Free Pansy by Charles Hayes

worse, much worse. Even so, he figured most of the men he had served with would never set out to study war and get to the crux of the matter so that they could deal with what’s eating at them.
    It all comes down to killing, he thought. One philosopher Amy told him about, but whose name he could not recall, put the whole thing in perspective when he stated simply: life eats, and because it does, people and animals have to die. Hell, even that old bear was just being a bear and doing what bears do. Preying on livestock seems evil to us as ranchers, but not to the bear. It was human beings that messed everything up beyond repair. And of course, no one really cares about the perspective of the livestock because no one thinks they have one, except maybe people like his cousin.
    Mandy had told him recently that during World War II, the Nazis gave strict orders that animals were to be treated humanely. It was considered a moral imperative that they do so. She said that if any of their police dogs became sick, they were taken to a veterinarian immediately, but if the same fate befell Jewish prisoners, they were simply shot on the spot. She found it insanely ironic that people were sent to their death in cattle cars, but if the cars had been filled with cattle, much more care would have been given to the animals’ comfort. A car meant for eight cows was made to carry a hundred or more Jewish prisoners. How was this kind of psychic contradiction possible for members of a species who view themselves as so morally superior to animals that simply being compared to animals ruffles their feathers?
    Never before in his life had Randy been this engaged in serious reflection about the human condition. What thrilled him was that the deeper he got into it, the more exhilarating it was. Learning is cathartic, he discovered, and he wondered why this hadn’t occurred to him in school. Only a few days ago, he’d asked Mandy how she had learned so much. When he admitted that he never expected such wisdom from someone so young, her answer stunned him. She quoted something Ralph Waldo Emerson had said about young people reading books in libraries: Far too often they forget that the books they’re reading have, in fact, been written by young people.
    He knew nothing of the work of Emerson. His cousin's sincerity and her obvious maturity moved him deeply. Now he was beginning to wonder if Marlantes was really right about needing to talk about war experiences. Wasn't it more important to think about it critically and to consider many differing points of view other than his own? Indeed, so far, this seemed to be the secret. The only way to become objective about anything is to take another viewpoint while setting aside your own emotional involvement. And, if you didn't do this, how could simply talking about war help? What was beginning to form in his mind was the firm idea that what a person really needed to do was to forgive himself for those things that kept gnawing at him, the ones that gave rise to the dreams.
    It occurred to him that adrenaline is akin to magnetic emotion. Once it locks on to memory at the occurrence of a terrifying event, it can't be reasoned away unless it is overwritten by a profound revelation, an act of reasoning powerful enough to be experienced emotionally. Whether you told anyone about your combat trauma was much less important than simply experiencing emotional potency with the strength to override it or cause it to fade in significance. And realizing that so many worse things had happened in the past seemed to make the idea of letting go of your own bad memories a lot easier because yours, though dreadful, didn't quite measure up on the horrific scale.
    For his birthday Mandy had given him a copy of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature . Pinker wrote about the history of cruelty involving both animals and humans, and it was psychologically staggering. The filth and complete lack of etiquette that existed