Lost for a Time

   Sweat runs down the back of my neck, behind my ears, it tickles down my belie and inside my fatigues. I taste it in my mouth, my eyes sting of it. The jungle is wet and heavy with heat. There is a lull in the activity just now as my comrade’s stir around me, tired and quiet conversation mingles with the otherwise silence of the hot afternoon wind as the platoon settles in for a much deserved rest. Sergeant Caruthers posts two men at watch, one on the low ridge just behind us and one on the trail leading up to our position. Some sleep in what shade they can find and flick off the ants that crawl onto them from the leaf litter on the floor of the jungle. The afternoon here seems to offer a brief respite from hell. For now the war has taken the afternoon off. Yesterday morning at 10:13 a.m. I watched Franklin die. I know the time. For some reason I looked at my watch as he lay still on the jungle floor. He took a bullet, center shot square in the chest. He turned towards me and his eyes met mine and I saw the life go out of him like turning off a light switch before his knees touched the ground. Sergeant Caruthers and two PFC’s killed the sniper a moment latter. Franklin was “short”, thirty-two days and a wake up. A dust off took him out two hours latter with no wake up. There is no shuch thing as gravity here, this place sucks! We are on patrol here in the Ashau. Three days out now and one left before we are picked up by chopper and go into Phu Bai for stand down. And yet…just moments ago I was thirty-five years older, standing next to my Toyota in a parking lot, clearing snow and ice from the windshield. And I have memories of all those thirty-five years. I lived them, worked them, chased dreams that never came true, raised two sons, married and divorced twice. I did, I lived thirty-five years of life. Thirty-five friggin’ years of hard work, sacrifice and broken dreams. Dreams, that’s just it. Was it all a dream? A dream to escape this damned jungle, this damned war ten thousand miles and thirty plus years away from the Colorado snow? Do you awake from a dream or can you wake into a dream? Which is the dream from which I must awake? Am I sleeping in my warm safe bed with the snow falling outside my bedroom window? Or…am I here in this damned valley still, trying to do my job and stay alive? I do not want to believe I am here sweating in this jungle. I do not with all my heart and soul. I want to stand up and walk away from this tree under which I sit and leave the radio I hump on my back laying there in the damp moldering leaves, leave this valley, this jungle and never return to it again and go home and feel the gentile Colorado snow on my face. But I come back here to this valley again and again until now I sit here and wonder the irresolvable question…which is the dream from which I must awake? God help me.

     The fishing is good here today, six nice rainbows on the stringer. My oldest son standing next to me checking to see if the bite he has just had will reward him with a fish. The afternoon sun is pleasantly warm and the June breeze flutters in the trees just above and behind us. The lake’s inlet that we fish from spreads out in a gentile flow in front of us and swirls through the eddies around the rocks in the deep parts of the inlet. The fish seem to lay just beyond there if you cast your line just right. My youngest son has wandered up stream twenty yards from us and has caught two nice trout in that spot in just the last few minutes. The days up here are long, slow, and lazy now. June is beautiful here and just a day’s hike down from Saint Mary’s Glacier. The lake is full and the trout hungry and feeding near the surface this afternoon. Our camp site a few miles back down the road will wait for us to bring our catch back, and a fire pit stands ready for a dinner of fresh caught trout, potatoes, onions, peppers and s’mores and to dry our wet muddy shoes on what will be a ring of hot stones with a sky full of Rocky Mountain stars above. Good sons I have been blessed with and I, and we have always enjoyed a good camping trip together here in our home state of Colorado, though not often enough. If this be a dream I pray it lasts forever. Yes life is good today, I am grateful for this day and all its blessings and all things are as they should be, all things that is…save for one. Just a moment ago I sat beneath a tree in a jungle with a war close at hand and a world away from this ideal reality. Or is it a dream within a dream within a dream? Can someone tell me which world I can believe in, which earth lays beneath me feet? I ponder the sense and logic of this thought. Someone speaks and his familiar voice brings me back to now, “Got a smoke”? “Yeah”, I reach into my fatigue pocket and fish out a crumpled pack of smokes and toss it to Private Williams. He shakes one out and tosses it back to me and says “Thanks man”. I slide it back into my pocket, then taking the dirty khaki towel I wear around my neck, I lean my head forward and bury my face into it, wiping the salty sweat from my face and neck. Williams sits down next to me under the tree and leans back into it soaking up the last bit of shade he can find there. A moment of silence whispers by as he lights the cigarette and exhales and the smoke wafts away with the warm wind. Sucking in another long drag he sighs his weariness, then without looking at me he whispers a heartfelt “God I hate this place”, then follows with a question. “hey man…you ever dream, dreams so real, I mean like you’re not really here, like you’re someplace else and it’s like so real you’d swear”… I cut him off in mid sentence before he can finish the thought. I stand staring out my window 35 years away at the snow flakes falling in wind driven swirls. I answer him. “Yeah, all the time man, all the time!”

    Rondad     04/04/2006