IN MEMORIUM

We lost troops on the LZ and I’ll pay for that the rest of my life

DEAR LIFE

By Dalton Narine

At night, things that aren’t there 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 unit, carved up into a collage of fragmented bodies, a mash-up of cubism and surrealism as a result of slack coordination between an artillery battery and F4 Phantom Jets on a LZ that needed my skill as a combat controller. The aircraft arrived late, mistook troops on the LZ for Viet Cong and dropped their ordinance.

Having never been on R&R (rest and recuperation) I was in Saigon when I heard the news on Armed Forces Radio. Sure nuff I wept. I had a premonition the night before. At seven days short, I even volunteered for the mission, hence the pass.

Guiding in choppers into the Ho Bo Woods (Photo by Dalton Narine)

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 They’ve been replaced by nightmares and flashbacks that dispatch me to the patio to search the dark for shadows.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…