the 110th floor

I stopped understanding war when it wasn’t about the bad guys and the good guys anymore.

I stopped understanding war years ago, when parents society-sophisticated tried to explain the smoke

And the one thousand back-flipping papers in the sky

And the dust storm running down New York streets:

Firefighters caught up, women in business skirts running and

The planes came from two different directions but

Somehow there were four of them?

I didn’t understand. I didn’t try very hard.

I stopped understanding war when I realized it wasn’t just this once.

When I realized that a war didn’t have a time period, only amplifications

That the towers in New York were really the towers in Khobar and

People screamed the same in Vietnam tunnels as Iwo Jima foxholes and

Your hands shook the same on the video camera in

Tiananmen square and the streets of Syria,

Which were really the streets of Nuremberg, the glass

Sparkling on the pavement like lost stars and

I didn’t understand. I tried to sort these wars into “just” and “un” but I failed.

I stopped understanding war long before I realized the internet understood it all.

Long before I knew that Wikipedia’s blued links could lead me from page to page and

I could spend all night reading about one “operation” after another, searching for

Something headed “The Answer” or “History’s Judgment” or “A Real Reason We Decided To Invade”

Long before I apple-tabbed al Jazeera every hour to check on six separate states of Spring and

Watched hours and hours of footage too raw to be distant in which the

Same floors buckled under the strain of fire to collapse one after another after another and

I had to turn off the sound.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t have the processing power of my little-screened laptop.

I stopped understanding war even after the explosion of its supposed solutions.

The man hiding in his supporter’s dirt floor, his picture on the front page, he didn’t look

Evil, he looked pitiable – he looked helpless – he looked afraid and

The white UN drones, their target compounds didn’t just hold dictators they held a family and

When desert-camouflaged troops crossed over that line for the (gods I hope) last time

It wasn’t a victory it was a breath finally let go and

It was the excuse we needed to forget four and a half thousand left behind and

One set of blood-stained pictures dropped into the ocean after them and still

I don’t understand. I’ve discovered the end of a code-name isn’t the end of a war, only an era.

I’ve stopped understanding war and, honestly, I hardly try anymore. But goddammit I remember.

I can’t tell you if tanks in Kuwait were reasonable, or Cold War funding for Afghan rebels,

And I can’t tell you what it feels like to be hit with a water canon or lead bullets or the loss of a father

But I remember that someone does. I don’t forget that someone stood in a Palestinian camp and lived and

Someone stood on the 110^th floor and didn’t, and I don’t forget that

Someone is responsible. That sometimes that person is the UN’s most wanted

And sometimes he is the decorated war general and the foreign affairs official but I don’t forget that

Sometimes that person is me and even though I –

I don’t always understand, I remember that the violence doesn’t leave when it passes over my head

It isn’t gone when it leaves the television screen and the laptop screen and the public scene, even if it

Is sometimes impossible to understand, it is War and

It remains.


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