GOODBYE, SOUL BROTHER: The Cavalry of Ten Thousand Horses

1. THE GREEN HELL

1.1.  Shuvee, Lexington, lately of the _th squadron/_regiment, wants to go home.  More than two years after the end of the latest war to end all wars he remains in Fusaichi, the most undevastated part of devastated Japan, awaking on a cot in a Quonset hut shared with the other troop commanders.  

Listen -

the rasp of open-mouthed breathing, drooling, the stale breath, the dried drool; listen - the squeak of burdened mattresses when bodies turn, adjust to a new comfort, the breathing and the  rasping and the drooling and the squeaking and the adjusting of bodies; listen - sweat is drenching sheets, infiltrating the close air of the Q-hut.  Troop commander Shuvee hears it, the drenching sound of sweat, the seeping sound of sweat into sheets.  Listen.  Some other captain has let one rip.  A healthy wet rip.  My God, Shuvee thinks, can he play reveille?  No surprise.  Their guts are unhealthy.  A man who comes to Fusaichi should not have entrails.  The ripping smell hangs in the air.  The close air.  It’s always there in the close air:  the stubborn hanging of sweat and stale farts.  And the stink of Fusaichi, the incredible stink of it.  It somehow postures itself outside the Q-hut, lingers there, loiters and waits for the captain who must leave the troop commanders’ Q-hut to perform the duties of officer of the day.  The day is the second of November, 1947, anno domini.  

1.2.  Capt. Shuvee opens his eyes to the view of the galvanized steel ceiling of the Q-hut and wishes for a stainless sunshine when the sun, beautiful even with its worthless penetration of green Fusaichi, eliminates the darkness.  His first thought before the primitive rising of the worthlessly penetrating sun:  Shit, still in the boonies.  The goddamn green boonies of Fusaichi, not on the way to anywhere from anywhere else.  Most especially not on the way home.  On the outskirts of everyplace on the planet, Fusaichi is, somehow, considered a good investment by the U.S. Army, otherwise, why keep them here more than two years after the surrender?  Capt. Shuvee hasn’t had a home since he joined the Army.  He’s had outposts, camps, frontlines, lines of demarcation, trenches, not a home.  Join the Army:  become a professional homeless man.  

He joined because he would eventually be drafted and he didn’t want to be a conscripted body in uniform.  Dropped out of the University of New Hampshire where he played football - ra ra sisboomba . . . gooooooo Wildcats!  Always rushing, he would rush the passer while smiling a Wildcat’s smile.  Shuvee “the levee” he was called:  the ultimate embankment against an offensive flood.  He left it all to join the Army because Japan attacked his country: house of the Shuvees went up in an uproar, especially his mother Mrs. Alice Carnel-Shuvee, too much of a feminist to remove her maiden name.  Originally from Boston, she married Mr. Gabriel Charles Shuvee and settled with him at Nashua, New Hampshire where he owned a grand property and a sporting goods store for which he had a mad passion.  

1.3.  Passionately and real quiet because the other captains were still sleeping drooling farting rasping squeaking their cots Capt. Shuvee sits up and begins his morning ablutions:  shit, shower and shave and in that order.  Then he returns to his cot from underneath which he takes an anthology of poetry and reads -

Listen.

You can hear someone reading if you concentrate.  Hear and see.  Look:  Capt. Shuvee is sitting on his cot with a posture worthy of congressional honor and reading and reading sounds like consumption.  Listen.  Capt. Shuvee reads Von Clausewitz:  the greatest secret of war is to starve the enemy.  He reads this and silently applauds, in his head, dig?  everyone who turned Japan into a starving at most and everywhere hungry island nation, hungry and humble.  After  his silent wild applause he reads Napoleon:  a soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.  Fighting in Fusachi is for survival and if such survival is ever given a ribbon that ribbon’s color will be green.  Now he reads the war strategy of the master of war, Sun Tzu: All War is Deception.  And the deceived captain sits on his cot in his shared Q-hut - listen - and exchanges strategy for poetry first with Yeats: In dreams begin responsibility and he thinks I’m a dreamer; Auden:  Some books are undeservedly forgotten/none are undeservedly remembered and knows that if he were a book he would be past forgetting; Tennyson, Alfred lord of all who wrote reams of verse:  Cannon to right of them/Cannon to left of them/Volley’d and thunder’d/Stormed at with shot and shell and he must finish with Walt “Uncle Walt” Whitman (the favorite of his Uncle “Mo” Maurice) who sung his body electric and he reads among the bodies of his fellow troop commanders, their bodies restless in rest, they toss and turn like a proverb, fart and drool and snore like a skin bag of gases.  

