Somewhere In The Combat Zone
Short Story And Tragic Fantasia For Piano And Orchestra
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    Fall has always been my favorite time of year since that September all those years ago when I met Barbara.  I was a damn idiot for even thinking I could maintain the interest of a woman like that for very long; and when it ended, it hurt so very much,  I never put much effort into meeting anyone else and somehow began expecting another woman would find her way to me - just as a letter finds its way to a mailbox.  Even though it was decades ago,  I could still hear her voice and feel her gentle embrace as I walked down Peachtree Street.  There was a slight chill in the October air as it brushed across my face but summer's fading warmth lingered in the air - much the same as someone tries to hold on to something very dear as long as he can.  Everyone seemed so happy.  There were young couples walking hand-in-hand and laughing groups of people sitting around the outside tables of the restaurants along the street.  It was a damn terrible feeling, knowing I resented people I didn't even know because they were happy.  For a few moments, I tried to imagine myself sitting at one of the tables with her.  Wanting something I couldn't have only made me feel worse, so I began to stare at Sacred Heart Church and put together how I would phrase my confession.  It had to be some clever arrangement of words that put me up as a victim of circumstances I didn't create and, therefore, innocent from the bitterness and resent that had come to rule all that I did.  
    As I waited in the church, I looked at the statues, the flickering candles and a few elderly ladies who still insisted on covering their heads with a scarf as they grasped their Rosaries and uttered their prayers.  When I entered the confession both, my thoughts were still of her and all those years since when, especially in September, I had so hoped to have another chance such as I did then.  That September never came, and there I was thinking some priest could say a few words and impose some penitence that would change it all, and I would walk out and maybe even become one of those people on Peachtree that seemed so content.  That would have been something like a Protestant bolt of lightening, on the spot repentance.  
    The priest's grip on my hand was firm as I uttered, "Father, be merciful to me for I have sinned.  It is sometime since my last confession."
    "What is it that brings you to me now?" he replied, his grip remaining firm.
    I struggled with the words but finally began to invent my contrived absolution.  "I don't need to confess a single act.  I've....I've had a number of heartbreaks and disappointments in my life, and I'm afraid the natural consequence has made me deceitful and too self-serving.  I've become inconsiderate of many things and people and constantly find that I place what's important to me ahead of everything else.  No longer can I find it in my heart to consider the feelings of other people.  I'm afraid their disappointment in me is turning them into what I've become but I'm just not strong enough to keep going on and on in my own hurt and disappointment." 
    With that came some relief, as I was certain I had masterfully painted some picture placing me as a victim and, therefore, deserving complete impunity from any hurt I had wreaked out on anyone else but the priest immediately released my hand.  There was a moment of silence before he said, "And how many people do you think there are in this troubled world that suffer disappointments?"
    "I....I don't know."
    His voice became more intense.  "And what should some presumed poor soul do when he finds himself in such a dilemma?"
    "I....I don't know.  That's why I came here today."
    "Oh, I'm sure you do know," he said.  "You just won't admit it to yourself.  You seem to know what's right and wrong but you've washed yourself in all these heartbreaks and now blame what you're convinced is a cruel world that so unjustly inflicts pain and suffering on someone who doesn't deserve it."  
    I waited for him to say something else but he said nothing.  Finally, I asked, "What must I do to absolve myself with the Church?"
    Immediately, he responded, "Don't expect me to tell you something you already know but refuse to admit.  I don't know where your heart rests, what passions you have or what means are at your fingertips to turn your life towards some good.  You must consider that for it is only you that can know how you can free yourself before you fall too deep into the pit you've described and forever out of the grace of the Church.  No priest can dole out penitence as though he were a doctor writing a prescription for an infection and expect all sin to disappear within the 10 days the medicine is taken.  Go out there in the church this moment and ask God to open your eyes and heart, if you refuse to do it yourself."
