Their Violent Oath
***
“First Sergeant, call the roll,” the officer in charge of the ceremony ordered. Wyatt rose along with the rest of his unit, which had gathered under the pall of recent events.
“Sergeant First Class Duranio,” First Sergeant Duggar began.
“Here,” Duranio responded, an air of bravery added artificially to the timber of his voice.
“Staff Sergeant Alexander.”
“Here Top,” said Alexander, and First Sergeant Duggar continued his roll down through the ranks, solemnly calling off the names of his soldiers. Byleck, Brown, Wolf, and Sokalowski rounded out the non commissioned officers. They were stoic in their returns, but some of the privates, Abdi, Rodriguez, Wilson, Leight, Beecher and Frank, whimpered. Wilson had even cried aloud, his face striped by tears. Wyatt’s name was up.
“Private Joyce.”
“Here first sergeant,” he answered as somberly as the non commissioned officers had. Then it was Captain Saragossa.
“Captain Saragossa…”
No response, but the tearful sputters of heroic men.
“Captain Saragossa…”
All remained silent, save the restless shifting in chairs of the assembly.
“Captain Deon J. Saragossa...”
Finally, the response came in the breathy drone of bagpipes playing a lonesome rendition of Amazing Grace. That despondent tune called for the spirit of Captain Saragossa to ascend. He was exulted by three volleys from the honor guard’s seven rifles.
“Ready, fire”
Bang-slap-click “Ready, fire”
Bang-slap-click “Ready, fire.”
Bang-slap-click The rifle shots struck a crisp rhythm through the loose whine of the kilted piper, who never stopped playing. He just turned, and walked off until the heartache of his song, wending through the breeze, grew dim and intermittent then vanished away for good.
“First Sergeant, let Captain Saragossa’s name be stricken from the roll,” said the officer in charge.
Wyatt was not given to emotional outpouring, but he could feel the heavy gloom of the ceremony drawing metal from his stoicism and adding it to the lead weight in his stomach. He imagined how his family would endure The Final Roll Call.
Private Joyce…
Private Joyce…
Private Wyatt D. Joyce…
***
Hayden,
Please apologize to your mailman on my behalf as I hear depressing letters are heavier to carry than letters containing good tidings.
I write you with great concerns about my future. Remember our “forgotten soldier” hypothesis concerning the reason I haven’t been deployed yet? It’s about to be tested by top brass. I am still in Korea, and it is safe here. But for how long I can't tell. I read a newspaper article called, Every Soldier to War, today. It was about an effort by Human Resources Command to root out soldiers who have somehow missed this war, and to send them to deploying units. If they find me, I will be involuntarily extended to spend the next two years training up and fighting in Iraq.
This would be a cruel twist for me. I’ve been waiting to become a civilian again for the majority of my enlistment. Now, at the very end, I may be delayed. In an imposition that would be illegal by all rights of contract law outside of the military, I could very well become a ‘stop-loss’. I’ve searched myself and asked God; no answers yet as to whether I could bear another two years of waiting for my real life to begin.
That said, I feel compelled to reassure you my fears are not for my own personal safety. They’re for my principles. I've become a devout humanitarian. I have tried both philosophical stances on this war, and settled on the fact that I can not in good conscience endorse it. I would sooner vow to never again call another person “enemy” than redeem my oath to defend against, “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” In the five years since I swore to that rhetoric I've come to believe, above all, a man deserves to abide his own code, no matter what entity claims ownership of him.
I have to warn you about a trend you will soon notice in my letters: sunrises. I’m writing by the cool hued light of an amazing one right now. Dust from China blows across the Korean peninsula this time of year. It picks up pollution along the way, so the locals wear surgical masks. They call it the “Yellow Sands”. I’ve seen satellite pictures of the clouds, and have to say, they’re an impressive ecological event. However, sitting here, watching the Sun born anew, all I notice is that they make for an amazing light show.
