Letters From Odysseus

May 6, 1902
Dear Simon,
My beloved Patroclus, I am writing to you in the hope that I can inspire in you a sentimentality towards my person, such as it is, and in the knowledge that the longer I remain here, the more I am evolving into a person I do not recognize, but I would like you to know me, the me that I am becoming, very much., Amor et melle et felle est fecundissimus, remember? Well here is your venom. At 1:30 the general gave me a memorandum with regards to sending out a Tennessee battalion on the line. He told me that it seemed they “were looking for a fight.” He is a brash thing, rotted teeth, permanent scowl, more beast than man, you would hate him. Regardless, I met one of our company at the Puente Colgante, the suspension bridge,
who told me that the Fourteenth and Washingtons were shooting down everyone and taking no prisoners, and that this would be the new procedure. I later learned why, some natives would fall, as if dead, and then climb up a tree and shoot every soldier that tried to pass, even the injured would climb up, bleeding everywhere, pressing hands against abdomens to hold their innards from falling out, without faltering. This lead to an order by General Jacob H. He wanted all persons killed who were capable of bearing arms against us. This meant all people from the age of 10 upwards.

They tell us that this war is glorious.
I have heard the patriotic chant of men singing our country’s song at night, but how can there be glory in the howling of a child? There is no boundary, no threshold, no limit to the horrors we might enact. We have killed men, women, children, prisoners, captives, we treat them as one might treat the most wretched and feral of all dogs. We do not take prisoners, and I wish that I could say that this was a mercy, but I am sad to declare that their deaths were rarely ever swift or painless. I have held down a boy of 16 years, four men pinning down each of his limbs, two others pointing their barrels straight at him, while I shoved the barrel of my gun down his mouth to keep it from shutting, and pumped saltwater into his lungs till his limb’s dutiful machinations ceased and he drowned on dry earth. We have taken prisoners who held up their hands with peaceful reverence and submission and shot their bodies full of bullets till they were piles of bloody viscera for our men to scrape off the ground. I laugh to think that I once cried when my father killed a deer. I sobbed like a widow as I clutched the doe’s blood drenched neck in an embrace. Now I do not flinch when I pierce the ribs of a child and watch his frail little body fall
dead. Sometimes I think, does God ever look down at the atrocities we are committing and turn away his blessed face in disgust? Then I remember Simon, God must love killing, he does it all the time, and are we not created in his image? No, sorry then, sorry I shouldn’t talk like that. I can only imagine what my mother would say if she heard me. She already has a fit when she heard of my inclination to study Classics. “God save you, you’re becoming a pagan,” she wept. But God, it is difficult to live in a place like this and keep anything sacrosanct. Let alone our minds. Our commander says that it will take years to secure the Philippines. I wonder how many bodies we will have to shovel into the trenches to get there. Pile bodies from where you are to the horizon, Simon, and I have walked further. It’s a kind of violence that makes you tired beyond what can be written here. I am not afraid, and I am always ready to do my duty, but I would like someone to tell me what we are fighting for. Is that too much too ask? I already see you in the dark of my mind Simon, shaking your head in that sad slow way that you do. I know the futility in such a question, but I cannot help but ask it. I blame it on your constant readings of Plato’s Dialogues. Now Socrates is always rattling around in my head. How much easier it would have been to be a philosopher back home with you. It is a sad profession, playing God, as we are not instilled with his apathy, but I am unhooking the burden of my compassion from my soul a little more everyday. I still keep that copy of the Iliad you gave me before we shipped off.
I have been without food, without water, have watched the tongues of men around me swell up and choke them because of dysentery, but I have not separated from that book since the moment my feet touched solid ground. It has been my touchstone in this madness. I would call it Hell, but no painting of fiery torment invoking Dante’s darkest visions could ever compare to our reality. The twentieth Kansas regiment swept through Caloocan in February, it was supposed to contain 17, 000 inhabitants, and now Caloocan does not contain a single native. Only bric-a-brac scattering of rubble from some church and prison remain. On the fourth of that month we fought in Maypaja, a town that had 5,000 people in it that day, now not one stone remains stacked upon the other. This is the most infernal and deviant kind of desolation. This is the Hell no Pagan, Jew, or Gentile could have imagined. “There are no bargains between lions and men,” yes, surely we will all kill each other and eat ourselves
raw. Even as I write this too you, with no surety that this letter will arrive at your doorstep, I know that I will return home. Fortis est ut mors dilectio. Love is as strong as death. I have waded through enough death here to know that it is a strong force indeed. For, “There is none alive more agonized than man, of all that breathe and crawl across the earth,” but I am hopeful that the person that arrives home to you will have seen enough of human suffering to be prepared to receive all else that life has to offer. Perhaps then I can trade out my Iliad for Homer’s second work, something a little more appropriate of my state of return, the Odyssey. Here’s to a journey a little less prolonged.

Your ever faithful Achilles,
J.D. Davis, Company A