    I kneeled down on the prayer slat, and then my resent was directed towards the priest.  I had come with what I insisted was the best of intentions but now he was expecting me to come up with some impromptu act, much the same as a cab driver who delivers a baby 1 mile from the hospital.  I couldn't find the words, certainly not a prayer, to plea for peace of mind.  Then, it suddenly struck me - this undefined act the priest had suggested must precede any rationing out of peace of mind.  I started to try to organize my thoughts into a prayer but there was a popping in my head, perspiration broke out on my face, and a sickening feeling seized my stomach.  I mumbled to myself, "God damn, I'm having another seizure."
   Suddenly, the church was completely empty.  My head was spinning.  I fell, struck my head on the pew and was laying there staring at the ceiling that began moving around.  I heard the distinct sounds of the old streetcars rattling down Peachtree Street that I remembered from Euclid Avenue and my childhood but how could that be possible?  Buses had replaced them decades ago.  My body was moving.  I was gliding through an open field but it became curved and distorted.  Then, I was moving over a forest.  The trees were bent, and the leaves kept falling off and reappearing on the limbs.  There was the World Trade Center but no, that couldn't be right.  It was standing on an unpaved street with horses and carriages in front.  Then, Mother of Jesus, it was the Hindenburg that struck the walls of the 2 buildings bringing them crashing down.  The same dense cloud of yellow dust billowed down the streets but then, everything went black and suddenly, I heard hoof beats coming towards me and saw what looked like 2 Confederate soldiers with their capes streaming behind them.  They stopped not 10 feet from me where 2 others rode up beside them.  Their breathing was labored as one gasped, "Sherman's just outside Atlanta!  They gonna burn it!"
   I was astonished, began looking around and my eyes came to rest on a single man standing some 50 feet away in modern battle dress complete with protective vest and night vision goggles.  He raised his rifle and sent a deadly burst of automatic tracer rounds that brought all the men and horses down in an instant.  The men were all dead but the horses lay twitching on the ground with horrible shrieks of pain that sent terror piercing through my body.  Then, as if in some tragic overture, the horses' moans resolved into the screaming sounds of German Stuka dive-bombers.  I looked to the south and could see them in their 90-degree descents, pouring bombs on the dim outline of the city of Atlanta.  How could that be possible -  a man in modern battle dress and World War II airplanes somehow appearing in Civil War Atlanta?  The city was in flames.  What was that?  I heard motors losing RPMs somewhere in the distance, and then, I saw it.  A flaming B17 came into sight.  Its tail section had heavy battle damage, and 2 engines were on fire, leaving a thick trail of black smoke behind them.  The damn thing was headed straight towards me.  I dropped to the ground and felt the heat from the burning engines as it tilted to one side and crashed into the trees behind the fallen Confederate soldiers.
    Immediately, all fell quiet, and I again had the sensation of movement.  I was no longer in the field but standing in what looked like a classroom.  I guessed the slight, bearded man at the front of the room was a professor, because he was writing long equations on the blackboard.  He paused, looked straight at me for a moment and then, turned back to the blackboard and erased all the equations.  Then, he simply wrote E = MC².  There was something of an echo in my brain, and I heard the distinct words "Energy equals mass times the speed of light square."  I was struggling to recall so many things I never understood.  Einstein had sought to disprove Isaac Newton's theory that all observers anywhere in the universe would obtain identical measurements in space and time.  Einstein's theory was all measurements depend on the relative motion of the observer and the observed.  He showed that a complete description of relative motion required equations that included time as well as spatial sensory dimensions.  His theory established reference frames emanating from a position called the origin and could be described in terms of changes in displacement and direction.  I remembered one simple explanation.  If a man were sitting on a train, he was not moving, if the reference frame was the train but if the reference frame was the earth, he was moving relative to the earth.  And then I knew.  It was just as Einstein had said.  There is a relationship between time and consciousness, and time is not a container in which the universe exists.  But how could all these thoughts be in my mind now?  In high school, I had trouble with business arithmetic and never even took physics.
