No Believers in Fox Holes (p211-p219)

(Setting:  Freeman is sent to observe the non-war in Vhaicam.  He encounters a refugee from Communism, who has discovered the true meaning of life just in time to be obliterated by a missile.)

A day later, Freeman was wearing camouflage khaki inside a foxhole just 600 yards from the 33rd diagonal in Vhaicam, where the non-war was being ruthlessly waged. It was a ghoulishly dark moonless and starless night. Occasional muzzle flashes from blurting machine guns and lightning flashes of exploding ordnance on the horizon made the return to darkness even more suffocating and terrifying. A constant, inescapable rain soaked his ill-fitting uniform. Muddy rivulets ran down the foxhole walls and turned the soil into slimy goo that seeped into every bodily crevice.

A panoply of noises froze his heart. A nearby mortar blast rattled his nervous system. A cannon shot screamed overhead at mach three, arriving and passing in an unearthly rising and descending crescendo. Bullets whizzed by like buzzing insects with skull-crushing bites. A jet thundered by, spewing 130-decibel cacophony. The rapid whump! whump! whump! of a helicopter gun ship reverberated against the night like the heartbeat of a tortured universe.

Human sounds were the most disturbing. Pain-filled screeches announced a direct hit. Agonized moans heralded long waits for exhausted medics. Soldiers cursed malfunctioning equipment and the bad karma causing their miserable predicament. A rifleman wept over a compatriot lost to the Grim Reaper. Disoriented squadron leaders barked out terse commands. But the most maddening human sound was the arcane chatter pouring from the other fellow in Freeman's foxhole, who apparently was convincing himself he was still alive by delivering an unending monologue with machine gun rapidity.

Freeman, in his effort to find a solution for the non-war devouring the Honcho's potential voters, was asking the poor sonsofbitches who were getting shot at for ideas, figuring that these front line troops had the most vested interest in thinking of clever ways out of this mess. Unfortunately, most of their ideas involved killing various American leaders for condemning them to this hellish existence for no reason that any of them could understand. The Head Honcho was at the top of their hit lists.

Freeman's foxhole hopping to interview soldiers had deposited him with the lad who wouldn't stop talking. He was eager to escape the mind-numbing drivel cascading out of the youth’s mouth. Unfortunately, the raging battle had intensified, making a sprint to another subterranean refuge exceptionally dangerous. He had two choices. He could endure the maddening monologue of his temporary companion, or he could stand up and take a bullet in the head. He stood up.

No bullets slammed into his skull. Instead, he saw an amazing sight. Garishly silhouetted by strobe flashes of exploding ammo was a man running a life-or-death sprint across the 33rd diagonal, dodging bullets and bombs that miraculously had not yet obliterated him. Freeman stood transfixed, watching this desperate enemy skate and slide across the muddy Vhaicamese soil. Freeman's suspense mounted. The suicidal figure was heading directly his way. A moment later, the mud-soaked man collided brutally with him. They plummeted heavily to the slimy bottom of the foxhole and became entangled with the verbose youth that had never stopped talking.

All three of them laid in the muck intertwined like snakes. Freeman cleared his mouth of mud and shouted, "Who the fuck are you?"

The other two responded with a stereophonic "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm Freeman", he offered as they extricated themselves from each other. "I'm a public relations liaison for the federal government. I don't belong in this foxhole."

"I'm Sam Winters", said the youth that had talked Freeman to the brink of insanity. "I'm a private in the U.S. Army. I'm pretty sure I don't belong in this foxhole either."

"I'm Aiden Tyler Smith III", said the mysterious man who had made the death-defying battlefield dash. Reeking of prep school arrogance, he added, "I'm a Jesuit Marxist missionary. I'm absolutely certain I don't belong in this foxhole, since my dad is a wealthy American industrialist."

Freeman shook his head. "This is too weird. None of us belong in this foxhole, which is the most god-forsaken spot on earth, yet here we are."

After an uncomfortable moment of silence, Sam Winters asked, "Why are we here, then?"

"The Head Honcho sent me here to figure out how to end this non-war, which was supposed to stop the population explosion created by our F.U.N. program and the communist scourge started by the Jesuit Marxists", replied Freeman.

"I'm here because I was too fucking stupid to go to college or be born of rich parents", said Winters. "The army was the only decent job I could get after squandering my teens smoking dope, drinking beer, and screwing ugly but willing girls. Unfortunately, I got sent to Vhaicam by the Head Honcho and his generals to be killed. Seems too harsh of a punishment for drinking a few beers and screwing some pimpled girls."

