Don't get me started ...

It never seems to stop. Some days just make me sad. Rainy days make me think of sitting on a bunker with an M-16 on my lap, staring at the jungle during a steady downpour that has gone on for more than a week.

They make me think of the young Navy Corpsmen in a wrinkled, soiled uniform, but with a chest full of ribbons, sitting alone on a bench at the Da Nang airbase, waiting to go home but staring into space with vacant eyes, unable to talk, and I remember wondering how long it might be before the demons left him

They make me think of how we, I and the guys on the plane with me, thought we had survived it all when we first saw nothing but the South China Sea below us. How we did clap and cheer.

They make me think of maybe a fourth of my comrades on that plane who would be denied, because of the color of their skin, the basic dignities of life when they disembarked onto American soil, and how not a few of my brothers and sisters would be hated and harmed, even until today, because of the body nature provided them.

They make me think of the woman in the San Bernardino airport who shielded her young child from me when she saw the service ribbons on my uniform.

They make me think of the personnel manager at the telephone company office in my home town, where I had filled out an employment application just to pass the time, telling me that the telephone company didn’t need veterans. It needed smart young grads.

They make me think of the “liberal” woman at a party years later who, when a friend told her that I was Vietnam Veteran, looked me over and said, “You don’t seem crazy like the rest of them.”

They make me think of how many movies, even still, include the ubiquitous character of a dope-fiend sociopath stalking the innocent because of his military service in that long-ago war.

They make me think of how those of us who thought we had survived, now a half-century later, awake each morning knowing that we may be carrying a final liability foisted upon us back then by people who thought we could kill more of their enemies if jungle hiding places became defoliated. As our former colleagues die or become disabled, one by one, we think more and more about the idiocy of war.

They make me think of the draft-dodging sons-of-bitches who would send young men and women to war, then say that it’s not worth taxing the immeasurably rich to provide care for the poor and the poor in spirit, many of my comrades among them.

They make me think of the sorry bastards who mock those comrades in public.

Finally, they just make me think, and wonder, that’s all. It places a sadness in my heart for all those who served and then become forgotten. I’ll get over it, if the ancient seeds planted by evil men don’t get me first.