On the Maduro Raid, Achilles, and Kitting Up

Also a slight change in the way I write these essays

John Martin. Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still. 1840.

Welcome back to What then?

I am making a few changes. My personal writing is usually fleshed out in the form of mini-ideas, and when one of these strikes me, I riff an essay off of it. Strangely enough, this is not natural for me. So I am going to start writing a bit more like I do in my journals, but modified so I am writing for a reader as opposed to myself. My hunch is this will make them more striking, more intuitive, and more personal, though I may be wrong… it is up to you, the reader, to decide.

Enjoy, and if this gets you thinking, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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Kitting up as an existential posture—On a typical mission we would board the helicopters around 0200. My body’s clock was eerily attuned to plus or minus three minutes at any moment of the night, and I would intuitively roll out of my sleeping bag sixty minutes prior. I would grab my gear and quietly make my way out of the tent to let the day crew sleep. The freezing air would sting my nostrils and wake my mind. When I lifted my body armor I could see the Milky Way through the shoulder straps above me. I would place it over my head, carefully seal the velcro in front, and give it a shake to settle its weight on my shoulders. Med kit, knife, pistol, grenades, bullets, rifle, helmet, gummy bears, radios, night vision goggles, batteries, maps, compass, GPS, wax pen, coconut paste, water—each was in its habitual location. Each pocket was one of many in my mind that I could reach for and find in the pitch black. I would pause, and breathe, and feel centered as I took in the mountains beneath the stars with the mission on my mind.

It is significant that as my body slid into my armor, my mind slid into the zone. The unlimited possibilities outside of my control shifted from ungovernable anxieties to stimulating problems because my kit reminded me of the small number of primitive powers that are within my control.

It might seem like kitting up is merely smearing paint and grabbing arrows in the stone age. Or donning a purple plumed helmet in the bronze age. Or wrapping body armor in whatever age we live in now. Actually, kitting up is to ground ourselves in an ancient world in which we can be killed—killed by ice, pain, orca, and enemy. The primeval world sits in silence as we learn what we are inside. We are left with a clear and binary choice: are you really willing to fight and rage to live, or will you merely lie down and die?

Kitting up is to decisively own our individual existence on this earth. It is to consciously live as if our back is against the wall; or rather it is to remember it already is and always has been.

There is a reason why poets took this quiet, ancient, and elemental ritual and made of it poetry that will exist as long as our species. Take Homer, who is too good not to share in Alexander Pope’s epic translation:

Now issued from the ships the warrior-train,

And like a deluge pour’d upon the plain…

Full in the midst, high-towering o’er the rest,

His limbs in arms divine Achilles dress’d;

Grief and revenge his furious heart inspire,

His glowing eyeballs roll with living fire;

He grinds his teeth, and furious with delay

O’erlooks the embattled host, and hopes the bloody day.

The silver cuishes first his thighs infold;

Then o’er his breast was braced the hollow gold;

The brazen sword a various baldric tied,

That, starr’d with gems, hung glittering at his side;

And, like the moon, the broad refulgent shield

Blazed with long rays, and gleam’d athwart the field.

Next, his high head the helmet graced; behind

The sweepy crest hung floating in the wind…

The chief beholds himself with wondering eyes;

His arms he poises, and his motions tries…

Peace is the harder war—We live in a far more dangerous world than a river valley or the beaches of Troy. Peace is the most ungrounding condition known to man because it does not require us to kit up. Peace does force us to remember we only own that which lies within the borders of our skull. It also does not remind us we and only we are responsible for the course of our lives.

It turns out too little war can be as unhealthy as too much. For where is the playful sense of fatalistic seriousness that makes each moment explode with opportunity and color? Where is the ancient and ritualistic practice of grounding ourselves each and every morning? Is it any wonder we find so much dread, anxiety, or worst of all, nihilism?

The Maduro raid as a mirror—The most striking thing about the Maduro raid was not the fear of war. It was the reaction to fear of war in the context of all the other fears that define our era. Media and public discourse is dominated by fentanyl deaths, low birth rates, the mental anguish of girls, the suffering of boys.

If ever there were a sign of our times, it would be the problem of boys. Boys are addicted to porn and video games. Many are lonely, suicidal, and dropping out of school. And yet at the same time… they recoil from war. Something novel is at work here. Evolution would go insane. Many young men across the West say they would never fight for their country if it were to go war. This is probably due to a sense of meaninglessness, uselessness, and alienation. But the crucial irony is that war has been the cure to all three ills for as long as we have been human.

We see the perfect inversion of groundedness. An absolutely indecisive ownership of existence, a willing and surreal drift that is neither life nor death.

And now we come back to the Maduro raid. These same news anchors, public intellectuals, evolutionary theorists, and all who lament the crisis of meaninglessness—I have not heard a single one ask what it must have been like to be the Delta Force operator on those helicopters.

How many of these anchors, influencers, and aspiring anthropologists are themselves on antidepressants? How many cling to climate change, a social cause, or a political tribe, not because they actually care about these things, but because they are running away from a self they are terrified of? How many are terrified of war as a potential problem, while dealing with an actual existential crisis?

They do not see the truth lying at the bottom of this contradiction. So let us ask a few more questions: How many operators training for the Maduro mission could not wait to get home so they could inject Fentanyl? How many of the helo pilots who flew them in a few dozen feet above the sea at night were ruminating on the meaninglessness of their wretched lives over their radios? Zero.

I do not advocate for war.

And yet…

And yet I think of the men on the helicopter. I think of their kitting up at midnight. I think of their stance towards a clear and deadly enemy. I think of their grounding—the very same meaning and self-governance they may miss when they retire, and never again kit up before sitting in a black bird beneath the stars.

“I think they had

never found you,

Peace, more diffi-

cult to endure!”

Sappho is probably right. What is called “peace” is considered normal when it is actually an evolutionary aberration. Woe to the civilization that does not see the human situation as clearly as Sappho.

We have a duty not to bring back war. Which means we have a duty to replace its virtues in peace. Because if we do not, the ungrounded will seek to ground themselves by any means necessary. In an epic irony, they may even do so through war. Maybe the seams splitting across Western Civilization is the beginning of this return to the horrific paradox of war: horrifying, and yet so satisfyingly grounding.

A culture of contradictions—What is the desire to live a meaningful life and a reluctance to change? A contradiction. What is an animal designed to sprint and swim and crawl and sing around a fire who clings to luxury? A contradiction. What is a human whose every neuron and muscle is designed for a good fight and who instead of fighting chooses to drift unto death? A contradiction.

Creativity as a cure—I believe the cure comes down to a simple question: what are we willing to kit up for as if our boats were burning at our backs ? As if the stand were life and death? My hunch is the answer lies in tension, conflict, discomfort, controlled rage, hunting down contradictions, and revealing the meaning these contradictions camouflage under their complexity.

In a word, it is to create.

I do not mean a flight from a self we are terrified of, some escape into a grand Cause. Creativity, for my part, is how we strip ourselves down to the singular task we choose to make the theme of our short tenure on this earth. A task chosen not out of fear, but out of passion.

Creativity is to say No to those who shape our discourse but who do not know what it is to be human; it is to put earthlings on Mars; to put ink to paper; to resurrect dead languages; to plant saplings where the rainforests are burned to ash; to hold a unapologetically uncensored conversation on what it means to live a good life; to take a savage pleasure in fighting to the last.

The creative individual lives life as if it were a poem forever in mid-creation, written in their own hand.

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