To All Veterans

by Doc (Alan) Wilkerson

Why do we fear going to hell when we’ve been there… you and me. Twelve months watching, waiting, walking and fighting… Fears build, and hell grows on you.

The jungle is beautifully primitive. It’s grandeur greater than my ample imagination ever could conceive… continually in “awe” of the triple canopy jungle. Continuous sound… where lack of same intensifies the underlying tension, ever present, everywhere.

Dreams show, dreams of home and the fear of never seeing it again. Dreams of war, man’s hell… against his own Inner Being. But what is war? There certainly is no peace! There is only tension and less tension, or tension and more tension… which way do we look?

Stunning beauty immersed in man’s worst personal tragedy. Like animals, we rose with the sun and slept without it. Always fearful of the enemy lurking just beyond the shadows… right “over there”, just beyond our sight.

And the enemy is us! At least war is honest. You go, you fight, you fear, and maybe you go home… but never like you were before. Changed just enough so that only those who knew you before could see, and they saw while you were trying to forget. Trying to forget the unforgettable…

The smell of death…
The terror of battle…
The blackness of night…
The beauty in Nature…
The evil in man…
The sounds of war machines…
The suddenness and completeness of loss…
The loss of something greater than all else…
The loss of Innocence.

Even now, we live in controlled conflict, controlled tension. We search for releases… sex, movies, reading, denial, violence, drugs, guilt, withdrawal, death…

I feel that I died in 1968. My soul evolved beyond my body, beyond my mind’s capacity to understand, to make sense of, and bring order from chaos. Now it’s only a long or short wait, but it’s my choice.

For once in my life I have a real choice… to live or die… It’s as simple as that. But I don’t want the choice. I wasn’t trained to choose, only to follow. But in the jungle I learned about choice and no-choice. A very subtle difference really… maybe that’s why it’s not taught to us! It all comes down to each moment… each step… just like in the jungle. We intellectualize about how to “blah-blah-blah” and when to “blah-blah-blah”… but in reality, something else takes hold and makes the choice for us. We call it instinct, or reflexes, or reaction, or just plain old survival… I don’t know what it is. What I do know is that it is ME that chooses, yet the part evaluating the choice is not me…

Thinking kills. I’ve seen that too many times. It kills the first month when trusting the “small voice” inside has not yet developed. It kills the last month when fears of “not making it” envelop that “small still voice”… Which is the correct choice?

I fear that I am
I am that I fear
I fear that I fear
I am that I am

Since then, I wander alone and wonder why nothing around me makes sense at all… and worst of all, I still care!

Doc (Alan) Wilkerson
October 14, 1986 @ 9am