Special thanks for this moment— Bruno. At his side, he getting a life-saving blood transfusion, I wrote the poem
The most gates at society, hey! Propped on the sand in an eurythmic sweet sense, I look at humanity in raw oysters. There’s nothing there that makes us rise above our bull. We get decimated sometimes, and the humility lasts an hour. I don’t understand all this mess. It’s popcorn and candy to our sense of self tryin’ to prove our worth to one another. Look how big I am, and we can say that so subtly. I mean look at me will yah?
Can we spend this? It’s expensive not to see. I count this in humanity in everywhere I wait, in all the plays of the crowd. I want to get bigger than myself. Little everybody treats me, and I’m offended in my self-wears, and little I am. I can’t seem to see this when I’m in a fight. I don’t know how to handle it when I’m spellbound. Can I list my achievements please? Can I show you my worth, again?
Do I have to eat lunch with myself again? You’re not listening to me. If I was two I’d pitch a fit. That’s where I learn to get you to pay attention to me. I get expert at it by the time I’m twelve, and then all hell breaks loose, and I’m just shit-canned again, too old to get my way. Is that when the braggin’ starts? I have got to show you I’m worth, but I’ve lost all the old ploys, and I’m doin’ it again, wantin’ you to validate my self-worth the modicum of humanity.
Is that all turned on to kick-start our humanity, the pedestal I preach to you? Wow, I can sound so good in words. Do I hide behind my writing I knock down every word I say in some pinch or another that my hypocrisy wears? The hypocrisy of others stuns me. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere on the planet. There is no accountability for it.
Wow do I read sweet words. Can you solve the problem with love without love? You just get likes for it. Nowhere does it bring social change. The social understanding that you’re the victim too, my God that’s the pants we wear. Get people arrested will yah? That’s all you’ve done. You’ve crime and punishmented the thing. Everybody gets mad at people. It’s how you social change, with a baseball bat, but we can’t hypocrisy our way out of this. Love has to be love or it’s not love. Understanding holds you sweet. It doesn’t embarrass you in front of the crowd.
Where do we go with our social understanding to see the lies arise in everybody where we find our brotherly love? Can you understand that? I can’t cover this. I can’t even say it. You just write beautiful words. You don’t mean them, and there’s no way to show you you don’t. You’ve got that covered. You can’t see them in the arms they wear. You can make yourself sound pretty good, but unconscious springs get yah when the spell of your unconscious arise and offers your behavior to meanness.
There is not a day I don’t encounter this in somebody. You’ve encountered a rat in everything society says about me. The principles of love and pray don’t apply here, and you have permission to shoot me in your thought, and that’s a release mechanism like all society wears. If I even say the name you’ll hate me, and there is no way out of this.
I could have done a better poem and kept my social status out of this, but we can’t spend your hypocrisy on nothin’. You’re just bruise your shield in that unspeakable name. Now where you at? I don’t think it’s in loving shares. Oh you do your family alright, a satellite I, but to love humanity you must wear everything in humanity you hate, identifying with that behavior. It don’t come out any other way, the principle in your subconscious communicating that spell “oh I’ve encountered someone I don’t like,” and in the roles of identity you have to know you’re there: I am humanity. This gets larger than everybody, but you can’t find it without accepting everybody.
The roles are mean, even in children, and I need to see this in myself, and I bridge it that way to its appropriate goodness. You hear this now. I’m taking myself and getting myself out of the way, not for any humanity worth, not so you can see me. I just want to be myself, okay, the actual me, the thing I am behind the play, not yet angel wings, but the natural me that’s not stuck to anything that can afford to be nice because nice is what it does our human soul, and nary a subconscious spell can touch it, no matter where you meet life.
The basement’s all cleaned out, and this comes down from on high, if you want to know the truth of it. You can’t just declare your love. You have to raise it up out of you in the skeletons you wear. Can you get my pen rose? Can you hear it please? You have to get down and dirty and clean, at least in the eyes you wear. Whatever you do, see it.
I’m gettin’ down to the natural colors of my room. Do you hear that? Look at yourself some mirror. Roles involved with sweetness, and you’re being bigger than the heys of the crowd. Just don’t recognize that’s where you want mental health to go. Good for her, good for him, take advice.
