A Dream Discarded

[Andy Hirshfield]

Some folks may relate to this, particularly veterans. Comments welcomed.

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Here’s a little story of a short recurrent dream, ultimately unraveled and long gone.

 

Initially, a random composite of fears and experiences congealed, adhering to the periphery of my mind. It sojourned there a long while, hiding mostly,
metamorphosing between appearances, to emerge only while I slept. It was a
dream, only a dream, and it appeared several times a week for years. Some
dreams are vaporous, gauzelike, their colors skewed toward unreality, but this
one filtered through my perception in such a way as to attain a validity all
its own.

 

The basic scenario was quite real, received through my normal senses. It went like this: there I’d be, walking down the center of a littered street in a nearly
empty town, looking to the left, to the right, scanning vertically and
horizontally. It is a residential street, with concrete sidewalks and no front
yards, the two story buildings urban in appearance, but strangely rural in
atmosphere, as natural as a sagging barn roof. Curtains flutter from shattered
windows. The few vehicles are burned, overturned, lying dead on scorched
pavement. There is a sense of recent frantic departure, a lingering echo of
chaos. Usually I am accompanied by a friend or family member. Sometimes they are
armed; I am never unarmed. This dreamscape is most frequently set in daylight,
but when I move up the street at night, the darkness approaches from the
distance, unable to come closer than the aft of the buildings in my field of
view. The air may be filled with silence, with distant small arms fire, or with
the cooing of pigeons. The aura of tension is brittle and hard as tool steel.
My companion and I move up the corridor, scanning the buildings. Every episode
finds us the recipients of sniper fire, but not being hit. Grenades launched by
unseen arms explode behind us and touch us only with their concussion. I hear
rounds leave mortar tubes in the left distance, always the left, but they do
not impact. In one frequent version, we slowly advance toward a town square a
couple of blocks to our front. Suddenly gunfire erupts from a second story
window above and to my right. I quickly fire on the sound. Blood splashes from
the window and an AK clatters down to the rubble strewn entry stairs. Looking
back to the window, a still, single foot protrudes above the sill. My skin
feels heated. We continue. Violent events occur with increasing frequency until
the dream comes to an end, usually not before the situation has become
desperate. Occasionally the dream finishes with me on the roof of the Sonoma
City Hall, firing down Broadway, spraying rounds from the barrel of a Browning
.50. The barrel cooks; it is white hot. The rounds take erratic paths,
ricocheting from the buildings, the pavement, blowing through the abandoned
vehicles. I can identify no targets, and my body courses with adrenaline. Where
are they? The tracers arc through the trees, bounce from the facades of the structures.
They cause no harm. The scene suddenly becomes silent and I awaken.

 

In the years since the dream has faded I’ve rarely thought of it. Although I can’t remember it’s ever being set in Viet-Nam, it was clearly related to the war.
Many veterans have had recurring dreams rooted in their war experience, but not
necessarily expressed by imagery
of their own particular war. For me, this dream is now gone, the first symptom
to fade when I began to heal from the psychic and spiritual wounds of the war. When
finally I came to understand this dream, it lost its grasp on me. Thus I let it
go, and good riddance, sometime in the 1990’s.

 

Toward the end of winter ‘96, I was driving south over the Golden Gate Bridge. Beneath the low morning sun, Alcatraz sat on a plate of shimmering stainless steel, a symbol
for the blind justice which takes retribution against those who violate the
laws of man. In the distant west, a massive expanse of marine air blanketed the
ocean, impenetrable, disallowing any hint of man or his justice. Perhaps the
softness of fog could offset the harshness of prison concrete. It eases the
mind to accept the balance of justice and believe in the symbolic blindfolded
figure with the scales. We are comforted that justice will prevail over
injustice and right over wrong. Yet these opposites can be mysterious, more subjective
than their definitions might indicate. They can fall out of balance and may
become indistinguishable. In fact, they can simultaneously vanish. It is
unsettling to dwell within the absence of both justice and injustice, to behold
moral limbo, yet this condition eventually arises during wartime. This state of
existence leaves us forever insecure. Some survivors are rendered rudderless by
the wartime revelation of the ambiguity of right and wrong. We strive to regain
a state of equilibrium that ultimately eludes some veterans until the end of
their days. The lack of a discernable enemy in my dream represents this issue. The
enemy was us, as we were the enemy, both in the wrong, each guilty of
supporting our righteous cause, willingly or not. We assumed the position
dictated by the sickness of our species, the ceaseless, symptomatic, outbreaks
of war.

