It’s the same every week–go where the people are and infiltrate them with peace. Fortunately for him, his warfare-imposed disabilities do not impede this practice. And the months, now measured in many years, don’t diminish his efforts. He is a man transformed by his faith. He is a peace hawker, an oxymoron he likes to attach to himself, provocatively linking his passion for peace with an ardent commitment to activism.
He had weathered the Just Give Peace a Chance idealism of the ‘60s that greeted his stretcher as he was carried off the hospital ship. The chanting demonstrators that surrounded the gangplank were a curiosity to him more than a threat. This was all new. Three years previously, the din of the enthusiastic well-wishers for the brave young lads departing to Southeast Asia had cheered his heart. But all that had changed.The jeering was not the worst of it. The worst of it was two buddies cut nearly in half by machine gun fire. The worst of it was a girl who had decided she could not wait for his return. The worst of it was the sniper bullet that had ripped open a lung and opened his intestine.
He spent years looking for “the best of it,” the redemptive outcome of it all. It evaded him for a very long time. Peace had left him during the war, and he had never gotten it back.
His epiphany followed him late one night into Charley’s Bar, a dive identified by a dingy purple neon sign. Its flickering, burned-out script lettering resembled unintelligible Arabic scrawl.
Unlike the emptiness in his heart, he could spin his empty mug down to the bartender for a refill. This was familiar turf. He knew the pattern of the grain in the wood of the bar and the speed the mug needed to reach its destination.
But this time something in the emptiness of the mug and its spin on the bar grabbed his eye and his heart.
Yes, he had yearned for peace–longing for the absence of war had never left him.
But today, he realized it was different. He recognized, for the first time, what he had been hoping for–no war and no pain–was not enough. Peace, defined as the absence of warfare, still felt empty.
Peace, he recognized, is not only the absence of war. It is not simply a vacuum. It is not a neutral placeholder like a stalemated demilitarized zone.
Instead, it is the presence of something far more powerful. It is an active and penetrating force. Peace is a substance that steals domains and imposes goodness like a conquering army. It chases evil, conquers it and banishes it.
Today, in this crowd and for this crowd, a veteran of warfare again collaborates to give Real Peace a chance.
It is his opportunity to help rout wickedness and redraw the turf of good and of evil one more time.