“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”—Alan Watts
A young man in his green uniform slumps down at the bench of a bus stop on 4th street. He is not used to the hardness of wood that is well-formed and factory-made. There are places made of soft, wet earth in the wilds of an ancient country that the young man has spent the last eight months laying on, and with a new kind of repulsive nostalgia the young man half wishes to feel it again. In the face of the townhouses lined up prettily in front of him he feels as if that place might again become something reported on the six o’clock news, and not something he had breathed, had built up and destroyed utterly.
He recalls a day in the jungle when the sun set over Tra Bong and it was not the fire of napalm but of a gold sun hitting green water, a heaven in purgatory. The air was hot and smelled like mud and behind and in front of him the boys of his platoon were singing Dean Martin, and he hummed along, Non dimenticar, non dimenticar…
When his mother and father arrange a party for his homecoming, the fireworks fall over Lake Matakwa like VC rockets on China Beach. His kid brother Pete is there, the ghost of a laughing marine who has fled the world in a helicopter. His girlfriend Donna is the Vietnamese mother who looks over the skeleton of a burned hut and does not see a war, but an apocalypse where the horsemen are VC and GI both, working in perfect tandem.
They all belong in between death and life, even the ones who come home. As he sits on the bench, the soldier believes he has known both better than he ever wished to know.
