A Short Natural History of Terror

A Short Natural History of Terror


Terror is that one thing felt within us that someone or something can inflict upon us, in that it has the capacity to inflict upon us bodily injury, this comes to affect us even before the injury, this is terror at its roots—it is an old stimuli, of an even older standing. It dates beyond the creation of the human body, and it is real even if it is not from the visible world (that is to say, unseen)—it’s all the same—fear be it perceived as spiritual, can even be more frightening, because it is not of earth, objectless for the most part; it was—if not invented, than discovered—sometime during our pre-existence to accompany us throughout our existence, not on purpose I assume, not by accident I’m sure, but slowly by awakening senses because it was available, and usable—and there, by its first discoverer (no longer in its mundane, and hidden condition). Someone produced this, and for eternity after, it became to be something of that which we know within our sanity, in our brains, as harmful, how else could it be there? It had to be injected. O, most of all as a child; even a new born bird senses this thing called terror, when the nest is shaken, waken senses to face the affect is born.

Let me give you a true war example, one I had in Vietnam: when in an ammo dump, in South Vietnam, 1971, the enemy found the right position just beyond the divide of the jungle and the road into the dump area where the munitions were, he comes upon this isolated and lonely spot, like a spider to a fly, the ground is a plateau, and ammunition boxes are stacked high throughout the dump, and into the reception area, it is a dusty area, with ruts, and an almost straight road from the South China Sea, to the turning point into the dump area itself, which is another straight road to the ammo shack, with the tons and tons of munitions behind the shack is of course of concern, should they get hit, the whole dump goes up, and only god knows what would take place then. Here the wild weeds and lizards call home; flies seem to have found the luxury of a home also, the ammo shack, while the scattered munitions are spread out in a four acre area—and throughout a portion of the night, we get bombarded by rockets, but none hit the exact point needed to set off a chain reaction of explosions within our ammo dump.
Without knowing when and exactly where the enemy is, we all (about forty of us soldiers) hesitate to ask from the knotted up and solitary figures beside us, around us, if tonight is the night—it is terror being built up within us, then morning comes, and we ask: is this the morning when we are going to get hit by rockets again, because we got hit during the night, the terror is extended, even though the morning so far is quite; but knowing our dump was spared, but not the Air Force dump, it went up in flames, three miles away, we could see the mushroom clouds it made. Is this the morning when it all happens all over again and our dump is obliterated, and the short day every one gets sooner or later—is this my short day, but we all take this personal.
We now can hear the crumbling footsteps of each other in the sand, and the once silent door, to the ammo shack, the swinging door opens and shuts and we glance each time it does, and the sloping wooden steps—we can hear the squeaking wood as it absorbs the soldier’s boots as he goes from one step to the other, we can hear the chattering inside the shack, why, and what for?
Abnormal profusion of fear—of potential bodily harm, stemming from the night before, and its rhythms have not left our minds, the inner pores of our bodies yet—it all has soaked into our neurological systems, which has its own alert arrangements, that it might be duplicated this morning; this thin, shining line between the winds of safety and the terror of the bitten by a serpent, its glooms in circles around us.
What are we all listening for? Why do we hear every sound from every side of us? Precipitously our ears even hear things that don’t exist, why? Because we all know the rockets make a whistling sound when it comes. There isn’t a sound that is all that reassuring now; on a closer glance most of the soldiers want to get out of there that endured the night, we all feel like broken-steeples from churches. We know one person got killed, and one went into shock when a rock landed a foot from him and didn’t go off. The odor of damaging terror is all about us, seeping throughout the ammo dump, decaying within our souls.

The strange forest of terror is not laughed at, because we are in a war zone, any reasons for avoiding this locality are out of the question—so to some of us, we will get saturated with this witch-blood. This is warfare at its heart. The reason warfare was created, was to this end, to create terror—or at least one reason. Some of the soldiers here have gone along that path of retrogression, and it has become so common with them, that the terror comes to form an addiction by themselves within them. It becomes a well defined and physical stimulus—one of debauchery, depravity, one reproducing the other to a higher level, to form depression, to inbreed unnamable violence and perversity.

No one, even those who have the facts on terror, can say just what triggers what, and who, some soldiers have hallowed hearts, minds made out of wild cracking and rumbling blasphemies, and are on the side of Satan, and care not to be denied the taste of blood—especially after they’ve acquired it; there is a certain group, about three percent of humankind, that can kill without blinking an eye, and then go home and watch a sermon on television. This forms a puzzle for the psychologists. They give off no odors, and their minds can only be heard faintly, and at certain hours, from certain points at the bottom of great canyons.

No: 621 (5-9-2010)