Guns, I am told, are dangerous. But women are dangerous, too. A woman can rip your heart from your chest and drop it like a child discarding a candy wrapper, or stand in front of you, a disdainful smile on her face, tossing your heart from one hand to another while your blood drips through her fingers. It is much worse when your heart is not left behind.
No one explains the cruelest trick of life. You are happy, and life is good, and the years roll on, until you wake up one night, terrified, because you realize that the worse thing that can ever happen to you is for something to happen to her, and there is no way to avoid that eventual tragedy other than dying first, which is almost as frightening. It is all infinitely worse because she is a woman and the logic of your heart insists there is nothing better than a woman, particularly this woman. You are caught in this conundrum; your attention to detail failed you miserably and completely, way back when it was still possible to leave. So you lie fretting in the dark while your beloved breathes in and out in the night air, and you sense the entrapment of desire, the very danger of life itself.
Compared to that, a gun is harmless.
On the firing range, we finally heard the command:
"Ready!"
I lifted the M16 and cocked my head so I could focus through the rifle's sights. Now the target looked grey and distant and a little unfocused, its dark circles less distinct, but I braced my shoulder and hoped for the best.
We were all perfectly still for two long beats. My breath rattled in my head. I concentrated: Gun. Target. Gun. Target. The world
The air was pungent with a tangy fragrance: the delicious tongue-coating flavor of gunpowder.
contracted into a universe populated only by my arms, my eyes, my ragged breath, the M16 and a square of paper hanging motionless in the summer heat.
At last we heard:
"Fire!"
As I had been taught, I stopped breathing. The tip of my left index finger, finally liberated from waiting, retracted the trigger of the rifle. The M16 opened up with a glorious power and raucous blattering louder than anything I had heard in my life, a sound that drowned all thought and replaced it with a pure white space. For a split second, the gun was stronger than me, shaking my shoulders and causing me to levitate very slightly from the concrete floor I was splayed on, but I trained my body against the weapon and concentrated — gun, target, gun, target — as the rifle spat bullets through the moist summer air. Across the range, dark spots instantaneously pocked twenty-four targets. Flat on the ground and burdened with our rifles, we could not see one another, but I could tell we had done well by the triumphant pitch of Sergeant Ireland's voice as he shouted:
"Hold fire!"
We immediately stopped, then took breath. For one long beat the sound of machine-gun fire continued to travel across the air, the faintest echo of an echo. As marksmen do everywhere, we promptly looked at our targets, which to our gratification we had blown to kingdom come. The air was pungent with a tangy fragrance bitter in the back of my throat — the delicious tongue-coating flavor of gunpowder I would come to anticipate and crave — and my hands were warm and damp; I wiped my fingers on my fatigues, away from the creases so my uniform wouldn't lose its spray-starch edge. I was spent, amazed and almost immediately hungry for more. My body ached, partly from the unfamiliar position on the cement, and partly from joy.
I have been advised I could stop liking guns if I tried; I could excise that dark, rotten spot that threatens to spread and taint the flesh of my soul. I imagine there are books. Study tapes. Meditative exercises. I would not be surprised to hear, particularly in these parts, that someone had established an ex-gun movement, where through daily rituals and a list of proscribed thoughts and activities taped to the refrigerator door, I could claim to purge myself of the way I feel about weapons.
But denial not only makes the heart grow fonder; it makes the heart grow desperate, makes it panic with subterranean keening. I have counseled myself, in a quavering voice in my head, that I will simply not have a gun in my life, that it is far too much risk and trouble, that no one will understand, that it will be the ruin of me, that these urges are fundamentally wrong. My desire feels disloyal, shameful, and selfish; it stands between us, this secret I cannot share.
