Apr 27
By Wade Sayer
The beach was soft and sandy. The white sand seemed very clean this day and the breeze was blowing off shore. The shallow waters were particularly green and quiet. Further out, the deeper blue waters had white caps blowing sideways. Tom carried his rod and a bag he used for fishing with his lures and leaders, extra line and a netted bag just in case he would catch something today. The continuing dream of a fishermen: ‘Today I’ll catch a big one, a keeper.”
by Lawrence F. Farrar
Jeff Collingsworth, Ensign USNR, crossed the lobby of the Long Beach Officers’ Club and plunged into the din of the Friday evening happy hour. He spotted Phil Milton propped against the bar drinking beer and trying–unsuccessfully–to catch peanuts in his mouth. Jeff edged through the chattering, laughing crowd to join his shipmate.
by Bob Konrardy
November 1965. We’re dug in with the 7th Cavalry in the Ia Drang Valley and surrounded by North Vietnamese Regulars – over 2,00 of them against less that 400 of us. Instead of replicating the Little Big Horn, however, the last two days and nights the enemy has toyed with us, trying various battle formations and combat tactics to see how our choppers react and how we react. We have become their live fire training exercise.
by W. Frasure
Sometime in the night, the windstorm finally fucking subsided, leaving the advance party squad like shivering, wet derelicts who had failed to find adequate shelter. Tonight, Bravo Battery’s advance party, along with advance party squads from dozens of other combat units, has slipped into Iraq.
by James Seals
Father rocked in his rocking chair. He half watched from his porch as I exited my car. Father’s jaw clenched. I stood for a moment outside his garden gate, remembering the yellow, brown, and green meld of food that often lingered just inside Father’s mouth. I remember how the sight of his puréed dinner turned my stomach. I often thought, Father’s a hypocrite, or something age-appropriate as he showed the contents of his mouth to his guests just hours or days after having thumped the back of my head for my ill manners: elbows on the table, milk mustache, and of course chewing with my mouth open. Those times that I could stomach the sight of his mashed food, I hid my embarrassment for my father and for myself from those same visitors.
by m. j. cleghorn
Power’s out. Oh well; there’s plenty of wood out back, enough for this winter and next. Her son Ambrose had seen to that last summer, the summer he tuned 17, before he went off and joined the Marines. She had to sign papers because he was under 18 and still a minor. She signed. She signed because Ambrose was a good and caring son and that’s what he wanted. She had done her best, and there was nothing she could do to change it now.
by David Ackley
Like convicts, draftees were prone to claim it was all a big mistake, which didn’t mean we were wrong; for the half-million of us called-up that year the case was clear. We’d expected to be ground to slime under the tank treads of the Soviet divisions massed in Eastern Europe, but although the shooting war was cancelled and instantly redundant, we were sentenced regardless to spend the next two years eating mess hall slop, sleeping arm’s length apart in clamorous and foot-fetid squad bays; acquiring firsthand the jittery lassitude of an army in peacetime.
by Catfish McDaris
Wilber asked Churchkey to come with him to examine the newest house he bought, he said it was foreclosed on by a bank and he’d gotten it for a song. The previous owner had killed himself, he had never recovered from the war in Vietnam. All the windows were covered with red paint and blue dots were painted on all the walls and on every item in the house. The only thing without blue paint was a framed flag with a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and a Combat Infantry Badge; Churchkey knew these were high honors. Wilber threw the frame in a pile of garbage. Churchkey retrieved the flag and medals and walked out of the house. He went home and sat in his favorite chair in the backyard. He brewed a pot of steaming sumptuous coffee over a hot fire in his hobo pot and wrapped his Navajo blanket around his shoulders. His grandfather from Quanah in the panhandle of Texas had given him a Comanche arrowhead, when Churchkey wanted a special brew; he added it to the burnt blackened pot. Thinking about the mountains, his ladies, and his cat he wondered about it all. Later he heard that Wilber had found $30,000 in the rafters of the basement and rather than finding the family to return the money to, he had kept it. Churchkey called his amigo Jesus and said he had some poetry readings around Providence and in New York City. He quit working for Wilber; he hoped his greed would swallow him like a Burmese python.
Catfish McDaris is an aging New Mexican living near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has four walls, a ceiling, heat, food, a woman, a daughter, two cats, a typing machine, and a mailbox. He writes mostly for himself and sometimes he gets lucky and someone publishes his words. He was in the Army artillery from July ’71 to July ’74.
by Margi Desmond
Some civilians may reason that saying goodbye before a deployment becomes easier the more military families endure them. It doesn’t. Families understand the process better and already know items covered in the pre-deployment briefs, but the goodbyes are always hard.
O-Dark-Thirty