Changing America's Tack

 
Today is my sixty-seventh birthday.  They said it couldn't be done.
 
Forty years ago today was my favorite birthday; but I was Kissing the Cobra three days in a row and my birthday slipped by unnoticed.
 
"Kissing the Cobra" means taking the chance, in that case dancing through the shrapnel, making three helicopter assaults in three days, looking death in the eye time and time again, and time and time again death blinking.
 
Those were the good old days. hot war and dry rice paddies; but that's another story.
 
On this birthday I am Decapitating the Cobra; and that's this story.
 
For those of you who care, I have not been struck-awake by neighbors for two nights in a row.  I don't think this has happened since about August of 2000, when Republican American Fascism's murder-by-attrition policy was initiated.
 
My second-favorite birthday was my sixth, in 1946.  So many candles on my cake; six is a lot to a child.  I was more than half way to double digits, almost half way to my teens, and then soon after would be old enough to be a Marine.
 
We were World War Two boys; we fought the Japs and the Krauts in our dreams; and we hoped the war would last long enough for us to be in it.  By the time I was six the war was over, but I was smart enough to know there would be another war coming along, and knew I would not be disappointed, I knew I would have my Great Adventure.
 
It was on my twenty-seventh Birthday, forty years ago today (or a day one way or the other) when we came down into a hot LZ and the incoming stopped, just stopped, seconds before we touched down; as if God had put Angels' fingers into all those mean damn muzzles.
 
I jumped out of the helicopter and was running toward the tree line and almost stepped on a dead American soldier hidden by the tall grass.  His uniform was first-day clean, as if he had drowned in the font of his baptism of fire.
 
When I was fifteen years old a doctor told me I wouldn't live much past thirty because my blood pressure was about 200/140, which took me into world record range; so when it finally came time for my war, when I had planned to be an infantry officer in the Marine Corps, I was as 4-F as a one-legged lady preacher, and the only way I could get to Vietnam was as a combat correspondent.
 
As you might expect, I found that war without a weapon was like sex with a rubber, close but not really there; and I found that in covering combat for United Press International I had absolutely zero freedom of press.
 
There I was, couldn't fight, couldn't write, going into combat with a pocket full of ballpoint pens and a steno pad, and the pens were firing blanks; so I went back to my lovely life in Tokyo.
 
God, of course, had never seen me as a soldier in human warfare; and from before I was born, before I was dreaming fetus dreams in the womb, God had decided I would write The Obituary of the World.  That decision had been made long before my conception; but that, too, is another story.
 
There was a great gift God gave me in Vietnam, something you might feel it strange for me to consider a gift.  It was not the gift of living through it because God had long since determined I would live through it; it something else.
 
God gave me the gift of not knowing how guarded by God I was.
 
This was because God wanted me to enjoy the high of war, that great pleasure only warriors know; and to feel fear down to the marrow of my bones; and taste courage, courage so thick it changed me forever. 
 
God wanted me to know the taste and the temptation of Satan's Whisky; God wanted me to Kiss the Cobra human men so love to kiss, that Cobra-love that makes all men part of the engine of war.
 
Meanwhile, putting my birthday memory book aside, let's look to the news of the day, to the atomic Space War bullet impacting America before the last moments of August 13 disappear into the International Date Line.
 
You may recall this bullet is a continuation my most excellent advance documentation of the rolling of the cruise ship Crown Princess, which was in itself confirmation of the public damnation of the First Lady.  You can expect this atomic Space War bullet to contain the same metaphor patterns, including the event's arriving late in the time frame..
 
I tracked the news programs off and on today but saw no news that fit this attack pattern.  I saw only smart asses pontificating on war and politics, not knowing they will lose their souls in one week's time for their part in America's torture-enslavement of me.  It will be the second of the two atomic Space War bullets that damns them.