Conversation in the Rain

The man and I stood in the cold September rain and watched Yellowstone’s elk rut. He is a man in his late fifties with the roadmap of experience plain on his face. He wore a camouflage coat with hands stuffed in its pockets, his head crowned with a ball cap. On the front of the ball cap was a small badge with crossed arrows. The badge declared his membership in an exclusive club: the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.

“Special Forces?” I asked. “An old S.F.er.” the man replied. “When?” I asked. “69 to 75,” he replied. He ran headlong into what I tried to avoid - the Vietnam War. He enlisted, serving in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne and later in the Special Forces. He was an A Team medic and a demolitions expert. He talked about how satisfying it was to rescue downed pilots, about incursions into Cambodia, but spoke little about direct combat. He was in the tall grass.

During my brief military service I rubbed elbows with men from this club. Many were badly scarred. Some beckoned to ghosts for forgiveness, some opened their veins to narcotics and others slashed their veins for relief. Men in the bloom of their twenties subjected to the consequences of dubious political choices. This is how it was then, this is how it is now, and this is how it should be. War should scar, scar horribly.

We watched an elk harem mill about in the soft rain and I listened. He talked about being approached by Blackwater. He has the resume Blackwater wants: A demonstrated history of being long and tall in the art of war. A salary of $650.00 a day was offered with a fringe benefit of immunity from criminal prosecution. This would make him a bulletproof rock star sporting the Blackwater logo in place of the American flag. I told the man that Blackwater personnel had just killed seventeen Iraqi civilians. He held my eyes with his for a moment and asked, “Lit them up?” The question lingered, hanging in the air like the white vapor cloud from his breath. He turned and stared a 1,000 yards off. After a moment he mentioned he was flattered by Blackwater’s offer but declined it.

Abruptly an enraged bull elk exploded from the timber and raked the ground with his horns. We were drop-jawed stunned. After a moment, he told me of a friend who works for Blackwater. The friend was assigned to a unit guarding Iraq’s U.S. administrator, Mr. Paul Bremer, which foiled an assassination attempt in December of 2003. The man insisted that this was the watershed moment for Blackwater leading to a 21 million dollar contract the following August. The funding faucet was turned, to date upwards of a billion dollars has gushed into Blackwater.

Darkness encroached, we shook hands, and the man called me “Bro”. I walked away wondering about Mr. Rumsfeld’s strategy of pairing a small all-volunteer military with corporate militias. This strategy seems very effective in hiding the scars of war from the voting public. Without a military draft it is only the odd occasion that you run into someone touched by war. Has the absence of a military draft sterilized this War? The military draft, for all its faults, held up the scar of war for all to see. That’s how it should be. The scars of war should not be hidden, locked in political or corporate faults or inflicted only on volunteers. We need the draft back to make us realize the consequences of our vote.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2007. All rights reserved.