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I was twelve years old when the Holy Family Catholic Church left a box of food on our front porch. We were living in our second house since we’d returned to Nevada. This was two years after my mother’s second divorce, two years after I’d watched my second father hand my mom a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills to help us with the move back to her small hometown. From the ever green of the Pacific Northwest, my mom, my three sisters, and I drove sixteen hours south in a rented U Haul where we lived, briefly and for the second time, with my grandparents in their single-wide trailer in Nevada’s high desert. The first place my mom rented was one-half of a duplex, just two bedrooms and a bathroom. We shared a backyard with a neighbor, a huge, quiet man who always seemed to be wearing knee-high rubber boots. My mother squeezed my three sisters and me into one bedroom, she took the other. The house was small, but I don’t remember scrapping for privacy or primacy. We all got along. After the second divorce, surely there was a circle-the-wagons element to our unity.

Our new house on Helen Avenue was the same size as the duplex, but was an upgrade in ways far more important than square footage. We now had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. We had a garage, with a basketball hoop and backboard screwed into the wall, and real grass in a front yard encircled by baseball-gobbling juniper bushes. We had open spaces, ten months of sunshine, and an entire village safe enough for all its children to roam like feral cats who cared only where they were fed and bedded. We shared 1,040 square feet. We thrived.

We also relied heavily on extended family. My grandparents lived on five acres of alkali and alfalfa just outside of town, and had provided my mom a safe landing pad at least twice. An aunt and uncle, along with their three daughters, never lived more than five or six houses away. My older sister Michele and I, at least eight and six years older than every other grandchild, babysat our sisters and cousins when the adults went out on a weekend night. It must have felt to them like furlough. If the adults left us both in charge, our missteps were limited to making the younger kids go to sleep early so we could steal booze from the liquor cabinet. Michele and I and our friends would throw out empty bottles of the Canadian Mist we’d mixed with RC Cola, or refill cheap bottles of vodka with water. If I babysat alone, I’d invite over my best friend. The two of us would create intricate but fair and deeply thought-out tournament brackets, and then make the cousins fight each other. We pitted them against each other first based on age or size, each small child a tiny gladiator, armed with only a pillow and whatever bravery and pre-pubescent bloodlust they could muster. We were just kids too.

My mom always had one steady job and sometimes a second. She took weekend cleaning gigs at a local insurance office when she could. Any stress – and surely it must have come in waves – was rarely visible to us. She once picked up smoking. On a weekend afternoon, Michele and I sat down next to my mom at our Formica kitchen table, white topped with blue and pink overlapping boomerang shapes. My mom had a lit cigarette in her hand. Michele and I each pulled a cigarette of our own from the pack on the table. We lit the cigarettes, cradled them between our index and middle fingers, palms up like a cartoon Cruella De Vil. We blew small streams of smoke from between our pursed lips, then dramatically tapped the ashes onto thin Corelle saucers, fragile white plates edged with mustard yellow flowers and butterflies. We all laughed. Michele and I were proud of our creative and slightly dangerous intervention, but I wonder now what my mom must have felt, seeing her kids through muted, silvery, cumulus clouds of burned tobacco. She never smoked again.

Those same Corelle plates served us squares of Duncan Hines boxed yellow cake thickened with powdered milk, or Wonder Bread bologna and cheese sandwiches. The bread we swiped from the back of my uncle’s Hostess delivery truck. The cheese was free, government issued. Stamped on the side of the block of cheese in sensible, government letters were the words “U.S. Department of Agriculture”; below them was a stern reminder that the cheese was not to be resold, as if there existed a black market for the dense, orange substance, equally adept at stopping a door or a bowel movement.

My mom bought our house on Helen Avenue. Interest rates were high in the early 80s – 15% in 1981 – but a program at the Federal Housing Administration subsidized the mortgage and didn’t require a down payment. Michele and I helped where we could. I had an after-school job through Job Corps, we still benefitted from food stamps and the WIC program, and my mother certainly had no problem waiting in line for government cheese. It didn’t seem like we needed handouts from the church. Mom and Uncle Sam were providing just fine.

I returned home from school one spring afternoon to see an open cardboard box taking up space on our small, concrete front porch. I looked inside. A white-gloved Hamburger Helper looked back. Next to it were cans of creamed corn and boxes of macaroni and cheese and long plastic packages of spaghetti. Manna not from heaven but from an anonymous, possibly well-meaning but surely nosy, congregant. I looked around but saw no one. Moses’s mother hid on the banks of the Nile as she watched him float away in his basket made of reeds, and I wonder if Mrs. Maguire – my mother later learned who left the food – did the same. In my youth I extended her little sympathy, but as I aged and wizened, I considered the possibility that Mrs. Maguire doorbell-ditched our house not to save our embarrassment, but hers.

Donated food on our front porch was a tangible reminder of our poverty. I knew other people knew we were poor – a single mother of four can hardly be otherwise – but I didn’t know people knew. No one rubbed our faces in it. I played sports, had good grades, was popular enough with all the social groups in my high school and most of my teachers. My poverty wasn’t a discriminator.

I attended an expensive, private liberal arts college on an ROTC scholarship, more than happy to swap the next years of my life for some assurance I wouldn’t be in debt. I’d seen what those shackles did to people, and I wanted none of it. I arrived at school alone, with a terrible Flock of Seagulls haircut and just a few bags, one of them containing two suits I’d purchased after working the summer at Chess King, the 80’s beacon of New Wave clothing. Most of my classmates were Colorado kids or from Northeastern prep schools. Khaki pants and navy-blue blazer types. All of them, it seemed to me, were wealthy. In high school, my poverty was academic. At college, it was visceral. I learned words like lacrosse, Saab, Brooks Brothers. One dad paid for his son’s entire tuition with a credit card so he could earn “points”, whatever that was.

Any external embarrassment was fleeting. I kept most of my insecurities buried deep inside of me, where they belonged. Being decently athletic and knowing how to hold my liquor – drinking in the desert was pastime in my small, Northern Nevada mining town – went a long way towards making friends, and I made them. Good ones. I lived with the same seven other boys all four years of college, played sports with them, skipped class with them, leaned on them for help with math, leaned on them when I was a sophomore and a senior broke my heart.

