A GRUNT CAN COPE with monsoons, with leeches, with searing heat, suffocating humidity. The savagery of war does not strip him of his humanity. These things are external. They are not of the self. One does not say, “I am the pain of leeches.” One does not say, “I am a firefight.” “I am Manny’s death.” “I am an atrocity.” It requires a return to a civilized World to complete that dehumanization.
This became Bobby’s theory of the self. As you witness our destruction, you should have our criteria for evaluation. It was maybe six years ago that Bobby said, “In finding one’s self one loses one’s self and no longer needs to define one’s self because one simply is. That is the true self. When one no longer needs to define one’s self in terms of possessions, actions, or relationships, the self falls away, opening one up to actions and relationships. Losing one’s self frees one to do, to observe, to be observed, to interact without the constraints of looking at one’s self through others’ eyes, or even one’s own. Praise and criticism, real or imagined, block one from developing a value system based on criteria beyond the immediate, beyond the past, beyond projected opinions, polls, the people’s will, election results, resale values, net-net-net and myriad other less-than-ultimate criteria. Our problem is searching for ultimate criteria; interpreting actions and thoughts against those criteria; establishing a guide, a code, an ethic, that reflects those criteria.”
It was not new, but to him, to us, it seemed like something lost. It had been lost to “our people,” lost to our country; and our people and country were floating, a rudderless ship—the rudder voluntarily destroyed or purposefully disconnected in the name of criteria driven by the three great temptations: greed, lust, and power; insidious, manipulative forces like unseen toxins coursing through the system tripping, cutting, causing us to lose our way, to lose opportunities, to feel guilty for what might have been.
The bells of St. Ignat’s do not usually ring at this hour, at night, but they are ringing now, shaking me from my thoughts on self. It is day six of my fast. Owls howl. Bats scat. I’ve deluged my body with so much water it is running out of my pores and orifices and my ass is so sore. But it is nothing compared to my mind, my sense of self, at that time.
I want to be fair. Not all private or state or federal veterans medical facilities were as fucked up as Rock Ridge. And even those that were, including Rock Ridge, changed as the 1970s progressed. Change, however, did not necessarily mean improvement.