This is the joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of Nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” — G.B. Shaw
I must have been a little boy when I first realized that there is a lot more genuine human misery in this world than genuine happiness. I know because, soon after I entered junior high, I saw my first dead body. I walked out of metal shop and noticed a group of boys pressed against the cyclone fence, some of them gripping its links with outstretched claws. I joined them and, lying facedown on the sidewalk across the street, I saw the body of an old woman who’d just dropped dead. Her arms were splayed at her sides, her feet were laying flat and her hair was falling off the back of her head. Her little shaggy leashed dog was sitting on her shoulders as if waiting for her to get up, or maybe just claiming and protecting her. One of the woman’s legs started twitching and everybody recoiled, some mock-laughing, others cringed, making faces. Mr. Kelly came out of the shop and angrily ordered us to show respect and get moving. I happily obliged. “Her problems are over,” I recited in my head as I hurried away. My dad had recently described my grandma Moravcik dropping dead that way, and now I saw what he’d meant. You can’t miss something you don’t know happened—she’s resting in peace.
When, in Vietnam, a friend of ours got his arm blown off, my holemate, the son of a cross-country trucker out of Augusta, Georgia, stomped, spat and snarled in disgust, “It don’t mean a goddamned thing. We’ll all be dead in fifty years anyway.” Over the coming months, his exclamation became like a mantra. Trespassing in No Man’s Land, we tried to pretend we were already dead. Our time was something to be done and not lived, and it circled around on itself, our twenty-hour workdays face-to-back like cards in a deck; cards in a rabbit-eared poker deck constantly getting shuffled and re-shuffled, cut, dealt and raked in. Yes we did experience extraordinary things: a gumdrop-sized bird singing above our foxholes, the glimpse of a tiger, clear running spring water escaping the mud, mountainsides cobbled together with roots shaped like snakes coiled around skeleton bones, the moldering remains of ancient villages overtaken and getting devoured by jungle. But everything that happened to us happened out there. Events were daydreams rising and evaporating like gunsmoke.
The end came with supersonic speed. One day you’re in the jungle, the next you’re back home hanging out on a street corner. Or, like me, you’re sitting on a footlocker in a barracks soaking in soul music LPs, bobbing your head and spit-shining your brand-new boots. Yet death never left us. It became like a bird of prey perched on our shoulders. At times it affectionately nibbled on our ear and whispered sweet nothings. Other times it stood as perfectly still and inscrutable as the Sphinx. It yammered gibberish or flapped its wings and cried out to imaginary companions. We saw death in our barracks mates and families, in crowds, in the mirror. Our knowledge of death made us human again; it cut us down to size.
I’d gone to war because—just as they had done—I’d believed the lies of my fathers and grandfathers. That made their lies true in my head; true till proven otherwise. No intellectual position is sturdier than the assumptions it’s built upon, and my assumptions had gotten blown away (beginning with the notion that combat is a game). By way of example, imagine it’s 1860 and you’ve spent your first five years of life totally isolated on a ranch in the sticks. If all of your barn cats are white, you’re going to assume all cats everywhere are white. You’ll believe it until finally you get to town and drop your jaw at the sight of a calico cat. Once you’re back on the ranch, never again will you be able to look at your white cats in the same way. Never again will you be able look at yourself in the same way.
Throw in the war’s mythical Missing in Action and over 60,000 American soldiers and sailors died in Vietnam. In the years following their return, at least twice that number committed suicide (a modest proportion by today’s standards, I do believe). When after the war I was returned to Fort Bragg, NC, in the piney woods beyond my battalion area, a recent returnee hung himself from the branch of a tree. When word spread through the barracks, some guys went to witness the spectacle but I stayed put: His problems are over. Still it never occurred to me that so many thousands upon thousands of us would choose to join him.
I’ve never seriously considered committing suicide. I’ve thought about it just enough to know that, if I took a mind, my suicide wouldn’t be no “attempt.” Also, with all the horsepower at my fingertips, I’d make it look like a single-car accident. While I could imagine myself in circumstances where I’d be sorely tempted to kill myself—at some point life ain’t worth begging for—I never lost much sleep worrying about one of them coming to be. I knew I had plenty of time to be dead and so thoughts of suicide held no allure.
Like most every other combat vet, I humped around a heavy load of survivor’s guilt. But that was natural and, besides, I had a huge advantage over most all of the others: my survival was about as miraculous as miraculous gets (as in beating some mighty long odds). Cheating death allowed me to see that my future had to have at least some kind of purpose—to cheat death again if nothing else. But I took my survival as the chance to rebuild my assumptions to try’n get um right this time; to learn and commit to memory all I should have known and can be known by the likes of us. Like all of the world’s “lost generations” of surviving foot soldiers who had piled up before us and have piled up since, what was left amounted to lives of exploration: out-running ghosts, finding and testing limits, seeing into human hearts and minds, discovering real right and real wrong; the difference between truth and lies; petty lies and murderous ones. Our time continued to circle around on itself, only now our eyes were wide open.
Nobody chooses to be born. We don’t get to choose our parents, our place and time, or the circumstances of our childhoods. That, along with an appointment with death, is what we share. Free will amounts to making choices and even when chained alone inside a dungeon there are choices to be made. Yet, in and of ourselves, we are impossibilities. We owe our existence to what’s out there and we shouldn’t ever forget it. As our world and society goes, so go we. We are inextricably bound even when—or especially when—we kill, exploit, enslave or torment each other.
I think the best thing ever written about suicide was penned by Albert Camus. Camus argued that whether or not to kill yourself is the most fundamental philosophical question. If you think life in society is worth living, give the reasons why. If not, why not? Find out all that makes life worth living and then embrace those things to help make them so. Happiness is the pursuit.