I graduated from college and went into the army. There, my peers and I made the same amount of money, worked the same hours, socialized both on and off duty. There were significant events over the years, moments to which only I assigned value, but were indicative of me moving slowly up an economic ladder. I bought a new car, made my own rent payments, slept in a room big enough that I could push my bed up against just one of the walls. Nothing says you’ve arrived like being able to get out of either side of the bed in the morning.

Later, I could afford good beer, then good whiskey, then a good meal at a nice restaurant. I bought all three, each time with diminishing stings of remorse. When I retired from the army I bought a nice suit, had it tailored, then bought obscenely expensive shoes to wear with it. And then I bought more of both. Donated food on the porch was a distant memory, one I could conjure up voluntarily as a reminder of where I’d come from. Or involuntarily: A ghost, a seeping miasma of guilt and shame that I’d left.

I’d been living in Seattle for eighteen months when Covid turned the world inside out. I was a graduate student and did some work consulting, and both of those turned inside out too: My work-related travel stopped, as did my in-class instruction. Zoom sessions from the confines of my small West Seattle apartment became my Lauds, my Sext, my Vespers; the smokiest Scotch I could find was my nightly prayer. I needed to get out. I bought a rooftop tent for my 2003 truck. In the back I built thick, plywood storage boxes to hold cast iron skillets, a propane tank and camp stove, beer and fly rods. And then, opposite to the only consistent directional pull I’ve had in my nomadic life, I headed east.

There are eleven states between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. I hit them all. Short stays with friends broke up longer stretches of solitude. In October, I spent a week in northern New Mexico at the home of a college roommate’s surly father. I slept in his studio, borrowing his Wi-Fi and drinking coffee with him in the mornings, reveling in his tales of Taos in the 70’s. He’d started a commune, dabbled in the illicit drug trade, built houses, spent summers as a sawyer with the forest service. All his stories ended with some version of “so I told him to go fuck himself.” I loved it.

In the middle of a gentle, arcadian fall, I strung my hammock between two aspen trees in my friend’s father’s front yard. The sun’s rays softened through my closed eyelids. A slight breeze across the nylon folds of my elevated bed created a vibration that matched the sound of the beating wings of a passing red-shafted flicker. A half-day’s drive north of Taos, three of my best friends and roommates from college were recovering from my visit a few days before; two-and-a-half hours south, a fourth was expecting me. Though I spoke with my college friends regularly during my twenty years in the army, I was rarely around them for more than a few days each year. I had never really seen them in the capacity of husband or dad, never seen them interact with their children in intimate ways. Now I had, and I felt a pang of envy. It surprised me that it was for both father and child. Nostalgia was there, too. Not just for college, but for being around these boys I’d watched become men, humans I loved, friends with a shared history. Our connections never seemed in need of reconnection. Instead, we just fell back into an easy swagger of togetherness.

Many American boys, before culture allows them to be comfortable with affection or words of love, often in engage in high-risk behavior. In comparing feats of skill or strength or daring. Young men doing dangerous things together is a love language, a surrogate. For us, age and confidence softened whatever those societal pressures were that had prevented us from loving overtly. Trauma, too: One of our best friends killed himself two years prior. So maybe we just stopped giving a shit about societal pressures. Or societal pressures revealed other things we gave more shits about. Either way, I decided to stay.

I bought an acre and a half of rocky, red clayed soil at the end of a short dirt road. One college roommate, a house builder, walked the ground with me. I wanted to put my future home at the highest point on my land. He showed me that tucking the house into the low ground would give more complex views and take advantage of the setting sun, where New Mexico’s singularly brilliant light would reveal Georgia O’Keefe paintings out my kitchen windows. He extended his hands out in front of him like a movie director, palms out, thumbs touching together with fingers raised. I stood next to him and did the same, feeling the corners of my mouth curl upward at the discovery of the artwork I held between my hands. Another roommate drove up from Albuquerque with his surveyor’s tripod, helping me stake out the lot’s corners and high points. An unassuming but ridiculous athlete, in college he’d done things I’d never seen before. Juggling a soccer ball hundreds of times in a row, jumping so high he’d bounce his chest on the top of a door jamb, diving to touch a squirrel. He once leaped a parked car. Now, he handed me the end of a tape measure, and I walked sixty feet south, raising my arm high above the sagebrush to keep tension on the tape. I turned back to see him, his hat on backwards, eye pressed against the transit, body seemingly always at the ready to do something outrageously athletic. We played baseball together in college, he a pitcher and me a catcher, and I felt the urge to squat, to have him hurl a ball at me at nearly ninety miles an hour. We were eighteen again.

I paid a man to scratch out a flat place where I could build a house. I bought lumber from the Amish community in southern Colorado, then hired two Mexican men to turn the stacked lumber into the bones of a home. I wanted to help, to learn how to frame a house, but instead stood back and watched. I marveled at their choreography, their movements and ability to say so few words yet produce so much so quickly, their easy familiarity with one another. This, I thought, is what extraordinary looked like. I hired more men to install electricity and plumbing, then insulation, then hang drywall, doors, windows. I assembled and installed the cabinets myself, laying down cardboard over my polished concrete floors to help prevent scuff marks, stopping occasionally to imagine where artwork might go, or a dining table, or shelves full of unread books, then imagining where I might sit to read them. Friends would stop by to inspect what I’d accomplished since they’d been there last. My favorite moments were watching my discerning house-builder friend cast a critical eye: Silence was approval. A slow, measured walk with hand on chin was admiration.

