The Candy Bar

   Cameron Lowry was remembering a day where he was sitting on a rock staring at his reflection in a tiny pool of water in a small, sandy depression along side a small stream in the middle of a jungle in Vietnam. He had taken his helmet off for the first time in two days and had removed his boots to wash his feet with a small bar of antibacterial soap he carried with him everywhere. He had a clean pair of socks, which at the time he considered his most precious belongings, in his knapsack. The thing that he first thought of when he saw the dirty, gaunt-eyed face staring back at him was pretty deep. He remembered that he thought that the reflection, as slight a thing as it was, had materialized in this hellhole of world, and thus would leave an indelible mark of his presence in the universe at large for all time.

   He wasn't too surprised that he was thinking so deeply on that day. Lieutenant Ira Callahan, his platoon leader had led their squad into a VC ambush out of sheer stupidity and it had taken two days of bloody fighting to claw their way out of the blunder. Sgt. Albert Costello, a wizened old vet from the Bronx, had tried to warn Callahan, but the college grad, the scion of a long line of New England bankers, was bound and determined to wrest his political future out of the jungles of Vietnam. Both their bodies, Costello's and Callahan's lay about fifty feet from where Lowry was soaping his feet. There were seven other stretchers there, each bearing the lifeless remains of someone Lowry considered a friend. John Palmer, who he had gone through basic training with, was there with half his head blown off. It had only been a week before that he had physically restrained Palmer from a tossing a grenade into the latrine while Callahan was in there. 

       "He's a piece of shit, we both know it, but he ain't worth having carrying that around with you the rest of your life." He heard the words he told his friend as he pinned Palmer's arms hard to his side.

        "He's going to kill us all, Cam. He's going to get every last damned one of us killed if we don't stop him."

       As Lowry pulled his clean socks on, he knew he was going to have to bury that conversation in the deepest recesses of his memory, along with the one of Sgt. Costello getting killed while he was trying to drag the gravely wounded Callahan to safety. 

       It was Corporal Raymond Ruiz, who had been auto mechanic in Pomona before the war, who had saved the day. Ruiz had been a Sargent when Callahan had first showed up. He had been busted down to private for not obeying a command quickly enough in a fire fight that Callahan's had initiated his first week at the base.

         "That damn fool ordered me and Collins to walk right down that path in broad daylight. I tried to tell him the only reason we were still alive was we didn't do that kind of shit, but he didn't listen. Collins was a newbie though, didn't know any better. I told his dumb ass to keep his head down. He thought he had better listen to Callahan rather than me. He hadn't even wore the new off his boots."

        Ruiz had crawled over to where the  squad was pinned and started to giving out orders. It was a miserable muddy affair, and all the choppers were grounded because of the weather. They shouldn't even had been out there but for Callahan volunteering them to go. 

          He remembered the words Callahan used while over-ruling Sgt. Costello's warnings, "The won't be expecting us because of the rains. We have the element of surprise on our side."

          "But sir, they won't be expecting us because nobody in their right mind'll be out in that crap. Them sneaky little bastids won't even come out in this mess."

         "Give the men their orders, Sargent!" Costello stewed. You could tell he was at the point of insubordination; in his head he was balancing his duty to keep his men alive against a life long love of the Corps. Costello was old school, a devout believer in his sense of duty. Now he was dead and had died trying to save the life of the man who had killed him.

        Lowry remembered Ruiz telling him to take three men and to crawl west around the enemy's position. "Take your time, Cam. Don't get in no hurry. I'm gonna leave Jones, Lopez, Tiger, and Andrews here to hold this place while the rest of us will try to sneak around them to the east over there. Tell your guys not to shoot directly east, don't wanna get killed by my own guys. Stay alive."

      The plan worked. It took two full hours, crawling slowly, so as not to make any noise, to get into position. They were the longest hours of his life, thinking all the while, that they were going to run into some VC trying to do the same flanking maneuver. Ruiz and his men opened fire first, surprising the enemy who turned and tried to flee west and ran right into where Lowry and his companions lay in wait.

     After the all the shooting was over, the men still had to gather up the dead and triage the wounded for evacuation then wait all night for the weather to break. What Lowry remembered most about that night, it was his chosen memory of the time, was when during the sleepless night, while he was overcome with fear and fatigue, Corporal Ruiz had sat down beside him without saying a single word and just nodded. They had sat there in the dark silence for several minutes when Ruiz reached inside his knapsack and pulled a chocolate bar from out of nowhere, unwrapped it slowly, broke it in two and handed half of it to him.

      Lowry savored that moment, and he often used the memory of the simple act of kindness in his efforts to blot out the other memories that came unbidden. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

    He sighed deeply at the memory on this night and knew that if he opened his eyes right then, his tall, slender and beautiful grand-daughter Minh, the second child of his son John and his Vietnamese wife, would be patiently sitting there by his bedside studying for her exams at UCLA, and he knew if he truly wanted, Minh would jump up and rush out and buy him  a chocolate bar from the vending machine in the hallway. But, he didn't want to bother her.

​     Besides, he knew it wouldn't be the same. It would be nice, but not the same.