The Youth on the Cot (p226-p235)

(Setting:  While recovering from wounds, Freeman encounters the Youth on the Cot, who accuses religion of being responsible for much of the killing in history.)

When the dulling effects of morphine subsided, he noticed a heavily bandaged youth laying in a cot next to him, staring into space. "I see you tried to die for your country as unsuccessfully as I did", said Freeman wryly.

The Youth on the Cot slowly turned his blood-splotched face. "You can’t die for your country", he replied. "You can’t die for anything. Dying for something is a contradiction in terms. The minute you die, the thing you died for simultaneously ceases to exist, at least from your perspective. You can only live for something."

Freeman couldn’t argue with the Youth on the Cot, although he disliked the implicit burden to find something valuable to live for. "How did you get so mangled?"

"NV soldiers assaulted our position near the 33rd diagonal. Most of our regiment was killed. I took bullets in the leg and the stomach, but I managed to crawl to our machine gun emplacement. I mowed the attackers down, and then I blacked out."

"Geez, that makes you a hero!"

The Youth on the Cot shook his head. "If you kill one person, you're a murderer. If you kill hundreds, you're a hero, especially if you scratch 'Semper Fi' in the dirt before you die. To save my own life I killed NV youths that didn’t want to fight in this non-war either. Oh, I’ll get a ticker tape parade back home, but I won’t smile during it. When I see politicians heaping praises and confetti on me, I will be thinking of how Jesus described the Pharisees as 'hypocrites, all white and shining on the outside, and inside filled with dead men's bones.' True heroes are those working to achieve universal emancipation from warfare, which will only come from an enormous undercurrent of people forsaking national and religious chauvinism. As Thomas Jefferson put it, 'It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately. Moral duties are as obligatory on nations as on individuals.'"

Freeman thought it rather odd that the Youth on the Cot quoted Jefferson, whom just recently had been appointed Insurrection Czar. "Yes, it is absurd", he murmured.

"This non-war has sired many absurdities", said the Youth on the Cot. "One day, our regiment was ordered to capture and destroy a munitions factory while video cameras rolled, so that our general could relay heroic images back to the top brass in the Octagon. Everything went according to plan. We crossed into enemy territory and captured the factory. Unfortunately, there were no munitions in there, because they had already been distributed to the front lines. The general was furious, but he wasn't deterred by our bad luck. He ordered the captured factory workers back to the production lines until they produced enough munitions to make an explosion big enough to make a video spectacular enough to get our general his third star. So, we blew up the factory, sent the video to the Octagon, and applauded when our general got promoted."

"That is absurd", agreed Freeman.

"There's more. Another general ordered us to invade a NV village to liberate it from Communism. We attacked and drove out the enemy soldiers. Unfortunately, they counterattacked the next day. After absorbing horrendous losses, we retreated. But, in order to complete the general's mission to save the villagers from communism, we were ordered to shoot them before we left. We objected, of course. But our commander gave us three choices: shoot the villagers, get court martialled and be shot, or shoot our leaders. We shot the villagers. Every last one of them. And so the villagers were liberated from communism simply by being liberated from life."

"That’s really absurd", said Freeman. "But, I can top your story. Back in Washington, the Head Honcho was pissed about the high cost of the non-war. It’s expensive to transport troops, provisions, and weaponry around the world. He feared that these exorbitant costs would force him to raise taxes, an unpalatable election-year tactic. He hired consultants to find a cheaper alternative. They recommended killing the American soldiers in America, because it’s cheaper than sending them to Vhaicam to be killed. So, the Honcho organized a program to kill our troops before they even boarded the transport planes, which would be a big political feather in his cap, because it would save taxpayers millions of transportation dollars. Unfortunately, he overlooked one detail."

"What was that?" asked the Youth on the Cot.

"The Honcho forgot he was accumulating frequent flier miles for every troop transport flight to Vhaicam. Killing the troops in America would cost him a lucrative perk. So, the plan was scrapped."

"That tops my story", said the Youth on the Cot. "Jefferson was right when he said 'never was so much false arithmetic employed as that used to persuade nations it’s in their interest to go to war. Were the money that it cost to wage war expended in making roads, opening rivers, building ports, improving the arts, and fostering industry, it would render nations much stronger, wealthier, and happier. These false arithmetics have led me to abhor war and to view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.'"

Another quote from Jefferson, thought Freeman. He pondered this strange coincidence, then asked, "What leads us into these absurd situations?"

"Religion", snapped the Youth on the Cot unhesitatingly.