This morning, two years later, I wake for the first time inside this quiet cocoon. A deep arroyo moats my home to the east; on the far side of it, a low but steep undulating ridgeline blocks the afternoon winds. To the north, through a twenty-by-nine-foot wall of sliding glass doors, I watch a magpie, black and white with iridescent purple wings, land on a small juniper and flick its long tail at the morning sun. Stretching out beyond are gently rolling hills covered with big sagebrush and blue grama grass and piñon pine, all backdropped by the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo Mountains. On the south side of those glass sliders: Me. I sit on a leather couch I bought from a bougie Santa Fe furniture store. A cup of fair-trade coffee in hand, I stare up at foot-deep beams of Douglas fir and a spruce tongue-and-groove ceiling. Or, rather, my ceiling. My windows, my couch, my coffee, my beams. My view. My house. My home.

And then?

That ghost. On me like an ambush, squeezing my rib cage, the insides of my arms, my throat. The difference between a hug and a chokehold, I think, is just a matter of pressure and a few vertical inches.

I remember a time, when I was a young man, where I treated everything I perceived as wealth not as the bastion of the talented or hardworking, but of the greedy, of the nepotist, of the callous and opportunistic. I might have walked into a nice house – no food left on this front porch unless it was going to the trash – and thought what entitled asshole used their parent’s money to get this place? And now, I look at my possessions around me, at my house, at my ridiculous roller shades that I can move up and down with a touch of my smart phone while I stand within arm’s reach, and I think: OH. NO. That’s me.

“It’s turtle poop,” said the fishing guide, in accented but clear English. Confident. Behind and in front of you, a short swim away, is choppy salt water. Silty. Milky. To your left and right are small islands, explosive with red and black mangrove and spikerush and Mexican silver palms and Chechen and kitinché. Lush. Idyllic. You see birds whose feathers and calls are moderately familiar. The islands seem to you as perfection, though for what you are unsure. This moment, maybe.

In between the silty milky water and the lush idyllic islands is crystal blue ocean. Still. Unbroken. In this calmness you float, your face to the muted blue sky above. You could see to the bottom as you dove in from the boat’s edge, after you shed your clothes and before you closed your eyes, and you think it might be six feet below, or maybe sixty. You open your eyes to look up at the fishing guide. The tops of his feet and the backs of his hands are an enviable chocolate brown. He has spent most of his indeterminate number of years standing in the sun on the deck tower of a Mexican panga.

Now you hold two hands up to the guide, gently kicking your legs below the water to keep your hands above. You hold your two hands up to the guide and spread them apart to indicate something the approximate size and shape of the candy bar you ate just minutes ago, and you say, “it was about this big.”

Turtle poop, said the guide once again. He smiles, his raccoon-mask eyes, less tan than the rest of his face, wrinkling at the corners. “Good,” you say. “I thought for sure it was human.”

You lay back and close your eyes and float again, quietly elated that this thing – things – that nearly brushed up against you in the bay yesterday afternoon was not human poop. You lay back and float and are quietly elated that it came from a green sea turtle, an animal with a face moderately familiar, like that of an old man; quietly elated that this turtle that poops like you and has a face like you one day might, has, inside its flippers, a humerus and a radius and an ulna too, and four bony fingers and a fifth that looks moderately familiar to an opposable thumb.

You lay back and float, looking up at the sky at the origins of everything.

Basilio Nicolas Hage was an aspiring merchant, but he feared for his future. Signs of trouble were all around him. The Ottoman Empire was shrinking so fast, it seemed its death rattle shook the plaster from Syria’s once magnificent buildings right before Nicolas’s eyes. His hometown of Tripoli was the western terminus of the famous Silk Road and a port to Europe’s markets, but cheaper Chinese silk was making the local versions obsolete. French and British merchants brought money, but American evangelicals brought schools and tantalizing tales of land and liberty. If America’s political power was not yet dominant, her economy and reputation was. Industrial United States produced twice as much as did Great Britain, and she built things bigger, faster, stronger. More whimsical. Having the world’s tallest building wasn’t enough; an American invented a machine you could ride to the top of it. Stairs were yesterday’s news. America’s citizens invented refrigerators, lightbulbs, drinking straws, screen doors, slot machines, roller coasters, Ferris wheels, zippers, mousetraps, and cotton candy. They invented the phonograph, the telephone, the telegraph. One American laid cable across the Atlantic, a reversed umbilical cord attaching two continents, forcing the queen of a dying empire to tap tap tap her congratulations to the democratically elected president of a rising one. Days of staid, Victorian handwringing surely prefaced composing such a laudatory note to her plebian cousin, but no matter – her compliments were carried across the ocean fifteen times faster than had it been ferried by boat. The message itself was a white flag, a surrender, even if the queen didn’t yet know it:

The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work.

Americans didn’t desire to do anything, thought Nicolas. They just did it. America was the land of opportunity, of jobs, of liberty. Her streets, heard Nicolas, were paved with gold.

So Nicolas, like thousands of Syrians before and after him, chose myth over fear. He made his way first from Tripoli to Beirut, then to Le Havre, France, where he purchased a steerage ticket on the S.S. le Champagne to New York City. The ship’s doctor examined Nicolas prior to boarding, determining him to be neither an idiot nor insane (good my brother is not here to disagree, thought Nicolas), nor a pauper likely to become a public charge. The Second Officer agreed with Doctor Lucien, and added that Nicolas was not suffering from a loathsome, dangerous, or contagious disease; had not been convicted of a felony or other infamous crime involving moral turpitude; and did not have more than one wife. The inspection took just minutes. Other than his confusion when asked his color (“white”, wrote Second Officer Gaston), for each question Nicolas simply answered “no.”

The SS le Champagne left France on May 24th, 1899. Ten days later, after a trip that a reporter would observe as “vile and disgraceful treatment” by the steamship companies of the immigrants below decks, Nicolas tread his weary feet upon the terra firma of Ellis Island. He watched as a man checked his name against the ship’s manifest – one of almost two thousand times the customs agent would do so that day – then, satisfied, put Nicolas on a ferry to the mainland. America.

New York confounded Nicolas. Tripoli had been a water wheel for international powers since the Phoenicians in 300 BC, but New York City on the cusp of a new century was a different kind of melting pot. It was a volcano. Unbroken strings of tall buildings blocked the sun, policewomen patrolled the streets in skirts, people prowled the sidewalks in numbers greater than Nicolas could count in a lifetime. And cars! The first would not be seen in Beirut for seven more years, but New York’s streets were clogged with automobiles, sharing the road with trolleys and horse-drawn carriages. Enough of the latter were still around that Nicolas thought America’s roads were paved not with gold, but with horseshit.