They all have gas.  Diarrhea.  Nothing that goes in solid comes out solid if you’re an American in Fusaichi.  Taking a shit is like pissing out of the wrong hole.  Burns, it does.  Hell, trooper, I think I just singed off all my anal hairs.  Singed them off in Fusaichi, if not the asshole of the world than just a cunt hair away.  Definitely not on the way from anywhere to anywhere else?  That so?  How about that?  Then how does he find himself here?  How did the entire squadron arrive here to smell the undying hang of singed anal hairs and wet flatulence.  One trooper said at service that Fusaichi smells like gas and the squadron’s chaplain replied that we were all made in His image and so to take comfort in the fact that He farted out Fusaichi and we have been brought to breathe His holy flatulence.  But the chaplain is crazy.  They are all boonified or damn near, here in the boonies of Fusaichi where the craziest captain of them all must wear cologne or, rather, the mustard gas that he calls cologne.  Who wears cologne in the Fusaichian boonies?  Capt. Shuvee understands.  That captain believes that he can smother the stink of Fusaichi by dousing himself in artificial fragrance.  

Heavier than the emissions from rotten American intestines is the natural odor of the boonies.  Organic.  Capt. Shuvee knows it well.  Smelled it countless times all those times he went in the woods of the Shuvee property to congregate with wild nature.  Humble by nature he never pedestaled himself because of his species.  He thought in terms of human and nonhuman animals because we are all of us animals in the animal kingdom despite our species’ own le roi des animaux superior attitude.  In his boyhood he understood dominion to mean guardianship and protection so he did not hunt though he would have made a great hunter.  Always had an excellent aptitude for firearms.  With the m one rifle (the service rifle of the Army) he was a one man army.  More than one crack shot was a brave shot and in taking none of his shots was he a stranger to fear and in none could he have not done better.  His father always told him that a true man is always on a path of progress.  

The captain’s progress ended with end of the latest war to end all wars.  Dubya Dubya Deuce, dig?  With its end he has no more enemies to shoot.  He thinks thid ending more than permissible.  Tender, even, because he is tired of shooting.  Tired of the smell of a successful shot.  Every shot you make is ordained by Jesus, his father would say.  Well, he is tired of being a click click boom shotgun messiah.  He is tired.  Overwhelmed.  He prays This world will bring me trials and tribulations but I will be in good cheer because You have overwhelmed this world.  Amen hallelujah.  He remembers that he must visit the chaplain during his rounds as officer of the day.  

1.4. The first day he smelled organic death was a biblical ordeal.  Brief and biblical.  He smelled it and instantly and briefly knew it as both Genetic - for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return; and Ecclesiastic - for the living know that they will die but the dead know nothing.  He smelled and he knew as he came upon a dead deer.  Dead enough for botflies to have claimed dominion.  To God, the dust commander, he left her and to Mr. G.C. Shuvee, his father, he returned to show  the latest recordings in his notebook in which he recorded all the scat and track he found and identified.  Known as the king of scat of the entire county he came home and boasted, “See this scat, daddy?  It was dropped by a _______ not more than ____hours ago, you can tell by its shape and texture and - ”on-and-on he went and on-and-on his daddy stared hard to read what his son had recorded.  Hard staring, by God.  Because Mr. G.C. Shuvee was blind in one eye and this “Pollard’s vision” kept him from serving.  His son and only child, however, having perfect vision was stamped with approval to answer the call of duty.  Family and close friends advised Mr. G.C. Shuvee not to be ashamed but grateful for his blind luck and, after all, the Army Induction Center wasn’t lying when it determined that he would have to see the whites of the enemies’ eyes before he could see them well enough to shoot them and, by God, this wasn’t the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American Revolutionary War.  This was the latest war to end all wars, by God, and no one wanted an even later one so every one warring in it had to be well-sighted, by God.  

1.5. With approved vision and verse of poetry smothered by the biblical truth, hard truth, to be honest (scripture is always his final task of all his morning mental ablutions) Capt. Shuvee stores all his books away under his cot and makes his cot tighter than a reluctant virgin.  A coin would bounce off it.  So tight.  Wishes everyone’s bowels were as tight.  One second you’re fine and the next you’re pissing hot brown water out of your asshole.  Not a gentlemanly thing to do, for sure. And he is, above all, a gentleman, or so he imagines or so he esteems to be.  Gentlemanly he shits, showers and shaves, he dresses to begin his day as officer thereof.  

The Fusaichian stench will blast him when he removes himself from the Q-hut, steps over the threshold, steps as if the sanctity of all the world depends upon his movement.  Delicate and robust.  Undeniable yet refrained by God who always demands humility.  Into the native stink.  Into the native green.  Hellish green.  

