Hearing Margarette scream, Kenneth
Lawenski jumps off the leisure chair he was plastered to and begins
heading towards the bathroom door.
Before his wife's terrifying
cries pierced the warm humid Florida air, he is fixated in a trance.
He's back in a
firefight. Back in the jungles of Vietnam.
The flashback is triggered by
an explosion which sees half of Kenneth and Margarette's home disappear.
Kenneth at first doesn't realize
what is happening. The explosion sent his mind reeling back to the Quang Nam
Province,
specifically the city of Da Nang, Vietnam.
It was less than two months
prior, in October of Nineteen-Sixty-Five. Ken was living in a hooch, or
Quonset hut with his pregnant Vietnamese, sometimes housekeeper,
sometimes girlfriend. Fighting the Viet Cong and his demons.
Now he is wondering how the Marine
Corp
could have dropped him off,
on November 2nd, in a San
Francisco Airport. When only three days before he was in a firefight,
late at
night, with an M14 rifle, against a bunch of rabid Viet Cong.
Nothing made sense anymore. At
home, or in his mind.
He is called a murderer. A killer of babies.
Long haired freaky people,
complete strangers, wearing army uniforms that had flowers and
words like love and peace sewn on them, would come up to him, telling him, “Peace
Man,” while holding up the World War Two Victory Sign with their
fingers.
He wanted to break those
fingers.
The American People were
disgusted with drafted Soldiers like him who were just doing their
jobs.
Disgusted with the United States Armed Forces for fighting a
war where clearly the objective was not to win, but to perpetuate War
for the sake of Big Business.
He thought about Nguyet. The
girl he left behind.
Someone who obviously cared for him.
She would be having his child
soon.
Before being discharged, he went
to the Navy's JAG unit where he knew a guy and had his Will made out
so Nguyet and their child would receive his Pension and Life
Insurance Policy if by chance he never made it out of there alive.
Even now, being back in the States, he made sure it was iron clad,
where those two would benefit from his death, and not his wife of
seven years.
He was sure he loved Margarette,
or at one time had loved her.
But how could she know what it is like
living in constant denial of your own mortality. With all the death
that surrounds a person in the jungles of Vietnam.
Margarette's cries finally breaks his
reverie.
Kenneth is on his feet, gripping
the bathroom door handle, as the wood around it disintegrates.
Before his eyes, standing on
what was once his hallway, looking down, he sees a whirlpool of mud
and water.
His wife, sits in their bathtub,
as it goes around and around.
Margarette can't stop screaming,
while holding onto the sides of the tub, circling, falling
deeper into the vortex of a sink hole.
Ken isn't panicking.
What is
death to him.
For the last two years in
Vietnam, death was a constant companion. It was the only friend that had
made it home with him.
At first, he thinks there is
nothing he can do for Margarette. But the panic she is experiencing
brings back that old flame into his heart.
He can't let her die
alone.
He couldn't let her die alone.
The next time the porcelain
makeshift boat floats by, Kenneth jumps into it, immediately grabbing
his wife, yelling, “Kiss me. Kiss me now!”
He pulls her face to his,
pressing their lips together, forcing Margarette to stop her piercing
cries.
Holding each other, like the young lovers they once were.
Both, close their eyes.
Tears run down Kenneth's face
for the first time in years.
He is finally feeling something inside his
heart.
An emotion he hasn't felt since
before Vietnam.

This is,
Wrote This Story After A Man In Florida Tragically Lost His Life After Part Of His Home Sunk Into A Sink Hole,
Jim Hauenstein,
And,
“Life starts from a white hole and ends in a black hole.”
- Santosh Kalwar -
That is My Story and I am sticking to it!
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