passage. Dying colors.
The colors of Nam.
Brown, muddy rivers. Dark green body bags. Black cinders where trees and villages had once stood.
Cray faces with white eyes, waiting to be zipped up and shipped back to the World and laid away in
the auburn earth.
Those were the hues that had painted my life since that summer. 1963, that was the year.
A long time ago.
For over twenty years I had tried to erase the scars of that year. Now, suddenly, it was thrust back at
me like a dagger, and the names and faces of another time besieged me. Chief. Titan. Wally Butts and
Vince Dooley. Teddy.
Doe.
Time had dulled the blade, sanded down the brittle edges, but it had only sharpened that one persistent
pain. Doe Findley was the last fantasy I had left. I had flushed most of my other dreams, but that one I
hung on to, protecting it, nurturing it, seeking shelter in it, and I wasn?t ready yet to surrender it to
reality.
It was raining, a steady downpour, as the small jet swept in low over the marshes. I squinted through
the oval window, tear-streaked with raindrops, looking for something to orient me in time and place. I
suppose I was expecting that same one-room shed that passed for a depot, with its coffee machine and
half a dozen chairs they jokingly called a waiting room. Time plays crazy head tricks on you. In your
head, time is a freeze frame. People don?t grow older; the paint on houses doesn?t chip or fade; trees
don?t get taller. The grass doesn?t even grow.
What I really expected to see through that window was the past. What I saw was a low, glass and
chrome terminal, exploding strobe lights limning the runways, other jets jockeying for position. There
was more action on the runway than in Las Vegas on a Saturday night. Twenty years is a lot of reality
to swallow in one dose, but that?s what I got.
As I scampered down the stairs from the plane and across the ramp through the rain, I remembered
something my father used to say:
“Anything that comes easily isn?t worth having.”
Well, actually it was my mother who said it. My father died in action in the Pacific three months
before I was born. I was never very much for geography, but by the time I went to school, I knew just
about everything there was to know about the island Guadalcanal. I knew its geographic coordinates,
its shape; I knew it was barely one hundred miles long and thirty miles wide and that it was our first
offensive target in the Pacific. And I knew that on August 20, 1942, at 22:15 hours which is quarter