I don’t think it was specifically because of this poem, but Auroville International posted a poem of mine in their private Facebook group some days after I posted this poem to Facebook and here. I think it had to do with the quality of the poem they did post, maybe not in terms of poetic merit, but in terms of being sincere to the goal of Auroville International, which they seem to be. That poem is called “Prayin’ for the Hour of God” posted on this blog a few days after I posted this one.
photo by Nithish
Not one star Auroville International. These are the streets humanity is lost. Wow, could you say the Mother’s will is here? Fuck this assistant, is that what you say? I give my critique to the Sun. A poet’s basin it hears, and that’s how I write this poem. I’m a rose for my little boy, and I’m fighting for him here, S. Nithish. We make music together. Hear it?
Stop quivering old D, your fingers will look like the attention, and they are. Alright rebel, steal the show. I have my own blog to put it on, to make sure I can be heard. I guess you don’t have anything to worry about, and I’ve just processed you with the snake. Auroville International, here I leave my calling card you hateful organization hellbent on revenge, and that’s where we find your attention.
We’re all completely naked. All of you need to get off your thin horses and see this: that boy needs Donny. I feel like a fundamental character. I feel like a plot. These are ice to snow more shoes. We’re both realizing we’re here. Our mastermind sets people free. That’s the long and short of it. Now terrible channels go home. I’m about to go on the other side of the wall. You will see me there promptly. Then you can count grab ass and green cards, you holier than thou bunch of people, you people Auroville don’t need.
Just look at the character you endow with. You come upon the scene with the hatred of the machine, and you throw people away. Self-sacrifice to help your brother, go out on a limb to speak to him, you can’t find that in yah, because you’ve agreed among yourselves to hate and rob people of their right to exist and banish them from the land, and not even eternity can redeem them, oh you Christian bunch of people where your bones meet the land.
Stark naked I am in front of your mow me down, and I ride vulnerable and sweet to your execution where you ban art. I ride healing in the midst of your hate, and I’m here to stay. Are you gonna shoot me? There is no love in your ice machine, and that is pitiful and strange because you are the consideration of a city that seeks to grow new men and women who want to radically change the Earth into a paradise of brotherly love and hope that dares bring God into our human flesh and divinize the land.
You are that change, oh you normal people putting hate where God grows. Old system be gone, old ways, that punishes you an infantry of hate and ill will that has no means to grow the integration of society in healing’s ways. You destroy that too selfish and a pain to the officer of love.
See this and change or lose your raison d’être with us, the people on the groundwork of human unity, harvesting it into the hands of the city to realize this on Earth. Now take my sin and look at it again in light of the art I’ve given you. It’s the end of harm isn’t it? Paid for by penance and long years of learning the pain that I have caused. Can you grasp that? Goodbye. Auroville International will you answer your position?
Insert card and procedure. Remove the chance that we had, visiting. Are you English? I don’t understand. I didn’t red one second in that girl. Stay high and close. There’s a ballpark you’re gonna play on. It’s just a matter of minutes. Come on get happy. Ecstasy at the apex. Ride your family. There’s more than family values. Okay A camp, there’s Donny.
I’m gonna realize you in the stack. The stone of my words will remove them from any look on themselves innocent. Arrow on his sight, and Auroville is under the dominion of these wares. Well that’s in Pondy. The hand butter or you are called potentials, the rest of your life. Don’t feel scared there. You’re not wet cross.
Why would the child cry?— excellent. For some attention. These phrases stopped your evolution. You didn’t touch that child. You were so good to him he cried when you left. David Wayne was it? Your cousin’s boy, David King. They accused you of molesting him because he cried when you left. What a child and jury, these were your cousins you’d known all your life. They just accused you, without even knowin’ why.
“Must’ve stuck your hand down his pants, when we weren’t lookin’.” That was your uncle Jerry, whom you’d loved all your life. Jerry Duke and his wife Sherry Duke, they were monsters to you. Karen and Eddie, their children, were the posse. I think they saw the kid cry and made out you did it. You saw each one of them born and grow up. They were Jerry Lloyd’s brother and sister, your first best friend, the love of your life until you were five. You were like twins, daily in your playfields together. You kept that love, growin’ up. He didn’t.
Now wasn’t it David King had you stroke his penis when were a little boy and he a teen, and didn’t he tell you he raped Karen when she was 11, he 18? Wow you, Eddie and Jerry Lloyd, a lot of sex play when you were little, penises all in each other’s mouths, especially you and Jerry Lloyd. This continued growin’ up. All the cousins did it, James Duke too, and you’ve always remembered that horse Jerry Lloyd and them fucked when you were teenagers. Did I see you get on it too? Steve fucked yours, do you remember? You were 10, he 14. Now they’re gonna go and accuse you of child molestation. It ain’t right.
