Wheels of Justice

I talk about Palestine a lot. Sometimes I worry that might be all I talk about. I fear I’m going to become that old guy in the back of the room at a presentation like this one, filled with anger, disillusion pouring through, poetry long since waxed and in its place the vitriol of apartness. I watch Salam. His strength and stature belie the soft humanity beneath. I’ve told my stories. They’ve lost their connection to the soul that collected them. They are facts. Smeared newsprint on my fingers, nothing more.

In front of me, a generation of men who learned the meaning of war. They killed. For honor, for god, for country, they killed. My breath is suddenly unable to escape. In but not out. Building. Preparing. I look up from shaking hands to the eyes of the men in front of me. I turn away. They are too ready to hear this, too ready to understand. Unlike my closest friends, they never mistake Palestine for Pakistan.

I start to speak and choke. Where did these tears come from? Were they not long dried by the wind and burning sun of that refugee camp, what’s it called? Did my trauma find its way home, was it searching me out all along? I cannot speak. My voice is hoarse from endless speaking but tonight is the night it fails. I turn in my chair, pivot, scramble for the walls that protected me so long. They, like so much else, are gone. I reach for the glass of water on the table and bring it to my lips in utter disbelief that feeling has returned after so many months. The water falls into my lap, the embarrassment of men crying mercifully abated by a more practical kind.

These veterans get it. Bill gets it. We share something bought with lives. I know how blood pooling in a gutter smells. I know what the barrel of an M16 tastes like. The faces of those who died never leave you. Not for a day, not for an hour. They are there when you fall asleep and they will greet you again if you wake. This universal truth bridges the divide of generations, of patriots and rebels.

This bus and I are the same age. 1979. A life ago and a life to go still. In Idaho Falls, two eighteen-year-old boys spray paint ‘war’ on stop signs and become convicted felons. A student in Salt Lake learns for the first time how to find Iraq on a map. In Portland, the parents of a murdered friend read their daughter’s journal to strangers. A congressional aide in Boise admits he was doing covert reconnaissance in preparation for war two years before September eleventh.

This tour taught me a simple fact. That which connects us is infinitely stronger than that which separates. From Iraq to Palestine, Vietnam to Salt Lake, we will discover ourselves in each other, and we will continue.

mark t., Wheels of Justice