Arriving at the Vicenza airport 4 years after my first landing there, I recalled my initial fantasies of what the future would hold and compared them with the reality. The initial fantasies were unmet, but the reality was an unexpected journey that changed my life irrevocably in both good and bad ways. What I thought about when getting off that bus to fly home to Seattle was the friends I’d lost, that feeling of depression when great times come to an end, the nights downtown, the beautiful cities, and that I’d bury my involvement with the military as much as possible, taking it as but one experience and moving on. In watching most of The Sorrow and The Pity, a lot of recollections of my year in Afghanistan surfaced, coupled with other memories, and in thinking of writing these journal entries, I decided to bring up some of those memories for this class reluctantly.

When we landed in Afghanistan, the surrounding mountains and environment gave me what I retroactively can now call the most sublime (Kantian) moment in my life. We were all waiting for these supposed mortar attacks anxiously, for that moment we would no longer be cherries. A few days days later, two of my best friends died, and about 7 people were wounded, some severely. We stayed with the bodies over 12 hours to ensure they got back to the base, being shot at multiple times. When the explosives unit came, they showed us the footprints we’d made, crossing over a dozen bombs. It was like stepping in the one empty box in a  full 10×10 minesweeper game. I think about those footprints of mine often, and Salazar who was lying on one for about half an hour. A couple of people were shot those final moments before we finally managed to clean the place up. In the ride back to base I’d laid on someone’s leg wound on accident, in which he laughed and said “do you mind?” Moments before that my buddy Espinoza and I had machine gun rounds snap inches in-between our heads, scrambling in the dust trying to find cover behind the tires. It was pretty funny and terrifying, because I’d said we were going to get shot sitting like that just moments before. The reason I bring some of these moments up is that the group of 30 we’d come with had dwindled to less than 20 and we’d come closer than ever before since the 2 years we’d been together. The one person in charge of us turned out to be a coward which surprise us all greatly, and reminded me of the French who took the German’s side in France during World War II.

I understand that fear he probably was wrenched with, because he’d been blown up hours before and thrown meters away, and had to endure losing one of his soldier’s days within arriving. We had expected him to be courageous, to be that figure to hold our hands, but he abandoned us in despair, and I can’t possibly be mad. You can never gauge what a person will be like during moments of extreme stress, no matter what pre-established notions you have of them. It’s odd seeing someone so built and buff scramble around so afraid during a firefight.

The one thing I didn’t realize before joining the military, was the love these old veterans had for us young cherries. During those initial months in Afghanistan I realized how much I hated war, and how pointless being there was. I already had a semi-disgust for the military, but this cemented a deeper hate for those higher unknown powers at work in decisions for America. I am anti-war to this day, but in some sick way I’m glad I got to experience war firsthand. The reason I joined really fell on a love that fell apart which lasted a few years and my desire to go out in a bang. Rarely I came across people who actually wanted to be in the military, and if they did, they were almost always really, really patriotic. What also struck me was the intelligence most of these people I lived with had. Most weren’t academically smart, but had a high degree of street smarts. My branch of occupation was typically considered for the dumbest of the military, but a lack of intelligence and common sense would have gotten you move quickly.

Once you deploy and then come home, you come across the cherries back at home who missed the deployment, and you see that innocence in their eyes and long for it. All you care about in training them is to make sure they’re  going to get the chance to also come home when it’s their turn to deploy. The burden lies heavy when you lose someone in your platoon, and is a constant, daily reminder.

Our leader rarely if ever went out on missions with us, and we never got replacements, having to do the full deployment with triple the amount of normal missions tasked out to each individual. He was one of the strongest (physically) person I’ve ever met. He won multiple wrestling tournaments and was an instructor at a prestigious combat school. We thought he’d be this badass dude that was going to protect us, but he spent most of the deployment in the gym. My squad leader was an Iraq vet, tiny and skinny, and smoked a pack a day. The first firefight I was in, our platoon send the 6 of us out to deal with it, being the golden squad of the platoon. It started with them shooting at us in their dried up river bed systems-wadis. Our platoon set up an L, and we went out the side, and crossed this small empty field. They started laying into us with machine guns, less than 150 meters away. I remember using blades of grass as cover, and firing my machine gun, feeling so proud that I was protecting my 5 squad mates as they had to retreat, running their asses off in the extreme heat. This skinny guy didn’t give a fuck, and had no break in clarity, while I was scrambling and disoriented. It took a few weeks to get the fighting down and not lose vision. Fighting in Afghanistan is hell. Not only do we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment, but we’re facing people wearing rags and familiar with the territory, able to blend in quickly with the locals. I don’t know if I killed anyone, but it gave me a shell shock feeling knowing friends with multiple kill counts. I asked myself why we were there daily, always wondering if I should just put up with the penalty of not fighting anymore. The punishments of abandoning your duty during a deployment is extremely severe. I decided to make it through, if only to do what I could to keep what little people we had left alive.

