Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Predominantly draft era veterans end up at VA hospitals I’ve observed. And we’ve got all the warts and scars to suggest we were a flawed segment of humanity. Truth is, watching the mannerisms and behaviors we still are. Flawed, certainly, many also pathetic as individual personalities. Needy. Obnoxious.
But strangely enough, there’s a constant undercurrent of moments cutting through the lies on top of lies and BS revealing something I’m ashamed to admit I suspect is a sort of brotherhood. A smile and wink in an elevator from a guy in a wheelchair with more problems than me. Thumbs up signs when someone gets called to see one of the sawbones or other ‘team’ members.
Granted, most of the conversations going on are lies about things that happened when in the military. But when I brought up the subject of the Afghan/Iraq vets suicides the lies stopped and were replaced by frowning thought. A momentary pause to try to understand.
It’s there to be recognized. And it can also be found in the mention of the guys on ‘the 10th floor’. The guys who are ‘still in Vietnam’. Everyone knows about those guys and they only get mentioned in muted tones, phrases expressing horror and awe.
We few. We happy few. We band of brothers who aren’t on the 10th floor.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 
A good reason to be grateful. Today I’ll be happy because I’m not on the 10th floor. I’m lucky in my inability to imagine it.
You never hear of people who get stuck in the happiest days of their lives unable to join reality because their psychosis revolves around the most magical time they ever experienced. There must be people like that somewhere.
Anonymous: Whatever it takes to get stuck in time, I reckons, is what a person stuck in time will have done to get a piece of it. Gracias, J
Oh no. I never imagined there could be a 10th floor.
heretherebespiders: I’d never thought about it I suppose and didn’t have sufficient imagination to call it up as a possibility. But it doesn’t seem all that unlikely as overall unlikelihoods go. And damned unlikely, really, really really unlikely things happen more-or-less frequently in the real world, I reckons. So much so that people are flying around in airplanes and talking to one-another on the phone in grocery stores. Gracias, J
Thanks for telling it like it is.
Bev: It’s almost every way so’s to be easy for the telling. Gracias, J
Wars are sad things started by old men for their own reasons and fought by young men who don’t know why and may never know. My heart breaks for all those with lost dreams because of the crazy wars they fought in for the wrong reasons and didn’t know the reasons where the wrong ones. Blessings, M.
Just being human, same as we’ve always been. Gracias, J
Yup. When I was a kid (a teen) I worked at the VA as a pin striper (part of my Eagle Scout requirement – tho’ I worked a lot longer cuz’ I was interested in old timers – it was “the 7th Ward” – and it was … sad and bad. The Augusta VA hasn’t been called “the Euthanasia Center” for nuthin’, and I refuse to go there . . . unless I wanna die. They cured a couple of my old friends minor afflictions permanently.
But while I was there I saw two groups: the “Old Sour & Dours” – and Smokin’ Joe. Impressed me so much I wrote a blog posting about it: http://jeffssong.wordpress.com/2012/07/12/smokin-joe
and when I get ‘there’ – I wanna be like him. Sounds like you’ve met a couple of them. 🙂