Training Max: Chapter 15


 

It was the twelfth day of training when Max’s absolute dream and absolute nightmare came true: having been ordered through House Joint Resolution 169, the generals of the American military were asking soldiers from the Czechian reserve Army to engage in yet another proxy war against Hungary. At last, he thought, time to put on a goddamned battle helmet, finally, purely, simply becoming a soldier, through and through. (Or had he always been one…?)

That morning, after dressing in his Army garb, he briskly and purposefully walked towards the rest of the similarly-clad soldiers. His people. His Captain, watching him, noticed that Max was holding his CZ-805 BREN assault rifle in the reverential way that he was never able to hold a pen.

Finally - finally - like a bastard son who nonetheless effortlessly and perfectly play-acted to be what he was not the whole time, he had come home. His mind blessedly out of thought and his body ecstatically screaming with dopamine and testosterone (as someone had said yesterday - or was it a lifetime ago?), he got into one of the Tatra 810 medium trucks that lined the training camp. He was off to fight in a war in which didn’t believe but joined as his final redemption, the only thing finally capable of burning away his boredom and thus rendering his life with a meaning of self that is same, absolute, simple, silent. The truck’s engine started. He was home.

After the campaign, which lasted two weeks, he found himself on the dock, heading for a ship bound not for Czechia but for France. His training and subsequent war done, he was fatigued, complete – and, thinking that it had been impossible until then – happy. Not looking back at the shore, he hefted one bag in one hand, in which – with God, and only God, as his witness, not his family, not Chris, not his mates, not even himself – he did not pack his notebook.

Out of the bag, he took out his favorite blue beret. Knowing that he had one just like it in the possession of one French redhead with skin the color of ivory and green eyes identical to his own, he threw the blue beret in the ocean. He would soon have the other one, the real one, the only one that mattered. He would retrieve it shyly, lovingly, from Florence’s outstretched hands in less than two days. She didn’t know he was coming back.

She didn’t need to.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mental disorders: Thoughts on a whatever something or other

I suppose I could start in plainer English discussing who I am as a layman not trained in psychoanalytic language, and if so will revert to the language that I do use when discussing anything worth discussing: half academic and half wit (indistinguishable at times from being a halfwit). As a layman I chose to major in philosophy, for better or worse, which is a fast track to being witty, or being a halfwit, and other things besides. Or I could start with a bombardment of links mostly pertaining to The Diagnostic Statistical Manual   IV and V  and increasingly technical accounts of co-morbidity and dual diagnoses involving bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder until we both drown in jargon I will not be able to understand, much less simplify. For DSM-IV diagnostic criteria regarding bipolar disorders types I and II, look at  this  if you want a full jargon drowning, or  this instead  if only for its simplicity and overall pleasant color sche...
Read more

Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr...
Read more

Of finding something again

Image
I just sleep. I sleep to rest, to be away from the world that has given me so much and that I am not a part of anyway, to reset, to die. If only for a while.  I wake up and look at my phone, as all of us do now. The world painfully worlds, with no pauses and preambles: it elbows you in the face with all its glory, its vapid bitches, and all the iterations of the Andrew Tates of humankind. In everything we have a choice, save for one: this world. It is the ultimate given, the ultimate, ungentle, fact, and that we are in it. It doesn't stop. It can't; it doesn't have to. Immediately upon waking I close my eyes and dive deep into the recesses of whatever that was young that's left of me to desperately hunt for reserves of a desire to get up from bed, to work, to be . Two days ago I joked with my lover that I had been tired since 1984, and I think I mean it.  If not for him and another friend that gave me the time of the day in the MMORPG that I returned to, I would have ro...
Read more