Meaning

     John was about to board the ship that would take him and another three thousand, five hundred and eleven men off to the gray coasts of England. He didn’t fear death, guns, hostility, indigence, amputations, or insanity. He was well aware of these risks, though, and knew what that journey to Europe represented, but he took the aftermath for granted, and didn’t even suspect the nearly unbearable costs he would have to pay should he return to his home in one broken-mended piece. It was a test, a horrifying, nightmarish test he had been forcedly submitted to. He had never had any intention whatsoever to become a part of history, but when his name appeared on the draft there was nothing to do to avoid it. Summoned to the murky feast of the Waltzing Reaper by the madman’s physiological need to ostracize every bit of goodness left in humanity.
     Three weeks later he was part of Overlord. The pale, dismal moon over the Atlantic gave the Channel a solemn, peaceful appearance that night. The air fleet purred softly above their heads. And John thought that was what the Israelites must have felt minutes before Moses split up the sea, an unprecedented sense of ease and awe, all at once. He wished for Alice to be there with him –skinny, lovely Alice –just so she could behold the strange majesty of that display of megalomania with him, and so that she could hold his hand tight and in that comforting dread whisper “I am here with you.”
     It was right then, on the bow deck overseeing the first signs of his true reality –the glimpses of blasts, the vague roar of the waves breaking into the distant shores and the enemy gunfire on top of those yet-unknown cliffs splashing into the muffling bloodstained banks of sand– that John anticipated a far worse outcome than surviving the night, and woke up to this realization: the war would never end for him. His long-forgotten search for meaning struck him harder than any bullet might, and made him understand that in order to live he would have to deprive himself of the reassuring perception he had always had of everything that surrounded him, including both himself and Alice. He could no longer be John as he’d always known him. Casualty or veteran, he would have to remain a shallow shell of who he’d always been. And thus his war would not end on the beaches of Normandy. His sanity would not perish before the gashing suffering of his fellow soldiers. His death would not find him in a trench in the Bulge. And his service would not see its conclusion in the wolf’s lair or in the eagle’s nest. His victory would have to lie miles away from there. In the woman he claimed he loved. In the land he claimed he loved, where everything had just lost its significance, detached from any realities and details he might have ever known and grown to be grateful for, like the tiny pleasures of daily life, or the artistic contemplation of the sunset, or the incessant humming of a song stuck in his head, all of it gone, ripped off of his mind. The search for meaning would have to go on then for years after, leave him like a castle ghost amidst the fog of a black-and-white limbo, back home. And there would be no more poetry, no more howling, no more love, no more jazz, no more missing rooms.
     Until that war was over.
     And nothing left to do, but hold back the tears.
     Oh, Alice. She…

BCA

In memoriam Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”