March 7, 2015

Walking across my backyard on a sunny July day in 1962, and suddenly I drop to the ground next to the sandbox below my bedroom window. Face down, I can smell the sweet brown sand on one side of me and the sour black dirt on the other. I clutch the side of my striped t-shirt just as my pal, Joe, appears, kneeling at my side. I feel his hand on my shoulder as I manage to gasp, "They got me, Joe. Those goddamn Jerrys got me." I know it was Jerrys and not Japs because this is Hamburger Hill we're taking here.

Joe turns me over and as I look at the endless blue slate the clouds have written their names on, I know it's bad. I can feel the warm blood starting to spread where the German's bullet has entered my side. Across the street I see Nancy, the neighbor girl, watering the grass which I make into a hallucination. "Is that Marie I see?" I ask Joe, who cradles my head in this lap because he knows the end must be near, "Is she coming for me?" "Yeah, Buddy," says Joe, "She's coming for you." I cough up some blood and from the feeling in my lungs, I know I'm a goner.

Suddenly Joe is no more, Nancy's disappeared, and all I can see are the ants crawling into the side of my sandbox. Someone outside my sight line lets the dog into the yard, and there's Duffy, a fat, black Beagle in middle years, and no one but me knows he is Hitler's dog. Not only that but he loves that dog so losing him would deal a major blow to the German war effort. So my mission becomes killing Hitler's dog. And you have to know that killing a dog is not what I bargained for when I signed up for the Army.

But even that conflict swiftly tires and I begin to wonder what happened to Joe and Marie and the column of ants. How ironic, to die in a German child's back yard next to the sand box he has played in as the whole world went mad around him. I start trying to remember the common German expressions my mother taught me as I grew up, all courtesy of Grandma Kersten. Was it "heist" that meant hot? "Ach! Du Lieber Augustine?"

"What're you saying, Old Pal?" says Joe, and I know that is it. I feel the death rattle in my chest, and suddenly all is inky blackness around me. I feel myself swirling as though being taken bodily down a drain. Chimes ring sweetly in my ears. I see Joe as though from above, leaning over my lifeless body, and I realize that I'm going home. "John Hanley, what in the world are you doing, lying around on the ground like that?" asks Nancy, and as I slowly, sheepishly rise to my feet, I know that the time has come and gone to play my last role.