When we had the ceremony for the two that died, days into our deployment, while saluting the portraits of the fallen, a staff sergeant from another platoon yelled “Wombats” at the top of his voice (Wombats being our platoon name). I normally cringe at anything military related-wearing dog tags, salutes, marching, cadences etc.-but this yell was the most beautiful, tragic, and heart wrenching sound I’d ever heard in my life. Being a Wombat was something that had deep roots in our brigade, memories you hear while being smoked for hours down “the hallway”. If there’s any one strong moment in which post memory resonates for me, it’s the feeling of walking down those barracks hallways, recollecting the memories handed down to me-“this person died, this person went to Legion Co., that used to be my old room.” We had a creed that went, “pork chop pork chop, greasy greasy, beat that team, fucking easy easy, Gooooooo Wombats.” It’s from 3000 Miles To Graceland, and it was the weirdest shit ever. Whenever someone died on the base in Afghanistan, you would hear Taps being played, and salute the helicopter flying away with the body. I remember someone died a day before he was to fly home. The day our 2 friends died, we heard Taps over and over and over. During the summer, that song feels like it is endlessly playing. I remember thinking there was no point in believing I was going to come home, and the fear of death actually left me until I came home from Afghanistan. I remember rolling that phrase, “the fear” and “I lost the fear,” off my tongue all during the deployment. Once you lose the fear, you become comfortable there in its simplicity and seeing dead bodies doesn’t strike you as hard. The routine is just like any other place, except you don’t worry about bills, rent and debts.

A few days after the Wombats yell, I’d survived a near atomic explosion. They said it was the biggest vehicle suicide in the history of the war. It turns out that the semi carrying these explosives was turned around at my checkpoint, and decided to go around the wall and blow up at the side. I remember looking at the vehicle x-ray machine and then suddenly being hit by a massive shockwave. Everything went black and I reached my hand up to make sure my buddy Espinoza’s top half was still there. He crawled down the hatch and we asked each other if we were okay. We got on top of the vehicle and looked at the mushroom cloud next to us, amazed. There were tents everywhere, and I mean everywhere. The debris was as far as the eye can see. It killed a ton of people, but I never saw them, and we left that base a few days later to go to another base. Flying away I was struck with a hopeless, entrenching feeling of despair that we’d lost two amazing people for absolutely nothing, and I started to question that day if I was even alive. The rest of the deployment was a miserable grind, always waiting for an explosion which would take your legs off, or having to gauze a carotid gunshot wound.

Salazar’s mother flew to Italy for a lost soldier’s family get-together. The company gathered money for their flight to Italy, and then showed them around the city for a week. Horsley’s family didn’t come and wished to never speak to us. I talk to his brother every now and then, but other than that, I respect their wish entirely. Salazar’s mother is a wonderful woman. They have a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I remember Salazar sending all his money to help with her surgeries. We had a toast to his mother, and my squad leader gave a heart-wrenching speech. He broke down in tears during it, saying he was sorry he couldn’t bring her little boy home. That is a guilt I can honestly say is with me every second of my life. I’m not sure how easy that is to get across, but the few of us Wombats left from the deployment all share that burden. When at “our” bar in downtown Vicenza, where the bartenders each had drinks named after us, I had a moment with a buddy where we looked at each other, nodded, and he said “me too.” We both were thinking of him, and it was comforting knowing my pain was shared. There’s something about losing someone in war that wrenches your soul harder than any other death I’ve ever witnessed. I think about the World Wars often and the immeasurable amount of pain the world took on from those years. My usual silence about my involvement with the war makes me relate easily to those old war veterens-it’s hard to speak of war to those who haven’t experience it. And most of all, it’s hard to speak of it when you are shamed of being a part of it, while being proud of those brave enough to have endured it with you.