Freeman was beginning to think that the Youth was a lunatic operating on the heretical assumption that life was just a bizarre farce along the way to some other more reasonable existence, which is what Freeman emphatically believed. "Religion?"

"Yes, religion", confirmed the Youth on the Cot. "You know, 'Praise the Safari Golfer, and pass the ammunition.' I think it was Dean Swift who observed, 'We have just enough religion to make us hate one another, but not enough to make us love one another'".

"My adult experience confirms that, but it still seems unfair to attribute all of this bloodshed to religion."

The Youth on the Cot exhaled a cackling laugh. "Unfair? Communion, which is the heart of Catholic religious experience, is a vicarious cannibalization of the deity being worshipped. It’s a throwback to the nightmarish beginnings of mankind's conceptual consciousness, a celebration of flesh-eating and blood-drinking made palatable only through the suspension of critical thought and the activation of dogmatic faith. Communion plagiarizes pagan rituals that deified the forces of nature supporting the agricultural efforts of primitive tribes. Virgins and virile youths were sacrificed to the gods of nature in exchange for favorable weather or crop growth. These sacrifices were usually followed by a ceremonial feast in which the tribal members ate the victims in order to ally themselves with their deities. The wise men convinced the others that this bloody human sacrifice would ultimately benefit the whole tribe, as long as they believed the myths. They created a mythical pact with the gods, who gave mankind their best fruit and crop in exchange for bloodletting. This tradition of religious cannibalism and human sacrifice is entrenched in every primitive culture. It has been passed down to modernity in familiar rituals like the Catholic practice of consuming their savior’s flesh and blood."

Freeman wondered what Christ would think if he saw a modern assemblage of Catholics making pious ceremony out of symbolically eating him. Meanwhile, the Youth on the Cot continued. "Man has always used mythology to justify killing friend and foe. Primitive myths were rooted in worship of nature and inanimate objects, giving rise to a class of priests. The priests translated these myths and signs from the natural world into commandments to enslave and kill other humans, ostensibly for the benefit of the tribe, but more likely for the benefit of the priestly class itself or the tribal ruling elite that had expropriated the priestly class as its shill.

"Eventually, these gods of nature took on anthropomorphic characteristics, and the historically familiar religious deities evolved and became inextricably intertwined with every emerging civilization’s ruling elite, who claimed to represent these deities. In this light, all wars were instigated by mythology, because deities were the ultimate authority of the earthly leaders, as interpreted by the dogmas and myths of the realm. Behind every battle lurks a myth, such as the divinity of the Pharaoh, the divine right of the European Kings, control over the Holy Land, or propagation of the Aryan Race, to name a few. We kill each other for the sake of myths, burying objective truth under an avalanche of corpses.

"Do you know that Pope Pius IX issued a declaration called ‘Syllabus of Errors’, which contained 80 sweeping points condemning principles such as freedom of speech and religion, and disavowing the separation of church and state? He then confined 19^th-Century Jews in Rome to a dehumanizing ghetto, in an eerie precursor to Nazi initiatives less than a century later. When Pius died in 1878, some incensed Italians tried to dump his body in the Tiber River.

"As our mythologies evolved, they became less divine and more secularly humanistic. But, these newer myths demanded as much uncritical faith as their deistic predecessors. Myths like Hegel's Species Being, Manifest Destiny, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Common Good, the Cultural Revolution, Political Correctness, or even Ismism itself, have served as the war cry for man's organized conflicts. 'Deutschland Uber Alles' is mankind's most horrific metaphysical nightmare. Skeletons littered on the battlefields of history attest to the deadliness of faith in myths. All mythologies glorify sacrifice, and death is the ultimate sacrifice, particularly if it comes with sword drawn on behalf of a deity or earthly representative thereof.

"Myths devalue individual lives and life on earth in general, making absorption into the collective, and even death itself, life’s compelling objectives. When Jim Jones instructed his followers of the Peoples Temple in Guyana to commit suicide, they willingly complied, since the meaning of their individual lives had been neutered. The Spartans memorialized their fallen warriors by inscribing 'Having done what men could, they suffered what men must", on their graves as the ultimate summation of the pervasiveness of duty, suffering, war, and death in man's experience with mythology and power. When primitive tribes believed the myths of their priests, they consigned themselves to slavery and the threat of death. The root of man's oppression at the hands of other men is the sacrifice of individual rational interpretation of the world in deference to mythology. As Thomas Paine said, 'All churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to be human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.'"

The Youth’s words defied Freeman’s cultural conditioning. "You’re slandering religion by making it responsible for such pervasive misery and cruelty", he protested.

