Instinctive Reactions of a Dumb Ass

I knew very lit­tle about Viet­nam, except that US troops were being deployed there to halt the spread of Com­mu­nism. While I had no qualms with this goal on the sur­face, under­neath I sim­mered in a pot of emo­tional uncer­tainty that seemed to con­tra­dict this a pri­ori asser­tion. At the time, I was unable to pin­point any spe­cific feel­ing, other than a cer­tain uneasi­ness I expe­ri­enced around just how far I could go with regard to tak­ing part in the killing of other human beings.

By now, my dis­com­fort with the Navy had grown to such an extent that I began to won­der what my body, in its more infi­nite wis­dom, was try­ing to tell me. As the under­ground resis­tance to my life in the Navy had spread through­out my body, I found myself feel­ing more like a stub­born mule that refused to budge no mat­ter how much I cajoled or prod­ded it, than I did the human being that’d got­ten it into this mess. O how I wished I could see what it saw in its earthy wis­dom. But alas, I seemed hope­lessly trapped in an inescapable morass or night­mare, from which not even I could free my own ass.

Although the mule has received a bum rap as being a dumb ani­mal or “dumb ass“, like the jack­ass who sired it, more often than not, it takes after its mother, the mare who gave birth to it, in the way it gen­er­ally behaves. How­ever, if it senses a command’d shove it beyond the bound­aries of appro­pri­ate behav­ior for a mule, it’ll quickly revert to behav­ing like an ass. See­ing such orders as a lie to be resisted with every wily trick at its dis­posal, thus will it play dumb, ignore the com­mand, or refuse to budge, choos­ing instead to sit down on its haunches and bray at our stu­pid­ity while we—with our supe­rior intellect—stumble off into the very night­mares our more asi­nine instincts refuse to go.

And so did I assume a more mul­ish role onboard the ship by play­ing dumb, ignor­ing com­mands or pre­tend­ing to mis­un­der­stand such orders. When­ever I caved into the demands of the lif­ers and tried to lead an exem­plary seaman’s life, I’d grow increas­ingly agi­tated. As soon as I returned to my mul­ish escapades, I found hap­pi­ness again. Sub­jected to a form of behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion by my mule, I quickly learned to pay closer atten­tion to his wily ways. Like the mule, then, I could see that this life was not for me, that it was out of bounds for me—against my truest instincts. But I couldn’t see any fur­ther than the end of my nose or the instinc­tive reac­tions of a dumb ass, for unlike my mother, or the more mar­ish part of me, I was inca­pable, at the time, of ver­bal­iz­ing what I felt.