The days of coming back to Italy, drunk and ecstatic, walking around the parks and taking the bus downtown, were blissfully peaceful. As time goes, it’s easier to feign normalcy, but the wounds of seeing such monstrosities stays in my memory, and reminds me of what mankind is capable of, and the importance in doing whatever it takes to strive for peace, no matter how ignorant and childish a wish of such is. As for my memories, I doubt I’ll ever talk about them as brief as this again, and when I die, I know they will no longer exist unless I’ve shared them. This leaves me wondering why it even matters that I should share such a story.

There’s a scene in The Sorrow and The Pity in which the interviewer climbs down into the cellar of two former French Revolution fighters of World War 2. In prior shots we see these two ex-fighters working the field, suggesting them as peasants and being close to the land. Inside the cellar, one of them fills up multiple glasses of wine from a rustic looking barrel. They all sip the wine and the whole scene seems musty and cozily damp and dark. Despite this film being black and white, and somewhat grainy, my mouth waters at the sight of this wine, particularly homemade wine made in France, which has the stereotype attached to it of probably being superior tasting wine. Later that evening I’m in Safeway and decided to get red wine instead of my typical moscato or prosecco, which I mix with any kind of fruit juice. It’s somewhat embarrassing at having to buy wine in Safeway, and seeing that they sell hard liquor now shocks me. While circling the few aisles they have I’m confused by the prices in which seem absurdly high. This is when I realize I am unconsciously being snobbish. I lived in Italy for the past four years, and the wine there is cheaper than water. I remember being confused the first time I saw the prices of the wine there, disoriented by the comma being in place for a decimal. At first I thought these wine bottles were in the thousands, but questioned why there were only 3 digits. Such is the naivety of a foreigner who is accustomed to a world which works in a way easily understood. Anytime I mention Italy I instantly feel somewhat embarrassed that it may seem I’m trying to seem cool or travelled. And then when I realize I’m thinking that, I realize that it does mean I think it’s cool that I lived in Italy, which is probably due to our culture’s built up idea that everyone ought to visit Italy to have this change of life experience. If you’re worried about someone thinking you’re an asshole, chances are you’re probably doing something that makes you an asshole. Anyway, I lived in Italy for four years, and there’s no way to take a position of saying that without being afflicted by harsh self-criticism.  I’m at the cashier and it’s time to hand him my I.D. and without fail all these fantasies come to mind that he’s going to think I’m giving him a fake I.D.  It really, really annoys me at having to be carded. In the 10ish months I’ve been back to America, I’ve been carded every single time I buy alcohol, but in the four years I lived in Italy, and the multiple countries I travelled, I was carded 0 times. In these fantasies I always suppose the cashier wanting to land that kid trying to use a false I.D., in which I imagine is me, and become nervous that it’s going to happen. I leave the store with my 15 dollar bottle of wine, which would probably be 2 euro in Italy, and look at the entrance of the store as the light to my key flashes red as it unlocks the door. A sudden memory flashes back of a watermelon, harry potter books, and a really shitty ’94 Honda Prelude.

I came up with the term Gigantic Hearts to put a signifier to this unexplainable feeling in a particular moment of my life. I’ve only shared it with one other person, but she knew that nostalgic feeling I was trying to purvey. When I was 16 my parents finally divorced and my mother was set free. I was happy because I had the house without parental supervision, and a crew started to form of neighborhood kids. The real driving force behind what sparked Gigantic Hearts was a brother and sister moving into a house nearby. You read about these kind of people in coming-of-age stories, being the main character who opens up the narrator’s eyes. One of the first times I’d met the brother, he was playing an acoustic and just singing random shit that popped in his head, in a two story house with absolutely nothing in it. I escaped to that house often, lying on the floor beside Stephanie, hers and my story being another long affair. I’d been dumped by a girl I dated for around 3 years a few months before this, and felt extremely free and thought it would do me good to just not give a fuck for a while. Every Wednesday this group would meet up at night and drink stolen beer, skipping school the next day. The way we stole beer was to drive to multiple Safeways in different cities past midnight, walk into the front door, and grab as many cases as we could hold and run out screaming back to the car. My buddy actually knocked one of the sliding doors off its hinges once, which I didn’t know possible, thinking it was going to shatter. Sometimes instead of instantly stealing the beer we would scout around and walk through the aisles. I managed to collect the whole series of Harry Potter by stealing them from Safeway. We decided one day to throw an epic party that you always hear about, and I knew that I had to take charge to ensure this would happen. My buddy and I decided to stock up beer in a month’s time and store it in the shed. We got my mom to buy us dozens of cartons of cheap cigarettes and some hard liquor. When the party happened, there were hundreds of people crammed into my tiny house. We had bowls of cigarettes everywhere and a beeramid stacked to the ceiling. My friend who’d just moved here put a local band’s song on the ipod and someone in the audience was singing along with it, who turned out to be the actual singer, and then later on in the years he became the singer in my old band.

