James Frey admitted to making up most of his best selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, Winfrey, who’s endorsement sent the book to the top of best seller lists, brought him back on the show and picked each of his lies apart for her audience. Stewart contrasted this show of accountability with O’Reilly’s interview with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the statement/question: “So you and Dick Cheney aren’t the torture guys the New York Times say you are.”

O’Reilly, who purports to officiate over “the no-spin zone,” once claimed, using, as far as I can tell, a study pulled out of his ass, that 87 percent of Stewart’s viewers watch while intoxicated and called them “stoned slackers.” He went on to lament the fact that Stewart’s show can actually influence this cadre of non-thinking, unemployed, stoner Americans. However, an Annenberg Survey conducted in 2004 showed that these stoned slackers are more knowledgeable about the two presidential candidates than national news viewers and newspaper readers.

So people watching a fake news show, a fake news show on a comedy channel, a fake news show that follows a show about puppets making crank phone calls, are more informed about national events than those watching CNN, Fox News, or NBC, or reading The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, or The Washington Post? To use Stewart’s words: “What the fuck happened?”

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The feudal society of the 12th century was rigid. If one was born a peasant, they would die as a peasant and conversely, if born a noble, one’s birth and breeding would guarantee a room for the night, no matter how far their fortunes had fallen. There was no movement from one class to the next and the easiest way to distinguish class was by outward appearances—knights wore armor or fine silk and they looked noble while peasants wore threadbare robes and looked dejected. Criminals were ridden through town on a cart, subjected to the mockery and torture of a whole town.

Every writer must know their audience and Chrétien had no doubts about his. He wrote “The Knight of the Cart” for his patron, Marie de Champagne, and her court—nobles and knights and clergy. In order to please his lady and her court, he wrote a poem about a knight who would go through anything to rescue his love; nothing was too demeaning for this brave and praiseworthy knight. After the queen is kidnapped, her noble lover rushes after her resorting to riding in a cart after his horse dies. The cart is a wicked thing as Chrétien explains:

“In those days carts were used as pillories are now; for all traitors and murderers, for all those who had lost trials by combat, and for all those who had stolen another’s possessions by larceny or snatched them by force on the highways. The guilty person was taken and made to mount in the cart and was led through every street; he had lost all his feudal rights and was never again heard at court, nor invited or honoured there. Since in those days carts were so dreadful, the saying first arose: ‘Whenever you see a cart and cross its path, make the sign of the cross and remember God, so that evil will not befall you.’” (211)

But Chrétien soon begins to question this snap judgment, this idea that riding in a cart instantly turns one into an outcast. When Lancelot rides into a field to battle another knight who has his hopes set the maiden Lancelot escorts, the people gathered playing games flee in disgust saying, “‘Damned be anyone who seeks to amuse himself or dares to play as long as he is here’” (228). Lancelot is not worried by this response, he is a noble and brave knight and he knows it. He is not the only one.

The knight hoping to defeat Lancelot rides up quickly to an old knight present on the field. The young knight explains his happiness and that he will soon possess the woman he has wanted for so long. The wise old knight, his father, sees something in Lancelot and tries to talk his son out of his chosen course of action. When the son refuses to listen to the father, he orders not to fight and has him restrained (229). Lancelot leads the woman away from the field and the fickle people rush back to their games exclaiming, “‘A hundred curses on anyone who stops his play on his account! Let’s return to our games!’” (230).

Further evidence of Lancelot’s greatness comes a few lines later when he comes upon a church and, “being neither a boor nor fool,” enters to pray. After his prayers, he looks at the crypts and asks a hermit about the one covered with a heavy stone slab. The slab prophesies that the man who can lift it with his unaided strength will free all the people from the land of no escape and Chrétien tells the reader that it would take seven strong men to even budge the slab. But Lancelot, the knight who rode in a cart, “went at once and seized hold of the slab and lifted it without the least difficulty” (231). By lifting the slab Lancelot becomes a savior, he will free the people from a land of no escape.

Is Chrétien arguing against the cart? Does he use the noble Lancelot to challenge his readers’ ideas about class, about the judgment of a person based on superficial evidence? The episodes of the challenging knight and the slab may only serve to highlight Lancelot’s nobility—that nothing is below this great man when it comes to the love of his woman. Indeed, this would be an example of “fin amor” leading to detrimental public action. If this were the case, Chrétien would have already made his point. But he returns to the cart once again and makes stronger statements against it.

