Like Aw, look at those mountains there, how pretty are those mountains, bummer we don’t have more adjectives to describe em, innit. ‘Pretty’ don’t quite do em justice.

But it wasn’t about that.

Or: it wasn’t only about that.

Or: that wasn’t the part about it that was interesting.

Tangibly considering how gnarly WWI musta been, with the level of artillery they were dealing with. How things were still largely ground-level despite the introduction of new, industrialized weaponry. How that musta made for the biggest shitshow.

Homies getting merked, left and right.

Limbs offed, bodies busted open, your homie decapitated right before your eyes.

And then, for those who returned, no one who hadn’t experienced it understanding.

How could they.

They lacked the experience to even start considering how.

And those who returned lacking the words to make them.

What were words in the face of that.

That which could not be expressed in language was physical trauma.

Was that which dealt with the opposite of language—that which dealt with the body.

With the confrontation of the utter destruction of bodies.

Of their fragility.

Their tenuousness.

It was ‘about deep, personal traumas that one must remain silent.’

This not a theoretical claim, but a pragmatically, physically felt assertion.

There was no use in trying to make others understand; that which concerned the body was what completely, necessarily, belied words.

We turned left where California ended, at the ocean.

Pier-ward.

Along the gravel rather than concrete path, that snaked left, right, left again.

That ess-ed.

Through lawn, palm trees. The ocean on our right, way down there, other side of the PCH, the beach; restaurants in between.

Past the Veterans Memorial—five rectangular, upright, concrete slabs, in a row—where Wilshire intersected Ocean—