One Tin Soldier Rides Away . . .

One Tin Soldier Rides Away . . . War is hell. War. Hell. Those are naturally juxtaposed, without the "is" as filler; yet someone thought we civilians needed that little two letter word to connect the dots. Or, maybe we just needed some tiny little verb-wanna-be to separate two hideous compatriots. Are we really that blind? Maybe someone just has a rotten, misplaced sense of irony. Personally, I find it ironic that the quote is attributed to General William Tecumseh Sherman. He burned Atlanta. You can probably guess what I think of him and his . . . irony. They send them home to us, if God willing, they send them home at all, with a pat on the back and a "Thanks, buddy." Hell, who am I kidding? I doubt they even get that much. If they're really, really lucky, they come home with all of the parts of their bodies that they left with. At least, the parts we can see. The parts they see when they look in the mirror. What everyone thinks of as "whole." What does that even mean?You can send a kid to some God-forsaken piece of dirt and sand that no one but newscasters and generals can pronounce, and slap labels on it like "duty," and "protect your country," and "fight the evil-doers." (This last one is one of my personal favorites). But, for now at least, I won't jump on that 80-story tall soap box to rage against the near-ingenious smoke-and-mirrors act that got us mucked and mired in that sandpit. And I will never belittle those people that put on those uniforms and go over there and suck down that sand, regardless of how they feel about the reasons they are required to do it. Those people, at least, I can respect. For now, I just want to try and wrap my head around the aftermath. That's a lie. What I really want is to unwrap my head from it. But, I live a lot in my head -- it's where I am and have always been most comfortable and now it's a seething mass of contradictions that I'm trying to somehow resolve by expunging onto paper. Well, what passes for paper in the electronic world. The fact is, I am -- consider myself to be -- a head person rather than a heart person. So, I am having a great difficulty, still, trying to get these two units of myself to come to some sort of truce, even an uneasy one. The expression "butting heads" would not be appropriate, for obvious, even ironic reasons. My head and my heart are determined, however, to keep colliding until I either get whatever is causing the basic controversy out of my system; or until the two collide so harshly that they just shatter each other or meld into one unit. Is that even possible? To get to here, you have to back track to what got me here in my own head. That takes us back to my night with my kid soldier who had just found out he had lost his friend in Iraq. Sorry, but I'm just not going to sum it up for you. See "The Dash" blog. Moving on . . . First, I ask myself, was this random? I once was a big believer in God and an orderly universe. I don't know at what point my faith started to waiver, and I'm not here to discuss that now. I'd like to still believe in some sort of order or reason or purpose. Put your faith in what you will; allow me to find my own. I may have lost my place, but I have done this before and I suspect I will do it again. Whatever it is that guides the fools and the faithless will find me and put me right. So, was my being at this place with this kid, at this time, random? I don't think so. I never said I didn't believe in random at all, though. There are people who always want to shake me silly and kick my ass. Randomly, of course.For what it's worth . . . I'm just glad they care enough to want to do either, for whatever reason. My point, and I do have one, is that they send some of these kids back to us without any provision for the aftermath. Either for the kids or the families. Some can, or do, or manage, to deal better than others. Whatever that means. What we get back sometimes are tin soldiers. They look fine. They sound fine. They look just as they did when they left. They might be missing a limb. Or two. Does that diminish our love? God, I hope not. But, that's the outside. We get them back, if we are very lucky. Our brave and beautiful soldiers . . . and they are alive. And they are wandering aimlessly down some mythical yellow brick road, searching for a Wizard to give them their heart back. I managed to for one, because I had been through my own personal war that was just enough to help one young man get through one small battle. Whether it will be enough in the long run . . . that I can't answer. I won't presume to walk in his combat boots. He can't walk in my heels. But we were soul mates for a few hours. In those few hours, though, I learned something.I'm a tin soldier.I've worked so hard for so long to make myself a head person, not a heart person, that I am one of those people that has been shell-shocked, in a manner of speaking, that it took a big, brave man in uniform to make me realize that there is no shame in having a heart.It might even be ok to open that heart someday. Hell, I did open that heart.And, it wasn't made of tin, then.