Coming clean

It was tanks, but not til later. Initially he spent nearly a year in Colorado. Pushing paper, pushing time. He thought he would stay there the full 24 months. Then they called his name.
"Time to go baby boy," they said. "Time to do your duty."

Suddenly he's talking to me, off camera now. Watching a commercial yesterday for a gadget that heats your shaving cream he laughed, "I used to have one of those." That's not true. But he tells me in country they handed out little packets of chemically-induced shave cream. "When you broke it the cream would heat up, like you were in a hot shower." He tells me about the giant vats of dirty water they heated. How you had to be one of the first 15 to get that hot water, or wait til noon when the flies were sweating and you wanted a cold one anyway.

He was often one of those 15. He was assigned nightwatch. Midnight to 5am he and a partner would stare into the darkness. Watching for trip flares to illuminate the night and for men in torn clothes to take aim. I don't ask if those flares ever lit. I don't want to know, not yet. He tells me once wild pigs made it across the razor wire, sent bullets of fire into their view. He never saw them because all he could see was fear and gunfire. He tells me he heard the squealing late into that night, he says it like it didn't bother him. It was a pig.

A decade later, in the little house on the hill, hallway still intact, a strange sound came from our bathroom. Sometimes it was whirring, other times it chirped, my mom thought it was a beeping, maybe an electrical problem. It was my father who peeled the little green frog off of his heel in the shower. Fifties seafoam green surround had kept the tiny invader hidden for weeks. My brother cried for the rest of the day, while my dad flicked the tiny carcass out the window. I didn't use the bathtub for a solid week. My mother finally put her foot down, forced me clean again.

I'm a bit stunned that he's talking to me now, like a friend, like a confidante. He tells me about taking those warm showers at 5 am and then skips ahead months, mentions a stretch of time when he didn't get to bathe. Tells me a little about the leave time that followed, and a cheap Saigon hotel where he stayed in the shower for over two hours.

"I didn't think I would ever get out," he says.