Mind Shadow
(April 26, 2011) |
|
| As the bright sunlight filters in
through the window, a familiar, distant thunder is
heard; a jet circles in the skies over Washington.
Years ago, when I was a child, planes flew directly
over my house as they entered the landing patterns
for National Airport or Bolling Air Force Base. They
were a mild irritant because they momentarily
disrupted the TV reception as they made their
descent to earth.
Bolling long ago closed its
runways and the flight pattern for National has been
changed. But this plane isn't landing; it is
circling high over the city on a patrol, guarding
against possible terrorist attacks.
It's far
above my house, its engines a remote mutter, yet it
casts a shadow through the pattern of sunlight
shining through the trees and playing upon my living
room wall. It overlays the dancing leaves with an
invisible but tangible shadow of anger and fear.
Deadly explosions and sneaking attackers are
things that I thought I had left behind in another
life in another country. Yet, here they are again;
they have followed me home. And an old, long
sublimated feeling returns, vivid as ever: an
impotent, banked, helpless rage. The same anger I
felt in the bunker down in Tay Ninh after I returned
to Trang Sup TDY.
I was waiting for a flight
out, so I had no defensive position to man. I just
sat in the bunker with some others, listening to and
feeling the explosions erupting overhead outside
while someone else confronted the unseen enemy.
Dimly, I can hear children laughing outside as
the sound of the fighter fades into the distance.
Remembered sounds and odors recede; again, I'm in a
room bright with sunlight instead of a darkened
bunker.
The shadow dissolves back into leaves
moving lazily in the random breezes. The anger is
slower in receding. |
 By Thurman P. Woodfork
Copyright 2003Author's Note: In
my younger days, I would have thought nothing of
walking the distance between my house and the
Pentagon. Before my dogs died, I used to walk them
from my house to the Capitol. Now, after over twenty
years of traveling the world in the name of freedom,
it seems the menace has found its way to my own
neighborhood. When I joined the Air Force nearly
fifty years ago, an attack by such a faceless enemy
was inconceivable.
About
Author...
Thurman P. Woodfork (Woody) spent his
Air Force career as a radar repairman in places as disparate as
Biloxi, Mississippi; Cut Bank, Montana; Tin City, Alaska; Rosas,
Spain and Tay Ninh, Vietnam. In Vietnam, he was assigned to
Detachment 7 of the 619th Tactical Control Squadron, a Forward Air
Command Post located on Trai Trang Sup. Trang Sup was an Army
Special Forces camp situated about fifty miles northwest of Saigon
in Tay Ninh province, close to the Cambodian border.
After Vietnam, Woody remained in the Air Force for nine more years.
Visit
Thurman P. Woodfork's site for more information | |
Comment on this
article |
|