I developed a really bad cocaine addiction during these months-year, and a lot of the days were endless blurs or void. I missed a ton of school, but managed to keep good grades due to the flawed importance of test scores. One day the friend who had become so close very begrudgingly took me to Tacoma where I bought some cocaine, terrified I was going to get busted at every minute. You had to use a portable battery charger to start the car every time and you could only enter through the driver’s side. He was pretty mad at me about doing something so sketchy, and I remember one day collapsing on his floor and the look of worry on his face. A few days before we were stuck in unbelievable traffic, under the glaring sun, without a radio. We almost made it through singing the whole Bright Eyes album, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, just on the top of our heads. He was the first to take me to shows, and skipping school to go to Seattle became a normal thing. I started to have a naïve contempt for my peers in high school, because their lives seemed so boring and superficial, whereas I was seeing shows, meeting bands, doing drugs, and stealing things. What got me to quit was one night two close friends who I’d grown up with drew a gun on me and told me that I had to stop doing drugs, and they hated seeing who I was becoming. It kind of shook me out of my stupor, and they’d described personality and behavioral changes they’d seen of me, which I denied vehemently, but I’m sure now were true. It’s interesting to think of how much care my old friends had for me, even if it may not seem so, and how I have nothing like that now, despite being an adult, with the exception of those I deployed with, who I will forever love more than family.

As I look at the Safeway entrance, I realize it’s the one we stole watermelons from the outside entrance, throwing them in the intersection nearby. I live minutes from here, and it just now occurred to me. On these drives home from the stealing trips, I always had this melancholy which latched on to my anxiety so acutely. I’d quit doing cocaine fully cold turkey, but with it came the most severe anxiety I’ve ever had. I thought I was going to die at every second. One day we decided to steal food, and 2 carts later, running across the empty parking lot, we shoved all we could in the trunk and drove quickly to a nearby neighbor and parked, sitting in an alcove laughing. It was here this sorrow struck me most deep, and I thought I would never have a group of close friends such as this again, and in a sense it’s true. Around the fire of my backyard, in which we placed a circle of thrown out couches, we sipped beer and escaped everything together. I wish I could go back in time to those sorrowful moments in which I wished the moments would never end, and shake myself out of that turmoil. The separation of our group was slow, and one by one time takes us to different places despite our wishes to remain in each other’s company. My anxiety eventually died away, and I never really made close friends like that until moving to Italy. In a way, it’s interesting to reflect how so many negative actions are eclipsed by the love a group of people form of each other in seeking great memories.

I’m sorry this is really long, but it’s the shortest I could manage to get it. This is going to be a rough draft edit to my shabby turning point.

Arriving at the Vicenza airport 4 years after my first landing there, I recalled my initial dreams of what the future would hold. I’d had all these fantasies of making great friendships, doing crazy stuff in Italian cities, but mostly of having that great coming-of-age adventure. What I thought about when getting off that bus to fly home to Seattle was the friends I’d lost, that feeling of depression when great times come to an end, and that I’d bury my involvement with the military as much as possible, taking it as but one experience and moving on. In watching most of The Sorrow and The Pity, a lot of recollections of my year in Afghanistan surfaced, coupled with other memories, and in thinking of writing these journal entries, decided to bring up some of those memories for this class, extremely reluctantly.

