Ode To Odd Thoughts By John Briggs Scraps,orts,fragments...---Virginia Woolf Every so often little bits of the war would pluck themselves up to his surface. He didn't mind, though, because the bits weren't horrific. Just odd. Having breakfast with two buddies at a diner, something about the way the morning sunlight infiltrated on the village green, air wafting through the door, cool but warm at the edges, reminded him of one morning returning from a firefight. What came back to him was not the frantic sensation and sounds of jagged metal erupting around him as the VC walked their mortar rounds through his squad (something in fact he didn't remember)-nor what he told himself about why he hadn't warned the three men (no longer newbes, part of the squad now that more cherries had arrived) not to bunch up as they shuffled among the big jungle leaves-nor the feel of the helicopter rotor wash-nor the odd look of their corpses piled in the Slick when his squad was finally extracted. Instead, he remembered clearly standing outside at the canteen drinking coffee and eating eggs and looking up at a milky morning blue sky that was just heating up. It was as if he could still taste the sulfurous buttery after-tang of the powdered eggs and the gritty black bitterness of the coffee, loaded with sugar, and the slipping woozy sense that something was very, very wrong, metaphysically wrong, because the day was so normal. Though something terrible had happened, his silverware clinked against the plate, moisture began its exhalation out of the earth into air as the heat of the day hardened and rose. The day rolled on. His appreciation of this reverie was interrupted by his buddy across the table with a mouth full of toast and eggs pointing to a woman coming across the green toward the diner. Not until later in the morning, as he slid from his car seat to run an errand, did his mind connect with the fact that one of three who had been blown up that day on patrol had wasted a fourteen-year-old girl in a rice patty a couple of months before. Brady (he remembered his name) had freaked out thinking she was a VC carrying a grenade in her underwear. Splashed and slogged to grab her by the throat and held her under water, the ends of her arms and legs thrashing, until the flat, silver bubbles ceased. Then he was dragging her out onto the high ground trying to resuscitate her, breathing into her mouth and pumping her chest frantically while her father wailed and a journalist took notes. Nobody wanted to get too close to him because he seemed to have lost it completely. Eventually the journalist and the father went away. There was no evidence of a grenade. At sundown Brady passed out from hyperventilating to inflate the dead girl's lungs. For the next few days while they klicked around in the jungle Brady kept talking to himself, "Man, there was this fucking green bug on the water. That bug, man. Huge. Humongous." Evidently referring to something he'd seen skimming on the surface when the girl was in her death throes. After a few days, he stopped talking about it, though you could tell that the bug was still skimming there in Brady's mind. Home from work that evening he walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. Out the window he saw his ten-year-old daughter in the backyard sitting in a circle with her friends. The image infused him with the memory of a summer evening when he was nine or ten in the city sitting outside on a stoop with two of his friends discussing baseball. He remembered the feeling exactly and even the words they used and the games and players they talked about. Why the hell did he remember that? Odd. Momentous things had happened to his family during that period, but he knew those events now as only history, while that inconsequential discussion of baseball remained as the sole living fragment from a life that rolled on. Standing at the refrigerator he wondered if his daughter would one day remember this evening sitting in the backyard with her friends. Later, on the stairs in his undershorts and tee shirt padding his way to bed, he realized what it was. Whatever explanations he had told himself on the day coming back from patrol would have been empty and meaningless because his buddies had become the taste of eggs and coffee and the light blue of a heating sky. He could imagine that they, in turn, had been the shapes of their odd remembrances and the unchosen fragments of their everyday world gone by: the green bug skimming across the black surface of a rice patty, an idle discussion about girls or sports. Their lives had been such fragmentary odd things and then one day they died and became part of the odd things he remembered on the days that rolled after.