The War Prayer

A quiet lesson about intention, consequence, and what we look away from.

My freshman year of college, I had a creative writing teacher named Dr. Douglas Lepley. On the first morning, while everyone waited for the usual talk about expectations and due dates, he simply began discussing a book he loved. There was no formal start. No list of rules. Just a quiet invitation into something deeper than a course outline could offer.

His classes followed that same easy rhythm. He placed a book in our hands and let us find our way through it before anyone suggested what it meant. We talked about what stood out, what confused us, what stayed with us after the first read. Only later did I understand that he was watching how we thought before he ever taught us how to think.

After we had lived with a book for a while, he sometimes rolled an old television to the front of the room and played a film version when one existed. He never explained why. It was enough to see how the same story took on a different life in someone else’s imagination. When there was no film, we stayed with the text. He never pushed the material into a different shape. Each story was allowed to breathe on its own.

Every so often he revealed something from his own life that did not match the quiet instructor standing in front of us. One morning he mentioned that The Doors had played at one of his college dances. He said it as if it were nothing. But to a teenager who had idolized Jim Morrison, that one detail felt like a doorway into a world that was wilder and more alive than anything I had known. It made me realize that the man teaching our class had once lived through a time and culture that shaped him in ways none of us could see.

The writing assignments he gave us seemed simple at first, yet they pushed me into places I had not explored. I wrote about my parents and the strain they lived under, what it meant to grow up with alcohol shaping the atmosphere of a home, and the ambition already forming inside me without my understanding. That room became the first place where introspection felt like a natural act, something that did not need to be forced.

Then one morning he placed photocopies of Mark Twain’s The War Prayer on our desks. No introduction. No explanation. Just the pages. That alone told me he expected us to meet the story without being prepared for it.

Twain had written it late in his life but chose not to publish it. He believed the country would reject a message that sharp, especially in the patriotic mood of his time. Reading it at eighteen, in a quiet classroom on a campus far from anything resembling a battlefield, I did not expect it to reach me the way it did.

The story begins with a church praying for victory in war. Their words are sincere. They want their boys protected. They want triumph. They want reassurance. Everything about their prayer feels familiar and human.

Then a stranger enters the church and completes the prayer they have begun. He does not contradict it. He simply reveals the part that remains unspoken.

O Lord our God,
help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their dead;
help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of the wounded;
for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives,
and turn their homes into ruins.

Twain was not attacking their faith. He was exposing the cost hidden inside their hope. The part people rarely say out loud.

By the time I read that story, I already had a small sense of what force could do. Childhood fights had taught me what real impact feels like, and the Vietnam veterans in my town carried themselves in a way that needed no explanation. My uncles spoke of World War II in fragments, always surrounded by long silences, and even at that age I understood that silence can sometimes tell the larger story.

The rest of it came later. Years of martial arts training showed me how much responsibility lives inside strength. My time in the military put me close enough to the machinery of violence to respect its power, even though my roles were safe compared to those who served in combat. I remained whole, but some friends were not as fortunate. They returned from the Gulf with illnesses no one could name, and with wounds that healed unevenly or not at all.

And in recent years, I have come to understand that some battlegrounds are only miles from home. A close friend of mine, a Lewiston, Maine, police officer, still carries the guilt of being off duty the night of the mass shooting a few years ago. He cannot shake the feeling that he should have been there. His war is the daily reality of a city worn thin by addiction, poverty, and the quiet ache of a community that remembers better days.

All of these experiences, spread across different chapters of my life, eventually circled back to that first reading of Twain. The story grew with me. Its meaning widened. And each time I returned to it in memory, it revealed a little more of what he was trying to say about the cost of human intention.

Roger Waters captured that same truth in The Bravery of Being Out of Range. His words carried the weight Twain was reaching for:

We play the game with the bravery of being out of range.
We zap and maim with the bravery of being out of range.
We strafe the train with the bravery of being out of range.
We gain terrain with the bravery of being out of range.

You feel the weight of those lines. They land the same way Twain’s stranger does. They remind you that the loudest calls for conflict often come from those who have never felt its reach.

Lepley never lectured us about any of this. He simply handed us the story and let us find ourselves inside it. He wanted us to see the whole shape of our intentions. To recognize the parts we speak openly and the parts we rarely face. To remain awake to the way things actually work.

Looking back, that day gave me a kind of clarity I did not yet have words for. The understanding that every desire casts a shadow. That every hope carries a cost. That seeing the world as it is requires a steadiness that grows slowly over years.

It was one of the first moments in my life when someone handed me a story that revealed more than I was prepared to see.

And it came from a teacher who believed I would read it honestly.

Thank you, Dr. Lepley.