“Howard-related stuff is a badass genre. All I knew about Conan growing up was the movie, but as I've revisited all that as a man, it's really cool to explore all these underlying elements in the stories that just make you want to go out there, get dirty, and kick ass at life. In fact, quoting it was a regular thing with some of us in my old platoon. We'd be about to go train or go out into Indian Country and someone would say, ‘Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!" or "He didn't care if he lived or died. Life...death...the same.’”
-from an email from Samuel Finlay
I have had the pleasure of exchanging a dozen or so emails with Sam, as well as mining his book, Breakfast with the Dirt Cult for my research into aggression and masculinity. Sent to me for review, Sam’s book is too important as a record of the common fighting man, to simply review and cast on the “been read” pile. We are awash in super-soldier biographies from the most elite of our recent war survivors. There are also publishing houses signing welfare mothers in uniform to write about their adventures as women in the military. But there is little care for the regular soldier, the “Joes,” the much shat upon meat shield of our wan national will.
Even the everyman term G. I. [Government Issue] Joe has been co-opted by our materialistic feminine ethos to sell super soldier toys. When I was a kid G.I. Joe was a doll that you outfitted and roleplayed for adventure. I remember standing atop my parent’s stairs outside the house, loading the bearded G.I. Joe into an Apollo Space capsule [about the size of a toaster, and made of surprising durable plastic] and heaving the expensive toy out over the stairs, hoping it would miss the sidewalk, and then scrambling down the hill to see if my Joe was okay when he smacked down on the curb.
The heat shields held!
I have liberal friends, even among war gamers, that find it odd that a regular guy who has struggled physically to keep up with elite fighters would be fascinated to read about the alpha male heroes of Howard, like Conan, who is essentially the ultimate, barely believable, male combatant. They live in a world where it is heresy to believe in “supermen’ although such men abound in war and sports. Maybe I believe because I have been beaten by such men, and it fascinates me to put myself in their shoes, or to imagine standing next to them instead of against them in a lethal combat. Maybe I read these stories because I have an affinity with Howard, and Howard, like myself, was just a guy that “boxed,” sparred with who he could when he could and never accomplished anything of note in the ring, and knew well where he stood, using his imagination to sketch stories from the perspective of the super fighters that inspired him.
Before getting back to Samuel’s experience as a “Joe” and a “Corporal” as told through the eyes of Tom Walton in a novel that is thinly veiled nonfiction, permit a walk down memory lane to a half hour spent on a bench at a bus stop in Downtown Baltimore on a Sunday morning in 2012, with a former boxer nicknamed Poet, who inspired the fictional character featured in the serial by the same name on this site.
Poet waved me over to discuss my gear, as I was headed to spar with Charles out on the East Side and had dipped into the city center to transfer buses. I gladly missed my connect to speak with this fellow who did not remember me from the time he gave me advice about handling one of my fighters a decade earlier. At this point in life his eyes were going and the cell phone his dear daughter had given him was broken from a scuffle he had with “a few young fellas, who I managed to stretch out but barely.”
The bumps and bruises were as if nothing to him, but his darling daughter’s gift, the memento he clung to, being damaged, had him feeling frail inside, like life was slipping away, and he confided in me. He, like most semi-literate boxers from the poor side of the black community, admired reading and yearned to find solace in books, but had trouble with the mechanics of it, having been so poorly served by our criminal corrections facilities that masquerade as public schools for children in Baltimore.
He asked me what I was reading, and I was embarrassed to have only a manuscript that I had written, By This Axe!, which was a science-fiction tribute to Howard’s Kull and Conan characters, about some meathead super-jock who thinks he is the God of War reborn..
I read a passage from the beginning of the apogee chapter, Battle Noon, as he sat back with a tear in his eye, thinking—no doubt—of better days, and nodded positively, as he kind of rocked on his big hands, his wide shoulders rolling under his gray sweatshirt, “ ‘Bout stealin’ a Breath from Death, is what you writin’ ‘bout, son. Go on with yourself en right you anotha one.”
He said this as he nodded to the second bus screaming around the bend, indicating that it wouldn’t do to leave my sparring partner waiting in the park.
I have not seen him again. But his words have finally fallen into the place in the brain where they were intended, not to be correlated until I read the following passage from Sam’s book:
“He knew on paper he was just a bookish young man from Middle America, but in the Shithook [Chinook troop deployment chopper] with his platoon of natural-born pure-bred sons of bitches next to him, he felt like he was in a war band of pagan gods out for vengeance and blood.”
Later in the narrative of that deployment a soldier returning from a mountaintop patrol spoke glowingly of another soldier about what “a man” he was for humping the Squad Automatic Weapon all the way up the mountain. Reading a Conan, Kull or Kane story gives the reader the sense of being next to the hero, not the delusion that he is the hero, which is the only way that a denatured product of modernity could understand it. So, the fact that you can enjoy a Howard story, particularly a Conan story, is proof that civilization has not completely erased your soul.
To get a view of what it is like to go to war and walk the edge between civilization and barbarism, in service to a fantastical society more wildly degenerate than anything the author of Kull could have imagined, to walk the ground that Howard tread in his mind, read Samuel Finlay’s book, Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, via the link below.