Winters and Freeman turned to Aiden Tyler Smith III. "I came to Vhaicam", he began, "to convert the natives to Catholicism and Communism. I was a missionary propagating ism's in a world that I hadn't lived in long enough to know anything about, which just makes me a pest. I was an ideologue intent on installing the dictatorship of the proletariat everywhere, to fulfill a youthful urge for rebellion against the establishment represented by my wealthy father. I was jealous of his success, which I interpreted as exploitation of the working class and as an inordinate focus on the accumulation of worldly goods. The Jesuit Marxists attracted me because they had added Catholic mysticism to the dialectic materialism of Marxism. Christian maxims such as 'the meek shall inherit the earth', 'the first shall be last', and 'the Lord's Kingdom is not of this world' justified my Marxist tendency to despise my father's wealth, and also eased my fear of being unable to achieve all that he did, simply by convincing myself that his achievements were immoral. These Christian maxims spiritually excoriated the wealth-creating dynamics of capitalism, which made it easier for me and the Vhaicamese to accept the wealth-deteriorating philosophy of communism. There was a better life waiting for us in heaven, so there was no reason to value a high living standard on earth.

"We were wildly successful converting the Vhaicamese to Marxism and Catholicism. They were eager to embrace any ism that absolved them of responsibility for their own actions and that refocused their lives on heaven rather than on earth’s demanding environment. People are frightfully willing to blame their destitute conditions on someone else, and to believe that the only purpose of life is to somehow tolerate this existence until the postmortem rewards of heaven can be reaped.

"We made North Vhaicam a model proletarian state. We gave the means of production to the workers. We took from each according to his ability, and gave to each according to his need. We encouraged the workers to unite and to shed their chains. We created the Communist Party to oversee this final glorious stage in human evolution. Unfortunately, it all collapsed into a hellish nightmare. We felt like Jacob, who labored seven years to win Rachel as his bride, only to discover in his darkened tent that he had won the ugly Leah instead."

"That's too bad", said Freeman, who didn't give a damn. He was more concerned about dodging bullets targeted for his cranium. "How did that happen?"

"We all fervently believed in communism", replied Aiden Tyler Smith III. "Unfortunately, Communism didn’t believe in us. It requires inhuman creatures to live it successfully. We could never fully convince the Vhaicamese to discard their own individuality and to subsume their lives into the great proletarian collective. They wanted to live, love, and create, but the collective wanted them to sacrifice, obey, and conform. They each had magnificent dreams distinct from the magnificent dreams of all other individuals. But communism requires a communal dream, which never seemed magnificent or even interesting to the millions who were forced to abandon their individual yearnings and accept tasteless socialistic pabulum.

"Communism, like all isms, is a dogmatic mythology propagated and subverted by people who lust for power. Communist party leaders oppress just like monarchs, czars, and emperors. The monarch invents the mythology of divine right of kings to bind his subjects. The Master invents the mythology of class and caste distinction over his slaves. The pharaoh and the emperor invent the mythology that they are earthly incarnations of gods, to which the peasants must kneel in submission. Government bureaucrats invent the mythology of the common good to chain taxpayers to a black hole of spending that does nothing but enhance the lifestyles of these bureaucrats. The Communist Party preaches the mythology of the Species Being, and the proles kowtow in worshipful bondage. Fundamentally, each ism is substitutable for any other, because they are all merely psychological tools some people use to assume power over the rest, under the protective cloak of their uniquely ‘true’ mythology. When Marx invited the workers of the world to unite, they didn’t realize it meant they would be chained together in servitude to a master even more abusive than the one they sought refuge from.

"The workers' paradise became a nightmarish quagmire of corruption, ineptitude, and destroyed ambition. 'From each to his ability and to each according to his need' was contorted into 'from each according to the state’s five year plan, and to each according to whatever is left after party officials skim the cream off the meager production the disenfranchised workers eke out'. Haggard families clothed in rags are now begging for food from a system that never knew how to produce. Shoes and soap are a long forgotten luxury. Ration cards allocate every essential commodity. Long lines wait for scant supplies. Housing is one vast slum, because what everybody owns, nobody takes care of. Meanwhile, Party operatives confiscate the best of everything, including land, homes, and possessions. Power has been concentrated into a small caste of corrupt bureaucrats protected by mercenary security forces who pick through whatever the bureaucrats don’t want. The liberation of the workers cast them adrift from everything they had known or loved or been. Psychologically, they’re now all refugees, since the North Vhaicamese state has become an omnipresent monolith that nobody can muster the emotional energy to call 'home'.

