Then the Fun Starts ...             by: Jean Rea                  ©September 2000

 

You give up eating beef or anything American. Nuhc Mam, rice, roast pork, and chilies are your diet. Any soap is non US, toothpaste also. You only wear Batta boots or tire tread sandals, socks are wool and you coat your feet with carbolated Vaseline. Underwear rots on your skin and traps water so that goes too. You dress in tiger-stripe rip-stops with no rank or national insignia and carry weapons and web gear from the world over. There is no exposed metal that shines and glasses DQ one from even joining. You pack in the bare minimum and hope to hell you don’t need any thing more. Silence is golden and noise kills so you damn well are silent.

Then the fun starts ...

Triple canopy isn’t bad but moving through elephant grass is a bitch. Point takes all the skill and ESP you have and is draining as a marathon. You walk and your eyes never stop, you step in the foot prints of the man in front and hope to hell he was lucky. Sleep becomes the dream and food a nightmare. Smell is more used than sight and hearing is God.

Then the fun starts ...

You grow up in the racist sixties in the Deep South, you’re raped by your stepfather and it’s your fault because your different. You have a roll of dimes taped tight that makes hitting lethal and you learn to use a knife. You never smile or laugh or cry and when your so-called parents walk out you know it’s your fault. From the start you can’t understand the games boys play ... you do them anyway. When your seventeen you walk away from a scholarship and join the Air Force, hiding in plain sight. You try sex with men and sex with women and you still feel nothing so you close down even more. You don’t much care if your hurt as long as whomever attacks is worse off; people notice. And then you reach your goal ... War. It’s about time, you think; now you can die and still be a man. What a lie you tell your self.

Then the fun starts ...

Walking through the jungle doing the things the Powers That Be want done doesn’t bother you. Sleeping in rain, sweat and fear doesn’t either; you’ve done that all your life. Then comes the sweet sound of Dustoff and your life changes forever. You watch detached as the bird gets shot to shit and you’re firing and firing and then your bleeding and screaming. Your team gets you on the next Dustoff and you wonder why the medic is looking at you so strangely, so filled with pity. You’re happy now something you always dreamed of being, you know you didn’t fail, you are just like a man.

Then the fun starts ...

Waking up in a hospital is so strange, you know you’re dead. Is this some awful purgatory? The doctors come in and talk between themselves and never look at you or answer any questions. The nurses plump your pillows and change dressings and never talk to you. The guy next to you is burned and can’t see or talk and down further in the ward you see men or is it just bodies missing legs and arms and some poor bastards both, they never talk to you. You wonder what the hell is wrong with you, casts covering your torso and one arm, your legs and hips. Yep, you gotta be dead all right. Then one afternoon a Chaplain and two Doctors come in and tell you all. Your back is damaged, twisted and broke, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth vertebra shattered. Your left arm and shoulder has been shattered, the brachial plexus nerves may never regain full use. A hip has had to be replaced and the worst to them is your genitals are destroyed, you’ll never be a man any more.

Then the fun starts ...

You fight and claw never taking no for an answer, you know you never have to be a man again. Learning to smile, to laugh, to weep, to be a person ... no to be a whole woman is the hardest thing you ever done. The skills of survival are different in confronting an entrenched bureaucracy. You can’t fight them with fists or firearms, the idea of calling in an Arc Light does wonders as you wade through the mess they want to do to you. You know you’re stronger than they, They, that faceless they, whom only live by the book. You want to live, no make that triumph. And you learn, and you love.

Then the fun really starts ...

 

 

© 2000
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