Not My Father's War

The Ambush at the River…Booker and the Lieutenant:

Booker emptied an M-16 clip at the tree line, then looked at me.  We both scrambled to our feet and took off.  I ran with a speed and sense of determination that I never knew I possessed.  The bullets were whistling by us like so many angry bees, even as our men kept up their steady covering fire.  Booker and I were about half-way, when something slammed into my back with such force that it sent me sprawling forward onto the ground.

Shot!  I’d been shot!

I lay face down in the dirt and took a deep breath.  I was surprised when the breath still came.  Whatever it was had hit me square in the back and my flak vest had saved me.  I reached over for my rifle which had skittered away when I fell.  Retrieving my helmet was out of the question; it had rolled several feet away to the left.  I knew I had to get with the others.  I got to my feet and began to run that last twenty yards.  I don’t know which came first, the bullet that went through the fleshly part of my left thigh, or the one that shattered my right knee.  The effect was the same as if they had both came at once, and maybe they did.  I simply collapsed on the spot, my means of movement literally shot out from under me.  The pain was excruciating.  I tried to get up.  My right leg would not work at all.  The left hurt like hell but still moved.  I tried to get to a kneeling position, and couldn’t even get up on the knee that was still in one piece.  I tried again, using the rifle as a crutch, and immediately went face down in the dirt.  Bullets from the tree line were passing overhead with a whine, and kicking up dust around me.  I heard Wood cut loose with the machine gun.  I raised my head to look toward that sound and that’s when I saw Booker.  He was kneeling up behind the embankment, firing his rifle at the tree line on full auto.  Then he threw down his weapon and came up over the berm.  He was coming toward them without a rifle!  Then I realized he was coming after me.

Will and Katherine before the War…

“Because of you that’s all changing now,” I told her again, “and because of you…the fact that I’ve known you…I can never marry Allison, the girl back in Nashville, or anyone like her.  So, you were right.”

We were both silent then.  I pulled out my pack of Winstons, offered her one and lit them both.  We inhaled and blew the smoke into the cool night air.  I raised my eyes upward, and when I did, I saw the stars.  Millions of stars.  I wished that I could freeze this exact moment.  Sitting with her in the field I realized that it was safe to express feelings and not keep them hidden, and that the consequences of not speaking were graver than the risks of honesty.  I didn’t know where it was going to end, and strangely, that didn’t make a difference to me.  I was there.  She was there.  And I was beginning to take the chances I should have taken months ago.

“You already know that, though, that you were right,” I said, “I’ve got a long way to go yet to sort it all out.”

I tried to tell her about the old Will, and how it had come about.  About how I became the way I did on the outside, while being someone else, a far different person, on the inside.  I told her, again, with a lot more words than necessary, that she had been right, and that the old outer me was changing now into a new and real person. The words just tumbled out of my mouth that night.  It was like the ice breaking up on the pond after a long winter, a winter that had been so long, and the ice was so thick.