A Shot at Aaron

Aaron Concord shuddered from the ear-busting blast outside. Clearly, it came from the down-slope side of the house, near the pebbly, oyster-strewn beach that skirted the east border of their property. A moment later, the front picture window disintegrated into a thousand tiny cutlasses—too close to where he sat dozing in the pale loom of an old floor lamp—a barely begun novel in his lap.
The covey of # 4 BBs that followed, sliced a path through the half-closed, blue muslin curtains with such force that it could have been a grenade, he thought, before he realized the concussion was that of a large bore shotgun.
Aaron sensed the absence of an aftershock—flying metallic shrapnel—having accommodated to the hazard when serving in Vietnam. Instead, an opaque cloud of crystalline slivers flew everywhere from the shattered 1/4" plate glass window he and his wife, Peggy, painstakingly emplaced during their last remodel effort.
Mid-January and blustery, a typically misty night on Olympic Peninsula’s
western-most waterway of Puget Sound, a rush of 42 degree outside air bellowed around him. Aaron shivered uncontrollably from the implosion of cold. His nostrils burned but flared with the combined infusion of natural perfumes from cedar, fir, and pine trees that blanketed most of their land around the house, garage, and his helicopter hangar, upslope, near the west property line.
First dumbfounded, though nearly paralyzed with raging fear, he sat motionless—no idea what to do. The startling invasion then strangely engendered more anger than fright. Amateur builders, Peggy and Aaron worked for days when they cut through the outside wall, built the frame, secured the 4" x 8" header to support the lengthy span, and installed the pane.
He admitted afterward that the new opening turned the remote cabin into a fish bowl from the front. The dramatic change in the erstwhile windowless façade, however, offered any onlooker one of the finest possible 180 degree vistas of the lusty, green-bearded, pewter surface that typified sixty-mile-long Hood Canal. While proud of that, all too suddenly the tableau turned to a shooting gallery, with Aaron as the moving target.
Instinctively, he closed what remained of the drapes from his seated position. He tugged at the looped cord next to his chair with short jerks, and considered it damned fortunate that his wife of thirty-three years was away. Peggy stayed a short time near Seattle with his aging mother—going on ninety—to assist the elder in recovery from a stubborn bout of pneumonia.
He finally reacted to the blazing shock that triggered old military tactics as though it were yesterday, and dove for the bottom of the artillery shell crater he envisioned a few feet away, in that fleeting instant. His body curled, fetus-like; he buried his head in the muck, clamped hands behind his neck, and remembered what he learned in basic and advanced exercises, at Fort Benning, Georgia, an idealistic, twenty-two year old enlistee.
Reactions like that also arose by rote, from months of specialized Ranger training in 1965, and later, while on seemingly endless search and destroy patrols in the open flats, jungles, and rice paddies within a half hour‘s flight radius of Long Binh Army Base.
Sent to Vietnam as a greenhorn sergeant in the second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, in 1966, the heat was on in Southeast Asia and he fell into the midst of it.
"This is freaky…so damned cold. What the hell is going down? I have to get out of here." The forced air furnace ground at full tilt. Ribbons of ripped curtains fluttered into his space ... drying dishtowels on a windy day. Aaron wanted to get up, move from the room, when the vibrating tangle of frightening sounds returned. Another deafening discharge stopped him and found its mark in the same area.
Again, it shattered the silence of the woodsy environs that encircled the house. The first took out the expansive plate glass; this one tore straight in, and with sledgehammer force, splayed a four-foot diameter, orbital pattern of small holes in the white plaster wall.
The impact centered just above the newly varnished mahogany wainscot. Aaron trimmed the front room with the four-foot high bead board paneling before Christmas, to give the well-used space a more traditional appeal. Two framed oils, painted by their thirty-two year old daughter, Beth, dropped to the floor in secondary crashes.
Well beyond petrified; Aaron wondered how long he might be pinned down before Cobra gunships with their vicious firepower, would drop in to take out the hostile troops. They had to be close by. Where were the ground hugging, patrolling Loaches; Hughes 500s—comparatively smaller helicopters—low level spotters for the heavily armed aircraft? He lauded the radio call for immediate air support whispered by his nearest companion, PFC-2 Broadman, who also hugged the ground close to where he lay.