    I tried to reason all this out and suddenly realized I was back in the field.  Then, I felt a keen perception I had never known before and knew my body laid dead or near death in the church and that my consciousness, maybe even my soul, had entered some displaced reference frame, and I was being propelled through time where all events were displaced by my speed in relation to them.  This seemed even more plausible when I began to see long lines of refugees making their way out of Atlanta but they were not the people of that time.  They were the same ones I had seen in the old news reels of Polish refugees making their way out of Warsaw during the German blitz.
    My legs collapsed under me, and I sat staring at the ground for a few moments before beginning to look for the Confederate soldiers.  There were still laying stone-dead, but the horses were gone.  Then, I heard them behind me.  There were coming closer and closer.  What in the hell....they were pulling a Medevac helicopter.  Their breaths rushed through their nostrils, they tossed their heads and their feet dug deep into the earth as they struggled to pull the helicopter towards the B17.  I stood up to watch them but the sun immediately rose, and I no longer felt the cold of the night.  I was standing at the edge of a jungle at the side of a narrow road.  There were Oriental voices somewhere, and then I saw them.  A long line of American soldiers in tattered fatigues was moving down the road in stifling heat.  Their faces were drawn but all had the same expression, which was one of hate.  Somehow, I knew it was the Bataan Death March.  Some of the men were so weak they could not stand.  They fell at the roadside and were bayoneted by wrangling Oriental soldiers who....who were in the black pajama-type uniforms of the Viet Cong.  I was so afraid, I could not move, but the Viet Cong guards walked right past me, as though I were not even there.  My body was trembling as I slipped down into the heavy foliage at the roadside and watched the gruesome procession as it passed.  One exhausted soldier fell right in front of me.  Several Viet Cong stood over him for a moment and laughed before all of them drove their bayonets all the way through his emaciated body.  They kicked him, and he rolled right to my side.  I felt such sorrow in my hear and reached out to touch him.  His eyes came open, and he said in a condemning voice, "You sorry son of a bitch - what did you ever do?!"  Then, he was just laying there dead as though he had said nothing. 
    Again, I was moving. I could feel the air becoming colder and colder until the motion stopped.  I was in a trench, and every few moments, there was intermittent gunfire.  Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of artillery, and it lit the sky with ghostly orange and red flashes.  I almost screamed when I heard a voice in the trench saying, "John....John." 
    My body was trembling from cold and fright when I stared into the darkness and saw a man dressed in battle gear from the Vietnam War.  His flesh was a ghostly gray, and his eyes were sunken into his head.  His fatigues were dull and sweaty, even though it mush have been sub-freezing in the trench.  Above his left pocket was the Combat Infantryman Badge that was perfectly clean and seemed to glow through the morbid darkness, and I instantly knew this was a representation of pride in this strange place that ruled spirit and body.  There was a pleading in his voice when he said, "Where were you, John.  You should have been with us." 
    For many years, I'd always been ashamed that I hadn't serve in the Vietnam War but this shame had never been so vivid and punishing as it was at that moment.  I couldn't look at him, stared at the wet ground and could only manage a fragmentary response.  "I....I know I should have.  I....I just used all the protests to convince myself if I went over there and got killed, no one would say thank you."
    He reached out and touched me with his cold hand, and I finally could look straight at him.  I was startled to see blood all across the front of his fatigue jacket and said, "Oh, you're hurt!"
    He opened his jacket and said, "No, John.  It's my heart that bleeds for all those on that long, black wall."
    There was a first aid bandage over his heart but every few seconds, fresh blood would appear and then disappear.
    As he buttoned his jacket, a letter fell to the ground.  He hurriedly picked it up and brushed off the dirt.  His voice took on a kind and loving tone when he said, "From my girlfriend," and then he removed a small photograph from his wallet and showed it to me.