Tomorrow I’m going to a place called Nightmare for a training exercise. I’m not sure how it got that name, and I really hope I don’t find out. Expect more pictures soon, and keep sending them to mom.
Tell, Jen she better still be in school when I get home. Tell her I never stop thinking about her, and I love her.
Take care brother, and write me soon,
Wyatt
***
Their assurances- the rows of tall men and the artless cadence of marching feet- their violent oath: Your dreams are not safe, nor the tender operas in the sky, nor their promise that the Sun is close by.***
“Freedom isn’t free,” they told him. He seemed to remember when it was, a youth in which his boundaries extended throughout all of space and time to the edges of his back yard, an infinite garden, a flawless timepiece that would never corrode or need winding. That chapter of his life was so vivid, a wonderful schizophrenia, imagination and reality blended seamlessly into an impossibly vast world. Those memories were a Jackson Pollock painting, hazy and undefined, but beautiful none the less. He thought he was entitled to freedom then, but apparently he was running a debt.
Wyatt dreamed about the Eden of his youth, drifting in and out of the harsh tangibles around him- the sand bags and machine guns, the roaring knife of January wind invading his ears and storming his inner voice. He could feel the inquisition of the man next to him, peering over his shoulder and into his mind, questioning his dreams, “What you thinking bud? Thinkin’ about Sally rotten crotch? Cryin’ ‘bout goin’ home I bet,” no privacy, not even in his imagination, “Thinkin’ ‘bout your fag journal? Your little girl diary,” Wyatt hushed his thoughts to a secretive whisper.
I hate stand to- so dark and cold. Why does it have to be so damn cold? He thought.
The moment before the Sun comes up is also the moment in which it has been down the longest. Stand to was that vulnerable slice of the clock, just before sunrise, when the enemy was most likely to attack. All men must come to arms during stand to, and take up position along the perimeter. This was an important strategy, handed down by the likes of Alexander and Napoleon.
It was a wasteful way, Wyatt thought, to spend a sunrise. Slouched against the sandbag wall of his fighting position, peering through his M-16’s iron sights, he studied the crest of a distant roll in the landscape, pretending to scan it for the spearhead of an imaginary attack- enemies he knew would never come.
“Joyce, Private Wyatt Joyce,” the hard toned voice of Wyatt’s first sergeant was detuned from years of overuse, and startled him back to life.
“Here. Moving Top,” Wyatt responded, slinging his weapon and crawling out of his fox-hole.
He thought First Sergeant Duggar looked too old for the digital camouflage on his uniform. He was a ruthless cuss, indoctrinated, institutionalized and enslaved for the majority of his life. Wyatt suspected he suffered a condition, one in which every time he did not comprehend, he hollered; thus he was constantly hollering.
“You’re getting curtailed Joyce. Know what that means?” First Sergeant Duggar barked, leading Wyatt into a tent.
“That I’m getting cut short in Korea first sergeant,” Wyatt answered, ducking through a pair of olive-drab, canopy flaps and shifting his gaze to the ground to hide his fearful understanding of “curtailed”. The debt collectors had found him.
First Sergeant Jones’ long stare fell flat, “You’re going to a deploying unit, Fourth Infantry Division."
"But my contract is up in three months First Sergeant. I'm supposed to be getting out."
"Well you're not. You're contract is being involuntarily extended. We have stop loss papers you need to sign,” he said the words 'stop loss' without remorse. Wyatt tried to stifle his shock, his repulsion, and sensed a condescending scorn in First Seargent Duggar’s eye.
He looked out through the tent flaps, out across the perimeter and the low, dirty expanse beyond to the jagged Korean mountains. They slouched, relieved of their majesty and marred by defensive, military structures. From their tops the ancients had long ago surveyed a vast forest of natural wonders, but with age it had become a broad, screaming dystopia.
The Sun was up, fully visible above the craggy horizon. Wyatt had missed it.