Nicolas had never seen anything like it. New York in 1899 was the second largest city in the world, but it was surely the densest. Tenements housed 418,000 people per square mile, the equivalent of six human beings standing inside a box the length and width of one of Nicolas’s strides. Many were as new to America as was Nicolas himself – more than one-third of the city’s 3.4 million people were born outside of America’s borders. His journey should have better prepared him. The le Champagne manifest included Armenians, Austrians, English, Finnish, French, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Montenegrins, Polish, Russians, Scots, Swiss, Syrians, and Turks, but even the suffocating steerage air paled in comparison to New York’s streets. Nicolas missed space and clean air. He missed trees.

He wasted little time in New York. Nicolas skipped Lower Manhattan’s vibrant Little Syria, skipped trying his hand in the growing Arabic import-export business, skipped the street fights with the uncivilized Irish, skipped his opportunity to find a good Syrian Christian wife. Instead, Nicolas headed west, eventually finding himself not in America but in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home.

What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push Nicolas west? Was it flight from, rather than to? Ghosts of repeated failures or lost loves in dogged pursuit? Was it a condemnation? A serial reminder of stabbing epithets, slights, miscommunications? Perhaps it was simply a thirst for adventure.

It was, I think, a collective. Not just one driver but multiple, all of them exposing the potential in the new. Something untamed. Something only people like Nicolas could see in that precious-metal nimbus he watched drop daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed further west. An invisible finger drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun.

I want my great-grandfather to have found whatever he was looking for. I want to picture Nicolas in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots now familiar enough to assuage whatever homesickness he had for the tall cedars of his Mount Lebanon. A nirvanic look upon his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new hometown, his closed eyes turned upward to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

This creek, I think, is perhaps a metaphor, a stand-in, a liquid ekkyklema on my hero’s journey to know thyself, to bathe myself in healing waters or the love of God or a god or all of them or none of them, to get to the heart of the matter, to be consumed by the joy of everlasting love, to find redemption or enlightenment or nirvana or self-actualization, to cease the chase for rainbows, for ghosts, for King Charles’s head or the Holy Grail or myonetruelove or white whales and arks of covenants. Rumi said what you seek is seeking you, and it is here I realize why this goddamned fish is called a cutthroat.

published with permission from The Tahoma Literary Review

If you are standing in the kielbasa line at Nationals Stadium, do not dramatically leave the queue. Do not hip check people out of your way as you attempt to burst through a stanchion belt like it’s the finish line ribbon at your local 5K. Nylon stanchion belts do not break. Do not immediately look to your girlfriend for help. Though she supports you like a nylon stanchion belt, right now she’s as freaked out as you are. Do not spill your beer. You’ll need this later.

If you are walking through the condiments aisle of the gleaming new Harris Teeter at the corner of Madison and St. Asaph, perhaps perplexed by the apparent difference between cornichons and gherkins, do not consider putting a name on what you are suddenly feeling. You are wasting time thinking about anxious v. anxiety v. anxiety disorder, no matter what the National Institute for Health suggests you do. Do not let your eyes fly from object to object, searching for an exit like a caged feral cat or a teenager at a house party when the cops come. Instead, find something to focus on. A familiar face is good. Your friend’s, for example, especially if, after you make eye contact, his face clearly signifies “calm down, it’s going to be OK.” Sometimes a familiar face is not so good.  Your friend’s, for example, especially if, after you make eye contact, his face clearly signifies “are you having a panic attack? In the new Harris Teeter?”

If you are at a Mexican restaurant celebrating a birthday – not yours – with extended family and friends, do not get up from the table without saying anything. Do not pretend you are going to the bathroom, but then exit out the front door. Do not walk home 6.3 miles in your flip-flops, unintentionally walking through the “bad” part of town, hoping the homeless and high and half-crazy won’t talk to you. They won’t. You’ll be the one who looks crazy.

If you are riding your new (used) 1999 Triumph Thunderbird, do not worry, as a panic attack will never happen. Your family and friends may be concerned that you have possibly purchased this death machine in a passive attempt to kill yourself, especially your girlfriend, who is the only one aware that just a few weeks ago you wrecked your truck simply pulling out of the driveway. But they do not know. They do not know that a motorcycle is something to hold on to. They do not know that this motorcycle is responsive to you and you alone. And though your friends will tell you there are two types of motorcycle riders – those who have been in a wreck and those who will be – what they do not know is that you, while wearing your full-faced white helmet with black offset racing stripes and black leather boots and black leather gloves and a new unmistakably badass black leather jacket with more zippers than any one human needs, you feel completely in control. They do not know how much you feel in charge, how fully wide awake you are, how fully conscious you are of your body and your surroundings, how you interact with air, with bone-vibrating cold, with vibrant leaves falling from the canopy of trees roofing the George Washington Parkway as you head south on a late September afternoon.

A horseshoe, the color and texture of an ancient railroad spike, taken from my grandfather’s tack shed.

A CD jewel case, the contents of which do not match the label.

A ratchet.

A universal socket, hexagonal with fifty-four cylinders fitted snugly inside. A miniature Giant’s Causeway.

A partially eaten bag of sunflower seeds, purchased in 2020. Edible.

A baseball, abandoned, found in an abandoned Havana suburb in an abandoned field, saplings sprouting from stadium walls like an infant Angkor Wat.

A small, opaque, reusable plastic container with purple lid, contents invisible but to science: It once held Hatch green chile, then a portion of what was left of my friend. Seven of us spread his ashes on the eighteenth tee box of a golf course, a church where he was the best version of himself. I later thought of using the makeshift urn to hold flies, Copper Johns and Bead Head Hare’s Ears and #6 Poundmeister Craneflies, but that’s a different church.

What sacrament precedes discarding a thing that held discards?

