Gentle Violence

Prologue: Casually prepared

         Have you ever looked at a sattelite view of the earth? The internet offers easy access to these sights with terrain servers showing digital images of the entire planet as taken from space in an orbiting sattelite. This technology is easily accessed through portable, hand-held devices available and owned by over half the population on Earth - cell phones.

         Todays most advanced technology will likely pale in comparison to the scientific wonders of tommorow. To think that all of this is being created by an animal that has, through the trials of time, proven itself to be the dominant species of the planet - the Human Animal. From our conception, we are driven by our primal instinct to survive - the same instinct shared by every living creature on Earth.

         Let's take a closer look at one of these sattelite images of our planet. Zooming in on the East Coast we see open expanse of farmland, profitting mostly from it's crops in tobacco leaves, soybeans, peanuts, corn, and of course hogs. Through some parts of this and the surrounding counties, the smell of the hog farms is nearly unbearable. As a child, your mother would say to breath through your nose and smell it and not through your mouth for others to smell.

         There is a small, two bedroom house on an acre of land placed neatly between bordering crops of corn. The morning is just starting to open its eyes to find the occupants of this house still sleeping soundly from the Saturday night's weekly poker game. The scattered piles of poker chips on a coffee table turned sideways to accomodate all five players have been placed neatly back in the alluminum carrying case they came in. Two grown, young men seem strewn across the comfortably small living room bordered openly by the kitchen. One crumpled on the couch which wasn't quite big enough to hold him anymore while the other fully reclined on the lazy-boy in the corner. Their younger brother, from a different father than their own, was tangled with his sheets in his bedroom while their mother was sleeping soundly next to the man that helped to raise them. The Alpha-Male of this house.

         This man quietly pours across his wife as he lifts himself to his feet. The fan is running at the foot of their bed, tightening his muscles with the crisp air blowing through the room. The mirror of his wifes' dresser still showing signs of the soldier he once was.

         Dressed in an old pair of cut-off BDU's from the Army, and a loosely fit t-shirt he walks barefoot through his castle. His steps are surefooted and naturally gentle, though he makes no special