The Amber Wall.
I jumped to the first step and waved a clumsy goodbye as the bus driver squished the folding doors between me and my childhood.
Mom's tears had dried sticky on my face and neck. She had stood at the end of the dirt drive, tears streaming as her third son in three years was going off to boot camp.
The Greyhound made several stops along its stuttered route to St. Louis. The small towns relinquished those among them that wouldn't be missed, and each one who joined our bus ride I was sure, wouldn't miss them either.
It was just four short months ago that I had taken the physical to join the Marines. It was two days of belittling and humiliation. Two days of being passed from one pair of cold hands to another with some smartass checking off squares on a clipboard.
I passed the physical for the Marines; but I wouldn't be joining them.
Sometime in late spring I had been accepted into Southwest Missouri State University with the intention of studying art. My dad had opened the envelope addressed to me from the Selective Service with the cherished IIS student deferment inside. No kid of his was going to be a faggot artist.
We had a good knock-down, drag-out fight. Not over his personal mandatory draft, but because he opened my mail. I would show him who the real man was. I would join the Marines.
The week following my verbal commitment to the Marines my girlfriend pleaded with me to change my mind. "You'll end up in Vietnam by February." she warned. "The Marines go straight to Vietnam! Every one of them! You don't want to get killed in this stupid war do you?" She saw the Vietnam War through the same eyes as my mother.
By now, I had forfeited my deferment and my decision to join the Navy was consequential.
I was grateful to be in St. Louis for only one night. The next morning I was on a train for the remainder of the trip to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center just north of Chicago. The most memorable part of the train ride was throwing up my breakfast somewhere between the dining car and my seat.
Boot camp was twelve weeks long and I came out a different personmission accomplished.
By the first week of March, the sixth radioman class of 1969 was mustered outside the barracks at Bainbridge, Maryland for our first march to the school building.
It was three months of studying, weekend fire watch duty and lots of socializing at the enlisted men's club. Winter turned to spring and we prepared for graduation and our next duty assignment.
Every graduation deserves a big celebration and when it came to celebrating I was never one to hold back.
The party started around four-thirty at Fiddler's Green, the enlisted men's club on base. The music was loud, the conversation louder and the laughter was flowing like the cheap pitchers of beer bolstering our invincibility. The crowd at our table grew, and with every new face came a new round of beer and another level of lost sensibilities.
It was around seven o'clock when six of us decided to take the party off base. We jumped in a car and headed for a nearby town where we had met a couple of girls weeks before.
We stopped and filled the gas tank and managed enough money between us for a case of beer and a couple packs of cigarettes. It was typically a forty-five minute drive, but we were sure we could make it in less than thirty. We knew the roads well.
The party ended sometime after midnight and we left the girls' apartment with the beer gone and nearly all of what they had in the fridge. Our friends were unable to get off the couch to see us out.
The '63 Chevy convertible was speeding along the narrow blacktop road just two miles from the base entrance. I was sitting "shotgun"; front seat, next to the passenger side door. "Smitty" and I had flipped a quarter for the shotgun seat; he lost the coin toss and was sitting between me and the driver. Our three buddies were passed out in the back.
No one was awake the moment we hit the concrete bridge abutment dead center of the grill. The engine slammed through the firewall into the front seat. We were told later the car had gone from 65 mph to zero in less than two seconds.
Smitty died on impact. He should have been sitting shotgun. He was the only one of us with a college degree. He was going home to get married, and he and his young bride would have spent their first eighteen months in Honolulu, Hawaii.
My head went through the windshield and into the crumpled metal hood; my legs trapped and twisted under the dash. The recoil slammed me back into the car where I lay contorted on the floorboard; the burning engine crackling in my ears. All the others had been thrown from the car and lay strewn along the creek and the ditch.
I tried desperately to shove the door open, but the crumpled door had been jammed by the impact. I knew I had to get out before the rest of the wreckage became engulfed in flames and the nearly-full gas tank exploded.
I fell in and out of consciousness several times. Someone came out of the darkness and managed to work the door open enough for me to crawl out onto the blacktop road.
I was lying on my back, pushing with my elbows as I looked down at my feet. My left leg was rotated and twisted backwards, my heel pointing upward, toes facing the back of my leg. My shoes were gone. Blood was pouring down and from my head and face. I rolled into the ditch on the other side and as I did, I suddenly found myself floating above my body.
