Sitting with Warrior

By Carl Hitchens

Inner teacher, "Warrior," a Nanticoke warrior of the seventeenth century, shares
his wisdom with his grandson, and in so doing reveals the mystery of the warrior
spirit. It is through the inner-warrior that we self-actualize the inner life dreamed
into the outer life lived. It is through embracing our warrior nature that we
conquer self-delusion and self-doubt and realize the ultimate truth: We are
Warrior. We are the noble being we always hoped to be.

Warrior'sspiritual perspective on war, life, death, the meaning of existence
addresses those fundamental questions of human origin and purpose. HIs view
is both insightful and honoring of life lived and sacrificed in pursuit of higher
meaning. Drawing on spiritual science and "warrior perspective," he navigates
the reader through the inner workings of the human condition, enfolding within
it war as an ironic outcropping of consciousness raging for fuller integration.

As a Marine Corps veteran of an unpopular and divisive war, Carl Hitchens
contends that "Sitting with Warrior" chronicles not only his journey, but Americas
as well. By sitting and listening to Warriors wisdom, he has recovered lost parts
of himself. This gives America hope for stepping out of the long shadow of
Vietnam that today stretches over Iraq and Afghanistan. Hope that by sitting with
Warrior and his unifying truth, America can heal her old wounds. Hope that she
can draw from her pluralism and diversity unity rather than division"out of
many, one."

To Educators, Historians, and Mental Health Practitioners

More than story, more than memoir: Sitting with Warrior is an authentic peep
inside the combat mind experience of those who go to war. It looks at war and
warrior-ship in the full circle of cultural and nationalistic themes, and social,
psychological, and spiritual forces that form and shape those going and
returning from lethal combat. It is therefore relevant to any historical treatment
of war and its effects from readjustment challenges, to interrelationship
struggles to PTSD to spiritual healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450276320

Carl Hitchens

Carl Hitchens is a poet, storyteller, essayist, and blogger. His publishing credits include the books: "Thinning of the Veils (single-author poetry collection – Carl Hitchens–Drumtalk June 2018, "Shades of Light" (single-author poetry collection) – iUniverse 2013 and "Sitting with Warrior" (historical-memoir/myth) – iUniverse 2010-13, as well as the contributed poem, "Breath of Fire" (anthology, Meditation on Divine Names, Editor Maja Trochimczyk – Moonrise Press 2012.

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Copyright © 2010 by Carl Hitchens

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of history, of personal memoir, myth, and spirituality. All mythical characters, names, incidents, and dialogue are either the products of the author’s contemplations or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7631-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7633-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7632-0 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 07/10/2013

CONTENTS

Far From Eden

The Making of Legends

Impermanence

The Measure of a Life

The Noble Warrior

War and Peace

The Just War

Regrets

The Tarnishing of Glory

The Reinvention of Darkness

The Redemption of Time

I Can See Clearly Now

Epilogue

Glossary

Appendix

Dedicated to all warriors,

large and small,

from all walks of life,

of all times and places.

This is a dream.

All that is required of me

in this moment

is sustained, unaltered awareness.

This is the essence of sight,

where light and shadow become one.

Didn’t know for a long, long time

the depth of my wounded mind and spirit

Thought I was invincible.

Marched through Washington

back in the day—

me and the other vets:

Cutting images from the jungles of Nam,

pasting their ragged and bloody pictorial

onto the album of pomp and circumstance

Dream-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue

onto the covers of magazines

and newspapers’ front pages.

The healing …

the healing passed me over:

my sickness incurable

to group inoculations

of honoring and celebration—

afterthoughts politically won

by survivors

who refused to die out

of the American consciousness.

ONE

Far From Eden

The campfire was glowing in the distance, its golden-reddish color leaping out into the night from far back in the forest. I moved toward the blaze slowly, cautiously, stealthily weaving my way through the dark. Though I was wary of who and what I might find, curiosity drove me on like an animal toward my fate.

Cloaking myself in silence, I reached a tangle of bushes a short distance from the firelight. There I knelt and looked intently. Sitting cross-legged on the other side of the burning logs was a Native American warrior, his copper complexion showing in the wavering light.

He wore face paint. His body was covered in buckskin from mantle, breechcloth, and leggings to the moccasins on his feet. Around his forehead was a headband with a single eagle feather in it. Except for the scalp lock on top, his head was shaven. Beside him were a bow, a quiver full of arrows, and a heavy wooden war club. He was smoking tobacco in a wooden pipe, staring into the flames. There was something about him that felt old and familiar.