Jewett, they all lived in Jewett, Texas, on Old Durant Road. Some of ‘em still there. Mean people, they just got rid of you when you were in college, and they were not. Wow you had been a Green Beret, and they hadn’t been anything. They are jealous, vile, people, and your love for them was never returned. The suffering of that false accusation, it changed your life. You wailed in dream. You couldn’t believe it, and they never spoke to you again.
How’s that for family? They’re all born again Christians, and they act like it. They don’t love their brother. They don’t even know he’s there, still hurtin’ from their murder of his love. He cried for years in the solace of dream. This hurt. What did it do to his ramrod? False accusations sting. They waylay you. They change your behavior. Why even try? You do it then.
You were really good to David Wayne. He was four and don’t remember a thang. He was a cute little guy. The Dukes and the Kings, how are they with kids? They take care of them but don’t give them any attention, the kind that opens them to society kind people. They give them swimsuits and baseballs, but not the focused family time they need. They all watch television together. It’s not raise a kid, and they’re the center of the room, the heart of the attention. They’re not fostered so they grow up nice and sweet. They’re whipped with belts and switches and a lot of anger, and along comes this nice man from know how to do it, because he loves children so, and David Wayne gets the attention he so desperately needs.
Why did he shake his head yes that you touched him? He was four and didn’t know what they mean. This was a holocaust to that family’s sense of love and devotion, to that little boy’s pride. They got away with it, until today. You hear me speak now.
And you don’t have the ceiling to go that far.
You definitely do—
the spiritual guides of the net.
Do they pull your hair?
They’re a breakfast club.
They paint roses
on tall ships
that sink in port.
Where do you go with them?
Well ask one,
Donny Duke.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.
Are you listening to me?
The Gods talk through me.
They don’t hear me,
anybody listening.
It’s a complex Gordian knot this is all just grist for the mill,
and even if I had your attention,
would I be really worthy of your ear?
Would I shine?
Am I the right man for the job?
I put things in pigeonholes,
and I arrive at window time
to put you through a wall.
This is impossible,
explainin’ God
and join the spiritual path with life
in so many words.
I can’t tell you how to do it,
but I can try.
I sound so big on paper.
Hear me scream
when I hit my hand,
fly off the handle
when things don’t go right.
I do pick my nose.
I can’t handle everybody right.
I ride my bike and bark in traffic.
Really working on that now.
I tell you to practice God and I don’t
in Silly Putty,
or when that Tom has got my goat.
I’m a noise maker
when the text should be quiet.
I shoot guns
at my own reflection.
I’d sure like to quit
bein’ me.
Check it out,
no, I’m not
some spiritual master,
but I do go deep, you know?
I want out of this mess,
and I’ve opened my consciousness
to the point I talk to you.
I know realization occurs and I want it.
I’m not tryin’ to escape reality.
I would like to be the perfect motivation
it’s for God’s sake alone I try,
but realization has come to me
in stark moments,
and fuck God get me there.
I’ll sort it out with God later.
Took it home,
the stupid pinball livin’ I do,
and now you hear about it
I’m spiritual everybody.
Okay get away from me.
Well, even I won’t say that.
Needless to say,
I’m enlightenment’s bill
who’s bad on accountants.
A pink rose,
I put that on this little motorboat,
and let’s hope it makes it out of the harbor.
I’m not kiddin’ yah,
I’m not lookin’ for a dealership.
I just want you to hear me
because it’s there
my muse.
I’m out for business,
but don’t look to me
to be the one you adore.
I’m countin’ posters till pay time,
and that’s enlightenment,
and that’s realization.
Land more eyes,
I’ve got so many eyes
you’ve just got to see this,
Locked Press Enterprises.
It’s a rare form of shelf.
Study enlightenment,
whether you’re there or not.
It’s that special sauce, word,
that grounds you right where you’re at
in a better way of livin’.
Will Smith was gonna be an actor.
Oh my goodness,
we’re not tryin’ to broke you into goodness.
Based on love and importance
and only inspired by quotes,
quotes that I hear verbatim
and copy them down as they speak,
you’re listenin’ to the inner voice.
Am I okay now?
