Yesterday, just before dark, a cute little four year old girl played in our cul de sac with her dad. They played with a toy that she shot into the air with a large rubber band. It twirled slowly to the ground. As darkness chased away the dusk, the little girl shot her toy into the air and watched it twirl its way slowly back down to the ground.
While her dad and I chatted, she picked up her toy and shot it into the air again.
“Look! Daddy! It’s shining.”
I turned to look, but missed whatever was shining. She picked her toy off the ground and shot it up again. Her dad and I both looked up and watched it descend.
The twirling toy lit up the area beneath us and sent me back in time to the shores of Viet Nam. For a micro-eternity I was watching the white flares illuminate the jungle to expose the Vietcong.
I stopped breathing. Tears flowed. Memories of the choppers, flying back and forth, shooting their machine guns at the exposed enemy fighters, came rushing back. The tracer bullets looked like futuristic death rays coming out of the choppers. I worried that the tracers made it easy for the Vietcong to see where the choppers were.
My stomach vibrated to the rhythm of the sound of the choppers, even though the sound was only in my memory. But my body, for that micro-eternity, could not tell whether I was in Long Beach in 2017 or in Viet Nam in 1972.
Damn PTSD.
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