Everyone, that is, except for a grieving man who stood listlessly a number of yards away. He had a charcoal-coloured beard which kept his mouth prisoner, almost preventing him from the words of lament he couldn't bring himself to say. His eyes hung low behind squarely-rounded glasses, and they tried to stop him from shedding a tear.

In his left hand, he hold a postcard over the new earth that covered the cold loneliness of the grave. The face of the card captured the lenticular image in all its depth. I could barely make it out, but it appeared to be a shot of an American soldier, defending his post on the field of battle.

I drew nearer, out of curiosity, to find that I was decidedly mistaken; it was not one of our fine Yankee officers on the postcard, but rather, a Vietnamese sentry! The surreal image portrayed a calm soldier, as if he'd just finished traipsing across his homeland, stopping to admire it in all its beauty.

Because of the holographic look of the card, I envisioned myself at the War there with him - but definitely not alongside him - trudging through unforgiving marshes, machete bared, thrashing away at the suffocating foliage of every possible colour of green; in my other hand, I owned a beautiful pistol, which gave me more power over life than I was readily aware. The sun offered an evil glare, causing me to sweat, then stink, and finally to suffocate further. And the swampland - oh, the swampland! It bathed me in a stench far worse than any I could produce myself. Its waters were more cloudy than an Indian sky during a monsoon. The enemy was everywhere, and I felt energized to engage them! I encountered and overcame all the natural elements this foreign land dared to challenge me with, and I persevered. Let them come at me, I am not afraid!

...but I was not there, at the War. I was here: in the graveyard, where a number of our young soldiers who died in that bloody mess lay down in the black, still not knowing why they lost their lives.

The aging man sensed me nearby, turning to meet me, but not before he composed himself. "Hello," he said simply. The weighty bags under his eyes stood testament to his many sleepless nights. This War, and the damning results of it, cursed us all with insomnia, among other unspoken afflictions.

"Good day," I replied, as sincerely as I could, not that today's weather reinforced me. The sun was out, affording no real warmth, and aside from the sparsity of birch trees, the only painfully visible features were the rows of gravestones around us. "Forgive me for intruding, but that's an odd-looking postcard you've got there."

"Oh, this? Yes, it's a funny thing, isn't it? My son..." He paused for a moment, lost in grief. His husky eyebrows bent up toward his forehead, betraying a hairline in defeat. It took a moment, but he was his normal self again. "My son sent this to me during the War. He always was a character." The man chuckled to himself, then resumed his tale.

"Sent it to me from Haiphong - that's where he was stationed. Said that he'd been in Nam so long, he started to look like one of 'em!" He laughed again, and tried hard not to fall apart in front of me.

After a spell, he asked plainly, "Did you lose a brother of yours?" I suppose he asked me that question because I seemed much younger than he was.

"No, sir," I said. "My fiancée served as a nurse about forty miles southwest of Hanoi. Her unit was overrun by the enemy, and she was..." I decided to be civil, "defiled by one of those bastards.

"Excuse my language, sir. I didn't mean to..."

"No, no, of course you didn't. We do a lot of things we're not always proud of, son." His comment echoed what everyone was saying about the nature of the War.

The somber man resumed watch over his son, leaving me to reflect for a moment about what he'd said. It was something that would take me more than just a few seconds to make real sense of, if there was really any sense to be found.

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