The Survivor

Out of curiosity I got onto Humans of New York to catch an interview with Secretary Clinton which was reported to reveal her personality more clearly than she oftentimes comes across.  But I came away from this site after perhaps an hour scrolling through all the interviews with ordinary men and women almost all of them who had been in the military.  It has left me shaken in a way little else has in a long time.  Boys and girls, really, although of course they are in their twenties, but from the vantage of eighty six years of age they seem like such vulnerable youngsters.  And they are indeed such wounded persons; everyone interviewed seems to have had an incredibly traumatic experience mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they lost so many colleagues to bombs, rifle fire, all the normal experiences of war, all completely foreign to my own sheltered life experience.  Their losses, their shock in the terrible battles, post traumatic stress syndrome they call it nowadays, it was there in their faces, in the language they used, groping for phraseology that would encompass the monstrous experiences they had had, trying to formulate their thoughts on suicide.  Boys and girls, there were photographs of them all, when the interviewer had been with them, boys and girls at rest in New York City, sitting on a park bench, on a stone wall, the picture of rest and relaxation, but the words tell another story.  The loss that came from their words, their memories etched into their souls never to be forgotten, the wounds, and all so young.  So many gone from their lives, friends and relatives, such violent ends has been their experience of life.  Yes, I know that war does this; the twentieth century brought it almost daily to the mass of humankind.  It is just that I have lived my life almost free of anything like that.  Yes, once I was held up at gunpoint, but the man turned away when I gave him my money.  Now I am so old that I am more likely than not to be past the age of daring and courage and choices and assaults and loud noises and cries and screams.  At the moment as I type this I have headphones on from which is coming waltz music from the Edwardian era. The Edwardian era, prelude to the First World War, the Battle of the Somme and other atrocities, well, that says it all, the Edwardian Era a confection, a dream, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three.