Finding Faith
The jungle closed in around me. That's the first thing that I remember thinking. The jungle closed in on me, caging me, holding me to the earth when I should have been soaring high above in the clouds.
My cockpit had filled with acrid smoke. My engines had cut out. I had been left without power, without control, without vision. I had been left with no choice but to jettison the plane that had kept me above the cage of the jungle.
And then white silk billowing above me, slowing my descent into the jungle. Changing the suicidal plummet into a semblance of a controlled descent, like we had practiced. But nothing was the way we had practiced it. You can't practice for when your plane deserts you and you are alone in the jungle.
Oh, I suppose that I really wasn't alone. Our guys were out there, somewhere. And the other guys were out there, somewhere else. But you can't see them, can't hear them. So you're alone with only yourself to rely on, with only your wits and the scant provisions that come in the tiny kits we carried in the pocket of our flight suit.
It should never come to that, the time when your life rests on a few bars of tropical issue chocolate, a canteen of water, and some amphetamine tablets. The tiny tins couldn't hold much more and you were never prepared for being shot down because it always happened to the other guy. That was the sort of thing that never happened to you.
God, we were so young. We never understood our own mortality. We understood the mortality of the other guy, the one beside us in the briefings, because we had all seem them not come back. But we always came back. We never stopped to consider that to the guy beside us, we were the other guy.
I know that I never understood it until the jungle closed in on me. I existed in that peaceful bubble of naivety until the jungle reached out and pulled me into a nightmare that I would never escape from.
See a billowing silk wedding dress swishing down a church aisle and it still brings back that white canopy that dropped me into my Hades. Swings creak beneath a playing child and I feel the pull of the harness beneath my arms as my parachutes is caught by branches. Pass beneath a bower of roses in the Rose Garden and my chest starts to constrict as the jungle closes around me again, enclosing me in my own private hell.
The jackknife was in my hand as soon as my fumbling fingers could manage the buttons on my jumpsuit. Hacking, tearing at the braces that held me suspended beneath my parachute and caught ten feet off the twisted jungle floor, I was trying to escape from one prison into another. Deposited unceremoniously on the hard ground, I was on the run from everything.
I was running from the Viet Cong, from my own fears, from my sudden awareness that I had become the other guy. I was running but I didn't know where I was going. I didn't have anywhere to run because I didn't know where anything was. There was a wall of jungle. And no matter which way I turned, the jungle was always there, pressing in on me, enclosing me, imprisoning me.
I don't remember falling for the first time, but it must have happened. Because you don't just suddenly fall and find yourself too weak to push yourself back up. It doesn't happen that way. You fall and get back up until the one time when you fall and you can't manage to push yourself back up. I don't know how many falls it takes to get to that point. But it's more than one.
The knees of my flight suit were torn and elbows were bruised. I must have fallen hundreds of times before that. But that one time I remember because I couldn't get up. I couldn't reach within myself to tap a reserve of strength because it was gone. Two weeks on three bars of chocolate and rainwater dripping off leaves will bring you to the point where you can't push yourself back up.
So I crawled, pulling myself over the ground, clawing my way forward because I couldn't yet bring myself to give up. I refused to become the other guy. As long as I was running, even this pathetic creep that a child would have been embarrassed of, I wasn't the other guy.
And then, voices intruded through the veil of isolation. I thought at first I was hallucinating. It had happened before. It would happen again. But this time, the time when it counted, the voices weren't mere figures of my imagination. They were living breathing Americans. Americans who hadn't yet become the other guy.
Five feet to either side and I would have been lost forever in the jungle, another casualty in a war that no one wanted. I would have been another number in the statistics for an unjust war fought by the unwilling for the ungrateful. I tried to call out but my tongue had swollen in my mouth. My throat was so dry that I couldn't manage a croak. I didn't have the strength to beat two branches together.
But they were led by some unseen hand within sight. The leader started when he saw the apparition before him. Straight from death, I had to be carried for miles in the jungle that imprisoned us all. Plucked from hell, I was hauled through dangerous territory by strangers. I was saved by the sweat and blood of men I had never seen before and would never see again.
Caged. The jungle caged us. It bound us to our fates. It let no one escape its prison. It twisted its vines into our souls, sprung forth weeds that were impossible to kill. It sent its slow green poison through our minds. There is no escaping the cage of the jungle.
