#401 The Cruise of the Jolly Roger- Kurt Vonnegut
Nathan Durant was a seventeen-year army veteran before he
was injured during the Korean War. Once only joining to survive the depression,
he eventually became engrained in that world, and being a military man defined him,
but what next?
“He had always assumed that he was going to die young and
gallantly. But he didn’t die. Death was far, far away, and Durant faced
unfamiliar and frightening battalions of peaceful years.”
He bought a boat and looked for a new life. Meeting people
not in the military made him confused and feel like an outsider. Re-adjustment
was hard. Most people treated the war and stories of war glibly or
off-handedly. When asked to tell his own war stories:
“…he found himself including details, large and small, as
they occurred to him, until his tale was no tale at all, but a formless,
unwieldy description of war as it had really seemed: a senseless, complicated
mess that in the telling was first-rate realism but miserable entertainment.”
There is a saying that goes something like: For those who
have experienced, no explanation is necessary, for those who have not
experienced, no explanation is possible. I suppose war fits into that
description pretty solidly.
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