    It was a picture of a young woman but her face was completely gone, and somehow within this keen perception I then felt, I knew the photograph he held in his trembling hand was this mystic world's way of telling me she had hurt him but he still loved her in his bleeding heart.  But no, that wasn't it.  In a few moments, I realized it wasn't a woman who had hurt him.  It was the woman he would have married had Vietnam not taken his life.  My hands dropped to my side, and I was again staring at the ground.  My own hurt I had always blamed for so very much seemed so insignificant compared to someone whose life had ended at such a young age.  The only words I could manage were, "What can I do?  What can I do now?"
    He moved closer to me and again reached into his fatigue jacket, removing a single piece of paper.  As he handed it to me, he said, "What can you do?  You can write a plea for all of the victims of the Vietnam War in the hope that we may at last receive the honor we deserve.  Remember too all you see around you for this dreadful place holds the spirits of those who lay somewhere in the other world lingering between life and death.  It is here they must struggle to prove they deserve another chance on the other side."
    His cold and withered hand extended.  His eyes were fixed squarely in my own.  It was a blank piece of music paper he had given me.  As I looked at it, my hands began to tremble, and I felt a cold rush of air.  When I looked up, he was gone.  During the whole time I had been wherever fate had chosen to send me, all the things I saw and all the things I heard had spoken directly to my heart and unlocked an awareness I had never known.  I knew what everything meant, and I knew that poor man with the bleeding heart was asking me to make some worthwhile use of the limited will and determination I possessed to endeavor to make it all up in some epic musical score.  But how....how could he expect me to do that?  I was uneducated and self-taught in music.  What he had asked would require the skill and passion of the masters.  Wherever Rachmaninoff's soul rested, why hadn't he sought him out and given him this obligation?  But no, Rachmaninoff had no obligation to the men in the trenches, on Normandy's shore, in the Bataan Death March, in the frigid mountains of Korea or the stifling jungles of Vietnam.  He had lived his life well, and his work had touched the hearts of so very many.  I knew I was doing the same thing I had done for much of my life.  I was seeking excuses and circumstances I could shape, like a child playing with molding clay, into some explanation to free me from responsibility I refused to face. 
    It all started to come to me, right there in the trench.  I must do, or at least try, what he had asked.  Ideas began rushing through my mind.  The concert overture must resemble the opening measures of Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto with bold largamente passages.  Somehow, I must devise an elaborate piano cadenza that would immediately precede an interlude that would portray that wistful, nostalgic emotion I always feel when I remember her and that October many years ago.  Perhaps I should give the interlude a subtitle such as Once Upon A Blue October.  There must be descriptive sections such as those in Clive Richardson's London Fantasia - A Musical Picture Of The Battle Of Britain.  Somewhere in the score, there must be a restful melody just as Richard Addinsell had done in the melody to his memorable Warsaw Concerto.  I couldn't just write some contrived variation on these wonderful works.  What would the men in the trenches think of me if I did that?  No, the score must capture the originality the romanticist must always seek.
    A light snow began to fall.  The sounds of the battle drew closer.  Above, there was the whisking sound of incoming artillery.  I felt the concussions from the rounds as they began to explode in patterns all around me.  Suddenly, the trench was full of doughboys.  Machine guns rattled. Men shouted curses.  The sounds were deafening, and again I was so afraid I could not move. 
    A tortured voice yelled, "They've broken through!  We can't hold!"
    In a few moments, enemy soldiers began sliding down into the trench but it wasn't the Germans of World War I - it was the SS of World War II in their black uniforms and swastika armbands.  English and German screams clashed in a discordant blare of hate and fear.  There were sounds of rifle butts striking flesh and bone.  I could hear the sounds of cracking ribs when knives and bayonets severed deep into men's bodies.  The trench floor was littered with the dead and dying and they were all trampled over as the vicious hand-to-hand fighting came closer and closer to me.  I pulled myself from the trench and began to run as fast as I could - I didn't know in what direction or even where I thought I was going.  Then, I barely saw a corpse on the ground ahead.  I tripped over his hardened body and my head struck his helmet that had been blown away when the round that killed him had cut his head in half.  I lay on the ground, staring into the black sky.  I don't know how long I laid there but when I looked to my side, the man was no longer on the ground.  He was standing over me with blood dripping from half of his head and holding the other half in his hand.  He spit on me and placed his severed head together as though he were putting on a hat.  There were chorus-like voices in the sky, and all around me, corpses were rising and rushing to join to battle in the trench.  The snow pelted down on my face until I was again spinning through space and time.  Again, I could hear the sounds of the old streetcars.  Gradually, I could see the ceiling of the church flickering with all the changes it had undergone through the decades.  I was again lying on the floor between the pews and still breathing very heavily from my dash away from the frantic battle in the trench, even though I had been laying in the snow for some while.  In a moment, I pulled myself up onto the pew and mumbled, "Damn, I thought the Dilantin had stopped the seizures.  I never had one like this or some crazy-ass dream like that while I was unconscious."
