Chapter 374

I guess the night before put me in the mood for a stroll down memory lane. I say that because as I walked down the jungle path toward the boat landing my mind was split. Half was keeping a sharp eye out for stranglers from action the night before, and the other half was concentrated on my much earlier years. I bet everyone does the same kind of thing now and then. Well maybe not the soldiers running around the jungle seeking revenge part, but the split thoughts part.

Some of those memories are so painful, I expect that we all tend to bury them for years. Even buried memories come back to visit now and then, like bad chili.

As I walked along in the very front of our little group, I was isolated, not by distance so much as by who I was. It was as simple as that. I wasn't like the others and I really never had been. I was, of course, even less like them at that moment.

When I never really liked playing with dolls as a child, I probably should have known then that I was different. I was different even though I had the almost idyllic Saturday Evening Post family life. I had a hard working masculine father figure, who worked two jobs so that his wife could raise three kids.

He was the kind of man that in the back of her mind every little girl and young woman hopes to have as a lover. Like any other, so called, normal girl I had more than one dream where the man turned his face to me afterward, and it was dear old dad. No that had never happened in real life. Not that I would have objected, or ever told anyone.

I also had a strong mother, who had enough kids so that it was financially impossible for her to work. So we were poor, but so was everyone else in the mill village. I have a theory that you are only poor, when you know you are poor. I also think, that you are only poor, if you know there are people who aren't poor.

So my family only became poor, when I went to the town's high school. During all the other years, when I went to school it was with kids in my own socioeconomic status. So I was poor for the first time, when I was a teenager. Even then I defended my own way of life. I never apologized for being poor. I never took anything that belonged to anyone else, except the occasional boy from some rich bitch, just to prove I could.

It was bad to do that, but Jennifer was the worst of all possible girls to have pissed at you. She never was pissed at me, but we were like Frick and Frack. She knew how to scheme, like the slutty little bitch she was. I could kick any of the girl's and about half the guy's asses. We were like the cotton mill mafia.

I was a natural high school enforcer, since I had two brothers. In my house it was like, fight for it, or lose what little I had. I loved my brothers and was sad that neither of my brother's had lived as long as I had. They had not even lived to the age I had before the big change.

My older brother died in a South American shit hole, while working for the government of the United States. We never knew exactly what he did for them, but we did know that they sure were sorry about it. Or so said the little guy who had to look on a card to be sure he got my brother's name right. Eddie died in 1985, during the summer, at least that's what the little man said. He was really sorry that there was no body for us to bury. Seems Eddie kinda god lost while they were exploring for oil. Why a government employee was looking for oil in a foreign country I never knew.

My middle Middle bother died two years later in an automobile accident. That's what his buddy said at least. He flipped an old van over while making a delivery. Samuel was some kind of courier, according to the friend. He was the kind who paid no income taxes. The man who explained that also handed me an envelope filled with cash. I never bothered to ask what he had carried in the panel vans he drove.

I graduated high school shortly after Samuel went into the ground, after a closed casket service, I might add. My mother and even my dad seemed to be broken after that funeral. My graduation from high school wasn't cause for any celebration. I just got on a bus the next day to start my career with the Unites States Air Force. The rest, so they said, was history. At least little bits of history as it happened at the time. Since Eddie died in some South American shit hole. I seemed to be drawn to the area. I'm not sure if it's coincidence, or I just gravitate to it. I guess shit happens, like it is supposed to happen in the end.

By the time my memories got to my basic training in Texas, we had reached the river landing. I was the first to see the aluminum river patrol boat tied to the rickety pier. If it wasn't from the actual war in Vietnam, it was from that time period for sure. Just as were the small arms which we carried onto the boat. We had stepped back in time to the war my Dad fought. The one, where if he had been less of a man, I would not have existed in the first place.

If you do the time line you will see my dad was first there during the adviser stage of the war. Later he was part of The First Marine Expeditionary Brigade. After his tour with the FMEB he came home to start a family. He told me something I never forgot the night before I left for the Air Force.

"I hoped that by getting out, I would never see and feel death that closely again," he said. "Unfortunately life doesn't let you insulate yourself from those kinds of things. It happened with the boys and all the nightmares came back."