Small Wars Journal

Young Men and Guns

Sun, 11/06/2016 - 10:58pm

Young Men and Guns

Keith Nightingale

Always, our young men with guns trudge, crawl, climb and run with a quiet universal dignity.

They hear only the slurping pull of mud against their boots or the scratch of sand on the trail and the erratic grunts and groans of an untoward moment as they move to their assigned tasks.

They carry the eternal burden of responsibility borne by a moment of choice to be part of something larger than themselves. To escape one world for another. To have a choice with their life and sometimes the unprogrammed event of death. Youth is eternal. The results are also.

Our expendable youth doing what it has always done—lifting and carrying our national burdens for other generation’s benefits—a gift of graciousness absent the acknowledgement or reward.

They have a poise uniform to their brethren, but uncommon amongst others. They share the same emotions, anxieties, elations and fears. They are uniformly uniform, a poise which is their strength and bond.  

They exhibit a continuing stoic resignation to their situation. There is a weariness to their movements that belies their youth. Here, at life’s edge, youth can act older but it cannot act younger. They accept life and death and administer the same absent great thought. Lack of thought is a necessary mental subterfuge. When the shroud eventually departs, their age is accelerated.

Within each Grunt resides a stark hulking monster lurking inside the labyrinth of the mind. It is the abject fear of cowardice and ill-performance among peers. Each fights to suppress what reality would bring forth. The praise and respect of the group is a necessary plug to the channels coursing with cowardice.

They cover their fears with symbols, sounds, common language and common activities, but they are a bandage over what might be. Reputation is a lifetime for those together and will be recounted millennia after any act of performance-good or bad. A burden of a moment is carried always. 

The casual indifference to death masks the fear of acknowledging its personal likelihood. Honor is built by suppressing normal instincts. Disregarding mortality for the benefit of others is the invisible crown of reputation. There are decorations, but it is the crown that truly counts.

Reputation is something worthy of death. It is a choice. Often a chance. Young men with guns move quietly, effortlessly to the obscure future. Hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, burnt lips and reddened eyes. Shoulders sliced by straps and internal organs stressed beyond any athletic endeavor.

Sores fester, the body suppurates in numerous orifices. Everything carries pain. The mind stifles it all as a necessary anesthetic to permit what must be done to be done. These young men with guns.

The line is endless over time. Shadowy figures plodding through the grey mist of dawn into the beckoning obscurity of the night doing what they always do. Young men with guns.

They pass the living and the dead. The eternal warriors of their souls. The ephemeral whisps of life trace and course through the column-here touching, there avoiding. The eternal scene of men in battle. Young men with guns.

The vision is lost with the distance and time as the figures gain and recede in our consciousness to disappear in the mists of time. Our young men with guns.