DEAR LIFE
BY DALTON NARINE
Friends who read To Hell and Back to PAN are concerned about my next move. They think I have more to say.
Doctors at the Veterans Administration (VA) are pushing hard to bring me back to the best of health, and I’m not complaining.
I mean, too many surgeries, though mental health therapy for wounded men like myself grab the last hurrah and feed on its fertile imagination.
I clearly remember the night The VC, boldface just so, mortared us in the bunkers and pelted Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) on a cool night.
I ended up in a full-to-the-brim Hospital.
Nowadays, at night, things that aren’t tend to blur things that are. Like those ghosts that alternately laugh and give you the business. They rattle around in my dreams. Not the human kind in Hamlet, but the haunting, unstable memories of guilt and loss and failing.
Fifty-three soldiers, half of my company, carved up into a collage of fragmented bodies, a mash-up of cubism and surrealism as a result of slack coordination on a Landing Zone (LZ) that needed my skill as a combat controller.
I had a premonition the night before and every body in the Hooch remembered how I was fussing around that night, screaming that it was gonna happen.
The next morning, I was in Saigon on a pass when I heard the news.
So many men gone, it crushed me. They’ve been replaced by nightmares and flashbacks that dispatch me to the patio to search the dark for shadows. You don’t get that mood in Doonesbury, a popular comic strip.
Shining a light on demons enables the strip to deal with PTSD in a clever way. Doonesbury steals access to group through the character of an Iraq War veteran and his trip-flare sessions with a counselor, a Vietnam vet.
Mine haven’t been framed by a serio-comic reality series like that. It’s too damn real.
For example, time and again the dead would cut into my sleep, hauling abstract nightmares. A few years ago, they adopted new, stranger tactics that jacked up the terror.
Twice, in dreams, they made me stand in front of my house to watch a matinee of their theater of war. Wrapped in gauze flecked with Nam’s psychedelic red dirt, and dried blood, the ghosts rode two flatbed trucks in a tangle of broken limbs and Picasso faces. Such hallucination jangled the nerves, robbed me of sleep. There’d been no known medication that worked back then, though group sessions have been remarkable in building coping skills – how to put the nightmares in perspective rather than, in my case, intellectualizing them, which separates me from emotions, confusing those with analysis, a defense mechanism I’ve been prone to exhaust while deviating from reality. The therapist’s observations.
Well, here they come again. I’ve had enough.
It is 1 a.m. I’d better call the VA hotline.
I’m sweating on the edge of the bed, within reach of the phone.
Rubbing my face in my hands, I envisage hospitalization in a Veterans Administration ward for months.
No, no, no, no! Not that ward.
I ease off the bed, move out in the dark. Up the hallway. To the “bunker,” a study decorated with pics of my Nam adventures. I reach for the discolored helmet on the wall, release its emotional grip, strap it on.
Imagine that! Once a relic of Rocket Alley in the Iron Triangle, it now becomes a postwar mission awaiting green light. I wade back to the closet, grab the old fatigue shirt hanging like peeling wallpaper, then lace the jungle boots idling in a corner.
I disable the alarm. The chime might notify anyone awake that I’m fixing to take the usual post-nightmare, three-hour drive through horse country and back. Never mind. I slip through the glass double doors to the patio, and just like that Nam is underfoot.
I remind myself to trust my pace count as I navigate the “bush” in the dark. Without a compass, I’m heading God knows where. To forgive the interest of the dead, of course. To bury the past. I’m banking on a theory posed to group by a therapist a few months back.
I’m in the power of now.
At one point, the march seems to lead to the very spot in a scene from the 1990 Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa's “Dreams.”
An officer, the lone survivor of his company, is disturbed by the sound of soldiers marching behind him through a tunnel. They’re the ghosts of his men, mascara-ed in white, obediently following their leader home from the war. Wracked with guilt, he reminds them that they had been annihilated.
''I survived,'' he sounds off. “I can hardly look you in the face. I suffered so much I felt dying was easier. I know your bitterness. They call you heroes but you died like dogs. Go back and rest in peace.''
It’s been a long slog, wandering from pillar to post at this outdoor confessional. Been gone, what, four hours? It sinks in now that I’ve taken absolution to the edge of pathology.
Better call the VA, you could be backsliding, a voice calls out.
Ha! How long has she been monitoring my behavior through the door?
Back in the theater, you recall the phrase that caught up with troops across Southeast Asia.
Don’t mean nuthin’.
The mission’s success, though, means I’ve got it. The palpable desensitization to my visceral trauma. No more negative waves of bombs washing over a company spattered among multiple craters.
All gone – in the garbage: the helmet, the ribbons, medals – the accouterments of combat. Funny thing though, I wasn’t able to clear the battlefield of self, that icky residue of the psyche that summons deeper therapy to unclog other psychic torture. Like the image of my best friend who lost his face to a booby trap, a Chi-com grenade dangling as bitter fruit on a low branch.
Whoa!
A fresh nightmare rattles the wire at the perimeter I’ve rebuilt in the psyche. This time there’re no misshapen corpses on flatbed trucks rumbling past the house. Just an ol’ olive drab Army Jeep, a dingy white star on the cowling, the Jeep slowly rounding the corner. The mind deceives. I’m thinking it’s the same 4x4 I drove around our firebase — surrounded by VC forces — while landing and dispatching troop-laden choppers on a red-dirt runway with a makeshift windsock; and coordinating with an artillery Fire Direction team nearby. Only when I pick up the white flag sticking out from the grill did I exhale, just briefly.
