Short Story

   I've been writing this story for a bit, it's supposed to be about a Vietnam soldier who is in the hospital.
But I can't finish it until I know more about the war. So....until then, this is where it starts.


“I didn’t ever get hit,” I tell him.  “And don’t go callin’ me a coward, sayin’ that I’m not wounded ‘cuz I hid from the fightin’. Not me. I didn’t let my buddies face down the enemy alone. I just got lucky, is all. I seen my fair share of battle, all right, and that’s what my hurt is. Every single night I see ‘em again. I see my buddies goin’ down, bloody, torn up…dead, sometimes. That’s bad, you know. But to me, there’s somethin’ worse.
  That’s when the bad guys are right close, and you can see their faces. You can see right into ‘em. They’re afraid, same as you. Maybe they don’t wanna be there, same as you. Maybe they don’t know why they’re fightin’, same as you. But somebody tol’ you, and somebody tol’ them, that you gotta fight. So you do, and they do, and one of you gets lucky, and one of you don’t. And that’s the worst. When you look at ‘em, and see that they’re people just like you. And maybe they got kids and a wife, or a girl back home, like me, I got a girl. Kate.
  But you point your gun at ‘em and you kill ‘em anyway, ‘cuz if you don’t, they’ll get you. And you think, ‘Hell, that could have been me.’ And then you move on.
  Made me sick to my stomach the first time, when I killed somebody right close-up like that.
  That’s when I quit lookin’ at ‘em, lookin’ at their faces.
  That’s what my hurt is, and it’s bad. So bad that the docs say I got shell-shock. Patton beat a guy up for that, you know. Slappin’ him and yellin’ at him. He didn’t think it was real, thought that poor sucker was makin’ it up. But I guess its real…I don’t know.
  Sometimes I think I just got so sick of all the blood and the killin’. What’s it all for anyway?
  ‘Gotta stop the commies,’ they say. The commies, they’re bad, I know. We gotta stop ‘em, I guess. But I can’t take it no more.
That’s why I’m sittin’ here in the hospital. This is jus’ me thinkin’, passin’ the time. I been here for awhile. There’s a part of me that wants to go back, you know. I can’t let my boys face this alone. But when I sleep I hear him screamin'. I see his blood, and his face is just…gone. I look at my hands all covered in blood, can’t wipe it off. Happens every night, always the same. I wake up screamin’ and sweatin’. They gotta give me meds to calm me down. Can’t hardly eat, can’t sleep, and can’t fight ‘cuz I can’t eat or sleep.
I got a notice the other day, sayin’ I gotta go back. I’m scared stiff, don’t want any more of this hurtin’ and killin’ but I gotta go. ”
I’m tired now. All this talkin' has worn me out. All this explainin' so the guy in the hospital bed next to me, the guy who took a gunshot to the gut, won’t think I’m a coward.
 “Maybe I talk too much,” I say.
  Now it’s his turn to look at me hard. I can see that, just like I did with him, he wants to know if I’m tellin’ the truth. I’ve got that defensive feelin’ in my gut, sittin’ here with him scrutinizin’ me like that. He don’t say anything for a couple of long minutes. But I guess he must have seen the fight in my eyes, must have known from that I was tellin’ the honest truth.
  “Son,” he finally says. “Like they say, war is hell. And you’re always going to have your brave men and you’re cowardly ones. You know you might get hit, cut up, might die, even. But you don’t know what kind of horrors you are going to see. And there’s nothing in this world that can prepare you for that. Like you said, in many cases, what you see is worse that what you feel. This wound I’ve got,” he gestures to his stomach.  “This is going to heal. And then I’m not going to remember how it felt when I was hit or how sick and sore I was after half as well as I’m going to remember the images of my buddies bleeding and dying on the field. Some of us are better at blocking those memories than others.
   Those images being burned into your brain like that, they don’t make you a coward. They just mean that you’ve seen some of the worst of the fighting, that’s why you’ve got those pictures in your head. Maybe a coward wouldn’t have seen all that.
  But if you let this whip you, if you shirk your duty when your time comes because of this, then you are a coward. As soon as you are deemed fit for battle,  then you had better go. And you had better do your damnedest because there are other men whose lives depend on you. If you let them down, then you are a coward. You said you were scared stiff. But you also said you’re going to go. And you are going to do your damned best back there because its you duty.
  I want you to know that I respect you for that. It’s not easy, and I know that least of all between the two of us. I’m good at blocking those types of things. Maybe someday they’ll come back to haunt me and I’ll be in your position. But right now, it looks like I’m the lucky one.”
  He was finished. I sure appreciated his words, all right. I think I needed to hear ‘em, to know that somebody else don’t think I’m a lesser man just because of this.
  He was right though, about goin’ back. As much as I hate it, as much as it scares me to death, the honorable thing to do is to go. Like he said, I got buddies back there, and there's other guys back there, layin’ down their lives. It would be cowardly and plain mean of me to think I’m the only one who’s got this. I just got a break for awhile, is all.