Go beyond the pain

None of us can lay claim to monopolising post-war pain and suffering…

Dante might…People who existed before novocain might.

Human cry out from the depth, like animals, might…

But war and aftermath…loss and betrayal…disbelief and feeling vain….

We have yet measured its full weight – veteran affairs or civilian affairs.

WWI was supposed to end all wars…

Then the first cut wasn’t deep enough. The Great Depression and Hitler rise got us right back into the ringer.

Subsequent wars….among them, Vietnam, crashed right out of the gate; post-VN USA vowed “No more Vietnam” i.e. unless one can dominate from the get-go, then don’t get involved (this Powel Doctrine helped with the first Iraq War).. Like an addict and his “last” fix before rehab, the war apparatus gets pulled right in…

Right after 9/11, the war on terrors was “open-ended”… (budget surplus)

Even after lost limbs and lives….of “Hurt locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”…our Coliseum spectators still haven’t got enough blood-sports, nor are they fully grasped the costs and consequences of war ( from its initial conception to its balloon-up completion.)

Many of my countryman have tried, to throw paint on the canvass, to sound the alarm bell, to be the lighthouse… – I have yet read “Things we lost in the water” – to no avail.

Most Vietnamese writers have tried their best…but faced a dilemma: ones with verbal ability to convey the pain did not fully exhaust and exploit the depth of separation and suffering, while the authentic remain maimed and numbed…(after all that betrayal, who cares about “educating” the ambivalent public on chapters and causes of war).

So we end up all the poorer…with Apocalypse Now, an adaptation from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the Deer Hunter ( pre-existed script meant for a Las Vegas Russian roulette saga).

Let next generation keep marching into sunlight…to die or get killed, out there or in here e.g. on Jan 6, through the jagged-edges of Capitol broken window – now enshrined as Joan of Arc in our culture war? .

Can’t stand it when people kill in the name of this god and that god, the Holy Wars and the Crusades, for the latest revelation and Dead Sea Scroll…(to my knowledge, no revelation arrived in time to save Jim Jones, the Heaven’s Gate techs, or UA 93 passengers)…

Leave us/me alone.

Enough loss in the air and in the water.

Enough suffering that last a lifetime.

No more “God spoke to me last night”! All the powers to you…. Go ahead and speak in tongues to Alexa…. or try Google translation and help machine learn…

The world has moved on. Our era is the aftermath of an aftermath of an aftermath….

We live in cyber world, wireless and frictionless.

More broadband and fewer face-to-face.

Warfare is moving online, leaving past pain off-line…

Zoom it…(Zoom has just bought some cloud company at the tune of multi-billion dollars to scale up to enterprise levels).

Forget it. Past pain is for old timers, an older version..in Star-Wars time. Now it’s Cyber-Wars time, of multi-Billionaires in space race….”Ask not what your country can do for you”…

We still can’t stand six-feet apart, while they socially-distant planets-apart.

No one, neither the Afghan interpreters nor the Vietnamese ones, can claim monopoly of pain and suffering.

Live with it. Get a broadband connection….and join us in cyber space….It is what it is…War to end all wars…open-ended…out there..but on Earth and off-line, pain and suffering are still real and still count, with or without novocain.

“Strumming my pain with his fingers….Singing my life with his words…”