After Lancelot finds lodging for the night in the home of knight, he is challenged by another knight who has been searching for him. This knight calls out, wanting to know “which one of you was so proud and foolish and so empty-headed as to come into this land, believing he can cross the Sword Bridge?” (239). When Lancelot answers that he is seeking the Sword Bridge, the knight mocks him and reminds him of his shame for riding in a cart. When the knight brings up the cart, Chrétien writes, the lord of the manor and all those with him lament: “‘Oh God! What a misfortune!’ thought each to himself. ‘Damned be the hour when a car was first conceived and constructed, for it is a vile and despicable thing’” (240). No one says this out loud, they only think it, yet “on this matter, everyone spoke with one voice” (240).

This incongruity between the nobility of Lancelot and the shame of his riding in a cart is similar to the incongruity between Jesus being free of sin and his saving of and talking to a whore who is now venerated as a saint. In the same way a new citizen of America is often more familiar with the history United States than one who has lived here all their life, Chrétien, as a convert to Christianity, would have been familiar with the way Jesus constantly sought out the dejected and rose them up to the status of people worthy of love and respect.

Chrétien is concerned about those who were unlucky enough to be born to the peasant class, those unlucky enough to be paraded through town on a cart. But he has to balance this concern for the downtrodden with the sensibilities of the nobility he wrote for. It would have done him, or his message, any good to denounce the class structure of the day in any kind of certain terms. Those who went against the comfortable hierarchy of the 12th century would be labeled agitators and most likely end up at the stake. Chrétien, by words and thoughts, tells a story with a subliminal message. Writers are still using these same tricks.

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Sometimes, time can move glacially and it is hard to tell if anything of significance is happening. Other times, historical times are more obvious. Surely Pepys, an educated man as evident in his literacy, knew he was living during historical times. The English Civil war had ended in the death of a King and marked the beginning of Puritan rule on the island and its territories. But history cannot be wiped so clean. For over five-hundred years, since the time of the fabled and noble King Arthur, the English have known a King and they would have their king. Eleven years after the beheading of King Charles I, his son, Charles II, was invited back to England to take up the throne and a small group of ships was dispatched to Holland to bring him home.

This is where Pepys’s diary begins. Pepys’s cousin Mountagu (who later becomes Earl of Sandwich, Pepys’s patron) is dispatched to pick up the King and his brother, the Duke of York, and asks Pepys to accompany him on the trip as his secretary (5). These first pages of the diary firmly establishes Pepys as a man of status and ambition. On the way to Holland, his ambition, or vanity, is clear when he writes, “I wrote this morning many letters, and to all the copies of the vote of the Council of Warr I put my name; that if it should come to print, my name may be at it” (7). On the voyage back to England, Pepys listens as the King tells the story of how he fled Cromwell’s troops from Worcester and is “ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through” (8). It seems remarkable that Pepys is on a boat with the King listening to his stories. Pepys seems unimpressed, remarking at the end of the voyage how “a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are” (9). This is made more impressive given Pepys’s youth—only twenty-eight years old.

As interesting as Pepys’s encounter with the King, the diary really comes to life in the showing of everyday life in London. Of course, Pepys was of the upper class, made evident by being invited to pick up the King, so his accounts must be taken with a grain of salt. Were Pepys’s days typical of someone living in London? Probably not. It is always striking, whether reading Dickens’ David Copperfield or Pepys’s diary, how the world seems to stand still for the rich. Whatever it is they need, they will find as if it has been waiting for them all along. On the first day of the Great Fire, Pepys walks the streets and “down to the waterside and there got a boat and through the bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire” (155). Pepys’s account is curiously void of the commotion that must have been present that day. The nearest Pepys comes to showing this commotion is when he takes word to the Lord Mayor, from the King, that he is to pull houses down to stop the spread of fire. Pepys records, “To the King’s message, he cried like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster then we can do it’” (156). This passage also serves to show Pepys’s status once again, he was ushered in to see the King, gave his advise, and this becomes the King’s order.

But Pepys was not always a man of status, of wealth. He dreams of becoming rich and talks at length with his wife of what he will do when worth 2000 Pound (107). The Restoration of King Charles II, the resulting rise of Mountagu to the Earl of Sandwich, combined to give Pepys power and money. He was elevated from a temporary clerk at the Exchequer to a position in the Navy where he grew wealthy off questionable payments of contractors (69).