This, inside my truck’s center console, topped by a string of brown Kukui nuts, a circle I drape ceremoniously over my neck when I need to feel invincible.

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“Sarajevo in the summer of 1995 came close to Dante’s inner circle of hell.”

Thus begins Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, his acclaimed work on the human experience in modern armed conflicts. War Is a Force is ostensibly an exploration as to why we wage war despite the nonsensical reasons we engage in it and the unavoidable damage it causes us. A theologian by education and an investigative reporter by training, Hedges is well-equipped for observation. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us,” he writes, having personally witnessed, and reported on, wars around the world. Hedges recognizes that societies and individual humans have been capable of heinous acts for our entire histories. He is specifically interested in the “why” we humans continuously return to war, and why we continue to expose that evil within us. His answer: “Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living”.

Here is the primary theme of War Is a Force: We humans not only regularly reengage in violence, often despicably so, but on some level, we enjoy it. Hedges does not directly write “war is fun,” but the implication is present. Armed conflict provides emotion and emotional bonds largely unattainable in other forms of human interaction; these emotions and emotional bonds then provide us “meaning” or purpose and thusly enjoyment; because we knowingly benefit from it, we are all liable.

The title notwithstanding, Hedges’ theory is that engaging directly or indirectly in mortal combat, or suffering the effects of those who do, provides an answer to the eternal question of “what does this all mean?” His theory, however, plays only a supporting role in War is a Force. Rather, Hedges’ thesis is most clearly outlined in the introduction:

“I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers—historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”

Comparing war to a lethal and addictive drug diminishes those qualities Hedges uses to make his greater point, that war provides opportunities for excitement, exoticism, and power. Hedges makes these points forcefully. But it’s that last phrase – that war’s “bizarre and fantastic universe,” grotesqueness, and dark beauty provide us opportunities to be greater than what we thought we could be – is where War Is a Force is lacking in logic. Hedges’ argument, essentially, is that we offer ourselves the opportunity to experience nearly divine moments of self-actualization when we are at the darkest, most vile, most evil versions of ourselves.

Though war certainly provides opportunity for excellence, for heightened emotions, for virtue and courage (discussed later in more depth), Hedges conflates these with “meaning.” It is difficult to square Hedges’ assertion that war provides us “a reason for living” through the experience of death and dying (physically, emotionally, and spiritually). His main point is further weakened by highlighting that these moments of “meaning” are fleeting, as if the long stretches of misery and suffering experienced in war are mitigated with short bursts of experiencing that essence of understanding, and relishing in, the human condition. Hedges also fails in providing us alternatives or meaningful comparisons. The bravery of not going to war, for example, or the shared experience of achievement through some joint endeavor. Protests movements, rebellions, non-violent uprisings, repealing of unjust laws – all have elements of oppression overcome through shared sacrifice. All are possible without experiencing the drug of war.

Hedges, an experienced war correspondent and a Harvard-educated divinity student, wrote War Is a Force as an ablution. “This book is not a call for inaction,” he writes. “It is a call for repentance”. Hedges distributes sin equitably throughout the book, but writes most caustically of politicians and the media. The repentance, however, is most palpably his own. Hedges is a keen observer of the drivers of war, leveraging his experience in conflicts in Central America, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. His experiences as an observer, a dispassionate reporter, and a voyeur are what has led Hedges to repent through this simultaneously deeply personal and transcendent book.

There is irony in this juxtaposition. Hedges’ “call for repentance,” whether his or ours, counters his own argument that war provides a forum to the essential human experience. If Hedges believes war provides us meaning, and if meaning provides us insight into what it means to experience ultimate humanness, then for what reason must we repent? In War Is a Force, Hedges does distinguish the everyday humans caught in conflict from those he calls “mythmakers.” It is the former, perhaps, who find meaning without seeking it out, as it is these “everyday” humans who most often exist in a paradigm contrary to their professed moral structure. We live our daily lives locally, without the specter of organized, state-sanctioned violence or mass destruction. When we are presented with the opportunity to find Hedges’ warfare-driven meaning, it is most likely as a result of the mythmaker’s efforts. These politicians, profiteers, and media magnates, Hedges argues, instigate, perpetuate, and profit from the death and destruction around them. The broad idea is this: Nations and power brokers – almost exclusively men – exploit fear for personal gain. Mythmakers, among whom Hedges lists historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, and novelists, play along with the power brokers’ fear-mongering, contributing to and then enflaming mass-hysteria based on the false divisions of race, ethnicity, or religion (though Hedges asserts most national myths are essentially racist, false divisions are evidenced not only on skin color, but on perceived territorial disputes, identity politics, or even, in a nod to Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan, the tilt direction of Christ’s footrest). We the mere human, powerless, become not victims but willing participants. We contribute to the destruction such that we forget that which made us functioning societies in the first place. “The employment of organized violence,” Hedges writes, “means one must, in fact, abandon fixed and established values”. Hedges later expands that “[t]he myth of war creates a new artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned”.

Hedges is not alone in this assertion, nor in affixing blame to the “mythmakers” for fanning the flames. Mark Kurlanksy, in his book Nonviolence, cites government propaganda machines selectively glorifying war and dehumanizing an enemy. “Hatred of the enemy is a cornerstone of selling a war,” Kurlanksy writes. In the first world war, British and American power apparatus needed to build opposition to Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and the high number of German soldiers. The collective British and American press collaborated with governments to portray the Kaiser “as monstrous, a lunatic,” while German soldiers were “said to rape nuns and mutilate children”. Yet, just two decades later, those nation’s war propaganda machines were relatively quiet despite the actual atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis. The reason, Kurlansky argues, is because fighting to save Jews and marginalized communities in Europe was not something the public was likely to support with enthusiasm.