From my hiding place I studied him, intrigued at how he blended seamlessly into his environment. He certainly wasn’t a faint outline, but his presence melded perfectly into the forest around him. Like a tree swaying in the wind, or the pouring down of rain, he was a weave in nature’s intricate fabric. I watched the way he puffed his pipe, drew the smoke in as if pulling the world around him inside, holding it and then blowing it back on the curls of smolder rising from his lips. It was as if he was breathing in and out his own existence. Every so often, he would glance around, not looking with his eyes exactly, but from behind them in some inscrutable way. I had the inexplicable feeling that I knew him.

Well, are you going to stay there all night … in the cold? Or are you going to join me at the fire here, and let me see who’s looking at me?

I knew I had been made. Still I glanced around hoping someone else would step forward.

Well?

I slowly stood up and walked around the twisting vegetation toward him, eyeing carefully his weapons and his hands, and their distance from me.

As I approached the warrior, he transferred the smoke pipe from the hand that held it to the one resting on his knee. He gazed at me, and then pointed with his eyes to where his free hand patted the ground with an invitation to sit. I calculated his reach and parked myself just beyond it, pulling my legs up under me in his fashion. He smiled to himself, evidently amused at my wariness.

I noticed close-up that the paint markings on his face were zigzagged drawings of lightning, and that his headband was beaded, perhaps with colored seeds.

The light of my fire has always burned, he stated. Yet it is just now that you have found your way to me. Who am I? That is your question, is it not? I can hear it loud and clear. As clear and deafening as those rockets blasting into the compound that day in April 1968.

Images of the attack surfaced immediately in my mind.

#

"INCOMING … INCOMING bellowed through the hootch like the recoil of a thunderous boom, which had bolted from the sky in an ominous whistle. The shouting was the Salts’ seasoned reflexes kicking-in with the fluid motility of controlled terror.

Bodies hurled themselves off cots; feet hit the deck running, pounding across the wooden floor out into the night toward the bunker.

This was my first rocket attack, my first confrontation with the fear-demons dogging me, since first pulling orders for WesPac, i.e., Western Pacific [operations]. In the prevailing winds of the day, this meant one thing, Vietnam.

Raw instinct covered my lack of experience and put me in mental synch with the others. I jackknifed off my rack and raced behind them, forcing out an INCOMING as I went by the ranking NCO. This shout was more a grounding for my fear than it was a warning to anyone.

Good man, said the Corporal—duty-bound as the last man out—waving an urgent hand onto my shoulder and guiding me out the door.

The bunker was low to the ground, with a cramped entrance to crawl through. It was dark, sandy, and close inside. The air was a thick, dusty mixture of earth scent and perspiration, trapped in a palpable atmosphere of constrained fear. A direct hit, by common reckoning, would turn this shelter into a tomb.

Everybody in? the Corporal asked.

Yeahs and uh-huhs answered back in the affirmative.

All right, sound off when I call your name. Down his mental list he went, each name eliciting a HERE or HERE, CORPORAL.

All right, we’ll see how long this one lasts. No one out till the all-clear sounds … I know you guys really want to be out there, right? Some chuckled nervously, others replied with silence. Life-and-death humor hit too close to home to tease out much laughter, especially when the punch line could be you in a body bag.

Some of the men lit up cigarettes, the flickering flames of matches and lighters creating wavering shadows in the dark chamber. One man extended a smoke to me. I took it, puffed it into a glow from his cigarette, and pulled the fumes into my lungs.

The 1-22s were slamming the ground all around the sandbagged fortification, the close ones kicking up the Red Beach sand on the outside walls like death spray trying to probe its way into our minds. A loud, metallic scrunch moaned a direct hit a short distance away.

Huddled in the dark with the other Marines, I felt the distance between birth and death collapse into one eternal moment, where the flame of life fought against the winds of fate. It was nothing in thought or feeling that possessed me, but, rather, an infusion of some innate awareness that pushed through the mind and the senses. Like the replay of an ancient memory, a narrow, vertical line of light appeared on the dark screen of my mind, burst into light particles, and then was gone. I knew this image was of the moment of death—that flashing of life into oblivion—and that my own dying one day was as certain as my need for air. Youthful illusions faded that night into a sobering maturity.

The all-clear siren sounded, and we spilled out of the bunker. It was good to breathe the air outside, even though it stunk with the sulfurous scent of explosives. The first faint light of dawn was just breaking as we stood gawking at the mess hall a hundred yards away. A big portion of the roof was collapsed, and a gaping tear was ripped into one long wall.

We studied the wreckage, as if it were a piece of art, engrossed in its twisted, misshapen appearance in the same uncanny way that one falls spellbound to Nature’s cataclysms. As with the atomic mushroom cloud, some eerie, grotesque beauty had unwrapped itself from the raw destruction and pinned our eyes to its magnetic power.

Something shifted in me during those mesmerizing moments. I began to walk a different path through life. The unconscious sense of immortality that attaches itself to youth left me. In its place, under the cold stare of truth, the grasping of life’s impermanence took root.

