Download PDF of this full issue: v39n1.pdf (18.1 MB)

After the War

By Christopher Arendt

The streets are infested with the refuse of the last war. Broken chess pieces from a game that was decidedly one sided scattered like glass across the city maps of our post-industrial masterpiece: our beautiful society. They hold signs that beg for help while they stare into the street where all of the blissfully unsullied capitalists drive beautiful, clean cars. They look into restaurants with tired eyes at meals that cost more than they were paid for a week of awful service to their country, and they are so broken that they are not even angry now. Now I am one of them, I shift along the streets at night with the same hungry obsessions, my hands held out pridelessly in a never ending struggle to find what I need.

Christopher Arendt at Chicago Memorial Day event, 2008.

Unlike the white bearded old men from the last war, I am something new. I am the advance party for a war that even they do not understand. I am not the first of my kind, but I am one of few. We are sounding the trumpets across the nation that the saints have finally come marching home. The old veterans are like drunken fathers whom I despise. In their faces I see my face and I know that now I too have become an ignorable annoyance to society. I know that we are brothers in being doomed.

I am young and relatively intelligent and I have no major addictions of which to speak or to blame my situation on. My homelessness is one of abhorrence. I am an alien, confused and lonely in a place where I once felt completely at home. But now I have gone to horrible places and I have done horrible things, and now the whole world to me, inside and out, stinks of the memories I have been forced to endure. Money, before a simple side effect of living, now seems a disgusting mental illness that infects the minds of people and makes them let these horrible things that I have done happen. And for this reason I can no longer participate in the financial system. The all encompassing exchange of numbers and the digitalization of self into something not abstract and beautifully complicated, but voiceless and consenting to all of the madness and violence of our fucked up world.

In this way the horror that war showed me was a cure. It has cleared my mind of the fog that allowed me to exchange currency wantonly and without reflection. Now I cannot do that, because I can see the blood dripping off of my bills. And I suppose that I am thankful for this, in a very complicated way. But there is no charm in my life now. The room for that sweet faculty has disappeared into some place inside of my brain that I have not seen since the war began and will likely not see again before I die. I understand that my affliction is more than likely lifelong. There appears to be no hope for those of us who do not have the luxury of forgetting the war.

There is obliteration of all different kinds. One need only go to the liquor store for that. Or report to the state to pick up the mountains of pills that they will give you along with a small share of hush money. There are men selling the cure to post traumatic stress disorder on every corner of every city around the world, but I do not have a disease. In the surreal reality of my experience I have been cleansed of the disease of modern life, and I mourn only for those who still have this illness and refuse to treat it.

So now the doped up, fat, stupid Americans are forced to deal with this new breed of trash upon the streets. Young, gaunt, hollow-eyed boys still too proud to ask for money directly are showing up on the streets steadily and I can see them coming. I have made an effort to welcome each newcomer as I see them. Welcome home, brother. We, the bridge burners and the stay up all nighter's are the inheritors of a proud tradition of abject poverty in despair of this nightmare world that we were forced to watch for extended periods of time without comfort or solace. I do not want to know what you did in the war. I do not want to know your job. We are ambiguous now. A homogeneous crowd of malcontents. Your face and your story are now as irrelevant as your needs to the common passer by. As the ghosts of the collective repentance for this war we have a job to haunt the every move of the vapid consumer. We are duty bound to rain on the parades of lovers and successful businessmen who have allowed us to kill and to be killed without regret.

If we fail in our mission then we will have to watch as the streets are again flooded with young, gaunt, hollow-eyed boys coming back from some horrible war that we do not understand, because we are still living in the last one. Drive on.

Christopher Arendt is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. He is currently travelling around the world and documenting his experiences as a homeless veteran of the global war on terror. He is confused and hungry but free.