***
From 32,000 feet the Earth’s grand arc had noticeable shape. It hinted to Wyatt of the planet’s dimensions and its membership in the greater cosmos. He had embarked on a twelve hour flight to visit his family in Minnesota for ten days, after which he would soldier on to Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, then the desert war zone.
As his flight path bent northward, above the Arctic Circle, Wyatt watched the Siberian tundra become a rolling sea, and took special notice of its transition from a liquid ocean to disjointed ice shores, and finally the solid polar cap. He felt like an astronaut orbiting Jupiter’s icy Europa.
Wyatt thought of his brother and how many times he had tasted the world from such a Godly perspective. Hayden had been a professional helicopter pilot for nine years, so Wyatt guessed he had made perhaps thousands of ascents into the heavens, freely mocking the jealous masses that slogged the ground below.
He remembered the flight they had taken together. The doors of their chopper had been left behind for a cooler day, and as they dangled beneath the whirling blades, Hayden had silenced the raucous
chop-chop by piping an opera into their headsets.
“What is this?” Wyatt had asked as serene tones soothed his nervous ears.
“I took some guy and his girl out past Taylor’s Falls on their anniversary. He had me play it for them. I told him I liked it, so he left it for me. I have no idea what it’s called. Beautiful though,” Hayden had answered.
“It really changes the mood.”
Then, for a long while, no words had been exchanged. With esoteric heads, they had soared, skirting under scant clouds and genuinely enjoying the lay of creation, its breadth spread out like a map.
“An eagle,” Hayden had finally said over the intercom, reaching across Wyatt’s body to point out the stately bird. It had swooped in to investigate them, a kindred spirit, and had joined their flight path for a short while, before departing with an easy, wings-left roll, soaring on to some favorite hunting grounds in its wild, northern kingdom.
The unspoken comfort of brotherhood, the Earth and the opera, the eagle and the utterly splendid magic of the sky- Wyatt remembered that eternal moment, and realized Hayden still lived in the garden of their youths.
Wyatt looked back down at the receding polar ice cap, and put his hands to his temples, feeling the flanks of his hairline where age had begun to cause retreat. He opened his laptop, and wrote a letter.
***
Riding the escalator down to the baggage terminal, Wyatt peered ahead, searching through the crowd of weary travelers for Hayden. When he found him they made eye contact, and at first there were only stoic head nods. The nods were an unconscious Minnesota tradition, chin up not down. Soon goofy grins were erupting from their faces. A chuckle escaped from Wyatt’s composure, and as they met to greet, Hayden hugged him unabashedly.
“How was the flight?” Hayden said softly in mid-hug. His voice had always been wise and handsome, but seemed to have a rich timbre Wyatt had either forgotten or never noticed before.
Wyatt backed up a step, and proclaimed, “Juniper!”
“What?”
“Juniper! Just remember it,” Wyatt said slyly.
“I don’t understand.”
“You may never know, but remember it- just in case.”
“Okay Wyatt- juniper.”
“Juniper,” said Wyatt.
“Another game.”
“You don’t like my games?” Wyatt asked, feigning hurt feelings.
“Ha-ha Wyatt, I love them. I highly approve sir.”
“Okay then, where is she hiding?” Wyatt asked.
“Jen? You think she’d come to see you?”
“Come on man, where is she?”
“Jen’s home with the flu, but she wished she could come,” Hayden said, and Wyatt searched his face for a lie, unable to confirm or deny it.
Then they milled around the baggage carousel for a while, talking about their family, and their jobs, genuinely pleased with each other’s presence. When they left the terminal Hayden asked very assertively, “Are you going to Iraq? It’s not a foregone conclusion you know.”
Wyatt didn’t answer. He had not thought of it that way yet. Nor did Hayden insist on a response. They both fell silent, allowing the question to hang ominously.
As they drove out of the city and headed north, towards their mother’s home, Wyatt observed that the Sun was already setting. “I somehow missed the sunrise from the plane," he said. "I lost a whole day I guess. I wish Jen was here. Where is she?”
