I’m stuck in the middle of the Vietnam War and I don’t know how to get out. I got the beginning and the end of the story completed. It’s the middle that is causing me problems. I want to show how I got to where I was, and then what happened when getting out of there alive.
I want to be like a Billy Pilgrim, the main character from the book “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He would travel from the past to the future and then back again to the present which was smack dab in the middle of World War ll when the Allies were freeing persons from Dachau. (See Dresden calls out for Vonnegut!)
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“So it goes” from past to future and back to the present
I have abandoned the story I wrote last year. Well, I haven’t looked at it for some months now is what I really mean. But I know it is still there, hidden away in an attic room of my house where I hear a noise banging about every now and then. Perhaps my writing about it here can be the incentive I need to travel to that sore spot and relive those days from a prism of youth and my maturity over the years.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Be authentic from the start to the finish from age five until age 65 and older. There’s got to be some interesting views on the war from those perceptions, don’t you think?
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I’ll tell of the kid who fought against a bully who called me a “displaced person” when I was not yet enrolled in first grade. He made me cry and I then made him cry when I punched him. (See: Name-caller gets buck kicked in the end.)
I’ll also talk about Plato and how I met him after the worst day of my life and the best day of my life while opening his book in a bunker on a hill in a base camp while serving with the Americal Division, the army unit that provided the world with Lt. William L. Calley and the My Lai massacre.
Forgiveness will then come into play as I tell of escorting a Vietnamese woman to Ithaca, NY, where I experienced a mystical uplifting.
That’s when I’ll put the story to bed finally disregarding all the bad ideas I had while saving only the good ones my writing instructor told me to create before crafting this Blog post.
Contoveros 
Write a story of what you think your life would be if you never went it might help
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Like Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried, war is the greatest burden we as a society place upon the shoulders of our sons and daughters. I said many times, perhaps here as well that the Lakota always invited the widows to their war parties so they would understand the impact it had on families … Aggressor and defender alike. You story is a very personal one told from behind the eyes of the one who knows it best. It will unfold when you are able to let the demons (daemons) and the Angels go from the grip of your hands … Always tell the story … Of how our futile choice … Is simply life’s demanding … That we raise our voice !
Namaste
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I wish I could finish the story so that I can let the demons and the angels go . . . They’ve taken on a life of their own and I don’t seem to have as much control over ’em anymore.
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It is not control, but understanding – Think of it as a cosmic dance like planets orbiting a star moving through space in a spiral … This is a good meditation relative to what I am saying – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU
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I watched the video and can see how life is more of a spiral rather than a mere rotation. Spirals indicate the beginning and the end overlap and continue through and in each aspect of reality.
I think that is what it means.
It’s my reality, isn’t it?
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It’s such an interesting concept that we tend to ignore based on what we learn in school. One can almost get dizzy considering the speed with which we are soaring even at this present moment! As Robert A Wilson calls them – Our reality tunnels …
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