I cannot just leave—
thousands of these things to your neck.
Oh come on they missed the term for public defender.
Give superior consciousness,
the mind you bungalow the divine.
It’s jet ski.
You know what I mean by dick.
That gives vocabulary.
I made it through I did
the stupid likes of me.
Okay,
let me go.
It comes out of the box.
August 2023 Military Memories Competition (on the internet site Together We Served)
Which song do you connect most to your time in military service? What specific memories does this song bring back for you?:
Aug 17, 2023, 3:43 AM
The Eye of the Tiger
It was a hot June afternoon at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, and we shuffled off the buses amid the yelling of NCO instructors shouting for us to line up shoulder to shoulder, our bags at our feet. It was a scurry; it was a hustle; we were hassled. There were over two hundred of us, not enough room for the place inside the gate we were, and so the line was a long L shape. I could feel my heart in my throat. This was it, what I’d been waiting for since I was seven and saw John Wayne in The Green Berets at a local drive-in. The Duke looked like a giant on that big screen, his green beret the headgear of a hero. At that moment, 1968, the Vietnam War was a nightly feature on the six o’clock News, small clips of U. S. soldiers at rest and in misery a staple of my childhood. At the movies it was just my dad and I, as this was a man-thing between us, and you must pardon me for such a masculine pronoun. He had wanted to join SF when it was being formed, or somewhere around that time, but he had decided not to reenlist.
The aspiration came to me. Sitting there absorbing every minute of that movie, it hit me like a self-realization: this was what I wanted to be. I don’t think he realized the weight of that in my consciousness because, when I told him, he looked down at me—we were in the front seat of a 1965 Mustang—and he smiled that patronizing smile adults give little kids when they are so earnest at being ridiculous. I was pigeon-toed and had asthma, a very small, little thing of a boy. “You know son, they select only the best for that.” He tried not to let on that he thought I was a weakling, but it came through in his incredulous smile. It didn’t matter. I knew I would be selected because I was the best. Of course I was. After all, I was the center of the world. At least that’s what my eyes and ears told me, seating my vision and hearing in the dead center of everything; smell, touch and taste put me there too, not to mention my thoughts, as you only hear your own. Those cheats—it’s a big and very disappointing fact of childhood that you discover your senses have been cheating you; you are not the center of the world, or, to put it more how it is: everybody else thinks they’re the center too.
One SF instructor was coming down one side of the L, and another was coming down another. They would stand in front of the SF candidate (we have to get one thing straight: the term Green Beret is for Hollywood; it’s called Special Forces, SF for short, and no, Rangers are not Special Forces). He would look you up and down and move on. The one that stood in front of me began to laugh. I became indignant, but of course I couldn’t show that. He said something like, “You, you want to be SF?!” I heard some splashes of laugher down the ranks. I burned inside. I think I said, “Yes sergeant!” but I don’t remember. It happened that I no longer had asthma, but I was super skinny and was still pigeon-toed, which really showed when I ran, and we’d had to run to get in line. I wasn’t the smallest in the class, but almost. The smallest guy had made the mistake of getting the SF patch tattooed on his arm before starting the Q course, and folks, you just don’t do something like that. He was hounded by the instructors until he quit, which did take awhile. I think he got to Phase II, as I remember him being hounded on a ruck march on Smoke Bomb Hill back at Bragg. At any rate, I don’t remember anyone standing in front of him and laughing on that fateful day (they hadn’t seen his tattoo, I gather), a day I’d be grateful for. It gave me the gumption to keep going. I had something to prove.
Enter “The Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. It was 1982, and that song was at the top of the charts. Cliché today, back then that song was real. Incidentally, that was also the year the movie First Blood came out, and I saw it in a theater full of SFers, SF candidates and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. When the line in the film was spoken, “Those Green Berets, they’re real bad asses,” the theater erupted in the spurious noise of young men trying to sound like beasts. You know, that never sounds right. Anyway, right there in that line of men, just inside the gates of the greatest challenge in my young life so far, to win the green beret, I started singing that song in my mind. It was the part, “rising up to the challenge of our rival,” that really got me motivated. I have to explain here a little of the layered workings of our minds, specifically that mechanical part that just starts repeating things in the background of our conscious mind, especially songs, in odd moments. If you take the time to consider the moment, chances are it’ll be one that relates to that song, not in every instance, but in many I’ve found. Anyway, [1] it set a president. Anytime I got into trouble or wanted to quit, which was damn near every day, I either played that song in my heart and mind, or it just rose up in my mechanical mind playing on queue. I let it move me. It gave me strength; it gave me hope. I rose to that challenge with the help of that popular tune. I became a Green Beret, and you’ll have to pardon me for sounding Hollywood. It sounds so much better now than SFer in the early evening of my life.
