by Shirley Delsignore

Created on: May 08, 2008   Last Updated: February 14, 2009

Robert surveyed his room. White walls jaundiced with age, an air vent that blows cold in the winter and hot in the summer and tiny flecks of plaster and dust onto the coffee-stained tile floor year round. There is a crack in the plaster ceiling that looks like a crooked grin which constantly taunts him. The room also contains a television mounted to the wall, a nightstand on which sits an empty Oriental vase, and his worn leather recliner. In the corner next to his bed hangs his thread- worn robe; above it hangs a dust covered spider web, both are the same foul color. Off in the distance Robert can hear the whispered hiss of machines and the hushed voices of the staff as they go about their daily duties. Occasionally a crackling voice would make an announcement on the overhead speakers, the announcements are of two varieties, a code of one kind or another and "visiting hours are over". Robert was a career soldier; he saw action in Korea and then Viet Nam. He was too old for any action to see duty in the most recent of conflicts. He rode a desk for the last twenty years of his service. Robert reaches into his wobbly nightstand next to his bed and retrieves the only items that meant anything to him: his Silver Star and a tattered copy of T.S. Eliot's poetry. The Military gave him the medal (a reward for killing) and his father, a World War One veteran, gave him the book (a going off to war present). War and killing is about the only thing Robert has any great knowledge of. He has spent 30 years in the Marines and what did he have to show for it? A tiny lonely room, and Vinny. And a mess of memories and nightmares. This place is a nightmare, where one comes at the end of their pitiful life. Thirty years of service and the only thing Robert learned is how to kill.

Robert remembered the first man he shot. He was a North Korean soldier. It was soon after the battle of Inchon, while trying to maintain the Pusan Perimeter. A small number of North Koreans were embedded in trenches on a hillside, and taking pop shots at U.N. troops as they passed on the road below. This "minor annoyance" was holding up supplies. His platoon was ordered to clear them out. What should have been an easy task turned into a blazing fire fight, and ended when Navy F9F Panthers with their twenty millimeter machine guns roaring, strafed and bombed the hillside. Robert watched as the empty twenty millimeter brass rained down from the sky, and thought how odd it was that he could hear metallic

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