It was less than half an hour, the news special. Less than half an hour of clicking and whirring film footage of tanks, explosions, guns. And boys wearing helmets, ducking and running or reclining against sandbags.
Two of them sat in a trench, shirtless, talking into the interviewer’s microphone. They were of smooth face, the kind that hadn’t yet seen the need for a razor all that much. One wore his hat at the back of his dark, curly hair.
“You can’t be safe. You can be lucky. That’s it,” he said.
“He could be Michael,” Mom whispered from her chair where she leaned forward as if to get closer to the screen. “Don’t you think he looks a bit like him?”
I didn’t answer her, afraid to miss something that the boy had to say. But the camera cut away, showing a man in glasses, tying his boot laces, telling the microphone about getting scared by the stuff the enemy kept throwing at them. Tying his boots, talking about war, and feeling lucky to be alive afterward.
Watching, hardly blinking, I bit at the inside of my cheek. Breathing shallow, I took in the images of war in black and white.
This is real. This is real. This is real, I thought.
The front door opened, Joel stepped inside, home from church youth group. “Whatcha watching?” he asked.
Mom shushed him, waving him off.
“It’s some place in Vietnam,” I answered, making room for him to sit by me on the couch. “Con Thien, they said.”
Explosions. Soldiers lay on their stomachs, tapped their fingers, waiting out the weapons aimed right at them. Then quiet. Bandaging of wounds, calls for something called a “medevac.” Powdering of feet, cleaning of weapons, writing of letters.
“Hey, who you writing to?” one boy asked.
“Grandmom,” the other answered.
Smoking and sleeping and joking around. Sitting in tall grass and walking along muddy tank tracks.
“You gotta just look to God,” a soldier said. “When I get scared, it’s about the only thing I can do.”
Planes flew through the clouds, letting loose hundreds upon hundreds of bombs. They fell, the cylinders, in graceful form, pirouettes dropping through the clouds. But when they hit the ground, fire burst upward.
I covered my mouth, hoping Mom hadn’t heard my gasp. That was someone’s death.
“Golly,” whispered Joel.
Mike Wallace narrated, but his words held no meaning for me. It was just a sharp undertone to the pictures that moved on the screen.
Two soldiers struggled to heft something onto the back of a Jeep marked with the American Red Cross. They lifted, rolled, and shoved it. It wasn’t until I saw the arm, dangling and lifeless, that I realized what it was.
I hardly made it to the bathroom to get sick. Afterward, I stayed there, my cheek leaning against the cool plaster of the wall, hoping to wait it out so I wouldn’t see anything else from that special report.
When I shut my eyes, all I could see was that arm.
A song from that morning’s church service echoed in my head.
Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.
I breathed in through my nose and out my mouth. Eyes still closed. My mind couldn’t let go of the image. The struggle, the arm, the cross on the Jeep.
“He could be Michael.” Mom’s words in my mind.
Oh God, our help.
“He could be Michael.”
Oh God.
Mike. That could be Mike.
Help.