Kurlansky, like Hedges, argues that the book and film industries are at fault as well. Through multiple passages, Nonviolence explores the American film industry’s glorification of war, contrasting World War II movies like Saving Private Ryan with Vietnam-era movies like Platoon and The Deer Hunter. A scene in Saving Private Ryan depicts German (they were actually Czech) soldiers attempting to surrender. Despite having dropped their weapons and raised their hands in surrender, the American soldiers shoot them, mocking their accents. A cutaway to the movie’s protagonist, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks), shows disappointment on his face. These young men are under his charge, and Captain Miller has already revealed himself as an honorable warrior-citizen. The American soldiers, however, revel in the shooting. One soldier jokes that the enemy soldiers were saying, “Look! I washed for supper!” Kurlanksy writes of the scene that the director, Steven Spielberg, essentially “argues that ignoring the Geneva Conventions and murdering prisoners of war is a reasonable act since the enemy was so insidious”.

Kurlansky adds organized, institutional religion to the list of war profiteers, and in particular skewers the Catholic church. The early followers of Jesus were strict adherents to non-violence, and were actively recruiting converts. As they found increased success in persuading Roman soldiers to put down their arms, the Roman Emperor Constantine (AD 306 – 337) realized he had an opportunity: If he recognized and supported Christianity rather than fighting against it, he could subvert Christ’s powerful message. In October of 312, the evening before he was to lead his army in a fight against a rival, Constantine – perhaps the greatest example of Hedges’ “mythmakers” – was said to have had a dream where Christ commanded him to fight under the sign of the cross. The next day, at what would be known at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s army fought with the sign of the cross painted on their shields. Their subsequent victory emplaced Constantine “as a ruler of the western half of the Roman Empire, but also establish(ed) a new role for the Christian and for Christ, a God who now would not only sanction killing but would take sides to help one band of killers triumph over another”. Constantine’s timely conversion to Christianity gave tacit permission to conscript Jesus’s followers while simultaneously pushing the movement away from non-violence. War and the Christian church have rarely been separated since.

This conflation of religion, war, power, and politics implies that war itself is not a force that gives us meaning. Rather, it is the idea of being part of some amorphous “greater good” that creates this façade. Meaning is achievable through war, perhaps even exclusively – at least an elevated sense of meaning. One might go even further back in history to find examples of the political influence in creating this myth: In the Book of John, the New Testament tells us that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Evidence that the Gospel of John was written at a time of increased tensions between Jews and Christians provides insight and context. Creating an ideal of a “greater good” for which one was willing to sacrifice one’s own life is one way to create inseparable bonds. It is also an ideal way to build an army.

It is here, with this idea of being part of a greater good, where Hedges’ allusions to the elevated humanness that war provides comes into conflict with war as a force that gives us meaning. Hedges asserts that “[m]any of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives us a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness”.

Hedges draws definitive lines in laying blame. Power brokers and mythmakers are on one side, on the other are those “restless and unfilled” who see no supreme self-worth until they find it in armed conflict. We are all at fault here, even as supporters or spectators. In Chapter 4, “The Seduction of Battle and the Perversion of War,” Hedges argues that the “successful anti-war novels and films are those…that eschew battle scenes and focus on the heartbreak of violence and slaughter”. As an example, Hedges cites Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel. Because she was writing as a woman, Hedges argues, Morante was “less able to identify with and be seduced by war and the allure of violence”. But then Hedges, well, hedges: “But in most wars women, if not engaged in the fighting, stand on the sidelines to cheer their men onward. Few are immune”. The image evokes the apocryphal directive of Gorgo, wife to Spartan King Leonidas, uttered during the movie 300. Gorgo calls out to Leonidas as he turns to leave his beloved wife and march his army of Spartan elites to face Xerxes and the Persian army at Thermopylae. “Spartan!” she says firmly and stoically. Leonidas turns to meet her gaze. “Come back with your shield,” she states, “or on it.” What man – cartoon, CGI, historical, or otherwise – could resist such testosterone-enabling drivel? Gorgo’s message is clear: Win or die trying.

In Sayings of Spartan Women (“Moralia”), Plutarch attributed the phrase not to Gorgo speaking to her husband, but rather a “fame unknown” mother speaking to her son: “Another (mother), as she handed her son his shield, exhorted him, saying, ‘Either this or upon this.’” Even this attribution could be propaganda. The Battle of Thermopylae was 480 BC, and Plutarch wrote Moralia nearly six hundred years later. The original source of the quote may be unclear, but this is Hedges’ point. War is false glory, and we are all complicit.

Hedge’s uniform assignment of blame is misleading and a bit undeveloped. We humans are complicit because we find an elevated sense of humanness in conflict, in fighting for our perception of “right,” our religion, our brothers and sisters in ethnicity, or even just trying to do something more exciting than our 9-to-5 job. If true, then surely those power brokers and mythmakers who relish war not for a sense of meaning but rather one of gaining or consolidating power are more complicit. These catalysts are motivated not by glory and meaning, but by greed, by arrogance, by narcissism.

Hedge’s condemnation of war’s power brokers isn’t new. Nick Turse, an investigative reporter, provides details sickening both in hideousness and gratuity in his seminal work on American indulgence, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Though Turse identifies brutalities from individual soldiers, it is American politicians, media, and the military industrial complex that are rightly excoriated. American servicemembers commit a long list of atrocities, but Turse leaves their individual motivations for some later analysis. It is the state and its politicians, with their interminable focus on “body count” in the Vietnam War (or for the Vietnamese, the Resistance War Against the United States) who are at fault for the despicable acts we humans do to one another.

Some of Hedge’s most salient points are made less emotionally by Sebastian Junger in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Written as an expanded version of a magazine article titled “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield,” the book is a distillation of Junger’s twenty-year experience with war. Junger spent significant time, some of it under fire, with young American soldiers in conflict during the war in Afghanistan. His experience birthed a prolific outpouring of both film and the written word, including three movies (Restrepo, Korengal, and The Last Patrol) and at least two books (Tribe and War). Though Junger’s writing feels more dispassionate than Hedges’, his experience was no less personal – Junger lost a good friend and collaborator, Tim Hetherington, to the 2011 conflict in Libya.