    Just as always before, my temples were throbbing and I felt as though I were wearing a hat that was 2 sizes too small.  I was terrified that the seizures had returned but at the same time, relieved it had all been a dream and I didn't owe anyone a damn thing.  But then, I looked at my shoes.  They were caked in mud, and my clothes still reeked with the scent of death from the trenches.  I was holding something in my hand.  It was the blank music manuscript the Vietnam soldier had given me.  The keen awareness I had felt in that horrible place remained with me, but I knew it would not last.  Immediately, I remembered a dream I had on the night I had my first seizure.  I had dreamed I was sitting in the old apartment on Euclid Avenue where I lived in my childhood with my mother and grandmother, but I was no longer a child - I was then a grown man.  I had heard the sound of the front entrance door opening.  There were footsteps in the hallway and a gentle knock.  When I opened the door, I saw my grandmother, who had died years earlier, standing there with the most kind and gentle smile on her face.  She was wearing a dark, blue dress with a white scarf around her neck, and there was a cameo just below the scarf.  In that loving voice I had recalled so many times since her death, she said, "Hello, my darling." 
    Then, just as in the church years later, everything went blank.  I don't know for how long until I found myself sitting in present time in my living room.  I had the same throbbing in my head then that I was to feel years later in the church when I sat there and finally realized what had happened.  Until the seizure in the church, I had thought the first seizure had been only a dream, but it wasn't.  My grandmother, in the life that surely must exist beyond this world, had known what was about to happen to me and wanted to reach back through some wonderful time and space continuum, some enchanted reference frame to tell me how much she loved me.  I knew she had come and remained with me there during all the time I was unconscious.  Death itself could not conclude the love she had always shown for me everyday of my life and continued to show, even though she was dead.  But how could I do what that man had asked?  Again, through the fleeting awareness of the other world, I recalled something I had heard or read somewhere in the distant past.  Someone had once asked Giacomo Puccini how he ever came to write something as beautiful as Madame Butterfly.  He had simply responded, "I didn't write Madame Butterfly.  It was dictated to me by God."
    Then, I was again in the church,  staring at the floor but then I heard those same words, "Hello, my darling."  I looked up and saw my grandmother standing there in front of the alter.  She was wearing a heavy winter coat, and there were flakes of snow all across the shoulders and fur collar.  I immediately knew it had been just as before.  Her soul had come into the trenches to plead for my life.  I stood up and began to run towards her but she faded away.  My legs collapsed under me, just as they had done in the other world.  There was a strange sensation in my head, and my thoughts of the score went completely blank.  I knew the awareness and vision I had felt for those fleeting moments had left me.  The ideas for the score ceased.  I might have lost consciousness for a few moments, because there was a vision of a blind man with a dog walking down a deserted street.  They came to an intersection, the dog looked both ways, as though he were about to lead the man across the street but suddenly, he attacked him, left him laying on the street with blood gushing from his throat and walked away.  Again, I was conscious and pulled myself back onto the pew.  Was that fate's way of telling me I could never do what the Vietnam soldier had asked?  I had the terrible sensation I would write something far inferior to the masterpiece that would worthily plead the cause of the dead from Vietnam and those who linger between life and death.  But then, the voice of my grandmother came into my mind, and there was a faint image of her in front of the crucifix.  She began giving me ideas for the themes in the score I must find it within myself to write.  Before I left the church and lost the awareness of the other world, I wrote down her words on the back of the manuscript the Vietnam soldier had given me.  It all came to me in a poem in her kind and gentle words.

