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,
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
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