A Long but Incomplete List of Some of the Things You Can’t (Don’t) Talk About

1. The first time someone calls you killer you’re a boot and haven’t killed anyone yet and maybe you don’t want to kill anyone at all because sure you joined 13 days before 9/11 and after 9/11 you were ready to kill the people responsible for making the people you love cry and afraid but that was just talk but killer as a name as in someone who kills another person sounds wrong but then you hear it so much and they say it with such reverence that you don’t hear it at all and you think of course you’re a killer what ever else could you be until you get around real killers and you realize that you aren’t and neither are they really but you’re a boot and you don’t know any better and they see in you that you can kill with and for them and you would because you have seen pictures of their families and they have seen pictures of yours and you know their first names and things about them and they have come over to your house to grill or you have gone to theirs for the holidays and you love these guys and you’d be damned if someone tried to kill them and so they respect you and so you think yes you are a killer and people are no longer people unless they are people you know otherwise they are targets like at the rifle range and it takes only three pounds of pressure to kill a man and doesn’t that sound psycho and yet you know that you wouldn’t hurt anyone unless you had to even though you were ready to kill that one fat ten-year-old because he wouldn’t stay back and you didn’t even say I’ll kill you or anything because that really only happens in the movies and you just chambered a round for him to see since you already had a round chambered and really only needed to squeeze the trigger and you remember it’s only three pounds of pressure and as you bring your weapon up and he sees the barrel and he sees your eyes and he and the adults who are pressing in on you back up and you remember the Sapper Sergeant Bear who you call Bear or Mike saying that the moment when you look at another man over your weapon or he looks at you over yours and he sees in your eyes that you have the power to kill or let him live and in your soul he sees that you will kill him that you are God in that moment to that man and you are never the same after and you remember laughing a little to ease the tension of the moment but then you’ve become that man even though you are really just a kid in his mid-20s with a son a few years younger than the kid you aim your weapon at and his eyes get big and the men’s eyes in the crowd get big and they move back and they laugh then you laugh and then you realize how tense you are but how your heart isn’t beating fast this time because you weren’t scared only tired and your desire to get home to see your kid outweighed this kid’s right to live but thank god he didn’t want to die that day and you had already been shot at and you had already seen another man through the iron sights of your rifle and almost felt the release of that three pounds of pressure until some officer says you didn’t see the shot he took at you and yells at you not to shoot and you hesitate to obey but he yells louder and maybe even grabs your shoulder but you don’t remember because you were focused on the man in your...