Eight or nine or it coulda been 12 men shuffled along the polished tiles of 7-West's lock-up ward in terry-topped slippers buffing those tiles as they slid along, my brother's own funky pair among them. The amount of daily Thorazine injected into a single one of the men could bring down a Kodiak bear, yet, kept them manageably in-check like chessmen.
Hollow stares sunk in ashen pallors of washed out skin from the lack of outdoor exposure added nothing to group's matched uniforms of faded-lime pajamas with wispy thin seersucker-striped robes barely moving in the slow parade to nowhere, a procession that would last more than 30 months up and down and up and down the VA hospital's generically-sterile corridors.
I was thirteen when he shipped-out to Viet Nam, remember him with 2nd Lieutenant's bars on his epaulets drawing salutes from the enlisted cadre of trainers following his commissioning ceremony, those bars the prize of any committed ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) student.
The brother I hugged too long and so hard when saying goodbye wasn't the wounded one the military returned 43 years ago, for war would forever change him and find me struggling to get to know a guy I still loved without limit.
Through it all, he was my hero and knows he still is despite invisible scars of invisible wounds that still paralyze by day and haunt by night through a pharmaceutical haze.
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