When we landed in Afghanistan, the surrounding mountains and environment gave me what I retroactively can now call the most sublime (Kantian) moment in my life. We were all waiting for these supposed mortar attacks anxiously, for that moment we were no longer cherries. A few days days later, two of my best friends died, and about 7 people were wounded, some severely. We stayed with the bodies over 12 hours to ensure they got back to the base, being shot at multiple times. When the explosives unit came, they showed us the footprints we’d made, crossing over a dozen bombs. It was like stepping in the one empty box in a 10×10 minesweeper game. I think about those footprints of mine often, whispering to me that I’d missed them, while Salazar laid fully on top of one for at least half an hour. A couple of people were shot those final moments when we finally managed to clean the place up, I’d even laid on someone’s leg gunshot wound on accident, in which he laughed and said “you mind?” Moments before that my buddy Espinoza and I had machine gun rounds snap inches in-between our heads, scrambling in the dust trying to find cover behind the tires. It was pretty funny and pretty terrifying, because I’d said we were going to get shot sitting like that moments before. The reason I bring some of these moments up is that the group of 30 we’d come with had dwindled to less than 20, we’d come closer than ever in the 2 years we’d been together, and the one person in charge of us turned out to be a coward, which reminds me of characters in France during World War II, particularly the Resistance. I understand that fear he probably was wrenched with, because he’d been blown up hours before and thrown meters away, and had to endure losing one of his soldier’s days within arriving. We had expected him to be courageous, to be that figure to hold our hands, but he abandoned us in despair, and I cannot help but not be mad. You can never gauge what a person will be like during moments of extreme stress, no matter what pre-established notions you have of how personality and character will translate.

The one thing I didn’t realize before joining the military, was the love these old veterans had for us young cherries. During those initial months in Afghanistan I realized how much I hated war, and how pointless being there was. I already had a semi-disgust for the military, but this cemented a deeper hate for those higher unknown powers at work in decisions for America. I am anti-war to this day, but in some sick way I’m glad I got to experience war firsthand. The reason I joined really fell on a love that fell apart which lasted a few years and my desire to go out in a bang. Rarely I came across people who actually wanted to be in the military, and if they did, they were almost always patriotic. What also struck me was the intelligence most of these people I lived with had. They weren’t academically smart, but fuck were most of them extremely “street smart”. One of my best friends was from the worst parts  L.A., and another a hockey playing Minnesota’ian. Those cliche people in the military were usually the ones not in combat positions, or I just avoided them completely. One day my buddy from California and I broke into the Arena and climbed on the roof, playing my guitar and singing Home by Edward Sharpe.

Once you deploy and come across cherries back at home, you see that innocence and long for it, and you don’t care about politics or the army or anything-what you care about is making sure these cherries are going to get the chance to also come home when it’s their turn to deploy. Our poor leader rarely if ever went out on missions with us, and we never got replacements, having to do the full deployment with triple the amount of normal missions tasked out to each individual. He was one of the strongest (physically) person I’ve ever met. He won multiple wrestling tournaments and was an instructor at a prestigious combat school previously. We thought he’d be this badass dude that was going to protect us, but he spent most of the deployment in the gym. My squad leader was an Iraq vet, tiny and skinny, and smoked a pack a day. The first firefight I was in, our platoon send the 6 of us out to deal with it, being the golden squad of the platoon. I’ll never forget those events. It started with them shooting at us in their dried up river bed systems. Our platoon set up an L, and we went out the side, and crossed this small empty field. They started laying into us with machine guns, less than 150 meters away. I remember using blades of grass as cover, and firing my machine gun, feeling so proud that I was protecting my 5 squad mates as they had to retreat, running their asses off in the extreme heat. This skinny guy didn’t give a fuck, and had no break in clarity, while I was scrambling and disoriented. It took a few weeks to get the fighting down and not lose vision. Fighting in Afghanistan is hell. Not only do we carry hundreds of pounds of equipment, but we’re facing people wearing rags and familiar with the territory, able to blend in quickly with the locals. I don’t know if I killed anyone, but it gave me a shell shock feeling knowing friends with multiple kill counts. I asked myself why we were there daily, always wondering if I should just put up with the penalty of not fighting anymore. The punishments of abandoning your duty during a deployment is extremely severe. I decided to make it through, if only to do what I could to keep what little people we had left alive. When we came home from deployment, our squad leader kept only me and my buddy, who got shot up on that hill at the beginning of the deployment, in the squad. He even kicked out the golden boys, and one day while drunk in Ukraine, he told us both that it was because he saw that we’d enjoyed firefights, and that we didn’t have the crippling fear. He wanted people like that to watch over him. I felt proud and disgusted. I felt proud that I was braver than this person who was ripped and worked out every day, among others who spent their deployment shacked inside doing nothing. I’d join the war in part to see if I was coward, however unusual that sounds. We’d always heard stories of people who’d been cowards during previous deployments, and I saw firsthand people gossiping and treating them like shit. I didn’t want that to happen to me, and it was true that our platoon held a certain prestige post-deployment. But most of all I’m embarrassed at being proud of this, proud that I was able to fight back against people I didn’t know, in a war that confused and agitated me.