It did fail me once though. I was in Robin Sage, Phase III. The G chief had given me the task of doing a recon before a body snatch mission, and that means kidnapping someone. I was a Sergeant E-5, an 11B2P, airborne infantry, and I was supposed to have a lot of experience in the field in my m.o.s. I had very little. I’d spent a year in the Horse Cavalry Platoon at Ft. Hood (now called the Horse Detachment), and other than being on a runaway wagon an hour before the Inaugural Parade for Ronald Regan, in Washington, D.C. in 1980, I hadn’t really gotten my juices going, and after that I spent about a year in a Pathfinder section doing mostly static line parachute demonstrations for Ft. Hood, never going to Pathfinder school, with very little actual field duty. As an SF candidate on a mock A team, composed of 12 people, I was in charge of half of the team. I was to lead my half on the body snatch mission, and so I had to go and get eyes on the target, alone and in the dark. That usually wasn’t a problem for me, like it was for many of the candidates. We as a species are so herd sour it’s not even funny. My dad had made me walk alone in the woods at night, or ride a horse alone for miles in the darkness, and if I didn’t do it, he’d threaten to whip me with the belt he had in his hand, not the best way to overcome fear, but I did get used to being alone in the woods at night. It’s off target, but he also made a slide for life over the pond we swam in (I was 10), so to get me to overcome my fear of heights. He was a serious man-maker, and I don’t cuss him for it, but, like I said, it wasn’t the best way to overcome fear, using the fear of a whipping to get me to face my fears. When he whipped me, he left welts on my legs and butt, and a bucking horse, the dark, or a high place were preferable to that.
So normally I would’ve been fine, but this time it was different. There was a Christian militia out there beating up SF candidates and taking their weapons. That news had sent a shiver of fear through our Robin Sage. I dreaded going out there on that recon, some several klicks from the G base. It was a mostly follow the railroad tracks sort of journey, and I arrived quite easily at the road the jeep was to be going down carrying the person we had to snatch, which was to be at 9 o’clock the next night. I hid in the bushes and mixed coco beverage powder, milk powder, and a couple of sugar packets together, making a Ranger pudding. It was my favorite thing to make out of a C ration, a comfort food that didn’t give me the comfort I wanted in that instance. I tried to shake off my fear, but then I heard men running on the tracks, and I looked, and sure enough, there were two men hightailing it down the tracks from the direction I’d come. It was the Christian militia looking for me. They must’ve seen me somehow. “The Eye of the Tiger” played in my mind, and whether I actually played it or it just played in my mechanical mind I don’t remember, but whatever the case it didn’t work, and I ditched the song in my thoughts, replacing it with, “Oh my God they’re after me!” And I got the fluff out of there, after a little wait to make sure they were far enough away. I think it was about 8:30, just a half hour before the scheduled jeep. I arrived at camp sometime later, relieved I’d made it, and I went to report to the G chief the militia were in the area. He wasn’t there, but one of his assistants was. “You idiot! That was the G chief going to town.” He had gone on a pogey bait run with an assistant. “You mean it wasn’t the Christian militia?”
It bears mentioning that, under interrogation by the local Sheriff, the SF candidate that had started the whole Christian militia thing had confessed he’d made it up to cover up having his weapon stolen from a wall locker in the 82nd Airborne barracks. He’d left Robin Sage and gone to meet some friends in the 82nd, to have a night on the town, stowing his M-16 in his friend’s wall locker. Big mistake. Someone stole it. After an initial, “What the hell do I do” moment, he concocted the plan, or that was how it was told to me. It’s amazing how such fine details go through the ranks. He had his friends rough him up some so to look like he’d been beaten up, and he went back to Robin Sage and told the G chief and his team leader, a captain, the big lie. Officers had recently started going though the Q Course with the enlisted, to make it harder for officers, who had up to that time gone through what was termed ‘The Gentlemen’s Course’. All this happened because a female captain had passed the course, and in those days, that was not to be, and they ended up failing her on a technicality after the fact. (For the record, I think she earned the beret.) I never learned what happened to that poor fool who just had to go party with the paratroopers. (82nd infantrymen were our OpFor during Robin Sage.) He did not become an SFer I’m pretty sure. What a gust of fear he stirred up, as I wasn’t the only SF candidate to swallow it, but I might admit I swallowed hard. Yeah, fake news is dangerous.
