"He sat there in the green clover and soft grass," Mark took a deep
drag and blew smoke through the bars into the dayroom.
All around him the lush corn fields glistened in the luxuriant evening
sunlight. A van load of Boy Scouts hurried past into town for ice cream.
He sat there, by the side of the road, next to his yellow van. The vehicle
was parked at a forty-five-degree angle, facing north. The driver had made
the decision to land here in a hurry.
The driver's-side door hung wide open. Something from ZZ Top -
"sharp-dressed man" was blaring from inside and off into the finely
trimmed Lutheran graveyard to the west.
Across the highway the steeple of the East Hill Church extended proudly
to the sky; the parking lot on the south side began to fill with wedding
guests.
He sat there, in a green T-shirt, with his pants pulled up above his knees.
He sat there, as large people do, like he'd been able to make it to this
point
with great effort, but he'd have to have a good reason to move if the time
came.
In his right hand was a dirty old cloth, which he was dipping into a white
Cool Whip container, the water having come from the church's faucet at
his side.
And with the cloth he washed his legs; the left one cut off just below
the
knee and the right one sickly reddened, bloated, full of sores.
Tossed between him and the van was the government-issue prosthesis.
"C'mere,", he motioned. "You can turn that off. Give me that sock in
there so I can wipe these off."
There was no sock. I reached in and turned the music down.
"This is from Agent Orange. I'm dying," he declared. His face turned red
behind his brown beard. When he bowed his head to hide his face, a patchy
scalp showed through his shoulder-length mane.
Seeing the orange water spigot, he had quickly jerked the van over to the side.
"My legs were burning up!"
Across the highway, the crowd at the wedding began filing out, congratulating
the couple on their new lives. A handily dressed woman in a crimson hat
and heels
strode past the van on her way to make a visit to the cemetery. On her
way back
she saw the man with one leg in Pleiku, his large white dog sipping from
the container.
"I killed women and children," he cried loudly.
"I killed a four-year-old boy. What do you think of me, sir?"
His slightly slurred "sirrr" and the whiskey scent in the breeze suggested
he'd been
drinking. He told me of an M-16 stored somewhere, and about how in the
Army he
had learned to take his pointer, ring and middle fingers to rip out an
enemy's throat.
"That's what they taught me," he testified, as the wedding guests milled
in the parking lot.
I eye-balled how far he might be able to reach up from where he sat, and
shifted my
weight to gain a few precious inches of distance, trying not to be obvious.
"I'm scaring you, ain't I!"
Uh, yeah, I said faintly.
"You owe me!" the large man bellowed. "They owe me!" pointing at the people
in the
church parking lot now beginning to climb into cars for the trip to the
reception.
"I got this fighting for your freedom. Not one of them in that church cares
if I just fall
over and die right here.
"But I can survive, anywhere," he promised, then added that he had toyed
with the idea
of killing himself several times in the past week in solitary Russian Roulette.
He spoke
angrily then softly about his family; about his wife, about his son, and
about his grandfather.
He cried again.
A big man, even with most of his left leg lying in the grass beside the
van, he was all alone.
The big man, his large, friendly, white dog, and his day-long nightmares.
But this hill was his. This hill he had taken. This picturesque scene with
the free water;
the church with the American flag and the Norwegian graveyard. He had taken
it by his
life's experiences and sat there, in the middle of "normal" life, daring
anyone to move him,
or to notice him.
"I'm in so much goddamn pain," he raged on through still more tears.
"Sorry," he said, his face pitched for a moment to the sky.
I told him that I needed to get back to the wedding. He excused me with
an expressionless wave of his hand.
I stretched my arm to his keeping my weight back. He shook my hand more
weakly than I had expected. "You know, I can hardly see you," he said.
"I'm losing my eyesight."
Then he went back to washing his legs with the cool water. And across the
highway the
newlyweds skidded of amid a hail of rice and hallelujahs; the lights and
promise of the city
flashing in their young, hopeful eyes.
"Don't do nothin' we wouldn't do!" a friend of the groom hollered after
the happy couple.
The veteran and his dog sat there, by the side of the road in the waning
June light, as the
corn in the fields around them crackled in the breeze, straining, hoping
to measure up by
the Fourth of July.
This was his post. He would maintain his position until relieved or overcome.
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Contact Mike Palecek at mpalecek@rconnect.com