Instantly, I realized He spoke in a language peculiar to all of mankind, and yet as different as every individual who has ever lived, for this babble was meant to confuse all but the one in whose tongue he spoke. To keep from losing touch with Who I Really Am, I had no choice then, but to listen to the One Voice, as it painstakingly pointed out to me the way I must go. Otherwise, I would only find confusion.

“Few like what he has to say,“ proclaimed some strange ensemble from across the void.

“They might learn what He really wants of them,“ I thought to myself, “which may conflict with their own agendas. As out of touch as they are with their feelings—the original language of mankind—they are incapable of seeing through the great darkness that has descended upon us and thrown our world into a tailspin.“

“All aboard!“ rang out the voices of my faculties, in the almost effortless, musical charade they played to entice me back into the world of the imagination.

At the invitation of the conductor, who looked a bit like my old mentor, did I fall back on the only reservation I had—of getting too carried away with my imagination.

“All aboard!“ came the last call.

With that, was I swept away with the rest of the crew, to the gun line off the coast of Vietnam, to see our first real action.

MR. HART: What was the approximate date the Davidson arrived on the gun line?

RESPONDENT: October. No, September.

MR. HART: 1967?

RESPONDENT: September, 1967.

As I ventured down avenues seldom, if ever, traveled by the likes of me, I stumbled upon a great fault in my personality, that volcanic rift between self ’n’ soul which’d been handed down to me through a line of ancestors that went all the way back to the beginning of time, when the Original Being was split in two for the sake of consciousness. Peering over the side, into the historic depths of this great rift, I watched as, ages ago, this crack spewed forth a magician, whose magical powers were second to none but those of the Creator. Immediately I recognized the magician as the Great Necromancer whom I’d encountered earlier. As it became clearer to me how much his very existence depended on this rift, I realized he was the one who had driven the soul underground and set up the self as a puppet dictator.

Having grown up oblivious to the wants ’n’ needs of my soul, with the onset of puberty had I fallen headfirst into this rift, where I wandered in darkness until Fate, the mother of soul, forced me to choose between her daughter and my self. Having been enlisted by the Navy to go off and free the soul of this country, Miss Liberty, from the clutches of the evil magician, Ho Chi Minh, little did I know I’d been duped, along with thousands of other young men, into fighting for one of Uncle Sam’s alter egos, a puppet dictator in South Vietnam. Thus was I cast to play the part of a fool in this human tragedy or adaptation of a divine drama in which I was to simultaneously star as the real hero.

A new breed of men, the reservists differed from the low life Neanderthals as much as did the Cro-Magnon men of prehistoric times. A more intelligent and sensitive lot, they hated, with a passion, their indentured servitude to a lower form of life, and rued the day they had ever gotten involved in this country’s military solution to the problems in Vietnam. However much they indulged in grass, hashish, or acid to escape the hellish conflict within themselves over their participation in this war, they nevertheless remained faithful to the wives and fiancées they’d left behind. In spite of their disaffection with the Navy and the war in Vietnam, they still performed their tasks, only to the beat of the rock music to which they constantly subjected themselves, to drown out the screaming of their souls in righteous indignation over their complicity. More often than not were they standing up for what they believed, and at least confronting the lifers before they would agree to carry out those commands that offended their sensibilities in any way. And because I seemed to speak to something hidden deep within their beings, they unconsciously adopted me as the rebel for their cause, the white knight who might just free them from themselves.

The lifers, on the other hand, feared this new breed of man, who dared to stand up to them and question their authority. Like outcasts, the lifers had flocked to the Great Gray Whore, only because she appeared to give them what this society otherwise withheld from them—a reason for living. Driven to serve the soul of this sick society, these patriots of the Great Gray Whore searched in vain through the brothels of the Far East for her ever-illusive form. In their quest for the Great Prostitute, the genie who could fulfill their every desire, they turned to the Spirits of Alcohol. Instead of releasing the genie bottled up within them, they aroused, from his slumber, the ogre who ruled over her, the instinctive beast hidden within us all—Hyde. Because Hyde gave them what they wanted, they grew fond of the horny old devil. Then, one day, they ran into their own shadowy perception of the white knight, hiding out within a lowly peon named Drury, and grew fearful; for somewhere, in the back pages of their minds, they recalled a tale from the days of old, in which the white knight slays the beast.

And in the middle stood the majority of the crew who, unlike the lifers, still had some semblance of a conscience to which the white knight could appeal. Caught up in this tug-of-war for their souls, when push came to shove, they often fell prey to the ways of their animal natures. In their inability to interpret the language of the body, they easily lost their heads when confronted by the rawness of their desires. With their heads in the clouds, and their feet mired down in clay, were they driven to live like the gods, one day, and the beasts of the earth, the next; for this, they believed, was the fate of those who lived in the middle.

While neither lifers nor reservists would have much to do with each other, those who lived in the middle associated freely with the members of both factions. By at least keeping open the paths of communication between the two sides, they seemed to temper some of the hostility each side felt for the other. For now, they were the glue that tenuously held the crew together.

“If ya mean the hate I feel for the f____n’ Navy and for f____n’ lifers, like Farris, yeah, sure I’ve felt it,“ replied Marty, “eatin’ away at my insides, until I’m ready to f____n’ explode.“

“Can’t ya see, Marty?“ I exclaimed. “Filling you with hate for the Navy is soul’s way of letting ya know she can’t tolerate the life you’re leading. Having shown ya what she doesn’t like in your life, she’s also given ya some indication of the direction she’d like to see it move.

