Look Into His Eyes

When you tried to look into his eyes(they constantly drifted in opposite directions, going in circles, making it impossible to look him directly in the eye) you saw bits and pieces of what he had been through, the horrific sights of war. the mass killings, the blood fill troop hauling area, the screaming bloody bodies of his friends, and the dead bodies flying through the air after a bone-shattering collision with a .50 caliber bullet fired from his machine gun mounted inside the door of the helicopter. You see, he had been a door gunner in a chopper in Vietnam and he had killed more people with that terrible weapon of destruction than he could bear to think about.  The M2 Browning Automatic Machine Gun is capable of firing 600 rounds per minute. These cartridges were 5.45 inches in length weighed 117 grams and fired a 40-gram projectile at 2850 ft, per second, they were effective up to 2,200 yards, or about 1.25 miles. The projectile converted to ounces would be just over 2. A 2oz ball of hot lead coming at you @ over ½ mile per second(.85Km.) As I said a terrible weapon of destruction. In the hands of a scared 19-year-old boy from Georgia, the damage was not only inflicted on his victims. The Army had turned another innocent child into a mass killer of men women and children. In some ways his victims were the lucky ones; their suffering was at an end. His suffering went on every minute of every day of his life. And would until his welcomed death. If you were to see him on a regular basis you would notice the old, some days were good, some days were bad syndrome. And if you saw him on a regular basis you would notice that there were many more bad days than good. There were days when he would not leave his apartment. The nightmares of not only his action but the action of others, his captors(he had been shot down twice and escaped both times), and the disturbing actions of his friends gone mad. If you were to stop outside his door for a quick concerned listen you would hear very disturbing sounds. The disturbing sounds of a man having waking nightmares. Horrible nightmares that created a wall of fear in his room and he could find no opening in that wall. On those days it was just a solid mass of fear. And try as he might he could not break through; so he sat there curled in a ball, quivering, flinching at every sound. As he lived in an apartment in the city, next to two hospitals, there was always an abundance of noise. Sudden ear-splitting, gut-wrenching, soul-shattering noises that would drive a stable man to the edge. As the complex he lived in was for Veterans in transition(read homeless), there were few if any stable men. No one for him to talk to, if he wanted to talk at all, who were not facing some of the same demons. He needed help, not someone to tell war stories with. The trouble with this situation was that although help was available his good ole boy Southern redneck hardass personality got all up in the way. If everything did not go his way he got that childish stiff-neck of his out and then it was “If it ain’t my way it’s the highway” time and it was like talking to a freshly plastered brick wall. Very difficult to get anything through. He would waste untold hours of his time planning to get back at people who had never done anything at all to him, except in his mind, his sick, twisted mind. He would invent all kinds of scenarios in his mind where people would do him wrong and then he would imagine his confrontation with them, where he was always victorious. He would not let it lie at that though, for once having kicked this offending person’s ass he would then plot out all kinds of revenge scenarios. One in which he would always outwit the police too. In other words, he was invincible! The scared young boy would disappear and this big hulking muscle-bound super-genius would come out and start kicking ass and takin names! It was a sick way to live. It was no wonder he was always alone. He could not keep a friend much less a lady. Sometimes he would catch himself and then he would stop what he was doing, catch his breath and go out for a walk. During his walk, he would always be nice to the people he met almost as in atonement for his unseen, unheard actions. He invariably felt better after these walks, so he tried to get out and walk as much as possible. This had a threefold effect, it got him out of his head and out in the clean air, it got him in great shape and thirdly, he had the makings some friendships on the way. But still, he would from time to time, too often, catch himself with his shoulders all in a bunch, hands flexed, head down walking along with visions of someone doing him wrong in his mind. Along with those visions of wrongdoing came the very violent visions that were his solution for everything, “ God help me!” He would scream into the thin night air. But no God ever showed up. He was sick and tired of people making excuses for this “God.” He only helped those who helped themselves. In other words, he only helped people who did not need it. “He works in mysterious ways.” So mysterious that none could figure it out. And his all-time favorite is “Everything happens for a reason.” The biggest cop-out of all time. As far as his tiny human brain had been able to discern was that if there were a God, it was the God of life. And in observing life he had seen that life was cruel, life was unfair and that life belonged to those who had and those who had were not sharing. What people did not know about him, the same people who chose not to see him in the crosswalk and run him down, or those who chose to drive through the puddles of water lining the street, soaking him to the bone, what those people did not know was that he was a writer. And a damn good one.  Those same people would yell out their window “Get a job you fucking bum!” Those people would read one of his novels before they went to bed at night thinking to themselves “Man this guy is good. He really knows what he is talking about. It’s almost like he has lived these stories.” And he had. What those people who judged him to be a worthless bum at a glance did not know was that he donated most of his money from the bestsellers he wrote to the Coalition For The Homeless and to a 501c3 that he had formed to help the homeless Veterans(those who fell through the wide cracks) and the orphaned children of wars. Like the one, he had fought in. A senseless war fought by politicians only interested in two things, power and money. Those fat-cat politicians never had to hold in the intestines of their best friend while clamping a hand over his mouth so his screams would not be heard by the enemy. Those fat-cat politicians, who were boffing their secretaries or P.A.’s (ladies were just as guilty as the men), never had to look into the innocent eyes of a five-year-old baby boy running up to the door of his chopper, see the grenade in his tiny hand, and then have to blow that child’s head clean off with a round from his M2 which could be set to fire single rounds for occasions such as these. Some nights when he dreamed of incidents like these, he would have to run to the toilet to throw up, as much for the fact of his participation, as for the fact that some sick bastard at the pentagon had thought that one up. Single rounds, so they could save on ammunition. He would puke his guts up(sometimes quite literally) and then he would fire his computer up and write. He would write about those feelings he had, the nightmares that kept him sleepless and tired all of the time, looking like shit, unshaven with roaming eyes because they could not stand to stay on one scene of this ugly grey world too long. And the fat-cat politicians, their secretaries and PA.’s, the people who would run him down in the crosswalks and run through the puddles knowing good and goddamned well they were going to soak him, but being too lazy to move their wheel a fraction of an inch to miss the black-tar filled puddle, those same people, who had judged him by his appearance alone, never stopping to think or to care. Those same people who would sit at home, all warm by their fire, cocktail in hand, feeling damn good about themselves and all of the money they had made that day! Not even thinking twice about the cold, disheveled-looking man shaking off the ice-cold water in their rearview mirror and sadly shaking his wet head. Those same people would run out and plunk down $12.95 at the local Barnes & Nobles for his next bestseller, read it and say “Man this guy is good! He really knows what he is talking about. It’s almost like he has lived these stories.”