In the Blink of an Eye
written by: Cristina Adiletta
“Why must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote and distant place -”
“That’s a good question, Mr. President. You said it right there yourself – Why?”
“Mom, please, shhh. We can’t hear.”
“… painful lessons of half a century -”
“What lessons! We haven’t learned anything! Here we are- war. Again.”
“Mom, can we just let the president talk?”
The tension in the room was thick, like the jungle to which every American boy over the age of eighteen was about to be shipped. Away from home. Away from the comfort of family and familiarity. Blind and into the bushes. President Johnson was just about to explain why even more boys had to be sent away from “exultant hope” to protect Vietnam from the thralls of Communism and, ultimately, American power.
Isn’t that funny? How did the formidable United States of America need eighteen-year-old boys to protect its reputation and a country that was eight thousand miles away?
America needed Charlie and his brothers to stand up for it. And without them, their power would falter.
War was not something Charlie ever expected to be in his future. His past was burdened with it enough. He was only seventeen and at the dawn of his life; not even sure which of the infinite selection of doors before him to go through. It was now clear that sometime in the near future, he would be heading to Vietnam, staking his claim to glory, and putting an end to the Communist reach. Shifting the paradigm of his ordinary life and locking the door behind him.
It felt like yesterday that Charlie sat in history class, learning about the most recent war in Korea. One he was all too familiar with, having lost his father in a circumstance that did not stray far from the one they found themselves in again. He listened to the teacher’s lecture about duty and responsibility and thought of his father. Did he not have a duty and responsibility to his family? Did you owe the country to which you were born something just because chance brought you there? He thought of this, then with the ring of the bell, pushed it out of his mind and continued to live in the ignorant bliss of being a teenager, for he had time. But then he blinked, and found himself in the summer of 1965, intently listening to the radio with his two younger brothers and a distraught mother fraught with the threat of living through the past, once, and maybe three times more.
And he blinked again.
His eighteenth birthday brought despair, mostly for his mother, who spent months trying to get him to go to school or even Canada. Married men and those in college were exempt from the draft, for a while anyway, and his mother was hoping the war would be over long before either of those options needed to be called upon. Canada, however, would be safer.
“Mary, down the street, has family in Alberta. Her son is going there. Why don’t you go with him?”
Every time this conversation came up with her, which was every time he spent more than 5 seconds in her company, the cracks in his heart deepened and his head fell a little lower. The anticipation for the promise of glory brought with it a budding excitement that he could not share with anyone. Having been left behind when his father went away, he knew what it had done to his mother, and what it would do when he himself reopened that wound.
“Mom, I want to go. It’s different from Korea. I’ll come back, I promise.”
But with that promise came guilt, for he knew his words were empty. But how easy it was to speak faithless lies when you thought you had time.
And then he blinked.
The ocean spread out below the plane like an endless breadth of an unknown abyss, waiting to swallow Charlie into his uncertain future. He sat in the crammed Pan Am cabin with his forehead pressed into the window, watching the earth stand still while he was being propelled into a war that he found himself wildly unprepared for. A pit grew in his stomach with every mile they gained. In a matter of days, his naive anticipation melted away into an apprehensive doubt, and there was nothing to be done about it. For the first time in his life, he had left American soil. For the first time in his life, he was expected to wield a weapon and, when necessary, inflict death upon another human being. For what? Would the daunting Communists see their wrath and be sparked into submission? Were they not also fighting for what they believed in? If it hadn’t happened up to this point, what was going to change? Were they to clear every inhabitant of Vietnam so there was nobody left to spread Communism to?
Before he found himself on this plane, before the president summoned his strength and dignity, Charlie was lost. He spent his days working at a garage, hoping for a clear sign that he was meant for something more. Then, all at once, an opportunity to stand up for the greater good was thrust upon him. Since then, he could not shake the ghost of his father. His father, who did just what he was doing now, gave his life so that his sons could live free in a country that protected them. Was that what Charlie was doing? Giving his life? Should he have known that the last time he saw his mother and his brothers would be the last time? Would he have looked at them through different eyes? Spoken different words? Held them even longer? At first, he thought this was the path paved by his father before him and accepted it as an honor. This was the future his father wanted for him, for it was the same one he took, and he knew with every gesture and with every lesson that his son wanted nothing more than to be like him. But now, as he soared thousands of feet in the air, with nothing but the cabin pressure crushing at his ears and into his soul, he thought that maybe what he received as a sign was actually a warning.
And then he blinked.
No circumstances during training at Fort Polk could have prepared Charlie for the conditions of the Vietnam Jungle. With every breath of dense air, he felt his lungs constrict in suffocation. He buoyantly drifted from day to day in a sprawling haze akin to the blanket of Agent Orange that trapped the lush vegetation of the country under fire. How long had he been trapped in this nightmare? Constricted by the relentless grip of war’s unyielding chains. His only solace was knowing that he was not in an isolated cage. The brotherhood among his fellow troops was the only comfort to be summoned in such a dark time. For, together, they were all alone.
Each of the men around him now had traveled thousands of miles to satisfy their own needs. Each one coming from a different past to the same present. Huddled in a dimly lit tent surrounded by the distant squall of unknown beasts.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m at my wit’s end with this goddamn place,” Harry claimed as he threw a card into their hopeless pile.
“I got a girl back home, and I don’t know if she’s gonna be waiting, or if there’s gonna be anything to even wait for if we continue the way we did yesterday,” Tommy added his bit as casual as if they spoke about which of his favorite sports teams had lost yesterday and not of his life with which he escaped by only a hair.
“Never mind what everyone is going back to. How did you all get here?” Did they all share Charlie’s desire for accomplishment or had he alone been tricked into the romantic belief of becoming a hero?
