The heartbreak from this young lad trying to smile, with his eyes so sad that they cause my heart to slow its beat as I look upon his youthful face, too innocent, it would seem, to have a place in something as mean and cruel as war. I wonder what he thought he was fighting for?

Did he volunteer, or was he drafted? Did he feel heroic...or merely shafted? When I went to war, I was thirty-one; he looks almost young enough to have been my son, thinking of  things like proms instead of how to avoid enemy bombs, and survive in the lethal jungles of Vietnam.

That he was weary is clear to be seen. How long had he been living out in 'The Green'? Hunting and being hunted 'til his nerves stretched thin and the ghost of a smile that had once been a grin was all that remained of the youth within.

Did the growing somberness in his eyes finally smother that smile until it died? Did the insidious inhumanity inherent in war change and harden him even more until he became a reflexive machine adapting to cope with the treacherous 'Green'?

If he did manage to survive the war and return to his home once more; in time was he able to revive that grin until it wreathed his face once again from laughing eyes to the tip of his chin? I hope and pray that really came true: I wish I knew; I wish I knew....

 © Thurman P. Woodfork

4/29/2007