The two writers’ observations are consistent, though War Is a Force seems to focus on the despicability of powerful men and institutions in conflict, while Tribe actually speaks to the collective feelings of togetherness, patriotism, optimism, and meaning that Hedges professes to write about. In a chapter titled “War Makes You an Animal,” Junger poses the conflict of what the state does compared to what the human does, in the context of pre-World War II:

“No one knew how a civilian population would react (to the trauma of losing 35,000 civilians a day), but the Churchill government assumed the worst. So poor was their opinion of the populace—particularly the working-class people of East London—that emergency planners were reluctant to even build public bomb shelters because they worried people would move into them and simply never move out…[n]othing could have been further from the truth.”

Junger elaborates, using an interview from a woman who was there at the time. “We would have done anything—anything—to stop (the Germans)”. British civilian deaths in World War II not only “failed to produce mass hysteria,” but the ever-present danger of bombing may have contributed to a decline in psychiatric breakdowns. “Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,” reported one doctor who Junger cites.

Here is the real force that gives us meaning: belonging, purpose, self-preservation, and a meaningful contribution to the preservation of others. War, perhaps, need not be the catalyst. But we don’t choose our baggage, and the writer often focuses on what she knows. Hedges’ baggage and knowledge focus on conflict and meaning, the melding of his two backgrounds in religion and war reporting, so a lengthy philosophical discourse on gaining meaning from conflict is not unreasonable.

Hedges does dutifully and thoroughly dismantle the romanticism of war, but the impact is minimized by his focus on how conflict’s direness – the hidden engine of war’s romanticism – provides the very meaning we desire. His experience is limited to “modern” warfare, but my own experience provides an alternate explanation. Though I served in the American army in conflicts overseas, I did not experience war as a force that gave me meaning. Perhaps I didn’t suffer enough. Perhaps I didn’t witness, first-hand, the depravity of war, or retained some skepticism of the utility of the wars in which I served. Perhaps I lacked that transformative experience of fighting for my freedom on my own land. None of this denied me the opportunity to find joy and meaning in my chosen profession; none of it increased my desire to realize John the Apostle’s greatest love and lay down my life for my friends. Though I would die for my friends, I thought I could both express and realize my love for friends better while I was living.

There also exist countering examples of “meaning” in history. In 350 BC, Aristotle suggested, in Nicomachean Ethics, that meaning might not be found in the crucible of Hedges’ modern conflict. Hedges suggests that war’s unwitting and unwilling participants are subjected to acute trauma and violence. Aristotle writes, instead, that meaning in one’s life is a slow drip. “One swallow does not make a summer,” Aristotle wrote, “nor does one day; and so too one day, or in a short time, does not make a man blessed or happy”. Aristotle was writing of eduaimonia, something close to happiness but deeper and more expansive. It is not simply living a “good life” in the Epicurean mold, but rather living a good life through virtue and acting virtuously. In the context of warfare, the professor Charles McNamara suggests this would be exemplified by exhibiting an amount of courage “between the extremes of cowardice and rashness.” Hedges chalks this up as one path to meaning, but a path that risks devaluing the emotion. Meaning implies positivity, a will to not only live, but to live well. This is Aristotle’s eduaimonia. We might stretch it to include simple happiness, or pursuing “meaning” as a path to that happiness (or, contrarily, happiness as a path to meaning).

Aristotle’s claim that a swallow does not make a summer has been much dissected. The writer and philosopher Paul Farwell, in Aristotle and the Complete Life, contemplates that Aristotle is unclear as to whether he means quantity or quality. Does a high number of good events lead to happiness, to meaning? Or is it something that adheres more closely to Hedges’ implication that it is the quality of an event, the ability of a thing to evoke emotion in us, that leads to meaning? Aristotle, according to Farwell, might mean “a happy life possesses a complete number of things” (friends, family, meaningful endeavors, objects) or “a complete time span, perhaps an entire life or at least the better part of one”. This notion of “completeness” of a life expands upon both Aristotle’s ideas on meaning as well as Hedges’. “(C)omplete virtue needs a complete life,” Farwell writes, “because virtuous activities need time to develop and to express themselves fully”. We may take liberties in comparing Aristotle’s “virtue” and Hedges’ “meaning” to mean the same thing. War, or at least the traumatic experiences Hedges would assert give us meaning, is quick. It is the heightened emotion of the traumatic moment that provides a benchmark against which we can compare our drab, daily lives, and whether there is meaning to be found there. Farwell, via Aristotle, might argue that we can experience loss, sacrifice, trauma, etc., but that virtue – the true test of meaning – requires time, repetition, opportunity, and the test of how we might act when someone isn’t watching. Farwell also points out that virtue “takes practice” and that is unlikely to be achieved in a short period of time. “To become courageous or self-controlled we must experience a number of situations that inspire fear or pleasure until the proper disposition becomes second-nature”. To show courage in battle, Farwell adds, “is closely associated with putting on armor and rushing the enemy. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that certain features of any virtuous activity are continuous throughout the activity – in particular, the agent’s disposition toward his feelings and his choosing the action for the sake of a noble end”.

We do find recent cultural examples that align more closely to Hedges’ theory, though his notion that the darkest days provide the most meaning remains absent. The Absaroka, a tribe of Plains Indians, trace their history to what is now modern-day Ohio. Pushed west by other tribes, the Absaroka – known to contemporary Europeans and modern-day Americans as the Crow – eventually settled in the Yellowstone Valley in Montana and Wyoming. The Crow lived for war. It defined their existence. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, author Jonathan Lear quotes Robert Lowie, an anthropologist, who wrote of the Crow that “War was not the concern of a class nor even of the male sex, but of the whole population, from cradle to grave”. Lear elaborates, citing the use of the “coup stick” as paradigmatic of Crow culture. A coup stick planted in the ground delineated territory – the trespass of which merited violent response – while a coup stick touched upon an enemy in battle was the height of Crow bravery, and thusly of Crow culture. Contrary to Hedges’ bands of power brokers and mythmakers, where the few shape the potential “meaning” (or misery) for the many, Lear argues that conflict is the Crow’s culture. The Crow raise the possibility that war might in fact provide meaning when the entire civilization agrees upon, and culturally enforces, war as the main force providing the meaning.

