the last fiction I'd ever read

I don't read fiction anymore.  My life has changed a lot over the last 15 years or so, and fiction books are one of those things.  I still read a lot, but it is all non-fiction.  It was probably sometime late in college that I quit reading fiction.  The last piece of fiction I read was William Gibson's "Spook Country".  It was a good book.  I liked the story.  It wasn't the Gibson I'd grown to love with Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, but it was Gibson nonetheless. 

I used to spend a lot of time delved into the worlds of other people, vicariously experiencing what they did.  I watched as Paul from Dune grew up and conquered the known universe.  I listened to stories from Piers Anthony about Death driving a sports car (or at least I think it was a sports car).  Neal Stephenson presented the internet as swashbuckling world where making faces move was more important than anything, and a crazy guy finally got his wish of nuking the U.S.  But I don't read those books anymore.

The old me loved them for what they represented.  They provided an escape to go when things weren't looking so rosy in my own life.  They were the escape I needed when I didn't like what I saw in my own life.  Most of the heroes in the stories were all the unlikely kind.  They stepped in from normal shoes and landed on a mountain, one crazy step at a time.  Many of them claimed they were "pawns of fate" and other strange statements, basically taking little responsibility for their lives. 

But that wasn't true.  These people stepped into situations that they didn't create, but they turned those situations upside down and on their head.  It wasn't always the prettiest sight, and things didn't always turn out as planned, but they took control of their own destiny.  And it was never easy fighting against the system.  But in the end, it was worth it. 

And I looked at my own life, tumbling through nowhere and ending up in places I didn't want to go and I wished I was that person who would just step out on a limb, without knowing the full extent of the limb or whether the branch would hold my weight.  I couldn't see through the fog (to make this paragraph so thick in metaphor that it hurts) and was afraid to step around, finding my way. 

But the Marines got rid of the fear of stepping into the unknown.  I remember sitting in some forest trail at Camp Pendleton, California during infantry school, acting as the squad leader for a life fire night assault.  It was pitch black, no moon.  We would sneak through those woods in darkness, setting up to destroy a fake enemy.  Claymores had been planted ahead of us, and they signaled the attack.  Rounds fired away.  Magazines emptied.  Sounds of buh-buh-buh-budget cut and butta-butta-jam came through the night as Marines ran out of ammo and continued their attempt at the assault.  It was beauty in precision and craziness, completely overwhelming to the senses and surreal in ways I can't even begin to describe. 

I didn't even understand what happened then.  I just did things.  Mechanical actions, much like a marionette pulled along by strings.  No happiness, no joy... just a surreal sensation of being wherever I happened to be at the moment.  No joy, no fear, no anticipation, no desire, no care.  It was a very empty feeling and I didn't like it and hadn't for years.

FYI, we didn't do so hot on our night ambush.  The people who were supposed to set the thing up didn't follow orders and screwed up royally.  No one died, but it was still annoying.  At the night assault course, we set the hill on fire as we went through fire and movement with live ammunition.  It was beautiful.    MOUT town was another surreal experience.  Two months before, I could barely climb the hill I ran up twice.  We practiced live fire room clearing, and slept on buses as we moved out of there, on to the next thing.  Always the next thing.

After my third tour in Iraq (as motor transport for all three, not infantry), I read the last piece of fiction.  At some point in my life, I realized everything I had experienced was enough to fill those books I'd read, and they had all passed me by.  I'd done what I had to do, but in the end I never really took charge of my life and stepped out on a limb.  It was always safe actions and safe moves.  Except for that time I went hunting a guy in the middle of the night during a security halt.  Not sure what to think about that anymore. 

After a while, I realized I had lived the crazy life.  My story book was there.  I just had to take charge of my own life.  I had spent enough time living my life through others.  It was time to take charge of my own life.