Distinguished Member of the Regiment
It’s late and I’m home, but I’m also partly at Fort Bragg still on that stage at the JFK Hall Auditorium shaking the Colonel’s hand after he puts the round medal around my neck in honor of my dead father, now gone fifty years, and his eyes stare at me with tenderness or what might have been pity, which makes me think he wished he'd known my dad whose picture projects on a screen for the audience to see while someone reads the details of his heroic soldier death, and here where the night ticks slowly by I'm also still thinking of Glen Lane, who looked tall and strong and young in the black and white photograph he handed me at the reception after the ceremony of his Special Forces team in Viet Nam back in probably 1966 with my dad kneeling in the front row and Glen wearing what my father called “tiger stripes” standing in the back, and how he’d told me he'd been wounded two days before my father was killed but that no one told him for a month because they were afraid he might never recover then, and how suddenly he’s in his 80s, no longer a soldier, and I’m lying here states away wishing I had said something worthwhile to him, since he’d sought me out to give me a copy of this picture, but all I did was listen, but not enough because a fellow army brat came out of the audience as a surprise, and the crowd was noisy and the southern sun so bright, and my son and daughter-in-law who never met my father stood nearby watching with curiosity and I didn’t want them to leave my side, while the round bronze medal hung with a green ribbon around my neck, and my body partly disassociated to a place where I might absorb all this later — maybe a place where it’s ok to put things on hold while you figure out exactly what you think about something and won’t have to realize yet that this honorable gathering will pass quickly like our lives, and the crowd will grow thinner sooner rather than later and it will be too late to speak to everyone you’d hoped you would, but life moves that way and sometimes, like tonight, you want to pull back the past like bedcovers and slow it down so you can be there again, I mean, really be there, so like life as a child, it will last forever and so will your father.
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