That Precarious Gait
Hello Friends,
I love Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Her melancholy words bounce along on a light and happy tune. Years ago, someone told me that all of her poems can be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas.” I’ll have to look that up when I get home and finally see if I can make it work – I’m not much of a singer. I’ve been a fan of her poetry for a long time, but I’ve never seen her mixture of beautiful words form such horrible images quite like what happens in this poem that I found while out here in Afghanistan.
Emily says:
I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously
The stars about my head, I felt,
About my feet the sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.
What gave me the spiritual nausea feeling the first few times I read it is the contrast between how beautiful this poem speaks to the way we are literally built from our experience and how poignant it is regarding life in a landscape full of IEDs. As I write, we have had four of the biggest controlled detonations I’ve ever felt – and, yes, I did flinch. That was the seventh %*$*ing blast, and I feel some anger. Number eight. My fault for not refreshing the battery in my radio so I could leave it turned on and know what was going on ahead of time. It will be a while yet before I am fond of surprises again.
We are in round one of Warrior Transition training. It feels good to sort of be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. RP and I conduct the training, and everyone we train gets to go home in a few days. Home may seem like it’s just around the corner, but the fight isn’t over. The two-thirds of us that are still out here may anticipate that we will get to go home soon. But the enemy is home. The enemy still shoots at us and still plants IEDs in the ground, still coerces the locals, and still watches the cycles of Marines who come and go. As you’ve seen in the news, even a few of those we thought were friendly have acted out their buried, violent agenda.
I’m at Camp Leatherneck now, which does have a few more conveniences. But the fact that I am transient here balances things out with some inconveniences. I don’t have an office or a chair or things like that. But I do have air conditioning to beat away the heat, so no major complaints. I wonder what it will be like to live again in a place without the ever present hum of generators and the industrial rush of cold air that makes one part of a tent too cold and leaves another still too hot.
We have indeed just had a big experience – an experience that tests every aspect of our being and changes our gait, both metaphorically and literally. It’s been hot and scratchy. The Marines and Sailors carry a ton of gear – more accurately, over 90 pounds during many patrols. Radios, batteries, ammunition, body armor, and water add up in a hurry. Patrols can last for most of a day – sometimes longer. I have waited for the Marines to come back from an operation and tried to help move gear from the landing zone. I struggled to lift even one pack for that short distance. They’ve been through repeated cycles of hydration then dehydration and exhilaration then exhaustion. They’ve slept in the dirt and eaten too much over-processed chow, which is probably better than not enough chow. There isn’t much point in complaining, but even if there was, you probably wouldn’t hear much of it. Circumstance is mostly accepted as “just the way it is.” At Leatherneck, we get to dabble in small comforts like choosing our own food, walking around without a pack, and thinking about what we’ll do when we get home.
Of course, we’ve also experienced the big stuff. In fact, we’ve probably jumped right over the big stuff and come head to head with matters of ultimate concern. The Marines and Sailors have been shot at and seen their friends blown up. They have put tourniquets on each other, just like they were trained to do. Each day, they get up and go out again into a place that messes with our sense of security about the earth we walk on. I wonder what Emily saw that prompted her to fit those particular words to her circumstance, and I wonder how it can be that her words also seem to fit so well on the circumstance of a completely different place and time. What did she not trust in her environment that made her step so carefully? How could she know about the unexpected moment of concussion that rings one’s skull with stars? If it wasn’t a wet sea of blood, then where did her feet wade? How is it that her words and imagery could anticipate the precarious gait of experience, in one place and time, and the precarious gait of amputation in another?
We look forward to going home. I will be glad to be back when it is my turn. And it will be complicated. There will be families at the parking lot in Twenty-Nine Palms who know that their loved one is not coming home. But they will be there, to close a circle that must be closed – to grieve with their other family of Marines and Sailors who were there when a loved one fell.
Scientists say that planet Earth is in the “Goldilocks zone” – not too close and not too far from the sun. Even if the Earth is in that perfectly comfortable sweet spot, there are places on the Earth that don’t seem like they are in the Goldilocks zone. It occurs to me that where we have been is the “Land of Too” – too hot and too cold, too much and too little, too boring and too exciting. And soon, too happy and too sad…
It may be that in some strange way, all the extremes will balance out, but it is only by having too much on each side of the scale. There is a lot to be thankful for out here. Body armor, luck, providence, and perhaps the enemy’s poor equipment and training have conspired in our favor. Bullets have followed a path around organs that leaves us wondering how it was even possible. Explosive devices have been triggered, only to fizzle out. Rockets have flown past their intended targets. All of that is awkward consolation to the family, friends, loved-ones, and fellow Marines and Sailors of those we grieve over.
There is no war without violence, there is no war without betrayal, and there is no war without feelings of guilt – even if there is very little evidence for guilt. The circumstance is simply too complex and tangled to leave anyone unscathed. We are left to make our way through life with a question hung permanently on a wall somewhere in the back of our mind. Why that person, and not me? Why me, and not that person? “What if…,” is part of the experience of war. It is the inheritance that no one could tell us about as clearly as the experience does.
We cannot pray for the past to be different. We can pray for the future. Pray for a clean election. Pray for anything that makes us more civilized than comfortable.
Hope to see you all soon,
Seanan
Chap Seanan R. Holland, LT, USN
1st Bn, 7th Mar
Disclaimer: All entries to CLF/Quest Military Ministries page reflect the personal views of the contributor. The views expressed here are in no way to be construed as an individual or individuals speaking in their official capacities for the agencies, departments, or service branches they serve in. This is not an official publication of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, any government agency, or any other organization.
- Welcome Home, Seanan - November 6, 2012
- Moving Toward Home - October 10, 2012
- That Precarious Gait - September 11, 2012
Thank you for this stark reminder of the human costs of war and trying to maintain our security in an insecure world.
My father was a combat infantry veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, 99th Inf, 394th Rgt, Co C. Recipient of the Presidential Unit Citation. 3 bronze stars.
He bore the scars, physical and emotional, of that conflict for the rest of his life.