When we had the ceremony for the two that died, days into our deployment, while saluting the portraits of the fallen, a staff sergeant from another platoon yelled “Wombats” at the top of his voice (Wombats being our platoon name). I normally cringe at anything military related-wearing dog tags, salutes, marching, cadences etc.-but this yell was the most beautiful, tragic, and heart wrenching sound I’d ever heard in my life. Being a Wombat was something that had deep roots in our brigade, memories you hear while being smoked for hours down “the hallway”. If there’s any one strong moment in which post memory resonates for me, it’s the feeling of walking down those barracks hallways, recollecting the memories handed down to me-“this person died, this person went to Legion Co., that used to be my old room.” We had a creed that went, Pork chop pork chop, greasy greasy, beat that team, fucking easy easy, Gooooooo Wombats. It’s from 3000 Miles To Graceland, and it was the weirdest shit ever. Whenever someone died on the base in Afghanistan, you would hear Taps being played, and salute the helicopter flying away with the body. I remember someone died a day before he was to fly home. The day our 2 friends died, we heard Taps over and over and over. I remember thinking there was no point in thinking I was going to come home, and the fear of death left me until I left Afghanistan. I remember rolling that phrase off my tongue all during the deployment, and while reading War and Peace and A collection of Cummings’ poetry religiously. “I lost the fear.” Once you lose the fear, things become easy and seeing dead bodies doesn’t strike you as hard.

A few days after the Wombats yell, I’d survived a near atomic explosion. They said it was the biggest vehicle suicide in the history of the war. It turns out that the semi carrying these explosives was turned around at my checkpoint, and decided to go around the wall and blow up at the side. I remember looking at the vehicle x-ray machine and just being hit by this massive wave. Everything went black and I reached my hand up to make sure my buddy Espinoza’s top half was still there. He crawled down the hatch and we asked each other if we were okay. We got on top of the vehicle and looked at the mushroom cloud next to us amazed. There were tents everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The debris was as far as the eye can see. It killed a ton of people but I never saw them and we left that base a few days later to go to another base. Flying away I was struck with this hopeless entrenching feeling of despair that we’d lost two amazing people for absolutely nothing, and I started to question if I was even alive. The rest of the deployment was a miserable grind, always waiting for that explosive to take your legs off.  I remember having an RPG hitting 100 meters away, and then 50, and then even closer. My squad leader didn’t flinch, and even though he was a redneck, chain smoking asshole, I couldn’t help admire him and wonder just how horrible Iraq was. Their memories are what kept me going, because they’d gone through worse, so I could too.

Our post deployment replaced of the coward leader we had had asked all the cherries one day if they wanted to deploy. When they cheerfully screamed yes, he said all these kids with combat patches would throw it away in a heartbeat. I absolutely despised garrison life and anything military related, which was apparent to my leadership, but they put up with it because I somehow won every prestigious badge and passed all the schools. When he said this, it was one of the few times I realized the giant show these people have to put up when in charge of cherries, because they are burdened with guilt and responsibility if they die. We’d get stories from him throughout various times, mostly when drunk, about Iraq. He told us how he’d lost an 18 year old to friendly fire and you could see that buried pain while recollecting the many friends you’d lost in Afghanistan.

Salazar’s mother flew to Italy for the lost soldier’s family get together. The company gathered money together and paid for them to come, showing them around the city for a week. Horsley’s family didn’t come and wished to never speak to us. I talk to his brother every now and then, but other than that, I respect that wish entirely. Salazar’s mother is a wonderful woman. They have a daughter with cystic fibrosis, and I remember Salazar sending all his money to help with her surgeries. We had a toast to her, and my squad leader gave a speech. He broke down in tears during it, saying he was sorry he couldn’t bring her little boy home. That is a guilt I can honestly say is with me every second of my life. I’m not sure how easy that is to get across, but the few of us Wombats left from the deployment all share that burden. When at “our” bar in downtown Vicenza, where the bartenders each had drinks named after us, I had a moment with a buddy where we looked at each other, nodded, and he said “me too.” There’s something about losing someone in war that wrenches your soul harder than any other death I’ve ever witnessed. I think about the World Wars often and the immeasurable amount of pain the world took on from those years. My silence about the war is something I can relate to from those veterans-it’s hard to speak of war to those who don’t experience it. And most of all, it’s hard to speak of it when you are shamed of being a part of it, while being proud of those brave enough to endure it with you.

