War’s all of that and more.
It is exciting, for one thing. Not always, as the monotony of it can be excruciating, but when it ceases to be boring it becomes very exciting indeed, and that excitement is heightened by the urgency of it all. One might be killed at any moment, so how can the body fail to be in a state of excitement? That, after all, is what adrenaline is for.
And there’s the camaraderie. Men working together, fighting together, united not merely in a common cause but in a matter of life and death. To do so seems to satisfy a fundamental human urge.
On top of that, there’s the freedom. Does that strike you as strange? I can see that it might, as there’s no one less at liberty in many ways than a soldier. His every action is in response to an order, and to defy a direct order is to court severe punishment. Yet this apparent slavery is freedom of a sort. One is free of the obligation to make decisions, free too of the past and the future. One’s family, one’s career, what one is going to do with one’s life-all of this disappears as one follows orders and gets through the day.
And, of course, there’s the chance to kill.
I wonder how many soldiers ever kill anybody. Relatively few have the opportunity. In any war, only a fraction of enlisted troops ever see combat, and fewer still ever have the enemy in their sights. And only some of those men take aim and pull the trigger. Some, it would appear, are reluctant to take the life of someone they don’t even know.
Others are not. And there are those who find they like it.
Lucas Hallam, if I may call him that, was to all appearances entirely normal prior to his service in the armed forces. He grew up in a small Midwestern town, with three brothers (two older than himself) and a younger sister. Aside from the usual childhood and adolescent stunts (throwing snowballs at cars, smoking in the lavatory) he was never in trouble, and in school he was an average student, in athletics an average participant. There are three childhood markers for profound antisocial behavior, as I understand it, and Luke, as far as anyone knew, had none of them. He did not wet the bed, he did not set fires, and he did not torture animals. (The pathological implications of the latter two are not hard to infer, but what has bedwetting to do with anything? Perhaps the doctor will enlighten me later.)
After graduating from high school, Luke looked at the vocational opportunities open to him, thought unenthusiastically of college, and joined the army. There was no war on when he enlisted, but there was by the time he finished basic training. He was a good soldier, and his eyesight was excellent and his hand-eye coordination superb. On the firing range he qualified as an Expert Rifleman, and he was assigned to a platoon of combat infantry and shipped overseas.
At the end of his hitch he was rotated back to the States, and eventually discharged. But by then he had been in combat any number of times, and had had enemy soldiers in his sights on innumerable occasions. He had no difficulty pulling the trigger, and his skills were such that he generally hit what he aimed at.
He liked it, liked the way it felt. It gave him an enormous feeling of satisfaction. He was doing his job, serving his country, and saving his own life and the lives of his buddies by killing men who were trying to kill him. Take aim, squeeze off a shot, and you canceled a threat, took off the board someone who otherwise might take you or someone you cared about off the board. That was what he was supposed to do, what they’d sent him over there to do, and he was doing it well, and he felt good about it.
The first time he did it, actually saw his shot strike home, saw the man on the other side of the clearing stumble and fall, he was too busy sighting and shooting and trying to stay behind cover to notice how he felt. The action in a full-blown firefight was too intense for you to feel much of anything. You were too busy staying alive.
Later, remembering, he felt a fullness in his chest, as if his heart was swelling. With pride, he supposed.
Another time, they were pinned down by a sniper. He advanced, and when someone else drew the sniper’s fire, he was able to spot the man perched in a tree. He got him in his sights and felt an overall excitement, as if all his cells were more intensely alive than before. He fired, and the man fell from the tree, and a cheer went up from those of his buddies who had seen the man fall. Once again he felt that fullness in his chest, but this time it wasn’t only his heart that swelled. He noted with some surprise that there was a delicious warmth in his groin, and that he had a powerful erection.
Well, he was nineteen years old, and it didn’t take a great deal to give him an erection. He would get hard thinking about girls, or looking at sexy pictures, or thinking about looking at sexy pictures. A ride in a Jeep on a rough road could give him an erection. He thought it was interesting, getting an erection in combat, but he didn’t make too much of it.
Later, when they got back to base, he went drinking and whoring with his buddies. The sex was sweeter and more intense than ever before, but he figured it was the girl. She was, he decided, more attractive than most of them, and hot.
From that point on, sexual excitement was a component of every firefight he was in. Killing the enemy didn’t carry him to orgasm, although there was at least one occasion when it didn’t miss by much. It did render him powerfully erect, however, and, when he was able to be with a girl afterward, the union was intensely satisfying. The girl didn’t have to be spectacularly good-looking, he realized, or all that hot. She just had to be there when he was back from a mission on which he’d blown away one or more enemy troops.
As I said, his tour of duty concluded and he returned to the States. The war receded into memory. Back in his hometown, in the company of people who’d shared none of his military experiences, he let it all exist as a separate chapter of his life-or, perhaps more accurately, as another volume altogether, a closed book he didn’t often take down from the shelf.
He found work, he dated a few local girls, and within a year or so he found one who suited him. In due course they were engaged, and then married. They bought a modest home and set about starting a family.
Now and then, when he was making love to his wife, wartime images would intrude. They came not as flashbacks of the sort common to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but as simple memories that slipped unbidden into his consciousness. He recalled sex acts with the native prostitutes, and this made him guilty at first, as if he were cheating on his wife by having another woman’s image in mind during their lovemaking.
He dismissed the guilt. After all, you couldn’t hang a man for his thoughts, could you? And, if a memory of another woman enriched the sexual act for himself and his wife, where was the harm? He didn’t seek to summon up such memories, but if they came he allowed himself to enjoy them.
There were other memories, though. Memories of drawing a bead on a sniper in a tree, holding his breath, squeezing off the shot. Seeing the man fall in delicious slow motion, seeing him fall never to rise again.
He didn’t like that, and it bothered him a little. He found he could will such thoughts away, and did so as quickly as they came. Then he could surrender to the delight of the moment, untroubled by recollections of the past. That, after all, was over and done with. He didn’t hang out at the Legion post, didn’t pal around with other vets, didn’t talk about what he’d seen and done. He barely thought about it, so why should he think of it now, at such an intimate moment?
Never mind. You couldn’t help the thoughts that came to you, but you didn’t have to entertain them. He blinked and they were gone.
After his second child was born, Luke’s sex life slowed down considerably. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and when he and his wife attempted to resume relations after the birth, they were not terribly successful. She was willing enough but not very receptive, and he had difficulty becoming aroused and further difficulty in bringing his arousal to fulfillment.
He’d never had this problem before.
It was normal, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. It would work itself out.
He tried mental tricks-thinking of other women, using memory or fantasy as an erotic aid. This worked some of the time, but not always, and never as well as he would have liked.
Then one day he used a fantasy about a woman at work to help him become erect, and, during the act, he tried to extend the fantasy to reach a climax. But instead it winked out like a spent lightbulb, and what replaced it was an involuntary memory of a firefight. This time he didn’t blink it away, but let himself relive the fight, the aiming, the firing, the bodies falling in obedience to his will.
His orgasm was powerful.
If it troubled him at all to have used memories of killing, any disquiet he felt was offset by the height of his
