Daniel remembers……
Journal Entry Eighteen
Dear Tess,
There are so many things I don’t remember, expanses of time that are missing, fragments of
memories, flashes of images, and sounds that just come out of the blue. I remember the sound of the
helicopter blades, whoop, whoop, whoop, right over my head, loud and thrashing. It was deafening. It
is still deafening. There are times when I lay in bed at night, while you are sleeping and I hear that
sound. I want to scream. I want to reach out for you, but I can’t move. So I just lay there in a cold
sweat.
It keeps happening—so much that I no longer even want to go to bed. I can’t sleep anyway and
when I try, it just wears me out. Sometimes I can still see the people. They are so different from us in
about every way. In war the people who are different are no longer people. They are no longer human.
They are simply ‘the enemy.’ They smell different. They look different. They eat different foods and
wear different clothing. There are other times when I know they are human just like us. I know that
most of them aren’t the enemy. I feel for them.
Most of them aren’t fighting and they don’t want to. They are just regular people like you and me.
They are just trying to live their lives, but they now have to live them right in the middle of a war
zone. Almost right away I had to learn that I couldn’t trust anyone or anything. For example, I couldn’t
even trust a cow! There may be cows filled with explosives that may just blow up if you’re not careful.
When we went out, we had to watch for everything. We had to be on the lookout for anything and
everything.