I had one for everywhere I went. I still do. I had it if I needed it, if I found a little time and needed, or wanted, to feel something. Somedays I’d return to an old entry, but mostly I would add another that was new. It was what I did when I was alone and still wanted to feel something.
That is what the filled pages were to me, and I add to them still even when others don’t accept or approve my reasons that I do. I need to, and so I do.
I remember the first time I realized that others took notice. It was Afghanistan, checking in with section leaders of a CAAT Platoon between patrols and one of them looked down to what I was carrying.
“I see you have your Little Black Book of Death, Sir!” he said with the lighthearted humor that only makes sense if you’ve lived it.
I laughed too. He couldn’t have been more wrong. That was the green one.
The black book was different. It was where I wrote my heart, where I saved my soul. It was where I wrote what I otherwise wouldn’t say and probably would never share. It was where I spoke honest, made peace, and reset my soul before returning back to living a life as best I could.
I kept it on, or near, as often as I could. If a thought arose, I wrote it down to return to it more fully when the day would slow.
To live in violence, to live daily with death, I believe we must, too, live with a peace if we are ever to return to a normal life unbroken. Maybe we are still broken in our own little ways, but we are not shattered, nor crushed, and if healed the scars of a life of violence borne appear no different to another than the common scratches life leaves on all of us.
The black book was where I made my peace. It was where I wrote stories, thoughts, recorded passages from books that left me in thought. It kept my spirit engaged and distanced from the rest that sometimes came.
Some nights I would write with a red-light headlamp under a camo net burning ninety-nine cent cigars—sometimes with a pink and other times blue label—sent by the case for the birth of our twins I’d never met. I remember another day coming upon another one of my Marines reading a small field New Testament under the netting. I could tell his mind was somewhere else, and I never learned where or on what.
He is gone now. Helmand didn’t take him—Baltimore—and that one hurt more than I ever thought. Death is one thing when it is expected, when a peace is made with violence and fate; but it is something entirely different when it arises without sense, sign, or purpose. I have written of him since, trying to give honor and a perspective to his life that ended without sense.
Not all soul-saving was recorded in the black book. Somedays I would write letters on a piece of paper or on a post card torn from the back of a cardboard MRE packet. Sometimes I had something to say. Often, I didn’t and wrote not to be forgotten: to show to another that they were on my mind, in a thought, and should something happen, show a small sign that they meant something to me.
Then, as well as today, writing for me was an act of peace: peace with self and with others. But there were times when there was not a place for that, and where you wrote and saved your soul, it should not go. So you tucked it away in the top pocket of a MOLLE pack that stayed behind. You left it there, keeping distance between it and what you knew would soon be done. Your heart cooled and a light went out. You steeled yourself and, when you were changed, you did bad things for good reasons and prayed God saw it in the end the same as you told it to yourself.
Some you remember, and some you don’t; but you’re still here and those stories have no home in the pages you wrote to make a peace.
Maybe you’ll write them one day, or maybe you never will. The world needs more good, not that, even when there are times it can be no other way. It happened. It was lived, but it is history, and you return to the little black book remembering the positives, little moments, stories, experiences, and see again all the good that was done.
That little black book is filled. It rests on a shelf, beside all the others through the years. Looking at the spines, you could not tell it from any other, same as the scars and scratches we all bear.
I still carry one with me. I still turn to it when I feel, or need to feel something. I return to old entries but mostly write new. It’s a fix I need, a little vice I live, even if others never understand.