“I told you she’s home sick Wyatt. You’ll see her soon enough,” Hayden said.
“Huh, I just wish she was here. I miss her,” said Wyatt, suspicious. Where was she? His imagination hurried to concoct jealous explanations the same way it had raced to assemble an impossible love story the first time he met her.
“So Wyatt, you don’t have to go you know.”
“Yes, I’m in the army. I have to follow orders, and think about it. This isn’t why I’m going, but they’d send me to jail if I didn’t.”
“Wyatt, Gary is setting up shop near Toronto. He’s got two birds up there, 44’s, and he offered me a job flying for him. You can come.”
“I can’t. I’m not like that, not like you.”
“Listen to me Wyatt. I know they filled your head with a bunch of nonsense and guilt about having to serve your country, but you’ve paid your dues. You’ve paid yours and probably mine too. You don’t owe them a thing if you ask me. It’s not your war. Part of Gary’s operation is going to be an aerial photography service, and they need a mechanic. It’d be something nice for you to do. Something you would like. A man deserves to abide his own code right? You don’t have to live your life in an army barracks, or in a trench or a foxhole.”
Wyatt thought about it, abide his own code, his own words had more weight when Hayden said them.
“It’s just too much- to move like that, to just… disappear. That's called AWOL. I don’t want to wreck my future, just to run away from my duty. And what about Jen?” he said.
“Jen is madly in love with you. She shot me down while you were gone,” Hayden joked. “She’ll follow you. I promise. And at least if you come with me to Canada, you know you’ll have a future. There’re no guarantees about that in Iraq.”
“I don’t know. It’s a big… It’s a huge decision. I didn't even know I had a choice until now. I hadn't thought of it that way.”
“I know. But you do have a choice, and you have ten days before you go. Just give it some thought.”
They got to their mother’s house late, after midnight, and both crept to their old bedrooms to sleep. Wyatt remained awake with a head full of jetlag and conflict. He pained over the fork ahead, unable for the longest time to answer even simple questions for himself. What was the most important thing?
Wyatt relived a private moment he and Jen had shared, stolen away from Hayden and his girlfriend in canoe, drifting across a northern-boundary lake.
“You think we’re in Canada?” Jen had asked, slouching back on her elbows in the bow of the canoe.
“Maybe; have you ever done it in a foreign country?” Wyatt had asked her, unhanding his oar to move close to her, playfully, and to trace the silk curve of her knee up towards her hips. Jen didn’t have to shave her legs. There was only the softest baby hair on them, so fine it could just be detected by the closest inspection. He ran his finger over her thigh, balancing along an imaginary line, one which he could never accurately predict whether she would or would not allow him to cross.
Jen had jumped, startled, and shrieked, “A moose!”
Nope, not this time, Wyatt had thought as he turned to see the massive creature. It had been larger than any magazine or nature program could ever fully convey. Wyatt had thought it was as big as a dinosaur, and later used that term, “dinosaur big”, to describe it to Hayden. The beast had lumbered across the shoreline, knee deep, refreshing itself in cool September water. This was his home, the whole world, all of nature and survival. It was completely unbound.
“You think you could protect me from him?” Jen had asked, coyly.
“He’s an animal. He’s wild.” Wyatt had not detected the intimate promise of Jen’s tone.
“You’re a wild animal too.” She had said, pulling him into her.
***
The Sun was still down, and it was black and frozen outside when Hayden got out of bed to let Jen in for the surprise that morning. He led her to Wyatt’s room where she was to crawl into his bed, careful not to wake him.
But Wyatt was gone. He wasn’t sleeping there in the room, or in the house or in the state. He had snuck off to war, and only left behind a letter in an envelope that bore the label, “Open when you see me again.”
Amid his confusion and the disappointment that lingered in the room, Hayden wondered about Wyatt’s game,
Juniper?
