Operational Culture for the Warfighter

What would be the point, in this first winter snow, of going

back to several of the women whose bodies I have known

and wondering what they thought about all these intervening

years. Inevitably it is their children, illnesses and death.

Their art, their work, community. How their words

enter your ears and stay forever! Rib cage and knee.

How we lay on the beds in our youth and late afternoon light.

At no point will the snow and bare trees stop being

interesting to me. Seven loads of apples went into Jim Kelly's

cider press Saturday afternoon. A paragraph from Wendell

Berry's recent essay was read. Those who felt part of that place

were embraced. Fields of pumpkins, corn to the west

and east. But I remember winter nights hurrying under

elevated subway, Bronx. Alone, unknown, I did not exist.

The point being maybe now I don't exist anymore than in Afghanistan.

A land to be admired, like all lands. How lovely the harsh

mountains and deserts, indigenous plants and people, adapted

ungulates, carnivorous mammals. What is left of them after

10,000 years of human history. Much has been made of the snow

leopard, by Peter Mathiessen. The city of Kabul is understandable

using the very same analysis Jane Jacobs learned from New York City.

At this point I would have to overcome a deepening solitude,

the snow of it falling about my ears, to hear their cries and joys

and understand thanksgiving. Has my father gone to his grave

without saying his one essential thing? He has said it, said it

in war and in preparing boys for war, and in peace and his wife.

Have my lovers gone to their graves already or are they still

in life? I have heard a random, strange selection of their words.