In between aircraft offloading supplies and ammo on touch-and-go landings, I re-route a F-4 Phantom Jet’s mission. He’s heading into an artillery salvo. The grumpy pilot pressures me for my name and unit. That’s classified I tell him, but it isn’t.
I am a black soldier with power. I run the show. I saved his life.
All I know is this: when situations like that are within my purview, I follow orders.
He’s a lucky pilot.
(Usually, in the trenches I’d speak to my Grandfather, Frederico Gonzales, who served in World War II until he suffered from trench foot and was sent back to Venezuela, then to his home in Gonzales, Belmont.
Such good times! They don’t usually pop up when you lay your head.
Back in the psychiatrist’s office to unspool the strange twist, I flash back to the first time I jumped from a chopper into a thicket of elephant grass and raced to the tree line to rub noses with Charlie. Facing the unknown would scare anybody. And her new prescription has my heart in my mouth. I don’t for a minute believe an old medication has proven helpful in reducing trauma-related nightmares.
“While it is a blood pressure medication, it has been shown to decrease that hyper-arousal that, in your case, is one of the most difficult symptoms to address.”
“Hey, Doc, Nam ain’t no off-the-rack psych trip, you know, but are you tripping? You can pop a pill to keep nightmares at bay?”
I popped those pills every night thereafter. Did they work?
Not exactly. The firewall is breached within three weeks when the worst nightmare of my life creeps up.
Two bedrooms down the hall, screams arouse panic in the lady.
I’ve found myself in that moment in the Zone. That ill-fated LZ.
The first thing I pick up are grumbling sounds, like an atonal score, as F-4 Phantom bombers pinpoint their target. They are late by an hour.
The air is charged with imminence of death; its aura forces on my will the memory of a poem, Horses, by Scottish writer, Edwin Muir.
Perhaps some childish hour has come again,
When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain,
Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill
Move up and down, yet seem as standing still . . .
Their conquering hooves which trod the stubble down
Were ritual that turned the field to brown
All things fall apart (Achebe).
All these things must come to pass (Matthew).
Signs of confusion freeze the brain and put emotions on high alert.
Where is God?
Unsurprisingly, the conflagration on the devil’s little acre at Cambodia’s doorstep has inflicted anew holy doubt on the soul, burning away the truth of judgment and the judgment of truth.
The hot of hell. The stuff I learned by rote as a child in the dialogue of catechism.
Maybe, inquiring about the whereabouts of the Supreme Being who touched me as an altar boy marks the proverbial end as my body tenses up, contorting into a burnt corpse.Then again, amid the doom and smoke, no need to question the supremely religious other, a Mother Teresa clone, about finding space on the landing zone. Here, in the gutter of life, she belongs. She’s here to save my soul. Shake me out of mental limbo.
I find myself in a world of hurt from the punishing brunt of the bombs. I’m sharing the horrifying experience of the company. I’m burning up.
It’s Hell.
The LZ vibrates and shudders; Thor’s hammer strikes like pistons — thundering hooves. The field tears asunder.
Ammo cooks off.
Grenades explode all around.
Nineteen-year-olds cry out for their mama.
I bawl.
The whiff of burning flesh floats from distance, retches like barbecued meat. And my rat-a-tat shrieks flash the news half a lifetime away, the years straining, but not sapping, the willpower to extract truths undefined, like the omniscient, everywhere and everyman God. Ourselves, not yet fully developed in the science and logic of life — and the absence of life. There should be no deity here but ourselves. That’s our problem. Made in His image? You can’t be more down to earth than going out with a bang.
Beyond intellect.
So, why didn’t the meds work?
“You had a situation where the nightmare was bubbling up anyway.” The psychiatrist’s view opens a new window.
My vision is visionary. I’ve found an unexpected denouement of my history with the wandering souls. The meds have reduced my bad dreams symptoms. And, only a beguiling few have cropped up since that brimstone night.
A few months ago, a new horror sprang up.
Where am I? Who am I? What’s going on? Why am I feeling this way?
The brain had stopped. The diagnosis? A dissociative disorder.
On average, twenty-two veterans commit suicide a day.
More meds.
I’m hanging on for dear life. Sometimes, i think I should let go.
Nah!
All the brothers are riding it out at the VA.
We’re all heroes who still suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
We suffer from problems regurgitating in the brain.
I tell the Psych that I want to be buried in the NAM.
They are working on it.
What do I have to lose but my life.
Dalton Narine of Brooklyn, NY, served with the 1st Aviation Brigade attached to the First Infantry Division in the US Army. He was involved in several military operations north of Saigon and east of Cambodia. Narine suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and cystic kidney disease as a result of exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange. Upon his discharge from the US Army, Narine wrote for the Village Voice while a student at Hunter College, Brooklyn College and New York University. He joined Eastern Airlines and moved up the ranks to assistant manager of public relations, serving the company’s president, retired NASA astronaut Frank Borman. Narine became associate editor for Ebony magazine, an editor at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and a features editor/writer at The Miami Herald. He won writing awards at Ebony and The Herald. Narine is currently writing a screenplay about the human condition - the moral edge of a soldier struggling with prejudice who refuses to surrender his self-respect amid the constant fluctuations of battlefield and post-traumatic survival.
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