The days of coming back to Italy, drunk and ecstatic, walking around the parks and taking the bus downtown, were blissfully peacefully and tragically fake. As time goes, it’s easier to feign normalcy, but the wounds and seeing such monstrosity keep in my memory what mankind is capable of, and the importance in doing whatever it takes to strive for peace, no matter how ignorant and childish a wish of such is. As for my memories, there’s so much more, and I doubt I’ll ever talk about them again, and when I die, I know they will no longer exist without having shared them. The question I’m left with facing is: does it even matter if I share these stories?

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #2
April 12^th, 2015

In Slavoj Zizek’s, Looking Awry, he claims, “The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., the object a is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze.” (1) When looking at Swann’s love for Odette, we can see a similar desire arising which mimics this definition. In what was initially thought of as disgust, Swann has replaced with an artistic masterpiece which he transposed those early feelings into. In creating a want for Odette which was initially nowhere to be found, Swann has formulated this desire through a distorted view, one which eventually grows into a jealous, self-absorbed desire to conquest the Odette of his fantasies. In creating this desire, Swann comes to pass over glaringly obvious signs of which she does not share mutual affections. These desire glasses which Swann wears resembles one of the harsher facets of desire of which we’re all privy to. In lesser strengths, we’re subjected to desires of which we create realities that do not fit into an objective world or object. An easier way to think of this is that we become blind with passion and forget the things along the way in our quests for the end, golden goal. If we think about Swann’s formulation of this desire, I’m sure we can see similar aspects of behavior that resemble our own lives. We see something that makes us angry, cynical, or blasé about, but may find ourselves wrapped up with those feelings, and even sometimes wanting to reconstruct that object so as to fit harmoniously into our world. It is not necessarily a bad thing to desire, for desire is a good motivational tool and inspirational push. What we should be wary of, is entrenching ourselves into that obsessive, controlling behavior of which Swann takes on in his falsified love of Odette, in which he hasn’t fallen in love with the person, but with the desires he’s created.

Bibliography

1.)    Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992. Print.

Jeremy Hacker
Journal Entry #1
April 2^nd, 2015

In the winter quarter of 2015 I attended a 3 week lecture series held by historian Thierry de Duve, which focused mostly on avant-garde art and French history, particularly dealing with modernism. The one thing that struck me when coming across this passage from Proust, “But none of them would go so far as to say ‘He’s a great writer, he has great talent.’ They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not do so, because they did not know. We are very slow to recognize in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas. Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicary, strength; and then one day we realize that it is precisely all this that adds up to talent.” (1), was that it closely resembled the way in which Manet’s art pieces were received by art critics around 1870. “More often than not, the critics judged that Manet could pull off successful morceaux, which, however, did not amount to tableau.” (2) A tableau in this context is a collection of successful parts, or, morceaux. In comparing Proust’s description of those judging Bergotte and the critics addressing Manet’s unsuccessful tableau, we see the timidness involved with judgment when something unique and new comes across our field of view, particularly forms of art which fail to meet what our memory of talented works are supposedly composed of. I think it’s easy to look in retrospect and tsk those who judge harshly, but I wonder at what lengths all of us may perform this somewhat harsh judgment toward something new and confusing. I imagine the rise of modernism, modern art in particular, came to fruition from the reflection of these unsure judgments and experimenting with notion of what makes art good, and whether it even matters. It’s in this respect of reflection that we see the genius of such modern artists as Manet, for they maintained a thin line separating themselves from traditional tableaus while still being able to be recognized as art worthy of examination.

Bibliography

1.)    Proust, Marcel, and C. K. Moncrieff. “Swann In Love.” Swann’s Way. New York: Modern Library, 2003. 137. Print.

2.)    De Duve, Thierry. “The Invention of Non-Art: A History.” Artforum Vol. 52, No. 6, Feb. 2014: 197. Print.

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