A Personal Farewell to Arms

Just before I turned 19, my country put a rifle in my hands and taught me how to use it. As an inexperienced city boy, I eventually learned how to unbolt it, release the barrel from the stock and remove the metal innards. Putting it back together was torture but, after a while, my hands took over even as my mind went blank.

Toward the end of basic training, as recruits sat on khaki blankets in a large hall, a sergeant ordered us to take apart our rifles and reassemble them in one minute--with our eyes closed.

As he counted down, I managed to pull out and put together a few pieces, but time was almost gone and I could hear disapproving footsteps and I knew the non-commissioned officers were shaking their heads. Sitting up, the wooden rifle stock between my legs, I fumbled to fit the barrel to it and slam home the bolt.

Just at the count of sixty, it all came together and I felt an overwhelming whoosh inside my thighs. At the age of 19, I was having my first conscious orgasm in carnal knowledge of a Garand M-1 rifle.

Three years later, after carrying my new friend through France, Germany and Austria without shooting anyone face to face, I turned it in but brought home a souvenir pistol taken from a German officer.

It remained on a closet shelf, wrapped and unloaded, for years until my children were old enough to start showing curiosity about it.

Forty years ago, I used my Army training to disassemble the weapon and then take a long walk through Manhattan streets, dropping parts of it into a dozen garbage bins more than a mile apart.

Somehow I've managed to keep my family safe without firearms ever since.

Katrina to the Nth Degree?

Myanmar is one of those mirrors Nature suddenly holds up every so often to make human beings face hard truths about what we call civilization.

As tens of thousands die, many needlessly, and millions face disease and starvation, international aid officials struggle against the barriers set up by politicians to preserve their power.

"(W)ith relief efforts still largely stymied by the country’s isolationist military rulers," the New York Times reports, "frustrated United Nations officials all but demanded Thursday that the government open its doors to supplies and aid workers."

As Americans watch in horror, Myanmar is a demonstration of how high the price of political self-protection can go, how much life can be lost to incompetent and uncaring exercise of power.

As we distance ourselves from such behavior, questions arise about Katrina, Iraq and the games that our own leaders are now playing in Washington over efforts to keep tens of thousands from losing their homes to foreclosure.

As we silently congratulate ourselves that life here is not held as cheaply as it is in Southeast Asia, it may be a good time to take a look in that mirror Nature is holding up there and ask our ourselves some hard questions about how much better we are doing here.