The Scrapbook

One day when I was nine years old, I was hanging out with my buddy Demontrion at his house on a Saturday afternoon. In the far corner of his room near the window was a closet which he scarcely opened back then. Years later when we were in high school and he became the clothes horse/ladies man he's notorious for being now, it would simply be the closet that was too small to accommodate it's fair share of his trendy clothes which seemed to go in and out of style as quickly as he put them on.

The houses in South Park where we had grown up had been "G.I." housing. By G.I. housing, I mean that at the end of World War II when the veterans returned home to the heroes' welcomes they'd earned along with G.I. home loans, men with expanses of land built neighborhoods with similar floor plans and sold them to returning soldiers, sailors, pilots and Marines. If you were to drive through my old South Park neighborhood you would note that most of the streets are named after generals and battle fields. The streets have names like "Doolittle" , "Iwo Jima", "Tarawa" and "Ridgeway."

Demontrion's grandfather whom I'd never met served in the Navy in the second world war and made a career of it and Demontrion's uncle Johnny did the same. His dad on the other hand had joined the Marines. He never talked about his war experiences when we were coming up, but as we grew older and learned what happened over there, we realized that we'd been reading the war on his face our entire lives. He was a quiet man who didn't speak unless he had something to say. Honestly to this day when he talks I find myself listening as if I'm still a little kid. He's always been one of my heroes thought I doubt I've ever told him.

Demontrion's parents were divorced and he lived with his grandmother. The room he had, had been the one his father and uncle shared. When his father returned from Southeast Asia, he hung up the dress blue uniform that Marines seldom wear, (but always seem to be photographed in whenever they do) in a closet along with a sea-bag full of mementos, one of which being a scrap book never thinking for a moment that ten years later they would sever as curiosities to his son and his best friend on a restless afternoon. We found a worn scrapbook full of black and white photos. There were pictures of his dad, but we had difficulty recognizing him. Neither of us had ever seen him without a beard or at least a mustache.

The photos were mostly of his dad and the other Marines in the unit in which he'd spent two years. They were young men, I'm assuming between 19 and 23 who had the tired eyes of old men. There were pictures in the jungles, small villages, and bares that we all find synonymous with what we know of Vietnam, but there was one photo that stuck in my mind. My best friend's father at 19 was sitting on a big rock calmly looking into the distance and smoking a cigarette. The photo would hardly seem unusual were it not for the small khaki clad figure in the background who had been crucified. We couldn't see the man's face, but he wore khaki and a pith helmet that we would later learn had been the uniform of the North Vietnamese Army.

I found it neither funny, nor disturbing. Honestly, neither I nor my best friend had any idea what we were really looking at. The crucified NVA wasn't real to us, he was merely a glossy black and white image in a photo. We didn't understand the two men in the photo. One the victor, the other the vanquished. They were members of an odd fraternal order of mutual respect. The fraternity of men who've exchanged gunfire. Before they entered a cluster of jungle that became a battle field, they were two highly trained, well armed, teenage boys who had been armed to the teeth and sent out to obliterate one another. Their differences? One grew up a military brat in Houston, Texas his father a proud Navy man who had served in the Pacific, the other had probably been raised in Hanoi hearing about how bravely his father and possibly his mother had fought against the French in the last war.

The two boys met in a battle that probably lasted minutes but seemed like a week and in the end, one got to go home and the other was "sent" home.

I would join the Marines after high school, learn more ways of breaking and utterly destroying other human beings that I would ever care to know, but I would never be sent to test those martial skills against some other teenage "patriot" fighting for HIS country. Demontrion and I never peered into the scrapbook again. I can't speak for Demontrion, but I think on some level we probably felt it just didn't seem "right." It wouldn't dawn on me until years later that we probably didn't venture to open it again, because on some level we knew that not being members of the "fraternity" we weren't worthy.