This fictional writing has been the precipitating output from the lived reality of Ambush Drill done during the Counter Insurgency Training at CTJW Kanker CG.
So this write-up should bring coherence to all the brutal anarchy in my mind. Words being uttered on paper, such soothingness they bring, such order, as if it truly exists. And there is just so much in this world, unfolding at the level of self and all that, to give a proper name and order to things once in a while becomes the necessity to keep going on. For there have been times when I began reflecting, pondering, thinking about all that has happened—moments when I have tried to touch and feel the labyrinths of cause and effect proliferating across my life—I have mostly lost my way.
As a human being embarked upon the vastness of life, most of us, for an enlarged briefness of our times, have lost our way, have begun to lie. Consciously or unconsciously, there is just so much lying we are doing to ourselves. So this write-up will aim to beat that. I will take us back to the very beginning of life, when man began to leave aside his true original fate of a hunter-gatherer and took refuge in plenary civilization—the beginning of his original sin.
As someone who has spent dense moments of life and its consequential realizations in the jungles, I have things to say. When you take hiding in the dense darkness of the jungle, submerging yourself in the realm of shadows, and you fix your Light Machine Guns at the possible directions of the movement of the enemy, you sit silently, patiently, strategically in the pursuit of the enemy.
I want to ask… do you also sit this patiently and silently at any other time? Do you feel united within yourself, consolidating within oneself, one within oneself, when there is that lethal enemy out there? Is that then the decisive moment when you find the redemption from the eternal longing to unite yourself with something that is beyond time and space, and yet at that very moment you unite within yourself… Are you also beyond time and space then?
And when it's really, really cold out there and you take shelter under shrubs so that you aren’t entirely exposed to the whims of the freezing old sky, do you question your judgments of life to have been at any other place than this? Does that question arise in you? The question of different paths that you should or shouldn’t have taken and the final outcome of it all. And yet when you sit and lie down silently under the murky shadows of the shrubs, the slithering cold movement of the midnight wind and the total acceptance of the vulnerability of life, you somehow feel a different type of peace. A peace that is actually peace for yourself.
Your heart and ambitions melt away. You close your eyes and a thin smile of contentment passes through your face. You anyway didn’t like the aimless hustle-bustle of industrialization. You always had the original authenticity with which things you called by their true names and counted man as man rather than assets and liabilities, and you lied. To live, you lied. But you knew within yourself the very reason for which you lied. You were aware enough, though you were way too alert.
You close your eyes and feel the movement of noise in the silence of the forest. Your group of troops—five men you are—rest are sleeping, soundly snoring. Such beautiful cozy corners that their consciousness has found for itself, a warm corner with woods interminably burning in the cold, dreary, rough terrains of their minds. They are sleeping without a care in the world. I also close my eyes and take a restful sigh.
Death has common denominators. The snake that would kill them can also kill me. I am no different. I am their superior, but I am no different. If I don’t lose care, if I keep my alertness intact, then in my head, somehow, I think that my life is more precious than theirs, and it’s not true. So I will also be as restful and peaceful as them. I will also learn to snore while sleeping. Communism wouldn’t have been that bad as well.
I try to sleep but I can’t. My mind has been bitten by the hyper-activism that has come to characterize my life. Always alert, always judging, rationalizing, drawing patterns in this vast randomness. It hardly finds rest and coherence, the belongingness. So I sleep a dog’s sleep.
What I feel in this moment is the presence of something nearby. What could it be? Could it be the very enemy for whom this whole ambush has been planned? Has the enemy sensed the design and taken the counter-ambush tactics at play? Have they surrounded us from all sides? Is the shadow of the enemy falling on other companions of mine as it is falling upon me right now? Does death really have that common treatment of all? Would we all go to the very unknown once we are freed from the ambiguities of life, or would we go all alone, by ourselves?
I don’t feel fear as much as I feel the alertness, the presence, the aliveness, the different paths that would come and go. Life doesn’t flash in front of my eyes. It just keeps penetrating the deepest seeds of melancholy and desire and yet can’t make sense of it all. I thought that death would make sense of all that has been life, but it’s much more ambiguous than anything.
But I have that one regret… I should have loved more. Face, features, and characters aside, the warmth I remember, and it reminds me that we have always been animals, but we tried to love as social animals and it didn’t work. We had so many constraints. I felt so disappointed and sad that this world is not free.
