Something Valuable
December 10, 2001
7:36 a.m.
Congratulations to Linda Dunn on her Pushcart nomination.   I'm also pleased to see the Stephen Leigh will have a story in the same anthology as Toby Buckell and me. It'll be fun to see my name in there with guys like that. I managed to move a little further in the book this weekend, but not nearly as far as I had thought I could. Several things occurred Saturday that stole time from me, and I spent Sunday afternoon on the couch watching the history channel with Brigid. I managed to get valuable stuff out of Sunday morning, though. I'm presently mired in chapter sixteen. I suppose I should rethink my wording in the last paragraph, though. I got a lot of valuable stuff out of Sunday afternoon. Brigid and I watched programs about hospital corpsmen, and about military photographers, and a few other bits and pieces of military history. I sat on the couch with her legs across my lap. She asked questions as they occurred. Why would anyone want to go fight? Did we loose the Vietnam War because we couldn't fight in the jungle? That's not movie blood, is it? I answered as well as I could, and she asked more questions and I tried to answer those, too. How the heck do I know the answers to these kinds of things, though? Who the heck made me God? "You'll find," I finally said to Brigid, "that when you're asking questions about wars, there are very few easy answers. You end up thinking about them from a lot of different angles, and coming up with a lot of different answers." I think she understands that. But she's thirteen. I just did my best, and hoped it was good enough. Halfway through the photographers show, she ran out of time, and had to go practice the piano. She's doing Christmas music. So I put the sound down low, and lay down on the floor in front of the TV to see the last bit. This was the part where American politicians blamed war photographers for showing the American people what Vietnam was like. This was the part where they complained that images from the war were what turned the people against it, eroded its support, and maybe even lost it. Brigid missed this part, though. She missed the story of photographers lying murdered by the side of a road in Cambodia. She missed the discussion of the politics of the moment. She missed the story of four correspondents who were killed on a south Vietnamese helicopter that they flew on because the US wouldn't provide them one. Who knows? Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's history written in retrospect to leave a particular flavor in the viewer's mouth. I don't know how to interpret Vietnam War history. What I do know is that while these images were flickering on the screen, Brigid was busy playing Christmas music. Right then, the sound of her piano was something important.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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I put up a little material about K-232, my story in the anthology Silicon Dreams |
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