The jungle closed in around me. That's the first thing that I remember thinking. The jungle closed in on me, caging me, holding me to the earth when I should have been soaring high above in the clouds.
My cockpit had filled with acrid smoke. My engines had cut out. I had been left without power, without control, without vision. I had been left with no choice but to jettison the plane that had kept me above the cage of the jungle.
And then white silk billowing above me, slowing my descent into the jungle. Changing the suicidal plummet into a semblance of a controlled descent, like we had practiced. But nothing was the way we had practiced it. You can't practice for when your plane deserts you and you are alone in the jungle.
Oh, I suppose that I really wasn't alone. Our guys were out there, somewhere. And the other guys were out there, somewhere else. But you can't see them, can't hear them. So you're alone with only yourself to rely on, with only your wits and the scant provisions that come in the tiny kits we carried in the pocket of our flight suit.
It should never come to that, the time when your life rests on a few bars of tropical issue chocolate, a canteen of water, and some amphetamine tablets. The tiny tins couldn't hold much more and you were never prepared for being shot down because it always happened to the other guy. That was the sort of thing that never happened to you.
God, we were so young. We never understood our own mortality. We understood the mortality of the other guy, the one beside us in the briefings, because we had all seem them not come back. But we always came back. We never stopped to consider that to the guy beside us, we were the other guy.
I know that I never understood it until the jungle closed in on me. I existed in that peaceful bubble of naivety until the jungle reached out and pulled me into a nightmare that I would never escape from.
See a billowing silk wedding dress swishing down a church aisle and it still brings back that white canopy that dropped me into my Hades. Swings creak beneath a playing child and I feel the pull of the harness beneath my arms as my parachutes is caught by branches. Pass beneath a bower of roses in the Rose Garden and my chest starts to constrict as the jungle closes around me again, enclosing me in my own private hell.
The jackknife was in my hand as soon as my fumbling fingers could manage the buttons on my jumpsuit. Hacking, tearing at the braces that held me suspended beneath my parachute and caught ten feet off the twisted jungle floor, I was trying to escape from one prison into another. Deposited unceremoniously on the hard ground, I was on the run from everything.
I was running from the Viet Cong, from my own fears, from my sudden awareness that I had become the other guy. I was running but I didn't know where I was going. I didn't have anywhere to run because I didn't know where anything was. There was a wall of jungle. And no matter which way I turned, the jungle was always there, pressing in on me, enclosing me, imprisoning me.
I don't remember falling for the first time, but it must have happened. Because you don't just suddenly fall and find yourself too weak to push yourself back up. It doesn't happen that way. You fall and get back up until the one time when you fall and you can't manage to push yourself back up. I don't know how many falls it takes to get to that point. But it's more than one.
The knees of my flight suit were torn and elbows were bruised. I must have fallen hundreds of times before that. But that one time I remember because I couldn't get up. I couldn't reach within myself to tap a reserve of strength because it was gone. Two weeks on three bars of chocolate and rainwater dripping off leaves will bring you to the point where you can't push yourself back up.
So I crawled, pulling myself over the ground, clawing my way forward because I couldn't yet bring myself to give up. I refused to become the other guy. As long as I was running, even this pathetic creep that a child would have been embarrassed of, I wasn't the other guy.
And then, voices intruded through the veil of isolation. I thought at first I was hallucinating. It had happened before. It would happen again. But this time, the time when it counted, the voices weren't mere figures of my imagination. They were living breathing Americans. Americans who hadn't yet become the other guy.
Five feet to either side and I would have been lost forever in the jungle, another casualty in a war that no one wanted. I would have been another number in the statistics for an unjust war fought by the unwilling for the ungrateful. I tried to call out but my tongue had swollen in my mouth. My throat was so dry that I couldn't manage a croak. I didn't have the strength to beat two branches together.
But they were led by some unseen hand within sight. The leader started when he saw the apparition before him. Straight from death, I had to be carried for miles in the jungle that imprisoned us all. Plucked from hell, I was hauled through dangerous territory by strangers. I was saved by the sweat and blood of men I had never seen before and would never see again.
Caged. The jungle caged us. It bound us to our fates. It let no one escape its prison. It twisted its vines into our souls, sprung forth weeds that were impossible to kill. It sent its slow green poison through our minds. There is no escaping the cage of the jungle.