Coward

By David Beakey

Strangely, he was not as afraid during the fire fights and incoming. But in those interim periods, when there was down time, the fear would become all encompassing. He would think about the days before all of this, when he was safe and when things were easy. Then he would think of various ways to get out of this mess. He could put peanut butter on his bare toe and hope that a rat bit him during the night, but the thought of those painful rabies shots nixed that idea. He could shoot himself through the palm, but then there would be telltale powder burns. Finally he came up with a good idea. The next time the rounds came in, as he huddled in the trench, he thrust his arm up, waving it as if to attract the shrapnel. The first two times it didn’t work. But then, one afternoon, as he raised his arm, almost as if to say, “Call on me teacher, I know the answer!”, it happened. He felt a searing pain and when he lowered his arm and looked at his hand, sure enough, it was covered in blood. He had caught several pieces of hot metal, just like he used to catch fire flies back home. As it was his trigger hand, and as he lost the feeling in the entire hand (he swore), he was sent first to Da Nang, then to the hospital ship, then on to Japan, and finally back to the states. They changed his MOS and he spent the rest of the war working as a driver in the motor pool at Quantico. He hardly ever thought of the patrols, the bunkers or his comrades, who had sent him off with cheerful ribbing about his “million dollar wound”. Occasionally, he wondered what they would say if they knew the full story. But when that thought entered his mind he pushed it away.

Now it is thirty years later. He sits patiently in his car as the traffic comes to a complete stop on the highway. Behind him, in a car full of chattering children, one young boy looks at the car in front of his and says to his father, “Dad, why does that man have a funny license plate?” The father looks at the plate and replies, “That’s a Purple Heart license plate. That man was wounded in combat. I guess you could say he’s a hero.”