It was April there under iron grey skies in that tent camp of cold Korean mud, and that's me scrambling to town whenever possible, in love with a bar girl, putting my life in the hands of a suicidal Honcho trying to scare me with his Daytona 500 cab driving.
BAHALA NA !, I'd yell - which means basically fuck it in Tagalog - not even his language, but he caught my drift. Always this test of fucking nerves, and fuck it was my official personal motto of the age.
I was really in love with the girl, her name was Young, but of course she was not in love with me - a dog tired stereotype, I knew. Another nineteen-year-old-near-cherry-boy-Lance-Corporal fallen victim to the Asian mystique, but fuck that too. That's not how it was.
We were some kind of orphans together, barely qualified to be called young adults, deserted, lost to the world. Coal fires, kimchee, sliding paper doors - big and little shoes outside, stoic faces, every eye averted - it was just hard - the whole fucking world was hard. The warm buzz of the soju completed my transformation into a white ghost dressed in camouflage, living proof that four bottles would not leave you blind like our commanding officer had warned during his Liberty Brief after all, but it would indeed leave you changed somehow forever.
I cried with my friend in the wind on a wet and cold rock mountain face, first time I ever hugged a man, because he was the only one who could understand the type of fucked up I was beginning to understand.
You see, he was uniquely qualified because his father, himself a psychiatrist, had died by his own hand while a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
**please pardon the language, but it was used intentionally to try to recapture a particular state of mind
BAHALA NA !, I'd yell - which means basically fuck it in Tagalog - not even his language, but he caught my drift. Always this test of fucking nerves, and fuck it was my official personal motto of the age.
I was really in love with the girl, her name was Young, but of course she was not in love with me - a dog tired stereotype, I knew. Another nineteen-year-old-near-cherry-boy-Lance-Corporal fallen victim to the Asian mystique, but fuck that too. That's not how it was.
We were some kind of orphans together, barely qualified to be called young adults, deserted, lost to the world. Coal fires, kimchee, sliding paper doors - big and little shoes outside, stoic faces, every eye averted - it was just hard - the whole fucking world was hard. The warm buzz of the soju completed my transformation into a white ghost dressed in camouflage, living proof that four bottles would not leave you blind like our commanding officer had warned during his Liberty Brief after all, but it would indeed leave you changed somehow forever.
I cried with my friend in the wind on a wet and cold rock mountain face, first time I ever hugged a man, because he was the only one who could understand the type of fucked up I was beginning to understand.
You see, he was uniquely qualified because his father, himself a psychiatrist, had died by his own hand while a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
**please pardon the language, but it was used intentionally to try to recapture a particular state of mind
Strange love story, full madness!
ReplyDeleteeverybody’s had kind of similar story in that age, a never can be forgotten story!