Saturday, February 6, 2010

Paperback Writer To The Choir

PAPERBACK WRITER TO THE CHOIR

The sunsets and sunrises at sea were spectacular with their varying degrees of reds, oranges, pinks, and blues always capturing my attention. Occasionally, in the silent darkness, there were splashes of yellowish white.

It was six bells on the middle watch when I heard the far-off rumblings of guns from a battleship. Looking toward the shore, between the helicopters on the flight deck, I noticed distant impact flashes were silhouetting the hills and mountains. It was good to see that the fleet was softening up our Battalion’s after daybreak destination.

This entire combat tour had been progressively interesting to me. Perhaps the fact that I had been experiencing, first hand, similar circumstances my WWII Dad and Uncles told me about when I was a kid, along with those old war movies I had watched, wandering what I would do if I were in the same situations, and now knowing the answers.

Sure, this was a tough business, and I knew that by making more acquaintances than friends, I would have an emotional defense as casualties presented themselves.

There were many once in a lifetime occurrences I knew would always remain with me. Training in the Philippine jungles I stumbled over what I thought was a dead telephone pole sized log, which turned out to be a huge python digesting some wild pig. On a search and destroy operation I was checking out a building for VC and found a Monk, just sitting and meditating in the middle of the total combat chaos, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

In later years, the most difficult task I found, as a civilian with combat experience living among civilians without, was having to engage in small-talk at the obligatory wine and cheese parties, while thinking the only thing we all had in common was that we exist in the same universe.

ANDY SYOR

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