Chariots Of Iron And Lord Indra’s Holy Napalm

A thread by Shantyman

‘Nam is myth, it is bronze age spirit in the 20th century, uncontaminated by the hypocrisy of its generation. Lord Indra danced in the napalm cloud, Valhalla was glimpsed between palm leaves in the dark and drugged Seers spoke with the one-eyed God on the banks of the Mekong. 

Here is no romantic delusion of the Civil War, no self-righteous state patriotism of World War Two and no public relations sanitation of the Iraq War. It is instead the barbarian world of the steppe and black forest, a liquor purer and finer than that to Americans in the last century.

It is the only war in which Americans have leapt beyond good and evil, reveling in destruction and glory as its own worthy goal, for no man feels as free and alive as one who lives in a world that is burning down—to say nothing of the man playing the role of its arsonist.

What other war in the nation’s history so naturally blends incinerating villages and their inhabitants with a permanent soundtrack and the vivid colour of LSD? Where else is the sharpest of all opposites reconciled into a zeitgeist that still persists for generations afterwards?

It awoke a virility of a past age within its participants and such was it potency that it become a lightning rod for the all the energies of it’s time, threatening world order as a nuke of kundalini. It set fires all over the earth, it was a gong that heralded the final hour. 

This is why they had to halt it the way they did, in panic and bewilderment at what was coming loose and bleeding back into reality, why they took a hard turn towards state-enforced moralfaggotry and mass psychological castration rather than a slow easing into it.

This is the sword of Damocles that hangs over their heads at all times, that anytime they drag the big golem out for battle, that the ghost of ‘Nam might possess it again and not be contained this time. This is why their coverage of every conflict since is so sterile and mundane.

The Pentagon and Langley eunuchs were not in charge of the situation. These men were their own masters and great effort was put into to preventing the ascension of any Col. Kurtz-like figure that could defy the machine and crown himself chieftain of the highlands.

Had one done so, an avalanche would have poured forth from him. Every renegade at heart would have been pulled to that figure, units refusing orders to do anything about it or halt their own deserters. Regiments become warbands, supplies become loot and rivals, worthy foes.

It would have been a threshold in reality being crossed, that modernity in one corner of the world had been totally wiped and that a new unknown race of nomads, totally alien to this settled world have burst forth like Gog and Magog to descend upon it.

Every unsettled account, aborted destiny and glaring contradiction of the modern age was being dredged upon by the pressure of this event and made to stand naked before it in judgement. The existential anxiety it produced hasn’t approached an intensity seen since.

What did their centuries of progress and development mean if, at the first opportunity, men would forget it ever existed and instead choose the world of smoking strange plants from the skulls of their enemies and raiding villages by moonlight?

The men who had tasted such a life cannot be brought back into the fold of modernity, those that felt it burn the strongest within them vanished soon after the war, lost to the needle and bottle or cut down like wild beasts when they refused to be contained in their cattle pen.

But ‘Nam still dances in the subconscious of America, the jungle and Charlie calling to them in their dreams like the protagonist in an HP Lovecraft story, ready to resume at the intensity it was left off at. Everything since has been them walking around in a daze, waiting.

“The 1st/9th was an old hyborean division that had cashed in it’s walls for chariots and gone tear-assing around the subcontinent looking for the shit, they have given the shudra a few surprises in their time. But they were mopping up now, and it hadn’t even happened an hour ago”