Is it possible to say precisely when a war ends? When I was a kid there was a version of the boogeyman legend that we repeated to one another constantly, in tones of delicious dread. Hitler had survived the wreck of Germany and was still alive on a South American plantation, plotting his revenge against the world. Even as we played at recess and argued about our favorite TV shows, we worried that he was lurking out there, maybe right outside the school’s fences, waiting for a chance to snatch at young Allied warriors. But there was a point — unrecorded, unknown, but still undeniable — when even this tottering ghost of the fuhrer became too old and weak to trouble the sleep of the world any longer. The rumor died, and took the last terrors of the war with it. Then the cool rumor kids were passing around was that the Holocaust was a hoax.

War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends — by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It’s a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.

-“Losing the War”, Lee Sandlin

Set aside an afternoon and read through Lee Sandlin’s Losing the War. It’ll take a while, but you can read it in chunks, and it is worth taking the time to do so. It is a haunting, and frightening look at World War Two, and war in general.

RodeoClown: praying.