This Magnificent Desolation (2013)
“It’s a book his mother had him read to him as a child, in both translation and Italian, and although he did not know the language, gradually, as he poured over the words, with their strange sounds and constructions, and spoke the words aloud, they began to make a strange and mystical sense to him. Later, in Vietnam, he came to understand the book in other ways, in those places where words had no meaning or articulation but merely hummed in his head, thrummed beneath his skin, and ached in that ...place his mother might have called a soul, the place where the center of all good things lay; it was an understanding so quick and terribly complete that he felt as if he was no longer reading but in the slick, sloshing belly of It, as he believed Dante must have been, and with this reality came a certain peace with and even acceptance of his condition, the war, and his part in all things that not only ruined other men but also, fundamentally, irrevocably ruined himself.
When his recon party passed through the sites of day-old fire-fights deep in the jungle, and he slowed at the sight of their fellow soldiers’ bodies or what remained of their bodies turned pulpy in the heat and black with flies, so that the bodies seemed to shudder as the flies moved in waves across them, it might have been Dante rather than Sergeant O’Neil at his side, uttering a cadence that would become so familiar to him that it would soon come to mean how far he and the other soldiers could distance themselves from the death about them and how long before they became strong in the ability to survive here by coming to feel almost nothing at all: Ain’t nothin but dead meat, Greenie.MoreLess
When his recon party passed through the sites of day-old fire-fights deep in the jungle, and he slowed at the sight of their fellow soldiers’ bodies or what remained of their bodies turned pulpy in the heat and black with flies, so that the bodies seemed to shudder as the flies moved in waves across them, it might have been Dante rather than Sergeant O’Neil at his side, uttering a cadence that would become so familiar to him that it would soon come to mean how far he and the other soldiers could distance themselves from the death about them and how long before they became strong in the ability to survive here by coming to feel almost nothing at all: Ain’t nothin but dead meat, Greenie.MoreLess
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