The Horror of the War

Introduction

Although accusations abounded that biological weapons were among the most nefarious means we used in that war, I, a military psychiatrist tasked with dealing with "brainwashed" American soldiers returned from North Korean---or, effectively, Chinese and possibly even Soviet--captivity, know that this is only as true of an accusation as far as it goes, so to speak. The words themselves, "biological weapons," refer to fact. But the kind of fact being referred to, is what I would take issue with the average defender of American exceptionalism regarding.

I came in near the end of the peninsular "police action," as the Allies politely called the desolation of two nations and the incineration or drowning---and worse---of millions of civilians. True, those who made the first real moves in the game of the war wrought atrocities aplenty of their own---but I am now speaking of my tour of duty, far from immediate political questions of moral equivalence and unholy incommensurabilities.

Private Daniel Haleman, from a rough town in an obscure forestland gracing the seasons of the Pacific Northwest, had been captured at the age of twenty-one, very early in the war. How he had escaped was something of either legend or mystery, depending on who of those who counted themselves as tenuous comrades therewith you asked. Unanimously those who hinted at or indicated hostile or negative attitudes towards at least some of the transition's circumstances always pointed to the curious, quite-angled tattoo the young man bore, one said to have been received while he was captive in the Red north. Christian extremists in these ranks would claim all sorts of neo-Nazi or Soviet symbolism, even some Maoist imagery, and then refer this hideous stature to deeper possibilities of iniquity.

On the other hand, Haleman had many defenders, myself included---if only until the end. Among these was a young man with whom he maintained correspondence before the war and to some degree afterwards. I never learned this personage's name and so adopted in my own musings the easy-to-use moniker "Mr. Know," to refer to him. I also wound up in possession of a singular letter, in an envelope steeped or somehow printed in blackened paper, with nodules along the sheet of paper encased therein, a Braille of incomprehensible origins. Lastly, his mother attempted twice to speak with him, but he apparently never took the time to rebuff her. In this, I think, he showed himself not as degenerate as he was to be accused of by any at all; but though I believed the regular accusations against him false, I came to have leave to ask whether he was partly to blame for something else just as hideous.