Operational Culture For the Warfighter

What would be the point, in this first winter snow, of going back to several of the women whose bodies I have known and wondering what they thought about all these intervening years. Inevitably it is their children, illnesses and death. Their art, their work, community. How their words enter your ears and stay forever! Rib cage and knee. How we lay on the beds in our youth and late afternoon light. At no point will the snow and bare trees stop being interesting to me. Seven loads of apples went into Jim Kelly's cider press Saturday afternoon. A paragraph from Wendell Berry's recent essay was read. Those who felt part of that place were embraced. Fields of pumpkins, corn to the west and east. But I remember winter nights hurrying under elevated subway, Bronx. Alone, unknown, I did not exist. The point being maybe now I don't exist anymore than in Afghanistan. A land to be admired, like all lands. How lovely the harsh mountains and deserts, indigenous plants and people, adapted ungulates, carnivorous mammals. What is left of them after 10,000 years of human history. Much has been made of the snow leopard, by Peter Mathiessen. The city of Kabul is understandable using the very same analysis Jane Jacobs learned from New York City. At this point I would have to overcome a deepening solitude, the snow of it falling about my ears, to hear their cries and joys and understand thanksgiving. Has my father gone to his grave without saying his one essential thing? He has said it, said it in war and in preparing boys for war, and in peace and his wife. Have my lovers gone to their graves already or are they still in life? I have heard a random, strange selection of their words.