Sadness
weighed heavy on my gut, pressing my diaphragm, shortening my breathing when I
read ...first firefight...1969...from an excerpt from Chuck Matheson’s book,
The War Still Rages, sent to me by a friend.
We patrolled
up and down the Guld of Tonkin. Invisible choppers roared over the jungle across
the water. Narrow death rays glowed reddish yellow lines against the black
night. All the while a constant rat tat that of the chopper's machine guns
insulted my ears. A perpetual knot kept residence in my stomach. I waited,
knowing our soldiers would give us coordinates, and then we'd fire our five-inch
gun (22-foot-long cannon, with a 5 in diameter barrel).
Five-inch made
it sound less lethal, but it was deadly accurate, up to 8 miles away.
Sure enough,
the turret turned toward the shore and gut-wrenching blasts shot out of the five-inch
gun.
Sometimes a white flare exploded on the land and manufactured daylight exposed everything underneath, as it floated slowly down on its little parachute.
Boys, we
were all just boys, scattered on all directions, running for cover under trees
and bushes.
My gut continued
its slow twist as my jaw clenched tighter and the machine guns’ rat tat tatted
death to unseen Viet Cong and US soldiers on the ground.
No escape.
So, all I
could do was pray. I prayed, "Please dear God, let this be a
nightmare. Please let me wake up back in
my own bed on Long Beach."
I said that
prayer over and over every single night. God wasn't listening to me or anyone
fighting this war. He was busy tending to the grieving mothers of the
Vietnamese boys we killed.
My hands
gripped the ship's safety line, as the sea breeze ruffled my hair. Gun smoke
and diesel fuel fumes mixed with the salt air as I stared across the water,
hoping we were out of range, hoping we didn't run aground.
4 years
after I left Viet Nam I sat on a bluff above Pat Hurley Park in Albuquerque
watching the 4th of July fireworks. In a lull between fireworks someone shot
off a white parachute flare, like the ones in Viet Nam.
Boom. I was
no longer watching fireworks. My whole body tensed. My mind blasted back onto
the ship, off the shore of Viet Nam.
Denise asked me what was wrong. I told her I had to leave. I was terrified to go to sleep that night and for many nights after. I was afraid that my prayer had turned into a curse, a punishment for my going to war. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, I would wake up back in Viet Nam and that Albuquerque, Denise, and my boys were just a dream. Even now, 50 years later, that feeling stops my breathing. Rationally I know it is 2022. But when that feeling hits, my body worries that the last 50 years were just a dream.
