The Acceptable Wound

A Griffin Signal fragment

America loves a comeback story, as long as you don’t mention what broke you.

The exception, of course, is the veteran of war. War is an acceptable trauma. If you were fighting for the national interest, you become a hero. Yet even the hero, if his scars are ugly, becomes an object of scorn.

I gave Blackthorn a limp—not too ugly—and kept him in shadows. Now I wonder if I can write him out of those shadows. Can readers bear to see him walk into daylight?

I remember when the story broke about Bill Clinton dodging the draft. I was a 90s kid. My mother said, “I don’t blame him. I’d suffer any consequence to avoid a senseless war.” My father’s answer was more careful: “Yes, Brit, I feel that too—but leaders can’t ask others to do what they themselves avoided.”

In retrospect, I find truth far more interesting than ideals. I’m drawn to the man who dodges the draft—why he does it, what he does instead, and what he becomes when history catches up. I’m less interested in what I would have done—I’d probably have jumped a cargo ship to Canada—than in how conscience reassembles itself afterward.

What do we become in consequence of our evasions?

What choices do we make from the things we refused?

The crisis of conscience and the choice born of self-preservation rarely pass the test of public judgment. But they tell the truer story of who we are when the flag is folded and the lights go out.

J.G.