“You can’t repeat the past.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
You staged hours before in the hangar bay of the ship by company, platoons, squads, and fire teams. You inspected, reinspected, and waited. You had an old iPod, back when they were just music, and you listened to zone out and to put your mind in a place and spirit that was not its normal state.
You had a playlist, just like in sports before, when games were played with lighter and less-grave costs. They were songs you felt more than heard as they cast a trance in preparation for coming violence.
The first song spoke its spell, “Come with me, Hail Mary, run quick see…”
*****
The first hard lines hit: “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me…Picture paragraphs unloaded, wise words being quoted…I’m a ghost in these killing fields. Hail Mary catch me if I go…”
A flame flares in your face as a heat rises up. Your eyes burn with tears and vision blurs before the after-calm. You can’t lay on your pack any longer, so you stand. You pace and play it all in your head. You bounce with the same rhythm you had playing sports: football, wrestling, an attitude before attack. You go through rehearsals, play them again and again in mind before they ever live—most never will. You see different contingencies, variables, outcomes, how you will react before there is ever a choice because there never really is. When it happens, it’s an instinct you learn to feel, trust, and exploit; a sense cultured man has conditioned himself to forget but returns when removed from the incubator of civilized world.
You see each potential outcome, not all s you desire, and there is something in the thought of eating a bullet or losing limbs from one wrong step that makes you sick; and you find a corner to be alone—the trash deck if it’s open—and you do as you did from nerves before big games in past, purging body of every excess that gives nothing to the fight.
It isn’t a bad thing. It becomes a ritual, and on the games and missions when it happens, you find you play your best. You throw up. The nerves lessen, but never fully leave until contact and there is only the game, and nothing else, until it ends.
You pace and shake, working out arms, kicking legs, staying as loose and relaxed as you can. Outside, the light of the sun falls, and the ship closes up to control its light. The time is near. You begin to stage. Platoon and squad formations on the hangar floor split and stage into two-rowed lines up the sides of the flight ramp by numbered manifests.
Attachments fall in: machine gun teams, assault teams, forward observers.
You gear up. The weight of SAPI plates strain on the tops of your shoulders, cut into the small of your back, and grind against your spine. It’s a small discomfort to protect when rounds come firing back.
Darkness falls.
It is time.
You are led from flight ramp onto awaiting deck. The sky is stars and crescent moon, and the air sounds mechanic thunder in the beating of rotors whose tips paint green-halo arcs in their spin, each aircraft prepared to lift from ship and deliver bodies onto shore.
You load as you’ve done and rehearsed so many times, and—when bodies settle—you feel the rise, cant, then speed as aircraft begins movement. You see the ship through the back of the bird as it swings and orients on objective’s heading. Inside there is blackness save for gauges and instrument lights, and beyond the ramp of the bird, there is whir of land you’ve never known but, soon, will be upon.
You zone out a short time more, knees unable to stay still—shaking—as feet and trigger finger tap. There is silence and waiting under the roar of churning air and motor until message through the headset, “T-3”—three minutes out.
You signal to the rest in the bird and do the same at “T-1.”
There are hard banks then shift in descent as, instead of flying, you fall; and, in a breath, every nerve’s released.
Your heart is cold. You are calm. You are ready. There is no weight. There is no burden. There is only what must be done.
You detach from before anxieties, detach from elements of yourself—pieces displaced and saved away so as to never be touched or changed from what may come—and when the ramp falls, you speed and spread in one-hundred and eighty-degree security. You hold low and cover face as bird blinds out vision in lifting for departure.
Dust settles. Vision clears. You assess, orient, then begin.
You are different than you were before. You are different than you will be after. You hunt with heightened sense seing by green light vision illuminated in new-discerned infinitude of stars and a crescent, reaper moon.
You are calm. You are cold, and as you stalk, your brain finishes the verse that set it all in motion:
“What do we have here now?
Do you want to ride or die?
La dadada la la la la…”—Tupac Shakur
*****
Some say you cannot relive the past. That is not true, for I do.
“’Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly as if the past was lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald