Editor’s Note: As long-suffering readers are aware, Socotra House has a mission of disseminating the experiences of a generation of old Spooks in the series of conflicts that spanned the globe on which we live. The Editorial Board is always torn between the recollections of what was and the observations of what is. There is considerable acrimony over the latter category at the moment, but it also reveals something else fundamental about the human experience: the onset of age and the inevitability of a transition to dust. We talked briefly about the number of those conflicts with which our crew had personal experience. For those of my age, the number is mostly “three,” though many who went to war in Southeast Asia claim “four.” The number is mutable, of course, since some pals worried about holes in the side of Somali buildings where they had to work. Without benefit of official ‘declaration’, of course. We were- and are- beyond many of those old manifestations of reality. The following is a departure for Marlow, who has attempted to capture the vagaries of age and health in the context of a life spent in the various pursuits for which we had national security authorization. We voted at the Editorial Board meeting to include a “letters to the editor” section in the daily screed. It is intended to be wry but honest in tone and substance. Or it can be just like this.
-Vic
Vic,
We were just past being boys with what our mothers called ‘angel faces’ when we willingly became possessed by a cold and nameless excitement of being a Naval spook. The long fingers of our still growing hands and minds closed and opened, closed and opened. We felt that we wanted, more than anything in the world, was the act of carving up those who wished us evil. We wanted and at times quietly wreaked something dark and unspeakable upon them. We wanted to carve the angel’s heads on their gravestones.
Those were our riotous years of endless work and savage drunkenness, as we memorized each port city’s accent, indignities, and stylishness, while striding and stumbling as we muttered through those dank side streets. These were just our gropings into our deep exile from our fellow countrymen back home as we did our nation’s secret bidding. Now as we wither, we try to paint with mere black and white typeset characters our hungers to preserve that great forgotten black-white and good-bad language and thought — the lost lane into heaven and earthly righteousness. How? When? Why?
This searching and endless asking still shows us to be youthful and idealistic. (Strange, no?)
That you set up your business in Culpepper, the little but important city dead center in our nation’s most deadly civil unpleasantness, lived there and in other places like Big Pink as I have in Key Weird and Savannah semi-soberly and industriously under the attentive eyes of neighbor folk still raw with immigrant enthusiasm for America, nearly died several times, and then less than eighteen months later became once again a howling maniac of words again, still makes me slack jawed.
How we can still slide down life’s polished brass rail without smashing our noggins is admirable. That we feel only past thirty but look much older is finally now only mildly annoying. Fortunately, our fading eyesight obscures from us our yellow and sunken faces and our waxen blades for noses that are true beaks. Oddly, we’re becoming thinner while still occasionally coughing.
So now only by the grace of God, neither you or I are alone or lost, despite having found neither order nor firm footing in this newly, ever changing world. As the old earth is cut away from our feet, we resume our aimless drifting along this beautiful continent. We turn ever westward toward America’s great spacious skies, its amber waves of grain, its mountain majesties above fruited plains to find grace, new life, and recovered health.
Onward, shipmate. Onward.
-Marlow
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