***
It was ten months later that Hayden finally opened Wyatt’s letter, and read it aloud.
“First, to Hayden, I’d like to apologize for the mysterious nature of this letter. It had to be this way. You would never have accepted it had you known it was a…” Hayden paused for a breathless moment, than heaved himself back into Wyatt’s words. “…had you know it was a death letter.”
The despair caught back up to him, and Hayden shuddered. His face twisted uncontrollably with grief. The sorrow in that room was unyielding; the audience, a grey sea of anguished faces, was casting waylaid gazes upon him in a tide of miserable, irresistible pain. He succumbed, and joined those who were openly sobbing. Wyatt was gone forever, snuffed out in his sleeping hut by a lucky mortar round, and no other would ever be quite like him.
Hayden released a shuddering sigh, and gathered his faculties, tenderly resuming his oratory posture at the podium:
“I also must apologize for leaving you, and mom and Jen, so suddenly. I didn’t want to be convinced. You may or may not understand, but now it’s too late for that. I know this must be hard for you, but I ask that you share these words with whoever knew me well enough to be saddened by my death. Any method will be fine, but if I have a say, I’d prefer whichever causes the least pain.
“Do you remember picking me up at the airport? I said something which probably seemed out of place at the time, but which upon reading this will gain great meaning.
‘Juniper’
Reminds of Jennifer,
The smell of juniper,
I remember to pledge,
My endless love to her.
If she’ll be mine today,
I’ll swear my life to her,
So keep close to my heart,
My lovely Jennifer.
“This may seem an odd little game, but then weren’t they all? You were an inspiration, and I have admired you completely in these last few years. You have not forgotten to live wild, as we did together when we were kids. Continue to do so, and always bring me along on your journeys.
“Mom, you know you were my muse, my first inspiration. Without you, I would never have written a sentence or snapped a picture. You bring truth to the old saying, ‘Mother knows you better than you know you,’ and you have brought an endless depth and love of beauty to my life. Thank you.
“I don’t have much to regret, and everything I have ever wanted, I have now: a loving family, friends and the last word. You should have known I could never leave this world without having it.
“As to the cause that drove me out of this beautiful life, well, I presume there is no satisfaction down that road. I take full responsibility, as I should. I have made decisions, promises: I've made too many of them. Now I'm paying back what I owe by leaving behind the world, my loved ones, forever.
“And that is the hardest part Jennifer, for I have broken my oath. I can’t imagine a deeper pain than losing you, a pain which I will never suffer. I am the one who has abandoned you, and in doing so, left you to bear that burden alone. Nothing can be a more desperate guilt than that. It seems trivial to say, but I am sorry. Know that if there is an afterlife, sometime, some way I will find you there to hold and to watch the sun rise. I love you.
“Goodbye,
“Wyatt Joyce”
the product of infinite hubris. Knowing about evolution is not to know that we are nothing. It only knocks us off of our natural delusion of grandeur. The fact that it's such a long fall is the result of the soaring height of our solipsism, not the depravity of reality. Indeed, the preceding paragraph is evidence of this hubris. It is a whiney declaration of tragedy because the universe doesn't care about me personally, because my memory will not last forever. That's a bit like complaining that Brunelleschi didn’t dedicate the Basillica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (and thus the exposition to the Renaissance) to me, only worse - cosmically worse. So what; the universe doesn't care, so we had better care about each other. As Hitchens says, only after we understand that there's no divine authority looking out for us do we realize that we might have to abolish slavery ourselves.
This is the original fuss maker, and still a wonderfully cogent case for evolution by natural selection. There was a great deal that Darwin didn’t know about. Mendel’s work in genetics was published the year before Origin, but ironically unbeknownst to Darwin. And of course, the discreet, quaternary structure of the information stored by DNA couldn’t have been known until Watson and Crick discovered it in 1953. Still, Origin remains a wonderful entry point to evolutionary theory.
