Little Circles

My dad was in the Navy in the Vietnam War. He was a signalman. In one battle, his boat, the USS Commodore Perry, was firing on the shores from a distance because marines had called in for fire support. From his position on the boat, my dad could see a glass wall. On one side stood a man writing on the wall, backwards so that the officials on the other side of the glass could see what he was communicating. Sometimes the man would draw pictures instead of write backwards words, for speed. On that day, the man scrawled a long series of pictures. There was a lumpy little water buffalo, little wiggly men in straw hats, and women holding tiny circles. My dad asked what the drawings meant. The man told him they were confirmed kills. The animals and the soldiers he drew were all dead; they died that day. The civilian men and women were dead too. And the civilian babies. Tiny circles on a glass wall.

The image of those little circles on the glass wall still haunts my dad today. Even now, my dad had a hard time telling me the story. It wasn’t just about the babies, I think. It was about all the evils of war that stain your mind and bother your gut. The knowledge that you are contributing to the death of innocent people is not something that just goes away. My dad’s story reminds me of how war has no moral. Even if there is a larger reason for fighting, it loses its meaning in the mindless kills and unexplainable horrors of war.