B006JIBKIS EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page A

years of guarding the dead had finally tired them. We were probably somewhere in Maryland or maybe Delaware. The graveyard was empty, except for a solitary couple in overcoats, arm in arm, standing at a grave. I wondered then if the grave was perhaps that of their child, or a parent, and what tragedy brought them there on that day. I knew I would always remember them, and they did not even know I existed. They were gone in an instant, as the train hurried north carrying me on some long forgotten errand. But that image came to me now, and I wondered if there were people on the interstate, rushing by, wondering at our grief, and we didn’t even know they existed.
    The minister from the chapel on the island had agreed to say a few words, even though he did not know Connie. He was a quiet and gentle man who cared for his flock and their friends. I knew that old Chief Bishop was a longtime member of the church, and I guessed that he had asked the preacher to come. It was a dignified end for a lady who had regained her dignity on Longboat Key.
    We drove back in on highway 64, turning south on highway 41, to Cortez Road and drove straight out past the Coast Guard station and onto Anna Maria Island. Logan and Dick Bellenger were in the Explorer with me. We stopped at a bar overlooking Anna Maria Sound and spent the afternoon holding our own little wake, getting drunk and remembering Connie.
    The dead haunt me. I’m not so freaked by death itself, but by my thoughts of the last day of those who die. The accident cases never know when they get out of bed in the morning and eat their oatmeal that it will be their last sunrise, their last bowl of mush. Is there any vision of what lies in store that day? Do they have any inkling, even a twinge?
    Once, a long time ago, I was walking down a jungle path, through an area that had seen a firefight at daybreak. The dead lay where they had fallen: American boys and Vietnamese boys, so different in life, so alike in death. As I rounded a bend in the path I saw a man in the uniform of a North Vietnamese regular, bending over the body of his comrade. He must have heard me a moment before I came into view, because he was already turning and raising his AK-47. I was holding my M-16 at an easy combat ready position, barrel pointing down at a 45 degree angle, finger on the trigger. Before the soldier could get his rifle pointed at me I had a bead on him and was pulling the trigger. It only took a second, from the time I saw him until I killed him. But, in that small space of time I saw it register in his eyes, or perhaps his face. He new that death had come calling, and that he was looking at his killer. I saw resignation, and despair, and regret, and, I think, acceptance.
    My shot caught him in the middle of the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. I kept moving, ever watchful for his buddies, scared as an eighteen year old gets, wondering if this was my day to die. They say that youth is bullet proof, that the young think they will live forever. But I knew better. I had seen too many of my teenage contemporaries die a violent death in that fetid country. I tasted my mortality every day, and on that day, I had killed a man, not for the first time, but close up, like never before. I only had that fleeting glance of my prey, but I have never forgotten him. I wondered often about his life, and about the strings of chance that brought us together on a fine morning in a jungle far from our homes.
    Death is random. We never know when or whom it will strike. The healthy young mother who discovers a lump in her breast, the teenager on his way to school who happens to share the road with a drunk driver, a soldier on a jungle path who was a millisecond slower than another soldier on the same path.
    But while death is finality for the deceased, it is perhaps only a small memory for the soldier who lived, or the doctor who told the mother she was past hope. And death is grief for those left behind.
    So,