trojan horse

he came, a child,

not quite innocent,

and left, no more a man.

monstrous—dark heart.

war dog. hound of hell.

suffering sorrows,

anguished agony, 

scorched death—his own

not allowed

but inflicted.

he would carry it long

and live its agony

in dumpsters and shadowed doorways

stinking with old beer and piss,

and nights of terror 

and hollow black emptiness.

shattered.

lost.

The year he was 18, his draft lottery number was 7. If he had been 19 that year he would have been drafted into the Viet Nam War in January. It was a wakeup call.

He was a gentle soul from a family of gentle souls. No one ever argued in his family. It was not spiritual or mature to fight, and his parents did not tolerate it. He had assimilated the calm and gentleness of his family into his being from an early age, and the very possibility of combat duty in the most horrific and publicly examined war of his time was more terrifying than any possibility he could fathom.   

The next year, his lottery number was 137. Estimates were that the draft would roll around to his number sometime in the early Fall. But a miracle happened. The Nixon administration began to pull troops out of Viet Nam, and within the year, extricated the United States from the conflict entirely. Regardless of whatever stains may have darkened the record of Richard Nixon’s presidency, he always would love the man for this act of sanity that had been so illusive to his predecessors in both parties. The draft never reached his number that year.

But having escaped the draft, he still could not escape the specter of Viet Nam. Many of his friends had gone. The luckiest ones seemed to be the ones who came back in coffins. America spent the rest of his generation wrestling with the horror that little war unleashed on her children. He often wondered why he had been spared. He was truly certain that to go would have utterly destroyed him, and suspected providence. But why had providence smiled on him but not on so many others he knew? He could not feel guilt for being spared, but was uneasy with it anyway. It lurked in his heart unchallenged and unhealed for almost 30 years.

After a few years, movies about Viet Nam began to surface. He never went to see any of them. The chaotic senselessness of the war still disturbed him too much. There was something in it that he could not identify—something that tore him apart inside even though he had not personally experienced the war first hand.

As the years passed, he never examined this overpowering aversion and terror. It seemed to crop up whenever he heard explicit accounts of violent, horrible abuse of groups or individuals at the hands of others. Holocaust stories and genocide and serial killings all seemed to stir the same dark brooding aversion. He avoided movies that depicted such events, and consciously practiced diversion from thinking about such things. He had always taken a measure of comfort in how repulsive such things were to him. It seemed to anchor his goodness and moral strength.

One day he made an emphatic comment to the Moon’s little sister about never watching Viet Nam movies. Her eyes lit up—his aversion was too strong. There must be some dark thing beneath it that she could explore.  

She prodded him to explain it and for weeks they discussed it. Then one day, it came clear to them both. The problem of Viet Nam was not that violence had been done. There were accounts of violence every day in the news. There were instances of violence everywhere in the entertainment media. These were deplorable to him, but most of them didn’t evoke anything of the revulsion that they were examining now. 

The problem of Viet Nam was that it forced America’s sons to confront their darkest, most horrifying potential for inhumanity, and then it abandoned them to the hell that boiled up from their hearts. Viet Nam moved and tore him so deeply because he knew that the monsters forced to the surface so violently and out of time for the veterans who had gone there were no less present in his own heart and in the hearts of human beings everywhere. Viet Nam had been a window into the dark shadows that lurk deep and unmolested in all of us. He had read essays to this effect over the years, and had intellectually assented to their theses. But this was different. Those essays had not touched the shadow in his own heart. They had been ideas to him. This was his own shadow. 

Now he saw that his aversion to deeds of inhumane evil was not so much an indication of his own moral strength but rather a deep dread of his own capacity to move in such dark places himself. What would it take to push a gentle, peaceful man like him into an unthinkable act? He knew that the world he lived in was capable of such a push. The things that were so repulsive to him were examples of just such a push—examples of people much like him who found themselves in circumstances that left no moral high ground; no clean way out. Or people who had been pushed over the edge into pain that deadened their hearts to their own humanity.  

The fact that his life had not pushed him so far was little comfort. He was clearly aware for the first time in his life that the darkest, most diabolical evil he could imagine was within his capacity. He had after all, been the one who imagined it. And he began to see how his upbringing had loaded the shadow with moral urgency. It had not just been good to be calm and peaceful and full of gentleness in his family—it had been mandatory. The struggle to overcome evil had depended on it. He had carried the banner. He had fought the good fight. And yet he had always been beset with this nagging undefined horror within. He was a Trojan Horse, and so, could never risk a moment to rest.

 He began to grow a deepening sense that he must come face to face with this black potential and learn from it. This would be the only hope to overcome its terror. Only by knowing it well, measuring its reach, testing its energy, could he trust his ability to live with it in balance and peace. This was perhaps, the greatest challenge he had encountered thus far in his life. It entailed walking into utter darkness to encounter monsters made of shadow. He must feel his way along, and trust his heart in darkness as well as he had learned to trust it in light.