Punky

It’s haunted me lately and I don’t know why. He died over forty years ago and I really didn’t know him. He was nineteen and I was sixteen; I went to see him when they laid him out. If memory serves me well – it fails more often now than serves – it took about three weeks to get the body back from Viet Nam. He was the first dead person I would ever view; it would never get worse, so far at least. We went in and Punky was the lone sentinel, keeping watch over nothing, the same reason he died. He was a paratrooper and there were a lot of stories about how he died. The story I remember was that he died on his first jump into the teeth of the enemy. That’s bad luck no doubt. I looked at this clay figure as it lay there, dressed up like a soldier, G.I. Joe, and if he were breathing, he would be standing at attention. First jump; bummer. I got lost in the scene that day; gazing at him and wondering what he felt, what he did, what was his last thought. Did he hear the bullets? Did he hear the bullet? Did he cry or did he curse? Did he just die? Did it take a while or was he gone in a blink? Why is he keeping me awake at night forty years later? Is it because I forgot his last name and had to look it up? I wasn’t close to him but I forgot his last name; not cool. I remember staring at him and thinking, What would I do if he opened his eyes right now? He didn’t, he never will again, he’s dead. He was in a casket in his full uniform, and he was under glass. People said he was caving in the night before and they asked people to leave until they covered the casket with glass so he wouldn’t cave in. It reminded me of gazing at an exhibit at a museum, you know, under glass and all. I don’t know if it reminded me of a mummy or a cafeteria line with a glass in front of the feature dish, but it did. I can still picture him and his hair was like that doll hair they used to use, all stiff and fake-looking, maybe it was. And he had make-up on because he was turning weird colors, maybe black or purple, it took a long time to get him back. I remembered thinking, why did they leave the casket open? Maybe they thought we would want to see him one more time. Maybe they thought if we saw him, we would go join the Army and die for our country; we didn’t, I joined the Navy and got high in Rhode Island for about three years. Viet Nam wasn’t my country anyway. 02/27/2011