Veteran Warrior Writings

Warrior writings

Desert Storm ¾/1991
By John Fisher
Author: Angels in Vietnam

For a moment, gliding through the winter wonderland, snow still falling, he almost forgot the horror. Shifting his weight onto his uphill edge, he cruised over to a large embankment where he began to carve large, bounding turns up and down the slope. Forgetting his frozen fingers and toes, he slapped the top of the ledge with his snowboard and flew into the air, landing twenty feet down the bank in perfect trim. Then, with strong squiggling turns, he accelerated downhill into the blizzard of his senses; he was in the middle of a cloud with no dimensions couldn’t feel the snow beneath his stick couldn’t see the terrain with the lack of glare.

Then it appeared before he knew it. A cliff, hanging silently from the pinnacle, and he was sailing out into the heavens of no return. In his unconscious state, Ben soared into outer space without fear of the inevitable. He was in another dimension a time zone not seen on a standard globe. He was absent without leave (AWOL) from awareness of any tense, until the unexpected landing. The nose of his board buried deep into the snow and his body twisted around like a tetherball on a pole.

He lay stunned in the blanket of powder, unsure of where he was, or for that matter, what had just happened. His leg looked warped, still attached to his board, oddly shaped. At first, there wasn’t any sensation, and then a warm feeling crept into his left leg. It didn’t hurt, just a warm feeling. He dug for his bindings and loosened the right leg, then the left. As he pulled the latter out of the fastening, it flopped off to the side, seemingly unattached. Oh my God! Quickly he straightened his leg as the throbbing began. Where was he? What could he do?

Ben covered his broken leg in snow and tried to come to his senses, but it was no use. It was dreadfully quiet and he was cold, in pain and tired. Before long, he slipped into a delirium of his past hallucinations of combat. He slipped into a delusion of before he was captured in Vietnam. ‘Jose, where are you man?’ Then he saw him, leaning against a tree. His arm was wide open and bleeding profusely. Ben crawled over and came face to face with a North Vietnamese muzzle. He braced himself for death, but it didn’t come. No blast no darkness. Jose cried out in pain and Ben looked over at his buddy Jeremy? Jeremy wounded in the arm and the communists had now captured them both.

Ben shifted in and out of consciousness throughout the night. At one point he had enough cognizance to cover himself with his sleeping bag, but he continued to be severely hypothermic. His broken left leg tingled from the weight of it’s internal bleeding and pounded with every heartbeat. When the sun rose in the morning, he did not notice. In fact, he did not notice much until he heard the helicopter’s blade slapping at the air from above. Then the medics came to his side and tried to get coherent information about his condition. ‘I’m fine,’ reported Ben. ‘Get to Jeremy. His arm . . . his arm is wounded.’