One September Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

go stir-crazy if he totally detached from the military after thirty-some years with Uncle Sam.
    “Wait…” Teresa paused, and he heard her shuffling through some papers. “Your classes don’t even meet until this afternoon? Easy does it, Jim. You don’t need to come in this morning if it’s not convenient.”
    He resisted the urge to accuse her of colluding with his doctor and assured her he would be there, his voice tight from lack of sleep. The damned dream was back, and though he spent the night fighting it, the pattern persisted: He would fall asleep, fall victim to the dream, wake up in a panic, then spend the next few hours trying to relax and clear his head. By the time he finally fell asleep, the sun would be rising, a spiteful orange ball bouncing in through the tall round window of the master bedroom.
    The goddamned dream.
    It had returned, a monster scuttling out of hibernation and roaring in the night.
    He lengthens his stride, trying not to favor his left leg as he cuts off to the right on the path that turns into the woods. As he jogs, he is vigilant, his eyes darting quickly from side to side, watching for movement in the trees. The slightest movement of a branch, the smallest jangle of leaves can mean danger.
    The enemy.
    An ambush.
    Well…he does not expect to find those things here but these are things that he teaches his soldiers, survival skills he learned by doing.
    Odd that the same memories that lend credibility to his days now haunt his nights. Sometimes he wonders why the dream has returned after having been gone for so many years. And how did he chase it away after his return from ’Nam? He can’t even remember, though he’s damned sure he didn’t employ the help of a head shrinker. Don’t need those guys to interfere and start telling him what to do.
    A man’s got to make his own decisions.
    Some of it’s obvious, of course: that the dream returned when American soldiers were once again dispatched to combat duty. Not to mention the kick in the butt that came when his own two sons dropped their career paths and enlisted in a Special Forces unit three years ago. If the act of packing up your sons and sending them off to basic training doesn’t send you rewinding back through your military career, nothing will.
    As he jogs, he notices movement in a lone tree standing in a clearing. His eyes dart over to catch a squirrel leaping off a leafy branch and somersaulting to a limb below. Rodent trapeze. Just a squirrel.
    Another lone tree appears in his mind, the last tree standing after B-52s came through the night before and dropped bombs in an attempt to clear the area of Viet Cong. His platoon had been sweeping through in search of the enemy when they came across the single tree. They paused there, curious that the tree had survived the holocaust of fire, and that it was occupied by a monkey who kept scrambling up and down.
    “Very entertaining,” said Riley. “Hey, Amitrano, you got peanuts to go with the show?”
    No one laughed. They didn’t do much laughing on forward patrol.
    “Weird,” Shroeder said, scanning the barren landscape scraped out by last night’s bombs. Eighteen and freckle faced, Shroeder was a kid from Wisconsin who should have been home scooping ice cream and polishing his car for his date at the drive-in with Betty Sue. “How’d that monkey survive?” When no one answered, he added, “You think any of those bombs hit Charlie?”
    “Bombing the jungle at night’s like shooting into a pickle barrel,” Jim said. “The chances of hitting your target are one in a million.”
    “Yeah, but sometimes you get lucky, right?” Shroeder asked.
    Don’t count on it, Jim thought, taking a last look at the eerie tree swaying in the early morning mist. The poor monkey was probably scared out of its gourd, traumatized by the fire-storm of the night before, only to awaken at dawn to find itself islanded in this tree. Isolated. Alone.
    Like the last one on