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Ken Williams: Haunted by the Past, Not Quite Ready to Vanquish It
Like clockwork — yearly — so maddening in its predictability and yet so unavoidable, the dates blur as time moves forward. My mood turns less joyful at first, then quiet, finally becoming grim. Sudden sounds take on a hauntingly terrifying quality. You look around to see if anyone has seen you jump, self-conscious, ashamed. The murky dates fall into sequential order. First came the terrifying helicopter ride into hell, the highlands of northern South Vietnam where the 9th Marines and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese 324B Division were locked in mortal combat. The playing field, the miles long A Shau Valley; a fog-shrouded, primordial, triple canopy mountain range that looked and felt like what prehistoric earth must have been.
Then came the fear and the confusion of combat; the ear popping loud explosions, and the gut rendering acknowledgment of mortality, when for the first time, one feels the physical presence of Death as an entity.
Time becomes hallucinatory, bending back into itself where the future becomes the past, which in turn invades the present. It all becomes confusing and terrifyingly real. You look at the clock, check the calendar and are transported back to that place and time that become one, suspended in a world that exists between then and now. It’s morning, no food. You look up and see stars, cursing — blessing the absence of fog. The choppers can land; we can get out of hell — the final act, yet only then can the final battle begin.
You hear the guttural sound of that early morning as a forlorn M16 cuts loose, chasing away demons in the dark. You already know what to expect next, the green tracers of answering enemy rifle fire. Machine guns come next to join the musical score. Your head bends down, knowing, remembering, the short round is already on its way, friendly artillery fire that will explode feet in front of the bomb crater where I had taken refuge. It will throw me into the bottom of the crater, a surreal yet deadly cloud of splintered wood and razor sharp, steel shrapnel. A blinding white light and a deafening roar presses in all around.
At this time of year, the days begin to run-on. As I drive to work, an ambush lands in the middle of the road, out of sequence — that’s already happened. Today is the day when the enemy will crawl through a storm of steel from bombs and artillery shells and a sea of napalm. The taste of hot and sticky air is once again sucked into your lungs. The hopelessness of despair compresses your heart as the bombing runs of the fighter jets and artillery strikes creep ever closer, delineating just how close the enemy has managed to get to you, how close your unit is to being overrun.
The impact of the enemy mortars intensifies your fear as they search out the helicopters, hoping to cripple the landing zone and thus escape. But then the weariness of it all catches up to you. You’re too hot, too hungry and just plain too exhausted to care any more. Maybe death is better than all of this. When the machine gun rounds strike into the tree inches from you, an unconscious part of your body kicks in, propelling you forward without willful thought. The slow moving sprint to the waiting chopper is like running through sand. The increasing racket of the sound of bombs, mortars impacting the earth, and automatic weapon fire shredding the air all around you blends into the present. It’s only then you remember. Looking down — seeing the grenade — that grenade.
Time elapses — time passes — years later the calendar turns and you survived another year. Another anniversary. A dark smile comes as you inform Death, not this time, not this year. You try to gently push the memories back, to contain and regulate them to the anniversary dates, or to a time when something in the present doesn’t jar one’s defenses. What needs to happen is to force time back into a linear rather than a circular form; an impossible task that even Einstein was unable to do. It’s called survival.
— Ken Williams has been a social worker for the homeless for the last 30 years. He is the author of China White and Shattered Dreams, A Story of the Streets.
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» on 04.20.09 @ 03:37 AM
Incredible. And to think that this kind of carnage has fallen on humans many times sense Vietnam. Most recently on Gaza City, home to a million prisoners, held there by Israel. Bob
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» on 04.20.09 @ 09:50 AM
Ken,
Anyone who was part of that epic battle in the A Shau Valley deserves a special place in Valhalla. Most can not begin to understand what it was like. My hat is off to you!!!
An AF veteran of the SEA War Games
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