 

Traffic crept steadily south in the early haze. Suddenly and unexpectedly the dream and its genesis flashed into consciousness. It had to have been a representation of
the razor edge tension I felt riding shotgun on supply convoys in the Saigon
area during the weeks after the 1968 Tet Offensive. The concept rang true: I
knew beyond doubt this was the reality behind the dream. That tension had festered
within me like mold in the bottom of a refrigerator, oozing forth to poison my
sleep. And now, these many years later, moving slowly along in my clean, white,
Ford pickup, I saw past the ephemera of the memory, past the residue of sight,
sound, smell and bitterness, directly into the pit of my old fear.

 

Whether traversing Cho-Lon in a little M151-A1 at three in the morning or passing the Phu Tho race track at high noon in a Ford – Philco flatbed, I unconsciously
stuffed my fear down inside myself. Although feeling the presence of eminent
death from ambush, from sniper, the trip wire with a Claymore at each end, I felt
no fear. I clung tightly to my guilty conviction that there was nothing to fear
here, for I’d escaped the field, had eluded the war. My terror was still back
up in the Central Highlands, where my former comrades were being ground to
pieces.

 

Hot food and beer dulled me physically, while pot softened my mental edge. My life was a cakewalk. How could I be ungrateful enough to allow myself the indulgence
of fearfulness, here in the Paris of the Orient? I really should have been out
in the bush eating C’s and smoking stale cigarettes, walking daily in the
shadow of my own death. I knew full well that night escort wasn’t shit compared
to night ambush, knew it from experience. The only real fear I allowed myself
in those days was the fear of being transferred back to the Fourth Infantry
Division. In truth, in the deep down part of me into which I would not see, I carried
a raw fear of being captured, maimed, suffering the injuries of war that I had
witnessed. Admitting to these fears in this easily privileged place would have
been to transgress normal intellectual and emotional behavior at war. To admit
that in this place I might see the air burn and smell guts in the trees, was
more than I could handle. This kind of fear wouldn’t help me stay out of
trouble, do my time, and rotate back to the world.

 

Once I arrived at work, I poured a cup of coffee and went back outside, for I was early, and the elevated feeling of the revelation was still upon me. I now saw that I
was still carrying the fear, bottled and sealed all these years. The tops of
the eucalypti swayed on the other side of Palace Drive and I literally
trembled. Adrenalin coursed through my system. Then, a slow moment flowed by
and took the feeling with it.

 

Downing the cooled coffee, I headed in to work feeling lighter, with the next turn in my path freshly reveled. Having discovered the fear, I would find how to cast
it away. Maybe it would simply dissipate. The events themselves were so long
ago, so far back in time. Surely I could figure out how to separate myself
psychologically from my past and leave it where it belonged.

[Chuck Stromme]

This is a powerful and evocative essay about a dream and its impact. Your story ties together past and present, fear and hope, yesterday and today, reality and the shadow world. This needs to be published. Thank you for sharing your experience.

[Edythe Stromme]

Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not. You threaded this together slipping between the present and the distant past of the war and less distant past of the dream. It's all connected and as imperative and fresh as it ever was. Your wish to dissipate it may be partially realized by the act of recording and sharing. I like your use of language. You had some terrific descriptive phrasing. Your dream is very visual and maintains tension. The description of your war experience has a gritty realism. It feels like you ended with a little peace and hope. Thanks for sharing. Oh and by the way, as an old bay area resident, your description of crossing the bridge was spot on. Doesn't the smell of eucalyptus forever make you think of that time and place?

