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This is how you tell a bad war story. You explain it all. Every inch of it, from the very beginning.
After all, we know this story. A crazed president, a nation that goes boom and the humanity burning under all of it. We know this story. We know of the betrayal and the spiral and the cigarette smoke that still haunts and festers. We know of loyalty and love and how quickly these things crumble under the weight of it all. We know of hope that rotted under floorboards and dead men who didn’t rot at all. We know how love warps. We know of gods and worship and the consequence of bearing the face of God. Well and truly, we know this story. How love prevailed and then it didn’t.
There was a time before this story, too. We cannot begin things in medias res, but we must. We drag a dead man through time to the very beginning of it all. We must. This is a very old story. This is history.
...
You tell a bad war story by talking about hazy memories in obscene objective detail.
There was a man. Let’s call him Wilbur Soot. There were more men. Let’s call them his cabinet. Wilbur made a country in another man’s land in the name of freedom. He emancipated the country from the Greater Dream SMP. Dream did not take kindly to that.
They fought a bloody war—casualties on each side, L’manberg hurt more than it could survive. There’s a duel. Right-hand man Tommyinnit loses his prized discs. L’manburg emerges victorious.
(A good war story may tell you that Wilbur was not made for this role, that he’s an idealist and very seldom a leader, and that he’s building this to make a place for people to belong. It may even tell you about his guitar and serene nights and how much he loved his people. His country. It may tell you that he wrote their anthem, and that he was a man trying too hard to be good.
A better war story would tell you that he is scared and tired. Would let you know of summerbright smiles that eventually fell like rotting fruit from trees in late autumn. It would tell you that history is cruel and he should have left a long time ago. It would whisper stories of revolutions and freedom and the merciless toll it takes on its revolutionaries.
A better war story wouldn’t be told at all.)
He built his country for a kind of people. A specific kind, and those barred did not take kindly to that. An election is held and it is lost, and other men take the presidency of L’manberg. Wilbur does not like this. Wilbur, in fact, hates this. He tells people that it is his country. Along with Tommy, he’s exiled. Anger and despair that have long since been there come to the surface in full force. Pogtopia is a hole in the ground, looking like an oversized grave, but one Wilbur has built himself. Remember this.
(This is the interlude where Wilbur tells his war stories. There’s hope painted into the closing silences here at the very beginning, but it peels. This is not supposed to be where his words are jumbled and smell of stale cigarette smoke. Where Tommy watched someone bound to him in blood and war—his brother—walk around like a ghost, always murmuring and plotting. It’s like he was preparing for it all already.
Sunlight doesn’t enter this grave. Here, where every sin is real fresh and original. Here, where nothing makes sense unless you’re Wilbur Soot.)
...
You tell a bad war story by simplifying it. By telling it over and over again. By leaving out the important parts and focusing on the results.
Wilbur attempted to blow L’manburg up several times. People tried to stop him, but he succeeded right after they finally won it back. Wilbur pulled his own father into killing him.
He succeeded on November 16th; the beginning of a dark, stygian winter.
(He does not get a grave.
Footnotes in this story may tell you that he was loved but too blind to see it. That through the darkness, people still hoped for him. Remember that Pogtopia was a grave that Wilbur built for himself. Remember that it was abandoned, relegated to a war monument that will be as easily forgotten as the last. You are the only one remembering.)
A boy is left in charge of a crater. He rebuilds a country from shreds and shrapnel. They call it New L’manberg. History, ever the bore, repeats itself.
(Well, here’s the beauty of a good war story: I lied.
You are not the only one remembering.
Wilbur rots in purgatory, succumbing to fate and then not. He convinced himself of his own imminent villainy. He remembers. This is the fork in the road. He is a dead man on train tracks staring at concrete walls and taciturn station speakers.)
L’manberg dies this time and stays dead. It is difficult to tell this story without talking about two boys that were ripped from innocence too early. One is Sisyphus, bearing his presidential burden he was never built to bear and the other is Tantalus, the right-hand man always reaching for greatness, but always two steps down and a little to the left. Perhaps even metaphor is too great of a burden to place on them.
Meaning, they were two boys caught in the crossfire. Ripped apart and brought back together too many times over.
“What am I without you?” / “Yourself.”
(There is a ghost that exists. Only a shadow of the man it represents. It does not haunt. It does not need to, existing in all the meaningful ways but one.
The dead man wants a fresh start—tabula rasa, as they call it. Good war stories are sediment and gravel. Good war stories are layers, burying bodies before they even know they are bodies.)
Bad war stories allow for revivals. Hearty remembrances that forget the crux of it all. Bad war stories are autopsies, pulling themselves apart, cataloging the minutes into line numbers and dulled blades. They plague and haunt in the most clinical sense of the word.
More men have to die before the story is called in for an overhaul.
Tommy dies, one day. Poorly kept records will tell you that Dream was only kept alive in his own prison so that Wilbur could be brought back. (Whispers of a revive book.) Tommy dies and
(now he’s underground, with his brother. He doesn’t want Wilbur back once Dream pulls him into the land of the living.
Wilbur played solitaire. Tommy’s void was dark and Wilbur’s train station was near-dark. They played solitaire and Schlatt was there and Tommy wants to live and remember their motley crew of revolutionaries instead of corpses. He supposes he’s one now, too.)
suddenly he’s alive again. In Dream’s cell. This is the price of dealing with avatars of God. Winters are cold and heavy but they, too, pass. Dream’s wall of lava warms Tommy right up.
...
You can tell a bad war story by never changing perspective. A wrong-man-dies, right-way-up scenario.
Tommy lives and he’s never quite the same again. When he dreams, he dreams of a brother enshrouded in darkness and he’s taken all the light with him. Tommy tries very hard to get his bearings back. He doesn’t want Wilbur back at all.
(Everything is dimmer in the wake of the train leaving. Tommy doesn’t see the way his brother’s face falls, how cracked and gouged his fingernails are.
Ozymandias is an old poem Wilbur loved. Tommy thinks Wilbur reminds himself of it now—a leader long beaten and buried, his creation little more than dust, a historical footnote.)
Really, Tommy doesn’t think any of these things at all as he’s being revived, because being pulled from the dead is an excruciating pain that leaves little room for coherent thought.
Wilbur is revived nearly two months after Tommy. The mythos of the man nearly dust, haunting in all the meaningful ways but one.
You can tell a good war story if it’s action-packed and heavy, and a bad one if it leads you to the good guy.
You can tell a beautiful war story if it starts in the summer and ends in the summer, battle-hardened men enjoying what they fought for. Winter is a figment of the past and the future, summer is eternal and false. You must swear uncompromising allegiance to heroes and villains in a war story, painting and characterizing and ignoring the sing-song cicadas in the garden. You must believe in a painted untruth.
War stories always forget to sketch the guitar.
...
You can tell a true war story by a certain, unwavering devotion to letting things happen as they do. Forget morality, forget laws of nature and science. True war stories bend truth around them.
Let me tell you a true war story.
(In the quiet whispers of early spring,
a sun rises,
and a dead man declares he’s alive, because he is.)
The world goes on.