The Youth on the Cot cackled again. "Look at you! Full of shrapnel and bleeding from head to toe, and yet you persist in defending the mythologies that caused it. Did you choose to come here and risk death? Is this what you envisioned as the purpose of your life when you were a child? What good will come from dying in this fucking Asian hellhole? Have I done religion an injustice? No, secular and divine religions have done the injustice to us."

While Freeman and the Youth on the Cot philosophized in their M.A.S.H. tent, the war outside consumed a steady flow of believers. The line separating the two armies hadn’t moved more than two hundred yards in either direction since the battles began, but a generation of humans had been sacrificed to the war god's gluttony for flesh. The irresistible force of the communist armies grinded against the immovable American and South Vhaicamese armies, yielding nothing but death. The wafting stench of slaughter intermingled with the stink of feces and urine in hastily dug outhouses. Millions of casualties blanketed the muddy landscape several layers deep. Artillery barrages churned fractured bones, jumbled limbs, and vivisectioned bodies like a grotesque tossed salad. It was impossible to dig a new trench without disinterring a jigsaw puzzle of cadavers. A dismembered arm jutted out from the muddy walls of one trench. Passing soldiers routinely shook its lifeless hand, hoping the dark absurdity would ward off insanity.

No one had time to bury the dead, but Nature worked heroically to remove the evidence. Millions of flies engorged themselves on decaying corpses, creating an eerie background hum with their massed wings. Jackals, buzzards, and vultures scavenged mercilessly, dragging around corpses in a surreal image that no Hollywood director could ever sculpt on celluloid. The air vibrated heavily with mosquitoes that were so voracious some men slept immersed in marshes, risking snakebites and drowning rather than the torture of a thousand insect bites.

Blood ran from the wounded in a crimson river that lapped incessantly against the consciousness of every soldier. Injured men wept and screamed and cursed, coughing up lung residue from their scrambled innards. Other men vomited at the sight of brains and eyes running together in a sticky goo inside the helmet of a fragmentation bomb victim. When men saw appendages laying about, they involuntary checked to make sure their own hadn’t been unknowingly severed by scything shrapnel. Incapacitated soldiers stumbled about on footless legs and gesticulated madly with handless arms.

Men were dying in more ways than a sane observer could catalogue. They were hung, scalped, mutilated, impaled, suffocated, speared, drowned, burned, gassed, decapitated, dissected, disemboweled, bayoneted, machine gunned, infected, injected, and irradiated. Ten soldiers per second were killed, making the beachhead battles at Iwo Jima look like training exercises. The slaughter rivaled the cudgeling and disembowelment of cattle in a Chicago meat processing plant, except that cattle are mindless beings with no choice in their demise. The end result, however, is still hamburger and bologna, ground out by ruthlessly efficient flesh-churning machinery.

But the soldiers continued to charge, goaded on by commanders who were goaded on by generals and politicians safely tucked away somewhere else. Military obedience, social conditioning, and religious self-sacrifice had broken their spirits. As they plodded toward enemy trenches, they fell rhythmically, like clay ducks targeted at a carnival sideshow. They rushed forward with élan and died with élan, falling atop one another like toy soldiers swatted by a hyperactive child. They careened into the yawing jaws of certain death numbed by opiates. They smoked marijuana, injected heroin, and swallowed LSD. They drank gallons of alcohol, sniffed cleaning fluids, and read arcane Biblical passages. But these merely cloaked the dark dangers of the battlefield with sugar coated psychedelic illusion. Death was still invincible and unavoidable. For them, the Wolf was no longer at the door. It was inside the door.

Nitrate-laced smoke hung like a dark thundercloud over desecrated land that was more moonscape than earthscape. The terrain was lacerated with tunnels, trenches, gun emplacements, and bomb craters. The incessant rain turned the soft soil into a gooey quagmire that swallowed soldiers up to their waists. Latticed pontoon bridges lined the undulating surface of the battlefront like huge treadmills designed for the goalless exercise of giant rodents. Anything that used to bloom was devoured by napalm, flame throwers, Agent Orange, and explosions. Forests were reduced to a haunting composition of charred tree stumps jutting out from the muddy earth like ghostly wooden sentinels. Foliage shredded by volleys of projectiles was strewn about the battlefield, as if a horrible supernatural force had ripped through the area and annihilated everything.

Hidden in this scarred venue were frightened men who had survived the human bologna grinder yesterday and today, but probably not tomorrow. For them, hope and dignity had already expired, leaving behind only vague recollections of what it meant to be civil. If they miraculously survived the slaughter and regained some semblance of humanity, their lives would still forever be tainted by this soul-wrenching glimpse of the Apocalypse.