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| Epilogue by � grannycougar �They made a speech, and played a trumpet, and dressed me in a uniform and then they killed me.� ~Irwin Shaw They discharged me. They said it was fatigue and my discharge was medical. The army was my career and I survived three wars, but because of one incident they didn�t understand, they discharged me and sent me back to the States. To my wife, who divorced me almost immediately because she said I couldn�t love anymore; to a homeland in which I was alien because nowhere is home any longer; to try to tell my story to anyone who will listen, in hopes they�ll understand the sanity of my present insanity---in hopes they�ll know it wasn�t my fault. That I didn�t allow this to happen to me. That it just crept slowly into me and stole bits of reality, rationality, and emotionality before I knew they were gone, leaving me bewildered. Leaving me feeling that somehow I was the victim of life�s monumentally nasty joke. I drink. They call me alcoholic and admonish it will kill me. They don�t understand that it would be a belated mercy. From death, at least, I won�t wake screaming, fighting dead air, sweating, trembling, dry-mouthed, weak from adrenalin, slamming into consciousness in a room with me the only occupant. What�s left to kill? I�m a fractured person, all my parts jumbled together like a Picasso painting. I use alcohol to keep the fragments stuck together in a sick semblance of sanity. I fear that, if I don�t, the pieces will fly and, like shrapnel, kill someone near me. For I COULD kill with no emotion---no anger before nor remorse after. It was, after all, my profession. She understood. I honestly think the little barmaid understood my story soon after my return to the States. It helped to share with someone who didn�t turn away from my cadaverous appearance and my verbal out-pouring, but it was no catharsis. At least, though, I felt she grasped my confusion about the Army�s having purged itself of me for the one empathetic act I was still capable. She also seemed to understand my reasoning when I saw the young, wounded tiger on the battlefield in Vietnam. The tiger cage---was that the catalyst that threw me into my ill-fated action? Possibly so, for the human mind does inexplicable things under duress. I had escaped from a Vietnamese tiger cage just prior to the incident I refer to. The tiger cage! It�s a bamboo cage too small to allow the human body to extend fully in any direction, suspended in mid-air day in and day out, no matter what the weather, exposing me to the sticks, stones, exrement and spittle of my captors and the villagers until death by torture, starvation or illness released me. That was their intent, but I escaped. We communicated. They never believed me, but I know it. I saw his lithe, muscular body shining and rippling in the sun as he ran out across the battlefield only to fall, wounded, rise in a daze, and then crouch in fear and confusion, unable to flee. He was a young tiger, but not a cub. He was adolescent, as I had been in my first war. I crawled to him. Finally, I was close enough to smell his hot, bloody cat-smell. He only looked at me. In that moment, we communicated. He, that he wouldn�t hurt me. I, that I would help him. I lifted him, but I knew I couldn�t carry him far enough. I got him to a jeep, asking the driver to help me, but he refused. In desperation, I threw him aside, telling him I�d kill him if he tried to stop me. The cat was still. I knew he lived because I could hear his breath as it puffed out with grunts at the jolting of the jeep. Once well into the jungle, sounds of battle became muffled. I found myself in a fuzzy aura of peace. The jeep lurched. The tiger coughed and stirred, causing me to turn. He leaped from the jeep and suddenly he was gone. I heard a snarl and briefly glimpsed him again as he stopped to lick his wound, before limping away into the jungle. I wept. I hadn�t cried since I was a child, but when the tiger was gone, I couldn�t seem to stop. I shook, I screamed, I rocked my agony, cursing man, begging God----that�s how they found me. They discharged me. They never understood. |
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