Despite rising with his cousin, Pepys held the fear of becoming poor and zealously protected his money. Pepys’s love of money, and the fear of losing it all, is made clear by his account of burying and recovering of his gold in 1667. Pepys was forced to bury his wealth after the Dutch took the Royal Charles and came into Hope. Pepys, working for the Navy, feels that his office and maybe his home will be attacked by angry mobs and sends his wife and father off to his father’s home to bury the gold. When he comes to dig the money up the following October, he frets because his wife and father cannot remember where it was buried, he eventually finds it but then is angry to learn they buried it in plain sight of the neighbors (243). His gold is strewn all over the garden, but he finds most it, although twenty to thirty pieces were not recovered, and “did bring my gold, to my heart’s content, very safe home” (246).

His issues with money provide an insight into his marriage and the roles of husbands and wives in seventeenth century England. While it may have appeared on the surface that Pepys controlled his house and his wife with ease, Elizabeth, Pepys’s wife, is no push over. The following passage illustrates both of their passions and establishes Pepys’s position in the house:

“At home find my wife this day of her own accord to have lain out 25s upon a pair of pendances for her eares; which did vex me and brought both me and her to very high, and very foul words from her to me, such as trouble me to think she should have in her mouth, and reflecting upon our old difference which I hate to have remembered. I vowed to break them, or that she should go and get what she could for them again. I went with that resolution out of doors. The poor wretch afterward, in a little while, did send out to change them for her money again. I fallowed Besse her messenger at the Change and there did consult and sent her back; I would not have them changed, being satisfied that she yielded.” (4 July 1664)

Elizabeth’s spending ways worries Pepys, he checks over her books one night, “And upon my being very angry, she doth protest she will here lay up something for herself to buy her a neckelace with—which madded me and doth still trouble me, for I fear she will forget by degrees the way of living cheap and under a sense of want” (64). It seems almost fitting that Pepys would scold his wife for spending money when he spent lavishly on himself (83).

Pepys was a restless and curious man. Like all people, he was complex and his diary records his many interests, from science to the arts to women. It is a wonder and testament to Pepys’s chameleon nature that he even survived Puritan rule. Pepys went to great lengths to hide his affairs, probably worried about his wife finding out, but more than likely worried for his reputation. Not only did he write his whole diary in code, but as an added security measure he weaved passages with several different languages to hide his indiscretions.

However, a man as amorous as Pepys could not hide his misdeeds forever. Elizabeth catches him one day embracing her young companion (or, “did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats”), Deb Willet, and is deeply hurt (256). To get revenge, Elizabeth tells her husband that she was a Roman Catholic and this troubles him (256). The fact that Pepys is bothered by his wife’s Catholicism offers another insight to King Charles II’s England.

When Pepys hears a story about four girls chanting and lifting up a heavy man with only their fingers, he inquires if the girls are Protestant or Catholic. He is told that they were Protestant “which made it the more strange” for him (170). After the fire, Pepys hears from Sir Crew that the fire was done by plot. Crew tells Pepys that there are many witnesses who saw efforts to increase the fire “and that both in City and country it was bragged by several papists that upon such a day or in such a time we should find the hottest weather that ever was in England, and words of plainer sense” (160). And when a meteor appears over the city, it is a signal that the rest of the city is to be burned and papists will start cutting throats (172).

It is unclear if Pepys believed any of this or if he was merely relating the stories of the day, but given his comment about the Protestant girls it seems he found them at least plausible. But Pepys is a hard man to pin down. He observed Mass at the Queen’s chapel at least twice and even watched the King take the Sacrament. He did not get his throat cut, instead he rather enjoyed the service, remarking that the music was better, the chapel nicer and the manner of performance glorious (24). Perhaps Pepys was not swayed by passions on either side because he was not passionate about one side or the other. While Pepys spirituality bordered on the superstitious, he never missed a chance to bless God or praise God or thank God for gold, he was not very religious. He did not like preachers and when he goes to church he is often involved in mischief. He writes without a hint of remorse about sleeping through sermons, reading books during service, and chasing after women in pews to the point of almost being stabbed. Again, Puritan rule must have been very hard on him.

But this is how Pepys survived. It is too bad Pepys did not keep a diary his whole life. It would be interesting to see how he coped during the Interregnum. A boy who upon the beheading of King Charles I remarked, “The memory of the wicked shall rot” went on to serve two Kings with nothing but loyalty (273). It is also too bad that Pepys stopped keeping a diary in 1669, it would have been interesting to see the Glorious Revolution through his eyes. But he wrote enough. Pepys lived through historic times and his diary allows us to see more than the restoration of a Monarchy, but the restoration of a nation.

