Free War Dances by Sherman Alexie Page A

father.”
    “You’re a great father.”
    “No, I’m not. I can’t be. What kind of father could raise a son who is capable of such a thing?”
    I wanted to rise up and tell my father the truth, that his son was a bloody, bawdy villain. A remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. But such sad and selfish talk is reserved for one’s own ears. So I insulted myself with a silence that insulted my father as well.
    “Don’t just sit there,” he said. “You can’t just sit there. You have to account for yourself.”
    My father had always believed in truth, and in the real and vast differences between good and evil. But he’d also taught me, as he had learned, that each man is as fragile and finite as any other.
    On the morning of September 11, 2001, my father prayed aloud for the victims. All day, the media worried that the body count might reach twenty or thirty thousand, so my father’s prayers were the most desperate of his life. But, surprisingly, my father also prayed for the nineteen men who’d attacked us. He didn’t pray for their forgiveness or redemption. No, he believed they were going to burn in a real hell. After all, what’s the point of a metaphorical hell? But my father was compassionate and Christian enough to know that those nineteen men, no matter how evil their actions and corrupt their souls, could have been saved.
    This is what my father taught me on that terrible day: “We are tested, all of us. We are constantly and consistently given the choice. Good or evil. Light or darkness. Love or hate. Some of those decisions are huge and tragic. Think of those nineteen men and you must curse them. But you must also curse their mothers and fathers. Curse their brothers and sisters. Curse their teachers and priests. Curse everybody who failed them. I pray for those nineteen men because I believe that some part of them, the original sliver of God that still resided in them, was calling out for guidance, for goodness and beauty. I pray for them because they chose evil and thus became evil, and I pray for them because nobody taught them how to choose goodness and become good.”
    Of course, my father, being a politician, could never have uttered those words in public. His supporters would not have understood the difference between empathy for a lost soul and sympathy with a terrorist’s politics. Make no mistake: My father was no moral relativist. He wanted each criminal to be judged by his crimes, not by his motivations or biography.
    My father refused to believe that all cultures were equal. He believed that representative democracy was a God-given gift to humans.
    “I think that our perfect God will protect us in a perfect afterlife,” he was fond of saying in public. “But in this highly imperfect world, we highly imperfect humans need to be protected from one another, and only a progressive republican government can guarantee any sort of protection.”
    In private, my father said this: “Fuck the fucking leftists and their fucking love of secularism and communism. Those bastards haven’t yet figured out that the secular Hitler and the communist Stalin slaughtered millions and millions of people.”
    Don’t get me wrong. My father knew that the world was complicated and unpredictable—and that only God knew the ultimate truth—but he also knew that each citizen of that world was ultimately responsible for his actions. My father staked his political career, his entire life, on one basic principle: An unpredictable world demands a predictable moral code.
    “Son,” my father said to me many a time in the years after September 11, “a thief should be judged by the theft. A rapist should be judged by the rape. A murderer should be judged by the murder. A terrorist should be judged by the terror.”
    And so I sat, a man capable of inexplicable violence against an innocent, eager to be judged by my God and by my father. I wanted to account and be held accountable.
    “I’m sorry,”