MUD, MEMORIES, AND CHRISTMAS: A VIETNAM VETERAN STORY

Time stops in a war zone. The days bleed together like ink on wet newspaper. You forget what day it is. Monday, Sunday, it doesn’t matter — five in the morning, ten at night — all the same. There’s only the next thing, and it’s always something worse.

You go through the motions like training taught you to. Your brothers are depending on you to stay alive. You forget the nights spent in mud, in slime, covered in the stink of sweat and fear. You forget the details. But not what you need to do. That stays. Always.

I remember coming back to base after Christmas. There was the smell of the holiday dinner — what little there was. A reward, they called it. We were rocks then, walls that didn’t care, without emotion, without sentiment. But something cracked when we saw that crude Christmas card from the unit. For just a second, we weren’t soldiers anymore. We were boys again. We saw our mothers, our fathers, our friends. The smell of home — good food and warmth — came over us like a blanket.

It lasted only a moment. Then we were back in the dirt, back in the war. But I think of that incident every Christmas. And I know some of the men I was with then never made it home.

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