If you have ever doubted we are all connected this is a story that will cure you of that…

I am not sure I got this into the Soldier and P story but there was a point when we were kids I really wanted to know what Special Forces was. I had no earthly idea and most oddly, either did the soldier.

Now that may seem hard to believe but it was the case. He just turned up one day and said this was what he was going to do. He said that it was what he wanted to do and what knew that he had to do but he had little explanation as to anything else, like why. He could not seem to communicate how this even got in his head and most particularly he could provide no details as to exactly what a Special Forces soldier was or did.

(swearing below the break)

Now of if you think of this in terms of my Venus Neptune (Love mystery) - he was damned slippery and I was damned direct.

“Are you going to cut people’s throats?” I asked. “I want to know if you are and if you are then by God, I want to know why! I want you to tell me and I want you to tell me right now!”

He didn’t know. He said he had no idea what he was going to do but whatever it was that SF soldiers do - that’s what he was going to do and no matter what I asked or how loudly I asked it, he always answered me with something like this:

“Can’t you just marry me and we’ll figure this out later? Come on, Els. No matter what it is I am going to do you know I am going to love you so let’s just get married…”

Stare. “How am I supposed to marry you if I don’t know what you are going to do? I want to know! Are you cutting people’s throats? Are you? Are. You. Going. To. Cut. People’s. Throats?”

“Elsa, come on. I don’t know. I. Do. Not. Know.”

“Find out! Find the fuck out why don’t you?”

“Els, I can’t find out. If I want to find out what Special Forces soldiers do, I am going to have to be one of them,” he said. “And I will be one of them and when I find out what they do then I’ll tell you what they do but right now I have no idea what they do.”

Now keep in mind, I am 18 years old here and what the hell? What the hell am I supposed to do? He was 20.

“%^&&^$#, are you going to cut someone’s throat or not?” I yelled.

See, I had been talking to a retired SF soldier who had bent my ear back and then some. Fact was I knew more about Special Forces than the soldier did but who knew?

So now it’s almost 30 years later. All these years later and he calls me up a couple weeks ago, breathless.

“P? I just got a book tape and you aren’t going to believe this.”

“What?”

“This book is about the mission I went on when we were kids.”

“What mission?”

“Do you remember when I had to go out of town that time? Remember when I left for 3 weeks and I couldn’t tell you where I was going?”

“Umm… yeah.”

The soldier had a top secret clearance when we were kids. He was not in SF, he was a geek. He was a highly trained, total intellectual who listened to John Lennon peace songs and sang them to me.

“Well I can tell you where I went now. I can finally tell you. I mean the guy who planned the whole thing wrote a book so I guess it’s no longer classified.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And I am sitting here stunned, listening to this. It’s dawning on me, the impact this had on our lives - both our lives. Here this stuff went on clear on the other side of the world and how it wound up affecting us so personally, P, it’s unbelievable.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Here we are, these two teenagers living in the desert, neither one of us know all that much except we love each other and we wind up having our lives change completely all because of some political problem on the other side of the world.”

“Yeah? Well fuck me, I don’t think I am going to like this,” I said.

Skip to Part 2 - The Revelation