"That's me." I thought. "What's happening?"
I reached down toward my face and looked at myself with a sense of overwhelming sorrow. I couldn't see a single sign of what had just happened.
As I continued to rise higher and higher, my lifeless body gradually became more distant. From nearly forty feet above the ground I floated calmly over the wreckage, the strewn bodies, and the events beginning to unfold below.
Bright red tail lights glared on the bridge and tires screamed as a car screeched to a stop on the bridge. Two young boys got out and ran back toward the flaming wreckage.
"There's noting we can do here!" one of them yelled.
"Let's get some help!" the other one shouted as they climbed back in the car and sped off.
I saw a body on the bridge, one near the creek in front of the car, two bodies lying almost ten feet behind the car, another guy blindly crawling on his stomach through the grass about ten yards down from the other two. I couldn't see Smitty anywhere.
The fire trucks were the first to arrive, then the highway patrol, followed almost immediately by three ambulances. People were rushing everywhere, one man shouting out directions and pointing to where the bodies were lying.
Everything was in slow motion and the sounds had faded to deafness. It was as though I was watching a silent movie about people I didn't know.
I watched as two ambulance attendants rolled my limp body onto a white sheet and twisted the ends like a taffy wrapper.
"This one's gone!" I heard the one holding my head shout as they lifted me onto the gurney and rolled me into the back of their ambulance.
It was at this point that I became aware of a bright yellow wall of light behind me with dozens of grey-silhouetted people casually walking past. I sensed that I knew some of them; all the others were total strangers. They were all ages; men, women and children, a few holding hands. Some were walking very close to me, others back in the distance. They never spoke; they just slowly and with no real purpose or destination walked by and disappeared as others came out of the bright amber wall.
The chaos below was of no interest to me now. The entire scene had faded away into the darkness and I was being drawn toward these "people" walking ever closer behind me.
There was no fear, no bright light at the end of a tunnel and no flashing of my life before me. I was filled with a total singular sense of choicea decision that was mine and only mine to make. It was being "given" to me by the silhouettes that had gathered and stood silent behind me. My choice was simple; turn completely around and I would join the shadow-people in the amber glow world or, do not turn around and remain in this world.
I hesitated only briefly, refocused with absolute certainty at the scene below, and the wall of amber light and its shaded forms of inhabitants disappeared.
Three of us were transported to the U. S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half away. I never saw the other two again.
I lay in the hospital unconscious for three or four days. Once awake, it didn't take long to know the extent of the damage; left femur broken in three pieces, skull fracture, brain concussion, both ankles fractured, three fractured vertebrae, broken shoulder blade, kidneys bleeding, facial bone fractures and deep cuts and other lacerations that had been "rough stitched", along with miscellaneous burns and bruises.
I have never forgotten the first moment of consciousness.
I craned my neck to look around, trying to understand where I was, what had happened. I gradually took in my surroundings; the rows of beds filled with young boys lying up and down and across from me. I saw kids my own age with raw muscle and bone protruding from where legs and hands and arms used to be, faces lacerated and swollen, bloody eye sockets and bodies burned and charred.
I was confused at first, and then my entire body was hollowed by an instant and intense feara fear that I had died and gone to Hell.
The fear was suddenly flushed away by a deep and profound sense of betrayal and guilt. These were Marines from Vietnam. No one had to tell me, I knew it in my heart and soul.
The irony and the reality lying around me were smothering me, sucking the breath from me; and I felt ashamed. Ashamed for taking an easier way out, ashamed for not being there with them. Ashamed of what these guys, these men, would think of me.
Someone stuck a needle in my arm and I felt the soothing warmth of chemicals and the temporary relief from the pain and guilt as I slipped into the darkened, no-where land of unconsciousness once again.
Sometime late into the morphine sleep, two corpsmen wheeled a new arrival onto the ward. He lay immobile in the hospital bed just to my left. The only thing between us was a small, beige cabinet with a black countertop at eye level.
"Ski, we've put your legs back together," the corpsman quietly assured him. "Dr. Donnolly is the best there is. He'll be in to see you in the morning. We'll get you another needle to help you sleep."
The kid responded with a tight grin and nighttime on Ward 2B fell back into its darkened loneliness and drug-laden calm.
All too often the restless ghosts of war shattered even the deepest morphine-induced slumber. The cries of endless nightmares cursed the pitch black air like screams for help from tortured souls.
Mornings never came soon enough.