Columbine

By David Beakey

He sat in his den, transfixed by the snow. Of all the madness, the horror, strangely the snow bothered him somehow. As he saw clips of the children running from the high school in Colorado, hands above their heads, he thought back to when he was young, like them. Of course things were different then, he reasoned. There was no comparison. But the more he watched, the closer it seemed. The interviews with survivors. They had that same numbed look. And there was the overall sense of chance. Some lived, some died, at the whim of their enemies or by dumb luck, a few by courage. And the snow continued to fall in the background, white and clean. It confused him. He remembered talking to men with microphones and cameras, at Khe Sanh. Back then, he had that stunned look that the children of Colorado had, the look of guilty survivors. But then it was hot. It was dry and the dust was red. And the war was in some other country, it was a civil insurgence that teenagers didn’t understand. They simply followed orders and crossed off the days on the calendar, hoping that they would someday return to the states. They knew that if they were lucky enough to make it home, they would be safe. They would be back in the land of suburbs and baseball. They could let their guard down. No one would hunt them; no one would shoot at them. But as he saw the children run from the school, those feelings came back. And as he watched the reporters, with the snow falling behind them, he remembered the rounds that rained down on him so many years ago. The screaming rounds that came from the sky. He remembered the feeling of wondering if this was the day he would die. It was a feeling that a youngster shouldn’t have to feel, but after a while, it became a part of his life, like the weather. It was clean and crisp, like snow.