"Yes, we liberated the Vhaicamese", sighed Aiden Tyler Smith III. "They are now free to consume the fruits of their socialist economic system, but there are none. They are now free from the exploitative bourgeois class, but their hunger belies the joy of their emancipation. They are now free to revel in the equality of their new society, which mysteriously doesn't apply to privileged party members. We credit-card socialists promised equality, liberty, and prosperity. But what we actually delivered to them was corruption, servitude, and destitution. Communism is a sham, the same sham that has been repeated many times throughout history, disguised by many different isms.

"Death by starvation, disease, or the silent bullets of secret police were the inevitable fates of workers in this paradise. I had to get the hell out of there. It reminded me of an old joke about a shipwrecked sailor who floated for days on flotsam until a rope was thrown to him from out of the darkness. He called out, 'What country is this?’ 'The Soviet Union', voices answered. 'I’ll float a little further', said the shipwrecked sailor.

"Unfortunately, I discovered I couldn't leave. I was told I was property of the state, that I was an inseparable, though insignificant, element of the proletariat. I was forbade to do anything of my own free will, since I didn't have a free will, according to their dogma which I had given them in my youthful naiveté. It was either escape and live, or stay and die. So I ran. Right into this foxhole, where I now sit with mud up my asshole, and my soul filled with dirty shame."

"Wow!" exclaimed Freeman. "It’s a good thing we're fighting the communists here in Vhaicam, so they don't take over the rest of the world."

"Bullshit", spat Aiden Tyler Smith III. "Communists are paper tigers. There’s no need to fight them, unless they attack you directly. They will eventually kill themselves. Their proletarian time bomb will implode inward. Humans won’t tolerate that environment forever. They will inevitably discover that communism is just another facade for generic oppression that has existed since the dawn of civilization, manifesting itself in varying forms and isms, but always of the same essence--some men clinging to power over the others behind a protective shield of mythology."

This retort silenced the three men. Overhead, a war raged furiously, oblivious to their introspections and impervious to their wishes and dreams. Men were killing one another, as they had since the first spark of mysticism twinkled in a primitive tribe. Nobody in the foxhole wanted to be a part of that killing. Nor did anyone else in any of the other foxholes, on either side of the 33rd diagonal. But the bombs continued to drop, the bullets continued to fly, and the casualties continued to mount. The three men in the foxhole were mystified by the absurdity of it all. The absurdity wasn’t attributable to Communism or Capitalism or any other mythology ending with an ism. The absurdity was simply that presumably intelligent individuals were allowing themselves to be slaughtered.

Proverbial light bulbs flashed on in the heads of the three men. They each had only one life to live, and to sacrifice it as pointlessly as this was obscene. They each had one golden opportunity on earth to grow, love, and prosper. Fate awarded them one heart, one soul, one brain, and one body with which to take one solitary crack at living life to its fullest. This wasn’t a gift to be squandered or carelessly discarded. They discovered that the preciousness of life is its scarcity and brevity. Sacrificing this one priceless opportunity to flesh-devouring warfare or spirit-devouring mythology was unforgivable.

It was fortuitous that this revelation dawned on Freeman, Sam Winters, and Aiden Tyler Smith III when it did. Hurtling through the blackened sky was a missile. It was nominally a North Vhaicamese missile, but that would be insignificant to the poor souls it obliterated. Corpses don’t care who fired the weapon that killed them. Death renders all implications of life irrelevant. Death destroys all personal perspectives. Death unmasks all mythologies and all social conditioning. Sometimes it is death’s approach that finally reveals the naked truth of life.

The North Vhaicamese missile continued its deadly flight toward the front lines. The three men looked skyward in reaction to the eerie screeching that was getting louder by the millisecond. During their fleeting glimpse of the nighttime sky, the missile skewered their foxhole. Their bodies were brutally scattered about the battlefield in a shower of blood and shredded limbs. Fragments of their flesh sprinkled soldiers in other foxholes, mingling with the rain into an unrecognizable pink goo that was an apt byproduct of the pointless effort to prove the superiority of one ism over another, which was of no consequence to those sent by the purveyors of their ism to die for it.