“My dad didn’t give me an option. Said no son of his was gonna bum around under his roof while there was national defending to be done.”
“Well, why didn’t you just get out from under his roof a little closer to home?” The tent filled with an electric laughter that sent a current through Charlie and reminded him that even though his will was fading, he was still alive.
If it wasn’t for the unwavering dampness that swallowed them every second, Charlie would have thought he was back home, down the street from his family, playing a round of poker on a Saturday night. Were these hours of passing time just another method of finding himself? Did he have to come all this way, to make friends and play cards, just to look a little deeper inward?
He was sitting in his classroom again, remembering all the time he thought he had, and now watched it slip away with every card that fell from his hand. Ace of spades, bear scouts. Queen of Hearts, the first day of high school. Six of clubs, his father leaving for war. Each card silently merging with the ones from his brothers. With Tommy’s girl, and Adam’s father, and baseball games, and Christmas trees. All the branches of a tree, winding and crisscrossing into one trunk. Charlie always wondered when he would turn into a man. He dreamed of it, wondering if it would be a specific day? A specific pinpointed moment that would be burned into his memory forever? Well, here he was, without any warning and the grains of time on the wrong end of the hourglass. Charlie sat surrounded by heat, misery, and camaraderie; and, for the first time, he felt he had become a man.
And then he blinked.
The deafening gunshots surrounded Charlie and consumed him in a pit of black hope. There was no more fear, there was no more question, there was only warfare. His eyes had become black, the youthful glow in them gone with the renewal of another tour. Charlie couldn’t even remember a life before the war. There was no before, he was born and baptized on the banks of the South China Sea. War. How a three-letter word could be so insignificant yet hold the immense consequence, fear, and violence that this one did. He avoided sending letters back home and knew that every day that passed was another day that his mother and brothers sat in suspense, waiting, hoping, for anything but the news of death. Or maybe, like Charlie, they lived on. They put Charlie on a piece of paper, folded it, sealed it, stamped it, and sent it away. Closing their hearts to him after their goodbye on the day he left. But his heart was not closed, it was gone. And he would not hold it against them if they had done so, for that is what he himself had to do to get to the next day.
In times of battle like this where there was not a moment of peace and the shelling and fire flickered around him like the fireworks on the fourth of July, Charlie became lost in a muffled sea of chaos. With a ceaseless tide of a thousand fragments closing in from every angle, he took not even a breath to notice that he went from crouched in the bushes to lying exposed and vulnerable on the ground, paralyzed in a distant echo of consternation. The shadows of his comrades hovered around him like dark clouds. He wished he could see their faces, but he knew that even if he did, it would not be enough to tear his soul from the cold vice of his lingering demons. For even as the seconds ticked by, and the war raged on, Charlie lay there unmoving, wondering if this would be where his life stood still.
And then he blinked.
The distant hum of the dull overhead lighting vibrated through Charlie and into every vein, every nerve, and every muscle of his body. From the crown of his head into his toes, and each of the fingers he had left. Only a phantom awareness remained of the arm that used to extend below his elbow. Sometimes he would wake in the night to what he thought were gunshots. Instinctively, he would throw his hands over his head and jump in alarm when only one gripped into his now shaggy hair.
“You’re lucky! We didn’t have to take the whole thing.” Lucky. That is what the nurse told him when he finally woke up in the hospital. Lucky, to Charlie, would have been never coming home. Lucky, would have been finding peace in the jungle, in perpetual slumber on the warm dirt, using only what was left, his body, to shield the country he was deployed to defend until the bugs and the leaves and the soil swallowed him up with the hopes and dreams of his fallen comrades. That is what he was called for, was it not? To protect? With his body and his M16. Was it “protect for eternity,” or was it “protect until you lose a limb?” Protect until we say so. Protect until you’ve lost yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally, and then we’ll take you back, clap a hand on your shoulder, and return you to the life you came from. Everything is here waiting for you. But it wasn’t.
Charlie wore his amputation like a neon sign that said “I just came back from Vietnam,” and with it came no hero’s welcome, aside from his own family. People caught glimpses of him and hurried away in disgust. “You were part of the problem,” one man spat at him. He gave way to the violent intentions of the United States and fought in a war that the country as a whole had no place in, and now he was blamed for it. He, with one arm and no soul, was responsible for the actions of an entire nation. All he could do was sit in this washed-out room, surrounded by men who shared his experience and nod in understanding every time someone poured out their heartache. He said few words now, for they carried little meaning. Five years ago, he left his home with a dream. Eager to prove himself and return or even die a hero having put an end to the Communist dispute. Instead, he returned to a country still at war, with more and more boys being sent to their collapse. Shoved down the plank, knowing not whether they would drown or swim.
With the burden of a country on his shoulders and the rest of his life chosen for him, he sat, at the tender age of twenty-three, unable to see four minutes into his future because he didn’t want to look. He once thought he had time. Like the stories he was told growing up, he thought he would write himself into a fantasy, fall in love, slay the dragon, and live happily ever after. But not every tale has to be written and told. Not every tale has a hero who has overcome the mountains of impossibilities that lay before him. Most of them are just days lived by lost people, doing what they could to survive. Making wrong decisions and suffering consequences. Hoping for more and getting less. With every day that passed and every dream that evaporated into the sky, Charlie lived out his life as put in motion by the millisecond of choice that got him to be without an arm. Just one brief flash of a second changed the trajectory of everything. Seconds that flash by so often without notice, and this one would stay with him for as long as he lived. But in the end, he kept his promise and was home. Even if it was just his shell. He stopped looking back on the moments that brought him here, for there was nothing in his power that could change the past. Charlie no longer felt the fear of running out of time because he stopped keeping track of it at all. And then he closed his eyes.
- In the Blink of an Eye - March 30, 2025