“Don’t ya recall how alive we all felt as we shared with each other our fantasies, the rebellious ideas our souls had awakened in us? Don’t ya see how listless we’ve all gotten since they cracked down on us with their decrees? Don’t ya ever feel like just reaching out and grabbing hold of the life that’d relieve the ache inside your heart and set ya free?

“Don’t ya see what we do to ourselves, Marty? When the soul draws us to her with tantalizing fantasies, we quite naturally stop what we’re doing and go to her. But let her demand commitment from us, and we drop her like a hot potato, for some whore or totally unbefitting way of life that neither satisfies our desires nor fulfills our needs.

“Why? Why do we reject one set of fantasies as unrealistic and accept another as real? Why don’t we decide for ourselves what is real? “Don’t ya see, Marty, it’s because we’re afraid. Because their fantasy’s overshadowed the hearts ’n’ minds of men for so long, we’ve grown up fearing the power they have over our lives, what they can do to us if we disobey them.

“And while the havoc wreaked upon our souls, by our participation in their crimes against the rest of humanity, is far greater than the damage they could ever inflict upon our bodies for our noncooperation, we kowtow to their god—to the cyclops who resides within the great pyramid on the almighty dollar. As the pawns in this fantasy, we’re taught it’s our sacred duty, when called upon, to sacrifice our lives to this god in the bloody rituals that’re periodically orchestrated around the hidden issue of maintaining, at all costs, the opulent lifestyles of those who’ve been favored by this god. Through one of the biggest pyramid schemes in history, the American Dream, have we been sucked into believing that we too can become immortal, like them, but only if we buy into their scheme and turn our lives over to them to be used as they see fit. Thus have we been bilked out of a truly fulfilling way of life.

“As our broken lives and dead bodies become the bricks ’n’ mortar with which they continue to build this colossal monument to their god, the question arises, do we really wanna spend the rest of our lives struggling, fighting ’n’ dying, just to help make some lousy bastard back home filthy rich? Or do we wanna espouse a whole new fantasy, one based upon truth ’n’ justice for all?

“Don’t ya see how much they fear us. How afraid they are of what we’re saying. How afraid they are of the rebellious tone of our voices. How afraid they are of our reluctance to carry out their orders. How afraid they are of the truth that keeps oozing out of us no matter what they do.

“And so I ask, who has more to fear? I daresay, they do.“

“I don’t know about that,“ exclaimed Marty, before he excused himself to go back to work. “They still have the upper hand, ya know.“

“Only because we let ’em have it,“ I yelled back as he disappeared down the passageway.

Although this fellowship was short lived, I nonetheless found great consolation in the affirmation I received from them, for the views I held. Seeing others, for the first time, under the spell of the same fantasy that plagued me, namely this underground resistance to the war in Vietnam, helped me to realize that I wasn’t so crazy after all. With participants from every division on the ship, I felt energized by the potential for action that lay within our grasp.

In the face of similar decrees in other divisions throughout the ship, and with the exception of a few stalwarts like Marty ’n’ myself, I saw this fellowship quickly disintegrate. In the end, I—like so many of the others—grew fearful of the consequences we’d suffer if we acted against the Navy. Unwilling to lay my life on the line, at this point in time, by joining this underground resistance, I simply stood aside and watched it fester beneath the surface until it gained enough momentum to push me over the threshold between fantasy ’n’ reality—to openly rebel.

“So this’s Yankee Station,“ I muttered to myself as we all laughed to assuage our fear of the dreadful truth this silence had stirred up from the depths of our beings.

Yankee Station essentially consisted of patrolling the coastal waters of Vietnam, in a semi-alert, battle-station mode in which we remained constantly on the lookout for enemy vessels both above and below the surface of the water. Our task was, of course, greatly simplified, since the North had a virtually nonexistent naval fleet. As we maneuvered up and down the coast, at varying distances from land, our greatest threat came from kamikaze sampans, loaded with explosives, or from artillery set up in the jungles along the coast to keep our ships with their big guns at bay. For the most part, we remained far enough out at sea, that I seldom saw land.

How easily were they seduced by this invisible body of nebulous feelings and deep dark emotions as it descended upon them with the caprice of an Olympian god. Instead of wrestling with this god, as Jacob had, they simply fell prey to all of its emotional bluster. In their inability to free their feelings from the emotional pall that overshadowed their souls, like a dark night, they failed to expose the naked truth of the god that lay hidden within the mood.

Having prevailed, thus far, against succumbing to the mood that’d descended upon the rest of the crew, like the plague, I was struck by the magnitude of its power when the ship pulled within sight of the coast of Vietnam. As I stood in awe of the dark foreboding clouds which hugged the earth and stirred the passions of her murky green waters into a squall, I sensed a great evil lurked about this land—that no good could come from our being here. “You do not belong here,“ I heard my soul scream out in the shrill voice of a Siren. Immediately, I saw her words as the truth which lay hidden at the very core of the mood that’d finally swept over us all.

Badly shaken by this sudden revelation, I turned aside, only to find Greg ’n’ Harold standing there with me. “We don’t belong here,“ I prophetically proclaimed.

The two of them just looked at me and smiled, as if to say that while they both agreed with my assessment of this external sign, they were at a complete loss as to what to do about it.