The fog comes down so gently bound, 
On fields of plight and endless night.
Falling flares light men's morbid glares,
Towards row on row of fallen foe.
Their restless peace so soon to cease, 
For now they stand each withered man.
When cold and harsh wind does send,
Them all to live and yet to give,
Another life in wicked strife,
Hope consenting, pain unrelenting. 

The cold and howling wind does send, 
Snow trickling down on barren ground.
Moments fleeting, fear conceding,
A tranquil pure when thoughts allure,
Another life so free from strife.
But then the hoards of guns and swords,
The creaking tanks crash through the ranks,
One more defeat, one more retreat.
Battle flashes, Warsaw's ashes,
Ghosts they stumble, buildings crumble,
When tortured past must ever last.
They're lost in time that won't consign
Their constant plea it set them free.

Blood-stained pages through all the ages,
Open their scrolls of lives untold.
It's Union blue in battle new, 
But now they fall at Moscow's wall.
In tattered fray of Confederate gray,
They rush once more some Pacific shore.
The whistles call the doughboys all, 
To cannon fire and twisted wire.
The trenches roar, the missiles soar,
Towards GI Joe in German snow.
Holy gates slam, Bataan be damn,
Now faceless throng of Viet Cong,
Stamp out their lives with sharpened knives.

The hedges of France call on the advance,
Hold at Pusan and strike at Inchon.
The angels cry, the warplanes fly,
Towards flaming kills o'er Korean hills.
Frozen blue the banks of Yalu,
Again you send those million men.
Now as then, the retreat begins,
And hell's own gate locks in their fate.
Torment begotten, this war forgotten.
Peace talks end and again begin.
Truce you say, call it what you may.
Victory denied, the ROK will not sign.
Still armies stand where it all began.

Yalu be gone now flows the Mekong.
Dian Bien Phu and time renew,
That slimy throng of Viet Cong.
So now you send few and gallant men,
To whores in Saigon and siege at Khe Sanh.
Record it all, as men they fall,
In sordid amounts of body counts.
Battle not end or permit they win,
And then cry why, the purge at My Lai.
Still the prisoners stay in Confederate gray,
Their precious tears through all the years,
Bastards they say they're MIA.
Names now they fall on solemn black wall, 
In honor they stand, each and every forgotten man.

Now angels kneel in Flanders Field,
At fading graves of hallowed brave.
Now, must all you go my score to show,
What powers be and saints to see.
Your hearts be bound and mercy found, 
Or must it pass and ever last,
Somewhere in time and always find,
My haunting score, now and forevermore.

    I worked on the score for over 2 years and tried my very best  to write something worthy of what that man in the trench had asked but I'm afraid it fell far short of what all those who served in Vietnam truly deserve.  Over the years, I've read much about chord resolution, harmony and theory but when I tried to apply it all in compositions, I could not quite make everything work as it was intended.  What resulted was a style that defied every principal ever written on music theory and composition.  Perhaps, some benefit has come from that.  The consequence was a unique, unpolished style someone with quite an imagination might even describe as original, and that is always the goal of the romanticist.  In laboring over the score, I learned a little more about music but nothing about physics.  I still can't explain the relationship between energy, mass and the speed of light.  The only thing I halfway understand about that is the example of the man on the train.  Some of the story is true, and some of it is fantasy.  You must judge the real from the unreal yourself.  I'm sure, however, of one thing.  There is a parallel universe where there is no past and no future and there the souls, consciousness and spirits of those who linger between life and death struggle in an unending war for another chance in this life.  Believe what you may about Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.  I know there is such a place, because god dammit, I've been there.  I've seen them, and I know there're out there somewhere....somewhere in the combat zone.