( the past, 1965 )   Ask not  - yeah right.

It's a fact. Boys mature two years later than girls. You can't miss it. You have eyes? Just look. Listen carefully as well. It isn't just physical change. Spiritual and emotional pockets of mind open up in that reworking of flesh awash in a tide of role playing hormones released by nature's clock. It's like going home and finding odd furniture in rooms that were not before known to exist there. Confusion precedes adaptation and familiarity, the unease of which is egged on by apprehension yet checked by curiosity.

Girls went through all of this stuff two years before, nurtured, tended to, and guided carefully by the women. But boys are not like them, sweet young things when the turn comes. At eighteen years, they are still erupting with change and uncertainty in large mean unfamiliar bodies. So? So, that's when we toss them into war. Would we send sixteen year old girls? Forget the muscle. The mind, what about the mind? What happens at that age when you screw down on brains of mush unsettled for the squeeze? Don't know? Well, friend, make a list. Jot down some possibilities. Any of them good? Hmmm. Is this too vague? OK. It typically runs something like this:

Just past twenty three hundred hours, the still air offended with it's heat. Already there were four young men dead and seven severely wounded. No help was imminent. At home... home... God, not here, home... home, thoughts strayed back to an unseen night landscape painted in sound by katydids, crickets, fences creaking in the wind and the far off yapping of rural dogs carrying for miles. Night sounds are many and assuring on the farm - at home. So many tonalities all accommodating each other's presence. Night music. At home, night is a lullaby. Sleep is easy - and safe.

At home, there are smells. Inside, kitchen scents float in the early morning and the early evening. Outside, you get used to the nearness of chickens. Horses... down wind of horses you dream of riding, almost flying, no really flying - aback Pegasus - with your naked muscularity in rhythm with the beast, long hair horizontal in the wind, leaving trails of heat, flames. Such are dreams in quietude, perhaps at the end of a fishing pole. Home is rich in everything. Everything gone. Now - home is changed.

"What's the matter? What's wrong?" her response to his startle, bolt upright in bed.

"Hear it?" holding up a menacing portent finger. She'd seen him do this so many times, so many years now, so many demons in the night for so long. It was that unmistakable silence which snuffs out the innocent night clatter. He was getting up to get his rifle, instinct purely, with a low but pressured whisper, "Whatever you do, don't move!" It was the silence. Silence a prelude to evil. Who will cry out next? This is what home in the present has become, a past forever tattooed on the psyche.

But back then? God! Home had been comforting, if only to be there. The landscape would be chattering with assurances. This place was not home. On this night of deadly quiet, men with black smeared faces were folding their bodies into shadows rooted to trees. Keep to the shadows! Each man knew the drill. It was so practiced. So many acquaintances lost to the light in the night sky. Io was rising, spitefully bright. Killer temptress moon, she was, willfully pointing out men to die. Only their pain would break the silence. From the direction of nowhere or everywhere in the tree tops, a shot rang out. A groaned reply was brief. So too, an urgent "He's hit! God! His head,.." followed by the muffled weeping of men, men in the wombs of shadow, embryonic men avoiding moonlight.

Many lived, but none survived. In the present, some will be asked to stroll romantically under the stars. Most will not. Never. Those few who do, will remember, and they will weep. Beautiful and reasoned words, synthesized empathic apologies, and healing strokes of well meaning women will not blunt this pain nor soften those scars. They are scars inflicted on men of the infantry who were hunted and exposed by the moon. They, mere boys whose fledgling humanity was lost in practiced leaps into shadows, shadows of trees of somewhere else, not home, somewhere between Plei Me and Chu Pong.

Night shadows as wombs, God! From each a silent prayer, "Who will deliver me?" Just past twenty three hundred hours, the still air offended with it's heat. Already there were four young men dead and seven severely wounded. No help was imminent. Saviors, if there were to be any, were way far away. This was going to be a long night. What ever else, stay within the shadow of your tree and don't breathe too loudly. There are snipers everywhere. Hush falls as shadows become home to men who look upon reflection as they would upon death. And, as with death, always, it will be the last rest they will ever know. Io, whose mistress are you?

She only reminds him, cradling his head within her breasts, gently stroking his hair, "Shhhhh. Come on, sleep, baby, sleep. It's over. Shhhhh. Come on. You're home now." But the moon is still throwing shadows and it is so quiet. Who will cry out next?