Hands down, the most poignant and pressing moment when “The Eye of the Tiger” saved my ass was back at Camp Mackall, at the end of the course, negotiating the infamous SF obstacle course. I swear to God, I heard a man break his thigh on the Dirty Name two events from there. The snap sound was sickening. My biggest moment of truth of the whole six months of SF training was a piece of cake to many if not most other candidates. You had to crawl 10 or 20 meters (it was miles to my mind) through a culvert that was about a meter underground, and it was full of SF candidates moving very slowly. I was so claustrophobic I could hardly ride an elevator without panic rising. I had a terror of tight places. There was an instructor at the top of the pit that led down to the entrance to the tunnel, and there wasn’t one at most of the other events. It seems I wasn’t the only claustrophobic candidate. I went down and looked into the tunnel and saw the men on their hands and knees moving slowly in it, just enough to make me hop back out of the pit and beg the instructor to let me skip it. He told me if I didn’t go in I didn’t pass, and here we were at the end of the course, and did I want to fail now? He wasn’t a jerk. Well, the only thing to do was play the song, this being the rival of rivals, and I made a conscious decision to play it in my mind; it didn’t just suddenly start playing in the mechanical mind. After a moment or so of letting that song motivate me, I jumped down there and went into the tunnel. About halfway I panicked, just went berserk, the men behind me groaning and complaining, as I’d come to a complete halt, but in my thrashing around, not going forward at all, I hit my head on the concrete above, and that snapped me out of it, and I made it through that tunnel. Everyone behind me was relieved. The feel of the open air after that battle, it did not smell like horse dung or the fear of night, let me tell you.
Our class was 6-82, the numbers designating the date, month and year, of that class of the Special Forces Qualification Course. When we came to attention as a class, we yelled, “6-82 WETSU!” the acronym meaning we eat this shit up, and I really did eat that shit up. When we first started the course, we were taken to an auditorium at the JFK Special Warfare Center. Some field grade officer stood at the mic on stage and told us to look at the man to our right and left. He said at the end of the course they wouldn’t be there. Sure enough, when we graduated, they marched us back into that auditorium, and two thirds of us were missing. I got a big surprise and made the Commandant’s List; the top 15% of the class. It happened too that I was called upon the stage to receive an ARCOM for becoming the Soldier of the Year of III Corps and Ft. Hood. I was so embarrassed, and the surprise on my fellow classmates’ faces, well, it didn’t say I was the best among them. The center of the world thing, it had vanished a long time ago. Every single day through that course I was sure I’d fail. I just racked up a lot of points. When others were kicked back in their tent during land navigation, let’s say, where we lost most of the class, I was out there doing it, every practice run. Pardon me if tears are welling up writing this. I am very proud to have won the green beret.
You know how it is as you get old. You look back on your life a lot. If I could pick a time to return to in my life, it would be to be back in the Q Course. That was the time of my life, and I only knew at the time it was tough, and I couldn’t wait for it to end. Isn’t that just so human? I’m listening to “The Eye of the Tiger” now, my headphones on as I write this. I’m in that tiger’s eye once again at 62. I’ve just published three books on most of the major e-book sites on the net, and I’ve stood up and spoken my own personal truth, with courage and sincerity, without hatred and anger, but I have little doubt most of you will not think me the best among us, but it’s in self-sacrifice that we are at our best. I’ve been seeking spiritual enlightenment for these past 30 years, and that’s not something you get to by rules and regulations, or even the one, two, and three of steps. You wing it in such a way you win it. Life is so short to live in line. You must understand that Green Berets aren’t soldiers who always go by the book. We are unconventional, and that means thinking and living outside of the box. SF, please don’t ever forget that. In any event, you can read my military memoir here, which is patterned after the service reflections of Together We Served, called An American Story: https://harms-end.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/an-amercan-story-3.pdf
[1] I’ve edited the story since the competition, from “I have to explain here…” to the word “Anyway,” and in the three other places the mechanical mind is mentioned in the story, the first later in the same paragraph and in the 6th and 8th paragraphs.
Harm's End 