Intuitive Guide to Battlefields and Violence
by Christina M. Wells
Take the winter tour of Christmas lights past the field where soldiers ran, their feet slipping in the grass with their guns braced against each other. Now there’s a slight snow, and there’s cocoa in the car with the station that plays nothing but holiday music from Thanksgiving to New Year.
Note that for you, nothing much happened here except a picnic you took one summer. You were a few blankets over from two women in sarees, and you watched a little Black girl with plastic pink barrettes at the end of tiny braids. She was running after a little boy, but there was laughter. Not blood.
Play volleyball at the end of the field if you can stand it. Otherwise, run for the trail in the woods that has a bench at one curve. Don’t think about how long this dirt has been here and whether anyone hid behind trees, or for that matter, whether they do now. Watch the wind blow leaves past you, and then, wonder what else is hiding in the air.
Think about how long it takes for the ground to absorb blood, how many layers down the DNA is. Even without a body, so much runs like a river below the mud your sneakers hit.
Or go to a winery on this land. A man plays guitar on a back porch, his speakers playing a heavy bass. Glass cases line the walls. Knives and guns are artifacts, but the signs are incomplete. There are no obituaries here—only weapons that sit by tables where you pour red from a bottle to forget red underground.
Or go somewhere else. It’s a cloudy wind a few hours north. You could go to a well-lit lunch spot in the rain and have a salad in a giant bowl, or you could go to a battlefield where state names commemorate. These are your options.
You can walk with your green ski jacket and mittens with only the wind pushing you as you go forward. Note that it may feel like something else is here, though, and I don’t mean the shady guy with a Confederate flag on a plate at the front of his big red truck. Something else plays off of you both, and it’s not one person as much as it is the whole lot of them, everyone who was here before it got to be a park.
Go downtown. There’s a house where a lot of tourists go because something happened there, one day. Even if nothing else ever did, that day outweighs the rest of them. Two women with sandy hair and a balding guy with glasses each say there are cold spots where there isn’t a vent. See how hard it is for you to go through the door to leave.
Take a ghost tour at night, because who wouldn’t in a town with more dead than alive? Get electronic gizmos for your time. Walk in the dark toward a house with cars out front and a light on at the top of a staircase. See if your ghost gear seems to beep for the dead, and not the living.
Scoff at the woman who claims to see things when she clearly doesn’t. Spend time thinking about how often the box you carry makes noise no matter where you walk. Someone is here, was here, is/was here simultaneously. Remember the red river some feet under the gravel, the mud, the battle off the battlefield. Prepare to scare yourself with the war that wasn’t in uniforms. War isn’t so uniform. Sing hymns in the car and tell the dead to stay.
Get on a plane. When it’s someone else’s war, maybe you won’t feel it. Find a castle with yellow flowers growing out of gray walls and wonder why it’s missing the roof over the great room where girls in long dresses walked. Think about how hard it is to imagine reasons why a sturdy ceiling would disappear when walls remain. When the ground takes them back.
Check the travel advisories before you get on another plane. Wonder at the advice that you should worry most about the places where the roof isn’t already gone. Have a drink. It’s complimentary, after all.
Go home. Read the celebrity column in the news to miss what could happen here, there, somewhere.
Spend time in a museum where they check everyone’s bags individually, then tell you that they hope you have a good time. Think about the time you walked from one quadrant of the city to another because someone shot a guard in a museum about atrocities in a war and nobody knew whether he’d been caught. Think about how you looked over your shoulder for blocks.
Think about where you can’t hold hands. There’s no war outside those houses unless it’s yours.
Go to the library. Try not to think about the sign outside where there was a battle once. Now people drive too fast, screeching up to a light. There are asphalt and yellow lines where there might have once been red.
Turn left, then right. There’s a church where something happened with a war. You don’t remember what, but this means war crosses your mind on the way to get coffee.
Or go to that other coffee chain instead. It faces a road named after a Civil War figure. Note that the people who work there are nice, though, and the lights over the people with laptops aren’t even fluorescent.
Make a list of everywhere you aren’t safe. Stick it on your stainless steel fridge, the one that doesn’t absorb your handprint. Think about the therapist who said to make anxiety positive. Go back and put a list of where you feel safe. It’s a short list under a magnet from a museum where a guard rifled through your purse.
Stay home where it’s safe. Bundle yourself in a quilt on the couch with your therapy cat and your therapy dog. Watch a documentary about war. Get up and lock the door.
“Though my wife served in Bosnia and Iraq, this piece comes from my observations, mostly in this country and occasionally abroad. It’s intended to address the commodification of war, and the places with devastating histories where people go for ‘fun,’ forgetting or ignoring the wars that have happened, are happening, or could happen.” —Christina M. Wells
Christina M. Wells is an editor and coach. She has published in the Northern Virginia Review, Crab Fat, bioStories, Big Muddy, and Sinister Wisdom, among other magazines. Her work also appears in five anthologies, including Real Women Write: Seeing Through Their Eyes, ed. by Susan Schoch for Story Circle Network. She has an MA from University of Arkansas and a PhD from University of Maryland and was a finalist for the 2022 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction (New Letters). She also has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is currently working on a novel. Find her at https://bychristinamwells.net.