DAYBREAK - A MOMENT IN TIME

I always awoke before dawn regardless of my exhaustion. There was never an extended period for which I rested.  I came suddenly awake with a sense of urgency to check the time. The anxiety was overwhelming. I lit a cigarette and attempted to answer all the internal questions spinning in my brain. If all the details were covered? Was the exit plan secure? What confronted us with the twilight?  

When I gathered the team to begin the day, there was a heaviness to the heat and humidity. It felt as if I was breathing in the microscopic remains of every organism, plant, insect, and animal that lived and died in the Kingdom. The air filled my lungs with the smells of the musty canvas, stagnant water, open trench latrines, the reek of unwashed bodies, and the unmistakable scent of decaying flesh. We were swimming in an ocean of secondhand atmosphere and moving to an unknown destination within some macabre opera.

We started the day with coffee, cigarettes, and uppers, fortified by a shot of whisky straight from the bottle. Einstein knelt praying to some psychopathic god, who watched in silence as everything in creation tore itself to pieces and reincarnated from its decay. A spirit was creating paintings of blood, guts, and body parts sprayed across some imaginary canvas in bright acrylic colors inside the gallery of my mind.  They would remain forever as snapshots and moving images without ever losing their intensity. 

            I have relived every moment in the Kingdom of Vietnam a thousand times and the flickering deaths of men who stood beside me on the field of battle. So many dead I lost count, but it was I who survived.   - Jerry Glazer