Welcome Home, Son

I woke up running.  There were crashing booms of mortars all around me.  It was dark, so dark that the exploding bombs looked like flash bulbs going off to light the ground very, very briefly.  Besides exploding mortars, there were the swoosh noises of recoilless rifle rounds and rockets going by.  Green tracers were like an invasion of pissed off fire flies.  It suddenly dawned upon me that I was running aimlessly and I was without weaponry at all.  Time slowed to an amazingly slow pace, my thoughts were shot through my mind like machine gun rounds.  I was thinking that with mortars falling so abundantly, standing straight up on a flat sandy open area was not wise indeed.  I screamed to myself, “DOWN, YOU IDIOT, GET DOWN.”  I dove forward and saw a mortar round explode right in front of me just as I hit the ground.  I heard the shrapnel whiz over me, then there came a tremendous boom just off to my left.  I still did not know just where I was and which way I needed to go to get back to safe harbor.  About that time a mortar flare popped just over me.  The place lit up in a dim, wavy, yellow light.

When we first moved into Hammond, there was a guy from Alabama in the mess section that went into the jungle and cut a long bamboo pole.  He had tied an Alabama flag to this pole and erected it right over his tent.   This tent was just to the rear and a bit north of our bunker and had I been headed toward the bunker, this flag would be ahead of me and just to my right.  I looked around in the rapidly dying light and saw this flag behind me.  I had run in the exact opposite direction, completely in keeping with my sleeping with my head toward the bunker though, only this rule I had broken.  Once oriented, I turned around and began crawling across the sand toward the lean-to, my gun and harness was still there.  Another mortar flare popped and I saw the lean-to had been torn completely down.  I could see the outlines of individual bunks and that was not like it should be.   Soon, my mind was screaming at me again, I desperately wanted to be in that bunker, and it was so far away.  Crawling was so slow, my mind whirring so fast, that bunker so far away.  These things blotted out the explosions, which were continuing.   “RUN, GET UP AND RUN, DAMN, HURRY, RUN.”  I jumped to my feet only to remember those explosions.  One step later, “DOWN, GET DOWN, I’M GONNA DIE.”  Another dive to the ground.  I hear some one yelling, ‘MEDIC, MEDIC.”  Finally I crawl to my bunk and wonder just what happened to the lean-to.  The bunks all seem to be intact so no explosion but the tarp is gone.  I found my gun and the bunker is closer by half than it was.  Just through that bramble bush.  God, I wanted to be there now.  Another blast just behind me sent me crawling again and yet telling myself to get up and run, no, don’t run that’s death, crawl, no that’s too slow, gonna get hit, get up, run, oh shit, die, live, oh god, where is that bunker?