I admit to having a natural atheist’s preference for Dawkins, and after reading him it will become clear to you why there is no Stephen J. Gould on this list. None the less, I am fairly certain that The Selfish Gene must be on any respectable evolution education list, especially one as philosophy minded as this. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins states with pure tone clarity exactly how reductionist we should make our thinking caps when regarding biology. His explanation of genetics, and the gene as the most prescient unit of natural selection was and still is a major contribution to neo-darwinism. Along the way Dawkins draws up many deep concepts and brilliant examples. It is important to note that the title, The Selfish Gene, is misleading. This isn’t a book about a specific gene for the personality trait of selfishness, nor a justification for being selfish. In fact, one of the overarching themes of the book is an explanation of the emergence of altruistic creatures from a substrate of genes that only ever evolve towards their own blind, mechanically selfish ends.
I know, another Dawkins book, but this one deserves to be on the list as well. The anticipation is that after reading Origin and The Selfish Gene, your head will be full of theory. Knowing how evolution happens, you will want to know exactly what happened here on Earth (or more honestly, what scientists thought happened based on the best evidence available when the book was published in 2004). The Ancestor’s Tale answers that question quite well, and without overstepping the limitations of current scientific knowledge. Dawkins is consummately intellectually honest, always careful to delineate between speculation and well trod science. The history starts with humans, and works back through most recent common ancestors with all of our current cousins. First it discusses the most recent common human ancestors that all living humans share - Mitochondrial Eve, Y-chromosome Adam and their ilk. Then it works back through our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos; then the rest of the apes; then gibbons etc... 
Soon the book has ranged beyond the marsupials all the way back towards the most recent common ancestor of all mammals, and eventually (after traversing the entire 614 page treasure trove) it arrives, with a healthy dose of explicitly acknowledged speculation, at the most recent common ancestor of all life on Earth. In the tradition of Chauser, Dawkins, tells the tale of a specific animal at each rendezvous point, and each tale has a moral about evolutionary biology to teach. For instance, the Axolotl’s tale, told when our most recent common ancestor with the amphibians is met, teaches the concept of neoteny. The Ancestor’s Tale is probably the most easily enjoyed of all the books on this list, and if you read just one, this should probably be it.
The title says it all here. This book is about sex and human nature. It’s the most provocative book on this list, placing humans firmly where they belong on the tree of life. When I say the book is about sex, take it two ways. First the obvious: yes, sex, as in people humping, why they do it, and why they do it the way they do it. There is a whole chapter on female infidelity as well as a chapter on the evolutionary explanation for the diversity of male sexual behavior - from harems to monogamy to homosexuality. The other way you should take it is less obvious. The question of how sexual reproduction could ascend to dominance in an evolutionary environment dominated by asexual reproduction is a perennial one for Darwinism. It is not perfectly clear that Ridley solved it, but the first several chapters of The Red Queen are dedicated to at the least advancing the ball, and he does a wonderful job of it. This book will blow your hair back. If you already fancy yourself an amateur evolution expert, and only read one book on this list, make it this one.
Dennett is a philosopher, not a biologist, but I would argue that he is as well educated on the topic of evolution as any biologists. This book isn’t so much an explanation of Darwin’s idea and the footnotes that modern science has added to it as it is a treatise on the ravages evolution has done to pre-Darwin philosophy. What of the precious Platonic idea of essentialism? What about purpose and meaning? What about free will? God? Does Darwin’s dangerous idea leave anything sacred? Dennett gives a gracious and morally conscientious treatment to these questions. Darwin's Dangerous Idea is definitely a book about evolution, but along the way you will encounter such a diversity of thought experiments, you will forget about biology all together from time to time. Of the books on this list, this is both the most difficult to read and my favorite.![irony [ahy'-ruh-nee]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JoxAY1m3_AM/SkgFxI5oYTI/AAAAAAAAAEk/L_mumx65QR4/S150/irony6.jpg)
