After the movie last night, Andrew and I went and found Matthew at a hotel on Burrard, visiting his friend Patrick. Patrick’s wife was there as well, and his two sons. Listening to Patrick is like looking into an unbelievable world. He’s been an american soldier since the sixties, spending time in both Greneda and Vietnam. He’s a thick personable man with a balding head and BORN TO RIDE on his right arm who tells stories like a Hunter S. Thompson. The son of a casting couch encounter, he’s not intimidating in the slightest, I want to vouch for his citizenship. His younger brother went to The Chair in Texas, getting the Death Penalty for the violent killing of five child molesters.
“I got to call down several thousand dollars in tax money once. A sniper killed a four year old, so I knew the first thing to do was to get him to give away his position. This was easy, I used to be a sniper, see, so I borrow a flack jacket off the driver of the tank, a double armored one, right? And then I stand on top of the tank and hold up binoculars and just say “here I am! Now where are you.” I saw a little puff of smoke when he shot me, right on top of one of the buildings. I didn’t really feel it when I got shot, the damned thing just threw me backwards off the tank. So I’m lying on the ground clutching my chest, trying to get my breath back. I said, “You did get his position, right?” and this feller, he says, “Yes captain, but we didn’t need that much confirmation. You’re crazy.” I couldn’t really laugh, right, but I called an air strike. Damn chest wouldn’t stop hurting, I didn’t know that when they shoot you they shoot you twice”
I broke in, “Well, yes, it’s a double-tap.”
He looked pleased. “Well, yes, it is. How’d you know that? Anyway, we stopped the snipers killing anymore four year olds, for a few hours at least. Expensive, but damn wurth it. The two bullets were this far away when we pried them out of my vest.” He holds his fingers up a few centimeters apart, “I don’t know why we kept going back there. No matter how much you wanted freedom for these people, there were always a few idiots trying to shoot you and they weren’t picky about it. I can’t stand for killing children.”
Then he leads into another place, another time. More war.
“We’d come into these villages and they would be empty. There wouldn’t be anyone anywhere, we’d scout around in the jungle, send guys out in all directions, nothing. Eventually we learned, started following the birds.”
His wife speaks up, “They just killed everyone”
“Yeah, mass graves. We’d get the caterpillars in and push the dirt back and there they were. Entire towns a few feet under the dirt. Women, babies, all the old folks too. There wasn’t anyone they didn’t bury.”
She says, “It was the shortest he’d ever been anywhere, but he was more wrecked then than any other time. It was bad. I can’t imagine.”
“I wish there was someway of telling people here.
I want to carry a recorder next time I see him. They’re here until Tuesday, hoping to move here permanently. In spite of the fact that they are everything Americans want to say they are, everything they want to claim,they have to leave. “There’s no tolerance.” I feel somehow like I’m talking with family, it’s unshakable. They’re all an odd mixture of samurai and lakota. They all grew up with horses and guns, they grew up going up mountains and defending they who require the spoken word.
How do we manage to live erasing these people? There’s no room for heroes in this day and age, the day is passing. They had lives that don’t exist anymore. We need inspiration now more than perhaps ever before and yet we’re killing it. Destroying opportunity with faulty government and lackadaisical apathy, sometimes I can’t stand it in spite of the fact that I think I understand it.