We should have been much more free to enlarge ourselves, and democracy isn’t freedom. Speech isn’t freedom. Freedom to be who you are beyond the constraint of language or power or anything that can constrain us should be freedom. I hope I will be free after death, and all of us would be free in that unknown realm. I don’t feel that bad about dying right now.
Given my enemy is a guerrilla, someone who is fighting the enormous with scarcity, would he shoot me in the head or slit my throat, thus saving one bullet? So what should I expect now? Fucking hell, life never ceases to surprise. What should I expect now? I hope for a peaceful death, and I want him to shoot me in the head and aim properly. A bullet that renders me half-alive is the last thing I would want. To that, I would want my throat cut; at least there’d be no return to this world post that.
Neither of that happens. So what falls on my face?
I open my eyes and I see a large dark space in front of me, standing still, in unilateral trance. Is it the void within myself that has come to life, or a transmutation of splattered mass since singularity that out of any galactic imbalance has found its presence in a nondescript place, somehow close to a nondescript man? Is it then the remnant, the rudiment of singularity? Then why does it not suck me in? Why do I not cease to exist independently then?
It’s not a guerrilla nor a black hole. So what is it? An imaginary entity borne out of my hallucinating lucidity. So then, is it just a dream? To confirm, I open my eyes with force, forcing my way into reality, day in and day out, as if life lived hasn’t been real at all, so the eyes have to be opened much more than they naturally open. And yet despite all that effort, it concretizes within me that it’s not a dream.
The entity in front of me has begun movement, and the way it moves makes me largely certain that it’s a bear that has strayed to the human warmth. It’s just a bear. Silly me. And yet, in the very same moment, I assure the presence of my AK-47 rifle near me, just in case it hadn’t been a bear.
A bear is not as lethal as a Maoist.
A Maoist is not as lethal as the void.
The void isn’t as lethal as the void inside.
And all that I think and feel is the ultimate truism of my life.
There are still a couple of hours left, and the chill has gotten all the more severe. I try to generate a warmth that doesn’t exist, and yet I feel slightly warmer. I assure the presence of all that has assured its presence to me and concentrate on the task at hand; that way, I don’t feel adrift. I close my eyes and think about good and bad things, and fluidly and swiftly I slither through their realms.
The only moments I stick to in my self-generated escape to the labyrinths of memory are the moments when I have made love. The touch of the very flesh, the total union with a human being, even if that’s never you. The moments of unconstrained violent passions within the four walls of the house. Maybe the most suitable place that is worth mounting LMGs is the perimeters of the houses where a man truly, truly loves something.
In such thoughts, my mind is invaded by the humbleness of sleep, the way rain fills the empty vessels.
I wake to the singing of the bird that doesn’t exist in this forest, and I know that this is the signal sent by the scout party that has seen the enemy from a distance. In the radio set, the movement is confirmed. It is ensured that no movement is made, no noise comes out. All that isn’t supposed to happen in the forest shouldn’t happen.
A man shouldn’t snore or cough. No activism or alertness should be shown. All should become part of the jungle, and the jungle would remain what it is—a jungle. The movement has to be made only in the moment when the majority of the enemy has come into what is called the “killing zone,” that is, the alignment that is perfectly and strategically visible to us and that would ensure maximum damage to the enemy.
For the very first moment in the entirety of his life, our enemy would be moving the closest to the destination whose beginnings began a long time ago, and the saddest thing would be that he couldn’t ever turn back and truly gaze at the beginning.
In that tiniest fraction when he would appear in the killing zone and the triggers would be pressed from our side, he would have all the time to recollect what he is or was and would be. In that moment, he would meet the ultimate cause.
So when they all—the contours, the silhouette of them all—appear in the killing zone, I, as the firing commander, have the responsibility to shoot the first bullet. Post that, the entire ambush party would wreak havoc upon them, carpet-bomb them through the UBGLs. All of us would want to kill all of them. But I would fire the first bullet.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t sleep and snore as soundly as my troops. But I would fire the first bullet nevertheless.
And then, when the time came, I didn’t just fire the first bullet—I emptied three magazines, that is, ninety bullets of it all, whose warm, empty shells splatter all around me. And somehow, in the recesses of my heart, I longed that every single bullet was a headshot, for half-life is as wretched as half-death.
And when I was done emptying the burden of my responsibilities, I felt a deep chill inside my heart. I gathered around the empty shells, and in their warmth across my hands, chest, and back, I felt the warmth that had been totally alien to me.
And the gunpowder all around me was a thick veneer below which I felt the much-needed protection from the cold.
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