Who was it? - yes, the chaplain.  Clement Canonero II, affectionately “Papa Clem,” who was a missionary in Brazil determined to raise a native to the glory of God because, after flunking out of college, it was either that or do something drastic like, say, kill himself or become a poet.  Not wanting to commit treason against his soul and having zero talent for liberal arts he chose the choice of proselytization and if it turned out to be the wrong choice, well, at least had made it with the God’s given freedom of choosing choice.  Had it been up to his father he wouldn’t have had a choice.  When Papa Clem’s papa came along everyone declared, “Here’s zealous Lucas” and ain’t no lying.  Zealous with unreal zeal.  Had a zealous connection with the Almighty.  Papa Lucas Canonero was originally Clement Canonero but changed his name to Lucas because he wanted to focus of Jesus’s ministry like the companion of Apostle Paul.  

1.6. Capt. Paul Kauvar, generally an Austrailian, more specifically a West Austrailian, opens his eyes in time to see Capt. Shuvee step over the threshold into the green night of Fusaichi and, being poetical himself, thinks Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways/and deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low and he knows that Capt. Shuvee’s only way is into the dark green hell as he watches him go.

1.7. If there is ever a service stripe given for service in Fusaichi it must be green.  Forget its stink.  Look at its green.  And if its green can make you forget its stink then, by God, how green must it be.  All shades, too.  You name it and Fusaichi sheds it from sky from tree from bush from creek from stream from leaf from the Q-hut Capt. Shuvee’s first destination is radiotelegraph “room.”  It is a strictly traditional room on account of its four walls, check, its entrance/exit, check, its roof, check:  this triple check justifies it as a room but it has only enough room to accommodate no more than four troopers, maybe six if all of them were super lean and lanky and only then if they were squeezed in assholes to elbows.  No matter the accommodation this room is occupied from dusk till dawn and dawn till dusk by a radiotelegraph operator, the dit da man, dig?  He operates the dit da machine primarily with his index finger that works the radiotelegraph machine.  

Before the operator of the second morning of November, 1947 speaks to Capt. Shuvee the captain must make his way to him, must follow the boot-rutted path through the Fusaichian green to the man who operates the dit da machine.  It’s a busy machine.  Always dit’ing and da’ing, always its brass key working under the sweat of the operator sitting and sweating in the green of Fusaichi.  All kinds of green.  Wintergreen, spearmint green, spring green, green ginger, green summer like a showery summer of green.  All of it shafted by a green light, a twinkling light that shimmers and twinkles and fairies down through the air all around the stench and the smell and the stink and the heat and humidity and the sweat and the diarrhetic misery.  

Miserably and full of duty Capt. Shuvee steps over the threshold and barely misses pulverizing a FuPeg turd:  the excrement of the tiny yellow natives who have lived here since dirt.  Stinking little FuPegs.  The largest males barely match an adolescent American male.  And they cover only what the chaplain calls their privy parts.  Small stinking yellow and free-shitting FuPegs.  They squeeze one out whenever the urge takes them.  Just assume the simian squat, that unique pose utilized for moving the bowels.  When their bowels are moved the aftermath is a solid loaf unlike the hot liquid stream that comes out of the Americans.  The turd that Capt. Shuvee narrowly missed is fresh as fresh and the FuPeg who pinched it is nowhere to be seen.  

Capt. Shuvee engages the hellish green one step after another, wan tup threep fower lef rye lef hada lef rye lef toward the radiotelegraph so-called “room.”  Lef rye lef over the uncut grass and one must wonder if each lef and every rye makes the Fusaichian grass wonder at his audacity to leave a foreign carbon footprint.  

1.8. Wan tup threep fower lef rye lef hada lef rye lef your lef your lef your lef rye lef hada lef rye lef under the fantastic moon hanging like a sky lantern in the dark dynamic sky.  

1.9.  The captain encounters another trooper.

1.10.  Mornin’, cap’n.

1.11.  Mornin’, trooper.

1.12.  And the captain keeps on lef’ing and rye’ing without a hitch like a well oiled machine, with awesome liquidity.  Look - each step is smart, his left foot takes a 30 inch step and he places his heel on the green ground of Fusaichi first and when he steps off he coordinates an arm swing.  See his arms swing and sway right arm forward with his left leg, left arm forward with his right leg, hands cupped with thumbs aimed down, his arms not stiff but swaying and swinging in a perfectly natural motion nine inches to the front and six inches to the rear.  Smooth and liquid and natural unlike the squadron commander who stomps like the tin man instead of landing naturally and smoothly on the heel and rising smoothly and naturally from the toes.