JOHNNY COME HOME

If there's one thing you need to know about my life, it's that I've never shot at anything that couldn't shoot back. Or didn't shoot first. That's the important thing.

I'm not one for the sickly-sweet or the condescending, so let me tell it to you the way I see it: you don't know shit. This isn't personal, by the way. It's just that you weren't born when soldiers - people like me - were killing children in Nam. You don't know what a LURP is, or why an M16 isn't any better than a pop-gun. You've never been in a war, never even seen one for all I know.

Wars tend to be religious. I read that somewhere, and I guess it kinda stuck in my mind somehow. More than that, I believe it. I remember feeling godlike once, young and metal-bucking, a lord of flies and night patrols. But gods don't stay young forever. Not even real ones like me. It kinda begs the question, when do gods grow old?

I think the day I got old was the day my brother beat the draft. He was four years younger than me, so it wasn't like he had to work for a living, just coast through college with his perennial good looks. He read me some poetry sometimes, poems about platonic love and whispery moons. I don't think I ever understood my brother very well. The only moon I knew - the one Nam taught me - was nothing but a big silver dollar flipped by god. He flipped it and it landed scarred side up. And so god made the world. I lost my flip with fate and ended up finishing my degree somewhere out in Charlie's country. We used all kind of tricks to keep ourselves from going south - going crazy - to stop us remembering the lucky ones back home. Laughter was one of them. I'd laugh, and the sharp staccato Hail Mary was enough to make any Vietcong think we were a god split sixty.

Someone would always read Dickens or Ibsen by the moonlight. Ibsen was a favorite, I think. It didn't seem wrong or strange to pretend we were cultured because, hell, we were all playing with dolls' houses back then. Especially the live ones. Break one, get another.

I'm not a bad looker, I've been told, but I'll never marry. I'll never have kids. Just thinking about my brother is enough to make me feel like I've made the right choice. Nam wasn't the sum total of my life either. Sure, I did my stint in rehab, but I never whacked out the way some other vets did. Thirty years on, I'm a professor in State Colorado. I've written children's books and fantasy novels and biographies about long-dead kings. I teach people like you things that I think you wanna hear. The day I came back to life, I hardly recognized my brother. I kept telling myself it was 'cause I'd been away too long, that I had to give myself a chance first. But even so, I knew something was different. He'd grown his hair long and his eyes were glassy, like he'd been smoking too much dope, like maybe he was dead inside. I'd seen that look before. My brother just sat there on the front porch, until he knew I'd come close enough to hear what he was saying. Then he spat on me, sneered at my uniform. He told me it'd been earned in the entrails of young boys, and he'd be damned if a fucking blood spider would ever be a brother of his. So yeah, technically, I guess you could call my brother and me the same generation, although it's hard enough sometimes just remembering we're the same flesh and blood.

Recently, I've been thinking about death a lot. What it'll be like, what it'll feel like. I'm not suicidal, at least I don't think I am, but neither am I afraid of dying. I don't think I'm afraid of anything anymore. In my dreams, I usually end up playing Russian roulette. The faces around me are echoes of real memories, guys I knew in Dak To, but just when I know my time is up and the bullet's in the chamber, they start to curl around the edges. Picture photos too close to the flame. Then the faces are mirrors, their gazes cold and flat and hard, the trigger pulls and that's when I lose control. People like to sleep because sleep is the closest they'll get to death.

I've been thinking about getting a sidearm recently. Just to get the feel again - it's been years since I've held one, let alone squeezed - but the slick sweat palm in the grip would be cathartic and anyway, the first rule of combat is get a firearm you know. There's no point carrying around something you can't shoot.

It's starting to affect my work, I think. I walked out of a lecture the other day, a hundred eyes looking straight at me and any one of 'em Charlie. The word 'gun' comes out a lot in my lectures these days. No one called it a gun in Nam, it was always just a piece or a weapon. It's never a gun. But it's starting to affect my work.

I can't say I know the meaning to life, and I don't think anyone else on the planet has the right to say they do either. But the meaning of life is something vastly different to the trick of living it, and that's the one thing I do know, and can share.

The trick to living - is knowing how to stop.