I have already gathered many blessings from all these posts
on Face Book. (I still wish that
Zuckerberg would modify the fricking posting format).
One of those perks is to have no obligation to please ‘The
Reader over My Shoulder’. I like what I
am writing. I like writing it. Your likes, comments (raves, questions, criticisms,
death threats) and shares are appreciated, but not required.
Often, when I read and re-write these monologues, I find
myself correcting the verb tense because, in my journey back to that year, I
catch myself writing in the present…of things past.
For, at the moment, I am transported back into that blond
youth of my youth, bare chested, tanned and sweating. I smell the heat, the dust, and the people of
Viet Nam. My spirit is there again. What
I had thought to have died on my return to the world has in fact been living
within me all along.
Is it not so for each of you, my brothers and sisters? My disconnected aging pals, my unseen soul
mates of our commonly shared experience?
Are your feet chaffing and sweating in your canvas-topped
boots? Are you pinching your P-38 between
your fingers, to open your C-rats? Are you cleaning the muck from your weapon? Are you slapping at mosquitos and watching
where you step? Is the crushing fear of
sudden death your every moment’s companion?
When you hear the throp-throp-throp of a chopper overhead,
can you still distinguish the sound of a TV station helicopter from the sound
of a Huey? If it’s really an old Delta
up there, do you shade your eyes to squint a glimpse of its passing? Does the noise evoke your memories? Or do you automatically bury such thoughts,
and continue on your Merry?
Just the other night, a person who has spent the last thirty
years as an Army counselor remarked that we should drop the ‘D’ from PTSD. Trauma is a natural response to horror; it is
not an aberrant sickness, he argued. Of
COURSE we are traumatized. Why do we
have to offer proof to the VA and others?
For me, the VA drugs, the VA psych visits every 90 days, and
the Vet Center consultations once a month weren’t working.
This is.
I am telling my story—I am so compelled. In one sense, I am telling your story as
well; but it would be far better for you to speak of these things for yourself.
Perhaps the healing that I can feel in my heart would work
for you too; but holding it back, as you and I have done all this time, will
not bring peace and closure to your egregiously wounded souls.
There it is, Motherfucker.
There it is…
(My spacebar keeps sticking.
Give it a squirt of cold pressurized nitrogen. Shit!
Still sticks. What to do? Why, trot down to the Walmart and buy a new keyboard,
of course. Stand in line (two of thirty
service registers now open for your shopping convenience), surreptitiously gawk
at Sunday Walmart people…nah. Just put
up and shut up, Corko me lad. Live with
it, to borrow the X-Gen term).
Or maybe juice the old American Express card ahead of budget
and get one of those new I-pads with touchscreen technology (Technology? Geez! That word has gone the way of the
Packard, but I have no other to supplant it).
Each new shiny-pad-thingy comes with Windows 8 installed (Oh! Sez Billy
Boyo Gates! You MUST move into the future with the 8—forsake that clumsy
patchwork 7 and climb into the future of now!)
The idea of paying $1000+ for a light-weight Leveno sandwich
board comes and goes. I rub my eyes and
look up for the first time in hours. It
is raining. I was unaware that it was
raining, so engrossed am I in my head. I
open the front door and verify the pat-pat of water dripping off the roof. Yes, it is raining, numb nuts.
This gentle patter does not evoke memories of monsoon. Nowhere near those September days and nights
and days of the monsoons. In Viet Nam.
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear
with a hearty Hi HO Silver—and AWAY!!
I walk down the main street of Tien Sha, five of us
abreast. I am wearing the coolest
raingear I have ever comshawed: a dark grey rubberized poncho with a hood; and
the brightest nylon fuchsia lining imaginable.
The lining is to attract the dustoff above the LZ; and to give Charlie
squatting in the bush a vivid target to shoot at.
One more genius offering from the logistics geeks, like the
plate in the sole of our jungle boots? Ya’
think maybe the gooks have by now abandoned the punji stick tactic? Not the Boy Scout Geeks at their distant conference
tables, no siree! Be prepared, they
rejoin.
Well, it’s dead on that they didn’t consider the poncho as a
fashion statement; but I have.
I throw one flap over my shoulder to expose the dazzling
fuchsia. I am at once Bela Lugosi,
replete with fake fangs and greasy slicked-back hair--the hair staining the
doilies in the parlor. I swagger down
the street. It is The Easter
Parade. I glance about, hoping to see
courtly nods of appreciation.
It’s a crying shame that no one pays me any heed. At least my garb repels the rain sheets,
pelting us now for a solid week around the clock. The water is kept off, but the encroaching
damp is inescapable. Eventually,
everything is damp, right down to the skivvies.
The water is so invasive.
Those super Jap 35 MM cameras we all get during our first month
in-country? If you don’t keep them in some
dry place (Good luck on that score), there is a fungus here that permeates the
lens and eats the rubber seals.
Expensive camera fucked. Your
photos all caw-caw. Your dream of a
Pulitzer dashed to smithereens.
At least mamasan’s prediction has been realized. (Don’ warry
Gee Eye! Hit koolah win Monsoon come!) It has dropped to a comfortable 96
degrees in daytime. The temperature
drops another 2 degrees at night. Why,
we could be in California! Except it
doesn’t rain there. It doesn’t rain
anywhere like here.
The storms aren’t a Godsend either. One time, a storm came boiling over the sea
at China Beach. I was propped up against
a beach cabana watching the squall approach as if it were alive. My friends had left me there while they went
to the snack bar. I was so stoned that I
was quadriplegic from the neck down. I
couldn’t move to shelter if the idea had struck me. What almost struck me was lightning.
As the storm rolled to landward, it brought along its
marching band of thunder...and lightning—great bolts striking down and
zigging-zagging every whichway. I watched the approach, made fearless by the
massive quantity of THC oozing into the bloodstream from a seriously stressed
pair of kidneys. I think I counted three
strikes exploding, make craters in the sand less than twenty yards away.
Cool.
The spectacular display moved inland; gone as quickly as it
had arrived. My buds returned with their
chips and drinks, having entirely missed the show. They looked down into my
wasted puss. They looked out at the
craters in the beach. They said nothing
and sat down in a circle, to rid themselves of the munchies. They were only in slighter better condition
than I was.
Cool.
Will our caped hero survive?
Will Black Pajama Bart take him out in a cowardly coordinated ambush of
7.6 mm rounds? Stay tuned…
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