[Andy Hirshfield]

Hi Edythe~
Many thanks for your encouraging comments on the essay. I have returned to your reply numerous times, but not for the positive feedback. Occasionally the articulation of a simple, obvious truth has illuminated my life like dawn over the South China Sea. Thanks for this basic lesson, "Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not."


Edythe Stromme said:

Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not. You threaded this together slipping between the present and the distant past of the war and less distant past of the dream. It's all connected and as imperative and fresh as it ever was. Your wish to dissipate it may be partially realized by the act of recording and sharing. I like your use of language. You had some terrific descriptive phrasing. Your dream is very visual and maintains tension. The description of your war experience has a gritty realism. It feels like you ended with a little peace and hope. Thanks for sharing. Oh and by the way, as an old bay area resident, your description of crossing the bridge was spot on. Doesn't the smell of eucalyptus forever make you think of that time and place?

[Chuck Stromme]

WAIT just a freakin' minute here. In The Green Berets, John Wayne was pointing out the sunSET over the South China Sea.

You mean that wasn't real?

OMG!

Say it ain't so, Joe.

* * * * *

Andy Hirshfield said:

Hi Edythe~
Many thanks for your encouraging comments on the essay. I have returned to your reply numerous times, but not for the positive feedback. Occasionally the articulation of a simple, obvious truth has illuminated my life like dawn over the South China Sea. Thanks for this basic lesson, "Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not."


Edythe Stromme said:

Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not. You threaded this together slipping between the present and the distant past of the war and less distant past of the dream. It's all connected and as imperative and fresh as it ever was. Your wish to dissipate it may be partially realized by the act of recording and sharing. I like your use of language. You had some terrific descriptive phrasing. Your dream is very visual and maintains tension. The description of your war experience has a gritty realism. It feels like you ended with a little peace and hope. Thanks for sharing. Oh and by the way, as an old bay area resident, your description of crossing the bridge was spot on. Doesn't the smell of eucalyptus forever make you think of that time and place?

[Andy Hirshfield]

My sincere apologies. It was not Mr. Wayne whom I misquoted, rather Rudyard Kipling, to wit: "An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!"

It was actually over the Sea beyond the Mekong outer which I saw the sun burst from the darkness.

Perhaps Wayne's scriptwriter was dyslexic. On the other hand, life was so chaotic in those days that the earth may have been standing on its N. pole. Come to think of it, the later might explain a great deal. Enlightenment dawns so slowly for some of us.

Chuck Stromme said:

WAIT just a freakin' minute here. In The Green Berets, John Wayne was pointing out the sunSET over the South China Sea.

You mean that wasn't real?

OMG!

Say it ain't so, Joe.

* * * * *

Andy Hirshfield said:

Hi Edythe~
Many thanks for your encouraging comments on the essay. I have returned to your reply numerous times, but not for the positive feedback. Occasionally the articulation of a simple, obvious truth has illuminated my life like dawn over the South China Sea. Thanks for this basic lesson, "Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not."


Edythe Stromme said:

Powerful emotions have no respect for time and don't care if they are welcome or not. You threaded this together slipping between the present and the distant past of the war and less distant past of the dream. It's all connected and as imperative and fresh as it ever was. Your wish to dissipate it may be partially realized by the act of recording and sharing. I like your use of language. You had some terrific descriptive phrasing. Your dream is very visual and maintains tension. The description of your war experience has a gritty realism. It feels like you ended with a little peace and hope. Thanks for sharing. Oh and by the way, as an old bay area resident, your description of crossing the bridge was spot on. Doesn't the smell of eucalyptus forever make you think of that time and place?

[Ted Czuk]

Wow, Andy, vivid and intense. Makes this both a hard and important read. But your recognition of, "... tension festered like mold in the bottom of my refrigerator." suggests that there was penicillin germinating in that mold as well. And though remedies often come with ugly side effects, it is the price we pay for health. Thanks for sharing this personal antidote with us.