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Two hours from Washington we make our final stop at a generic oasis in Pennsylvania. Our driver takes us past a gas station with several buses already parked, hundreds of passengers swarming the few restaurants, to a deserted parking lot on the edge of town.

After downing a greasy breakfast, my brother and I stand in the parking lot brushing our teeth with shockingly cold water. I tell him this reminds me of the army—the early hour, the strangeness of watching the sun go down and staring out into darkness waiting for it to come back up, being cold and not able to warm up, the smell of diesel filling the air, clinging to everything. At least it isn’t raining.

Carrying over one hundred fifty peaceful people from Iowa City, Waterloo, Des Moines, and points between, three buses have driven through the night to get us into Washington by 10:00am. Despite the cramped conditions that thwarted sleep, nobody seems the least bit cranky. In fact, when the buses pulled back onto the road for the final leg of the trip, the air is filled with a quiet excitement. We hope to be a part of the largest protest in Washington since the beginning of the Iraq tragedy, to protest global belligerence conducted in our name, to demand accountability for those who blundered, lied, cajoled us into this war, to make our voices heard, if only for a moment, in our nation’s capitol.

As we cross the Potomac, I look out the window at the white monuments we drive past. This is my first trip to Washington, but this town has become a national disgrace and I’m not here to see the sights. Our bus drives down Constitution Ave and I watch as people stream down the sidewalks and gather in parks. They carry signs reading “Bush=Murder,” “Impeach Bush,” and “The only bush I trust is my own.

The march starts at 12:30pm in front of The Ellipse with booming, fast drums, and a bare-chested man wearing a tribal mask who dances and blows a whistle. He leads a procession of disheartened brown ghosts that look like melted candles. These ghosts do their death dances over and over again to the beating drums and screaming whistles. People cling to trees and traffic lights screaming excitedly, “There are people as far as I can see! A sea of people!”

The brown ghosts and drums move on past our Iowa group and we step out onto the road, excited to start. The sounds of drums still fills the air. We have our own drummer, everyone has a drummer. Chants move up and down the crowd in waves: demanding peace, demanding change, demanding to be listened to instead of being dismissed with an irritating smirk and childish chuckle.

And there are a lot of people to listen to. We’re ready to start moving, ready to get the show on the road. But we don’t move and it starts to rain. A police helicopter circles above the march and we shout at it while waving our signs when it flies over. I’m surprised to learn we’ve been standing here for two hours. It hasn’t felt like that much time has passed and I wonder when we’ll start moving.

At 4:30, four blocks in four hours, we make it to the White House. My brother and I veer off into Lafayette Park to sit and rest for a while. I take his camera and move around the park taking pictures of the protesters and the White House. The tail end of the march is passing by, protesters carry empty, flag-draped boxes so people can see what we’re not allowed to see. I walk up to the barricades in front of the house and take pictures of two police officers that film the march as it goes by. Police form a line in the “no-man’s land” between the people and the well manicured lawns paid for by the people. I see Washington has in fact learned some lessons from the Vietnam War, albeit the wrong ones.

According to Democracy Now!, an independent media radio broadcast hosted by Amy Goodman, close to 300,000 people showed up in Washington on September 24th and marched. Have you heard about this protest? It’s understandable if you didn’t, the media mentioned it only in passing. To be fair, there was another hurricane churning towards the Gulf Coast that weekend and I’m certain the 24-hour-a-day news channels didn’t want to cut away from dramatic images of correspondents being abused by wind and rain for the anchor desk and control room’s amusement. Undoubtedly you heard about Cindy Sheehan getting arrested the following Monday for sitting down in front of the White House and refusing to move.

I’ve heard people asking why we even bothered protesting. We carried signs only we would read and chanted chants to empty buildings as the media looked away.

Do you really think you’ll change anything? Protesting the government is unpatriotic and treasonous, by supporting and marching for peace you give aid and comfort to our enemies. Sit down, wave your flag, and feel awe when that jet black limo speeds by from one mansion to the next. I find these attitude frightening, dictatorships have begun under such apathy.

Nobody in Washington that weekend thought we would change the government overnight. We knew American troops wouldn’t start coming home on Monday. But the fact that over 150 Iowans endured a 40-hour round trip bus ride for the sole purpose of spending twelve hours in Washington protesting speaks to the commitment of this movement. The ignoring media, the large percentage of lethargic Americans, the elected officials who fled rather than listen, all can be frustrating to people who believe in peace, who believe that the Iraq war was and is a tragic failure of leadership.

But we won’t be beaten and we are not going away.

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