A new chapter is emerging… here’s a quick peek before I drop it in as a page. Click this link to read the previously submitted pages.
Late summer 1969
~ J.D.
Heat hung in the air like a shroud enveloping everything in its sticky wetness. Bugs feasted on my skin, while sweat dripped constantly from every pore in my body. I sat perched in the ship’s crow’s nest, on guard in a land far removed from my Texas roots. Without thinking, I scanned the horizon for “the enemy,” an enemy that was almost impossible to detect. It wasn’t so much that they hid in the reeds or grasses that surrounded this murky river, but that they hid in plain sight. The enemy wore no uniform but dressed as every villager did. “The enemy” had no defined age or gender, which made my job nearly impossible. My confinement (imprisonment) in Viet Nam had been merely months, but it felt like decades. Nothing in my life could have ever prepared me for the devastation, the horror that I’d witnessed in the past six months.