Our Burst of Brightness (excerpt from novel)

I Am Not Pleased

….  I am not that pleased with the whole thing, … to be honest, I am not pleased with myself, or my performance either.   Why did Sarah insist on wearing a raincoat on her breaks during her gymnastics competition?^[1]  That made no sense.  I cannot tell you how thoroughly disconcerting this was, how unraveling and destructive and unsettling – how damaging.  And if I were to tell you why she did it, you would just relax – relax and laugh and be back to normal.

You don’t know, do you – that when I say it was disruptive and damaging – that I am admitting something that no father should ever admit since it betrays the sense of strength that a father needs to display for his family for the whole world, most especially his kids ….  We used to say children; we used to say the word children a lot more than we do now.

… In a field of grass in a faraway village, Sarah, my child, and her half-sister, Siphong^[2] … … my child plays with her mother.  You may be able to guess that this is from my wartime experience.  She, Pinky, the woman with whom I had sex …  was in some ways just a girl – things were different then and we were all so afraid – and no one, none of us anyway, none of the American soldiers, were allowed to think let alone – let alone anything – we were … we were just there to fight and kill – kill as many living things as possible – plants animals people of all ages and all anything else …

I know you may think that I am talking about Vietnam, because of my age, and you might be correct.  There are no fluorescent orange lines drawn on the ground in that part of the world ^[3] that says “Now entering Laos” or “Now entering Cambodia” Sometimes we would be told – not unlike a verbal kidnapping – “OK soldier – get in the chopper.”  When we hit the ground a few minutes later nothing was said because we knew the mission: Kill. Kill everything as fast as you can as best you can.   Because of the nature of my life, some facts have changed – a lot.  This is a novel, and this is the nature of a novel for the facts to have been altered so much that – now – anyone with half a mind would consider this fiction.

… once when I first got to “The Region” – I came upon a young boy, maybe he was 5 or 6 but he looked much younger both because he was malnourished and because the stature of people in that part of the world does seem just plain smaller at least it did back then^[4] – I came upon the young boy.  He was crying profusely and holding something in his arms.  What gave me hope, what helped me connect with him, was that he would look down at what he was cradling in his arms, then he would look at me, then he would look down.  It was uncanny, and I can honestly say I did not see such a thing in that same way – I did not see anything again in that same way ever again all the time- all the time that I was in The Region.  My Sergeant was standing next to me, at my left shoulder – young people nowadays in these more modern times, it is popular to say – kids now like to assign a position of the clock to these things, such as “he was at my 9 o’clock” – well yes; we did that most of the time, but in this situation, I was just a guy, a guy connecting with a kid.

Sarge could see how much I was connecting, he got very loud, very animated, very freaky within seconds – he spun me around slapped one hell of a slap onto my face, got incredible eye contact into the holes of my eyes, through and into me and said:  “ Look at me – look straight at me SOLDIER here right here look – he already had my full, complete, and unceasing attention nothing else was happening anywhere in the world I was already staring into Sarge’s eyes into him as though it was just he and I anywhere …  Right here boy – my eyes NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW – Then I heard a rifle shot, then another – two of the guys in our crew were now walking away shaking their heads – I could tell that look even with them walking away – as though I had done something wrong.

Then Sarge said a bunch of things as they say in movies, I do not remember what he said exactly because the little boy was lying in the dirt of that path just ahead, lying there clutching something which he had regarded as so very precious, was it an animal, his pet, or wounded stray upon which he had taken pity, was it a part of a human loved one?  “Don’t ever do that again soldier or I’ll send you home.  You almost got us all killed.”  Then he completely lost it again!

Why are you here kid?

“To kill things – to kill things, sir!”

And what is your mission?

To kill things sir!

And does it matter what the things are?

No sir!

Does it matter what the things are?

No sir!

Do what?

Kill things!

Do what?

Kill things!  And he kept this up for at least a quarter-mile of walking through the jungle that smelled like – like a field of corn back home that had been sprayed too many times with a crop duster.

end of Part One –

^[1]               Please remind me to tell you why.

^[2] Laotian baby names … https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Writing_Adolescent_Fiction/Character_names/Laotian  …  retrieved on Sunday, July 4, 2021 …

^[3]               Very odd that you should use the phrase “no orange lines… we had plenty of Orange, of course, Agent Orange …..

^[4]               Nowadays, I seem to have grown up – I have to come to regard all people with more respect and physical size does not say very much as to a person’s stature – especially their stature as a human being.