FIFTY YEARS IN A FOXHOLE has been accepted for publication by Sunbury Press of Mechanicsburg, PA and is due for release on November 7, 2017.
Fifty Years in a Foxhole
…Oh My God Oh my Holy, Ever-Loving Jesus Christ. Oh My God Holy Mary Mother of God, Mother of God please pray for us bloody, mud-sucking sinners now right now and at the hour and minute of our death, I am so heartily sorry, pray for me and my people, I love Mom and Dad and Rhonda, Ivy, Tim, Richard, Dianne…
Jesus I need to get that effing door shut. I can hear the prayers lining up like a bunch of hungry truckers at the lunch bar.
Oh My God, there’s no stopping them now. It’s going to be a pitiful long night of prayers and all the unholy shit that drags them out from the hollows of my twisted soul. We are deep into the Big Gum Swamp of Florida and it’s raining. We’re on vacation, my wife Rhonda and I. The rain comes every night, regular as a mid-season monsoon, just after dark. It is laying down on our ten-dollar tarp heavier than a mess of herring in a seine. Pounding, splashing, running water, the tarp sags under the weight, oozes, sprays, and leaks small rivers to flood the few dry areas which we have folded into. The air is thick, hot, and wet with hardly a spoonful of oxygen in it. I try to draw a breath and it’s like sucking on an empty scuba tank at fifty feet down. The rain shoves through the flimsy Big Box tent seams and now the water level begins to rise. Oh My God I am so sorry, please forgive me my sins… my tent is gone, my wife is gone, and I am sitting in a poncho covered foxhole with Rufus. I can see the whites of his big eyes… Oh my God..Pray for us all … I am so sorry. Rufus is afraid tonight too. I can see it, smell it. He is probably more scared than me because Rufus is a short-timer and he has come to hope and believe that he might get out of this shithole war alive. Hope is a tragic effing thing.
That was a flashback to the Battle for the Hills. Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, Sept. 24, 1966. I was battling with elements of an NVA regiment that had moved into the area south of the DMZ, increasing in number, with the full intent to stay. Rufus got out alive. TC and the Rocket Man both got killed and I got med-evaced with three bullet holes, one smack dab through my belly button, one tore off half my calf and shattered the shin bone, the last one tore out the knuckle of my ring finger.
Following the incident in Florida, I returned home to Lubec, Maine, joined a writing group, and with support from a weekly combat veteran’s group, wrote a memoir of my time in Vietnam and the subsequent fifty years of living with undiagnosed PTSD. My story of the war is just that—war; battle, boredom, terror, moments of great beauty, and the development of an existential elan which is hard to recapture. My story of the next fifty years is of love, life, study and inquiry, mayhem, pain, alcohol, confusion, and more love.
During this fifty years I found a world awash in trauma, and it was not about bullets, bombs, and bloody death. Trauma is at the root, about betrayal; we all know it, share it, and suffer the effects. The only way back is through trust, and trust is wholly dependent on love.
We fought for freedom and it is ours—it always was ours, yours, theirs. We are all free to develop into a compassionate, mature, and life-affirming civilized world or to wallow in a soul-sucking national and global mid-life crisis. Let it be Love. End the Wars.