It was clear that mortality walked every step with me. In the face of such destructive forces, unleashed with such harmful intent, so utterly close in that place and time, I grokked the delicate stitching that held my life in one piece. Steeped in that realization, I set myself to the task of survival, not so much by a conscious directing of the will as by an unconscious drive for self-preservation—tuning my awareness around an axis of acute instinct and reflexes. Where circumstances fell within my control, where my own actions mattered, I would act, think, and feel my way through the continuance of my earthly existence.

#

Judging from the puzzled look on your face, you’re wondering how I knew what happened that day, how I reached into your memories and pulled out that event for you to see.

I nodded.

You are curious about me—who I am and why I seem so familiar to you.

Again, I nodded.

"I am Warrior. And your coming here is no accident. You sought me out, you looked high and low, so to speak.

I didn’t know how to reply.

"When you left Vietnam for the world, for home, you left that exotic place you had come to know, come to expect certain things of, and reentered one whose reality had shifted from your mind’s memory to something else entirely. It was not the home of your past. As the home of your future, it was an ungainly thing to contemplate.

"On the surface of your five senses, there were many things still familiar in the ebb and flow of sights and sounds, but in your subjective, inner reality, this was a world apart from what you had known. More directly opposed, though, to your peace and tranquility, were those sensory factors tying you inexorably to the distant land you had departed. In some bizarre way, Vietnam had come along, as a permanent part of your inner landscape.

"So much so that a car’s backfire was now a booby trap going off. Clackers, Poppers, Klick-Klacks, or identical toys by any other name, were AKs popping death. An overhead helicopter was either a gunship giving air support or a medevac coming for the dead and wounded. There was an edge to everything.

Nam, as you referred to it, was a tropical country of mystery and mysterious people, of rice paddies, monsoon rains, and death by combat. It was a contradiction of lushness and devastation, of beauty and grotesqueness. You looked for yourself within its mental and physical borders, in its chaotic paradox of constant change and monotony. There, in its wild stampeding of events, you lost yourself and then found yourself, only to lose yourself again on returning home. And you have been in the process of discovering who and what you are for the last thirty-nine years.

#

Coming to Vietnam was at once exhilarating and terrifying. Getting off the Continental Airlines plane at the airbase in Da Nang was the culmination of my private ambition to face the crucible of mortal danger. Like my heroes in American iconic culture, I hoped, in the taking on of such peril, that I would find myself.

I had seen inklings of that genuine self in the male heroes of literature, stage, and film—the rugged individualists who trod their own path, followed their own truth, and dwelled outside the crowd and crowd hysteria. Men who took the road less traveled, but arrived inexorably—time and again—at the headwaters of the masses, where fate forced them to sacrifice personal safety in defense of others.

It mattered not whether these men rode the Old West alone or stormed upon the shore of Iwo Jima with a crowd of Marine infantry. They were self-contained pillars of strength and indomitable will. They led by example and their composure under fire. In the midst of chaos and change, they instilled a sense of hope. They kept their own counsel, fought their own demons, and prevailed over madness and evil. They were men carved out of their own innate natures, unspoiled by outside intrusion. Through the gravest of circumstances, the cream of their most authentic self rose to the top. My unearthing would then seem to lie in a similar path.

I had searched for my elusive self in other areas of American culture. But I was not there in

Reviews for Sitting with Warrior

[katerobinson-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Around the time author Carl Hitchens was a young, green Marine entering his first hot LZ in the jungles of Vietnam, I was a young countercultural student demonstrating against the unpopular war in the streets of middle America. You might say we were on the opposite ends of a spectrum. In his sobering first book, Sitting with Warrior, Hitchens generously took me to his war and also to sit with Grandfather Warrior, his internal spiritual teacher, who reveals the sweet spot of equanimity between these two destinies. I came away from my reading understanding better how one can embrace the seemingly irreconcilable differences between war and peace.

Hitchens has clearly spent a lifetime probing the depths and shadows of his war experience to find "the beauty in the breaking". Sitting with Warrior is a richly woven tapestry of light and shadow, fact and fantasy, prose and poetry that soars far beyond the boundaries of the tepid patriotic and political rants of ordinary war literature. This little volume pierces the heart of consciousness itself and ultimately merges the creator and the destroyer, and by healing that dichotomy within the warrior, also bridges the paradox that lives within us all.

As the book cover copy so aptly says, "This gives America hope for stepping out of the long shadow of Vietnam that today stretches over Iraq and Afghanistan." In my estimation, Hitchens has sorted through both the universal and place-specific experiences of warfare, the destruction, confusion, pain, death, and unending questions, and has emerged with a lyrical and articulate narrative that is astonishing in its depth and wisdom. Although this book is specifically a guide for the lost veterans of Vietnam, it is also a spiritual map for the veteran of any war, external or internal, physical or spiritual.