Mightier Than The Sword
It's been twenty years and I still find myself writing about Vietnam. I guess it's true what they say, that war is one of those experiences that never leaves your mind. I wouldn't be surprised if when I'm on my deathbed fifty years from now, when I'm struggling to remember my own name and who the people standing beside me are, my only remaining memories would be those of Lucas' face as he stepped on a motion sensor bomb, or Link telling me "You know, it's actually kind of a nice day out here". Perhaps that's while I feel the need to put my memories onto paper, to be able to record what I saw and what I felt during my time in the Vietnam War. That way, when the only things I can remember are Robin dragging Lucario out of a fog-shrouded rice paddy in Gia Lai and Jigglypuff being shot in back of the head in while singing the opening notes of Pollyanna, I'll be able to read this and figure out what all of this meant.
The inspiration for this particular set of stories came from me having come across a collection of old photos recently, allowing me to see the faces of the men of Omega Company for the first time since I returned home. While their faces were images that had never left my mind to begin with, seeing the items they held in the photographs returned a plethora of small events I had long since forgotten back to the forefront of my memory. These stories are not just those of explosion, gunfire, and the chaos that embodied the Vietnam War, but instead are those of the people who served in it. These are the stories of people whose humanity was revealed in both times of war and times of peace.
As I try to turn this endless stream of memories into a tangible story that can be told coherently, I find my writing doing the opposite of what I originally intended. Rather than giving myself a story which can be used to bring me closer to these memories, these paperbound facsimiles of my wartime experience make me feel like I was nothing more than a spectator of my own past life. The Falco I see in my own first drafts is nothing more than a caricature of the man I once knew. I'm beginning to see my own trials and tribulations as stories, using my own ideas to fill in the blank spots that don't fit into a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. This may make my retelling less accurate, but I hope that at least it'll get me one step closer to the meaning of it all.