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"I was there last night"


trapperjohn

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A couple of years ago someone asked me if I still thought about vietnam.I nearly laughed in there face.How do you stop thinking about it?Everyday for the past 29 years,I wake up with it,and go to bed with it.But this is what I said."Yea,I think about it.I cant quit thinking about it.I never will.But,Ive also learned to live with it.Im comfortable with the memories.Ive learned to stop trying to forget and learned instead to embrace it.It just doesnt scare me anymore.A psychologist once told me that NOT being affected by the experience over there would be abnormal. When he told me that,it was like he'd just given me a pardon.It was as he said,"Go ahead and feel something about the place,Bob.It ain't going nowhere.You're gonna wear it for the rest of your life.Might as well get to know it.A lot of my "brothers"haven't been so lucky.For them the memories are too painful,their sense of loss too great.My sister told me of a friend she has whose husband was in the Nam.She asks this guy when he was there.Here's what he said"just last night."It took my sister a while to figure out what he was talking about.JUST LAST NIGHT.Yeah I was in the Nam.When?JUST LAST NIGHT.During sex with my wife.On way to work this morning.Over my lunch hour.Yeah,I was there.Ask a vet about making friends in Nam.It was riskey.Why?Because we were in the business of death,and death was with us all the time.It wasn't the death of,If I die before I wake."This was the real thing.The kind where boys scream for there mothers.The kind that lingers in your mind and becomes more real each time you cheat it,You dont want to make alot of friends when the possibility of dying is that real,that close.When you do,friends become a liability.Don't get close to people who are going to die.In was you learn to keep people at a distance.You become good at it,that 30 years after the war,you still do it without thinking.You won 't allow yourself to be vulnerable again.I can still see the faces,though they all seem to have the same eyes.When I think of us I always see a line of "dirty grunts"sitting on a rice paddy dike.We're caught in the first gray silver between darkness and light.That first monment when we know we've survived another night,and the business of staying alive another night,and the business of staying alive for one more day is about to beging."One more day,God one more day.I recall the smells,too.Like the way cordite hangs in the air after a fire fight.Or the pungent odor of rice paddy mud.The mud of Nam smells ancient,somehow.Like it's alwys been there.And I'll never forget the way blood smells,stick and drying on my hands.I spent a long night that way many times.That memory isn't going awy.I remember how the night jungle appears almost like a dream like as the pilot of a cessna buzzes overhead,dropping parachute flares until morning.That artifical sun would flicker and make shadows run through the jungle.It was worse than not being able to see what was out there.We did our jobs like good soldiers,and we tried our best not to become as hard as our surroundings.We tried to walk that line.To be the good boys our parents had raised and not to give into that unnamed thing we knew was inside us all.As,I write this,I have a picture in front of me.It's of two young men.On their laps are tablets.One is smoking a cigarette.Both stare without expression at the camera.they're writing letters.Staying in touch with places they would rather be.Place and people they hope to see again.The picture shares a frame with one of my wife.She doesn't mind.She knows she's been included with special company.She knows I'll alwys love those guys who shared that part of my life,a part she never can.And she understands how I feel about the ones I know are out there yet.The one's who still answer the question,"Where were you in Vietnam?with "Hey,man,I was there last night.

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Its a ripped off from a piece called : I Was There Last Night By Robert Clark.

 

You can find it here:

http://www.alternatevoice.com/blog_archives/000228.html

 

and here:

http://www.brothersboundbyhonor.com/familyissues.html

as well as several other places by a simple search.

 

In my very humble opinion, original posters post is theft. Pure and simple.

-j-

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks again for letting me know that I'am sick also I'am a lier,cheat,an thief thats why I come to bangkok to be around my own kind,anyways I have group therapy on 1st an 3rd tuesday of the month now, so it will be awhile before I can come back to Bangkok,all donations for my treatment can be givin to my ex-girlfriend Noi.God bless everyone and little timmy too.

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