Khanabad, Afghanistan 10/12/02

transcribed 11/27/09

"My time in combat has changed me much. My writing has certainly become less introspective and soul-searching. My journal entries have beome bland, no longer tinged with poetry.

I have become barbaric, uncultured, uncouth. I have slept with whores. I am not afraid of death although I should be. I am not afraid at all but I am angry. Angry of having to bear such a terrible burden. Angry b/c I risk my life every day while so many have it so easy so many thousands of miles away. I am lonely as well. Elissa is so for away and we speak so seldom she may as well be on Mars.

How did I become this man? I just saw 3 men torn apart by an anti-tank missile –  Taliban fucks. I felt nothing. All I desire is to indulge my my most basic instincts: sex, sleep, and alcohol. I feel the poet dripping out of me. My Muse I have long since liquidated with a 100 round burst of cover fire from my 5..56 SS109 squad machine gun.

I squeeze the trigger and in equisitely exact notes I tear through bone and skull and brains, and I feel nothing. I am the machine gunner, mine is the power, mine the fire power of an entire platoon. In combat I am the angel of death, I am the strogest, the most horrid, the most horrific. I am the Christ of the Last Judgement. And what gives me this right? My anger? My sexual frustration?

I kill and will continue to kill b/c I don't care and I will be killed b/c I don't care. And when the moment of my death comes I will cry out to my mother just like everyone else.

There is nothing noble, nothing heroic in this. Only the basest elements of human nature. Kill or be killed, fuck or get fucked.

There is beauty in this worls but a part of my heart it is not. I know only mud and blood and snow and cold and pain and suffering and hatred and anger. I have heard Ezzan sung in the most beautiful place I've ever seen accompanied by the bone chilling c-rump of the 160's on a clear Friday morning. I've seen a magnificent mountainside ablaze in the glorious agony of death and vengeance.

There is only  truth in hell and pain and endurance and death and bodies with no heads. There is nothing else. "