The muse for Lear’s fascinating book is Plenty Coups, a Crow leader who lived from 1848–1932, and was perhaps the only native chief to successfully navigate his tribe through the cultural and existential devastation white Americans imposed on North America’s native populations. The Crow aligned with US forces to increase their odds of survival in their wars with the Sioux, but eventually were relegated to reservations like all other native tribes. Lear examines Plenty Coups’ ability as a leader, using as his base one simple sentence uttered by Plenty Coups during an interview with a biographer, who was asking about the Crow’s move from freedom to restraint: After this, nothing happened.

Warfare was so ingrained into Plenty Coups and Crow culture that the move to a reservation meant, quite literally for the Crow, that once they were denied their ability to engage in armed conflict with the Sioux, to steal their horses, to count individual coups on Sioux warriors, nothing happened. “Humans are by nature cultural animals,” Lear writes, “we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture…as participants, we inherit a vulnerability. Should that way of life break down, that is our problem”.

Lear doesn’t necessarily focus on Plenty Coups and the Crow experience, but rather uses it to keep us grounded in trying to understand our own experience. Radical Hope is, at its heart, a short but dense philosophical book on ethics, community, and resilience. Lear quotes the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins early in Radical Hope: “An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through a cultural scheme does it acquire historical significance”. Lear pursues answers to the questions of not only how a culture collapses, but how we should live with that collapse, how we should live with even the possibility of collapse. His answer is what he calls “radical hope,” or a hope “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it”.

Hope for Plenty Coups, and for us, Lear argues, was and is “intimately bound to the question of how to live”. This radical hope is different than “mere optimism”; rather, it is a manifestation of courage, of human excellence. Courage, writes Lear, “is the capacity for living well with the risks that inevitably attend human existence” (emphasis added). This is Aristotle manifested in a warring culture, not Hedges’ modern warfare. The difference is that war for the Crow is the culture, while modern warfare is a means to reach a cultural ends – power, money, prestige, territory. When viewed through Plenty Coups’ lens, the contemporary reader might interpret war not as trauma, but as culture; not just as a way of life, but a way of living Aristotle’s “good life.” Taken to a logical conclusion, the absence of war for the Crow was itself trauma, and one without meaning.

This notion elaborated upon might emphasize Hedges’ central point. If our daily life in today’s world is boring and unfulfilling, then one marked by violence might provide us opportunities to experience meaning and relevance, whether it’s façade or foundation. But in Plenty Coups’ world, daily life is filled only with meaning – not only one of survival in ensuring food, clothing, and shelter, but one of existential and spiritual survival through combat, or the threat of combat, with an enemy. Further, that existential and spiritual survival, because the entire community is vested in it, becomes one with cultural implications as well.

­­­­­­In War Is a Force, Hedges rarely differentiates between the wartime experiences of hunted or prey; of intentional or unintended targets (what the American military used to refer to as “collateral damage”). We all experience trauma, therefore we all experience heightened emotions and humanness, therefore we all experience “meaning.” This is a gross oversight. The experiences of war, where they are different than the mundanity of a daily life, might provide context as to the type of heightened emotions one might experience to better understand there is more to life. But to suggest that being victimized might possibly give us “meaning” is shortsighted. Any such argument conveniently ignores war orphans, the weaponization of rape and sexual assault and the witnessing of such crimes, and post-traumatic stress in combatants, to name a few.

There is an alternative argument to Hedges, Plenty Coups, and Aristotle alike, and one equally supportable: It’s all bullshit. George Bernard Shaw, in his 1894 romcom Arms and the Man, says as much. Sergius, a Bulgarian aristocrat, is a hero in the Byron mold. He’s a swashbuckler, filled with notions of leading cavalry charges and soliciting saber duels to defend one’s honor. He’s ostensibly betrothed to Raina, daughter to Catherine and Petkoff, a buffoonish but kind and wealthy dilettante. All profess clear opinions on bravery, honor, and station: “Can’t you see it, Raina,” Catherine tells her daughter, “our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like avalanche and scattering the wretched Servian dandies like chaff…oh, if you have a drop of Bulgarian blood in your veins, you will worship (Sergius) when he comes back”.

What none of them know – neither Catherine, Raina, nor Sergius, who conducted the cavalry charge – was that the wretched Servians had no ammunition. If they had, Sergius and his Bulgarians would have been slaughtered. The one character who does know is Blunthschli, who is introduced first as a ragged, dirty coward, fleeing from the pursuing Russians, but later revealed as a Swiss hotel magnate. Shaw ultimately develops Blunthschli as a professional soldier – a survivor – but he also appears as two extremes: The coward and the businessman. Neither, Hedges might argue, have experienced the force of war as one that provides meaning.

All are hypocrites. “I am no longer a soldier,” says Sergius. “Soldiering…is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak.” Never, adds Sergius, fight your enemy on equal terms. Sergius, of course, is cheating on his fiancé with Louka, the maid, and doing so in broad daylight and under the noses of Raina and her parents.

Only Bluntschli, he with a dearth of honor and romantic notions of bravery but a surfeit of common sense, escapes Shaw’s satire. It is Bluntschli who provides us the anti-hero to Hedges. He carries chocolate into battle instead of rifle cartridges; tells Raina it is a soldier’s job to live as long as possible while killing as much of the enemy as one can; and when Sergius requests a saber duel, replies that if he goes, he’ll arrive with a machine gun.

It is a late exchange between Bluntschli and Sergius that provides the best antidote to Hedges’ notions of meaning. Sergius, learning that Raina had observed him in flagrante delicto with the maid Louka, declares “Our romance is shattered. Life’s a farce.” Bluntschli ridicules Sergius, telling him he’s an amateur who thinks “fighting’s an amusement”. The insult has restored Sergius – he’s quite dramatic – who then tells Bluntschli he now refuses to duel him because “it takes two men – real men – men of heart, blood and honor—to make genuine combat.” Bluntschli has the last word, perhaps for Shaw as well as in response to Hedges’: “Now that you’ve found that life isn’t a farce, but something quite sensible and serious, what further obstacle is there to your happiness?”.