Where the Mesquite Tree Grows

Each day I live reflects the day just gone and reveals the days to come. Each day unveils promises to long for and melancholy memories of lives no longer shared. The passage of time from one to another littered with the heartache of mourning and sometimes torment. The sun in the morning revealing the certainty of the aches and pains of living, and the moon in the evening concealing the tears and fears of having lived another day.

Although I drape myself with the daily inconveniences and responsibilities to ably march past the barriers and obstacles that each day creates, I find myself exhausted and consumed with my inability to control much less command each circumstance or consequence. No matter what I say or do, the days ignore my pleas for the return of time I misused or overlooked. And now I sit and weep for all the days I’ve lived and lost.

Age reflects the tattered remnants of days long past. Each moment of each day a deflection of my reflection. The golden rays of hope no longer filter through the murky haze of anguish and affliction that each day exacts upon the consciousness of who I was or who I am, and no longer questioning who I will become. For all the days I’ve lived I understand but cannot fully comprehend the logic, if any there exists, for the joys and tears and fears that the days have brought to me.

Each day becomes a memory. Each memory becomes an irreplaceable part of me. There is a harmony between day and night and so too between life and death. Each has a cycle and a structure. Just as there are days too long and nights too short, there are lives that span beyond the ordinary and deaths that come too soon.

For all the days I’ve lived I have seen and felt and done the best and worst like all of us have done. I have laughed, and I have cried. I have felt the arrogance of pride and experienced the humility of nobility. I have seen the good that men can do and experienced the evil that also lurks within their beating hearts.

I’ve savored the pleasures and delights of life, but I have also stepped into the quagmire of war and seen the destruction of dreams and unfulfilled promises. To see bloodied and maimed young boys and men carted away like discarded waste, or observe the specter of fallen soldiers, muddied and lifeless so far from home, destroys the humanness within those left to see another day. Once bright and vibrant, now voiceless and fragile caricatures of their former selves, young soldiers stripped of their basic instinct to respect the sanctity of life, now hunters of human prey. We are asked to fight and even die, but never told the reason why. For all the days I’ve lived since returning home from war, I cannot fully understand the reason or the purpose for having shed so much blood and pain and tears and then to turn our backs and simply walk away.

For all the days I’ve lived and for all the ended lives obscured and buried by the passage of time beneath cold marble headstones in fields of quiet solitude, no words or stone monuments can erase the insanity of war or justify the righteousness of the depravity of man. I walked the tranquil roads and fields and soared through the blue cloud-filled skies of Vietnam. I saw the splendor of the flowing Mekong and gazed at the majestic mountains towering toward the sky. I saw children playing and women swaying as they walked with loads of bamboo reeds upon their heads. These were the deceptive and fallacious images I saw each day. It was this appearance of tranquility that was the cruelest weapon of the war. For the landscape and the people were alluring and appealing, even tempting to the sensibilities of inexperienced boys and men. For all the days I’ve lived, the thought that such beauty could conceal the killing fields that laid beneath haunts my dreams and memories of friends who were deceived and did not return with me.

I am consumed by images in my mind of faces and places that remind me of days that never seemed to end and nights that flashed by in the wink of an eye. I can still feel and smell the essence of war. War exudes a scent and vulgarity that only man can produce and only those who have walked through the valley of death can understand and comprehend. For all the days I’ve lived there has never been a day without a flash or thought or glimpse within my mind of some moment or some occurrence of my incursion into the bowels of the man-made hell called war. Worst yet is the unrelenting thought that I am here, and my friends are not.

But the saddest part of all is growing old and realizing that I will have these thoughts and memories for all the days I live.