The two looked at each other. One of them said, “Well, maybe you weren’t wrong. The war is over, son. We have to let the past rest. Also, in my book you did the right thing. Get up. Walk out that door. Walk down those steps. Cross the street. Go home. The war is over. You don’t have to go on trial. You don’t have to give back your medals.”

“I don’t want them. The past doesn’t rest. They were smoking dope, they were killing the people’s pigs, they were planting land mines all around the place, killing innocent people. They shot at anything. The…cries, they were going to kill children. Rape and kill them. I looked at their faces. I looked at the children. I turned and shot them. There wasn’t even a look of surprise on their faces. They weren’t even that clear. I hated them. I hate myself.”

“You only won this war if you stayed alive. You should have left well enough alone. You’re more a hero in my book. Sir, is there anyone we can call to come get you?”

“No. But I’m trying to tell you I don’t want the medals. They hurt my hands to touch them. They are hot. Like fire.”

“You are free to go, Sergeant Just.” He salutes.

He didn’t know what he expected, but this encounter was as meaningless as the men who left their medals at The Wall to make a statement. Still, he left the medals, all of them, and walked away, merely walked away. Outside, looking at the Potomoc, he wondered what Indian word the river name came from, where the tribe lived.

THE DAY OF TRANQUILLITY

He is a numb man. Flying back, almost home in the evening, he looks for whales in the ocean before the plane reaches San Francisco. He remembers when the whales used to pass by in great numbers. He would watch one, its great shining side, the eye with its old intelligence, the gentleness of it in the body covered with barnacle life and sea creatures. It was loved by his people. It was a planet. When they killed it, he thinks perhaps they killed a planet in its universe of water.

The next day he walks from the bus, wrapped in fog. He has left a part of himself behind. There are spiritual requirements to make up for all he has done. There are those that require offerings to the ancestors. You offer food, your body, your service, your heart to open and fill. Sometimes you go up to the rocks that are carved with humans being born of the whales.