The osprey soars across the sky above the lines of the vaults of the church with small Celtic crosses encrusting its peaks. I sit with a cappuccino and a cigarette, drifting lightly through the visions around and above me.   The osprey returns from the other side of the church to fly over again, heading for the near western horizon, over the escarpment at the edge of town.   I think of flight, its dream and actuality, a moving meditation on freedom, on the release of the spirit from the gravity of existence, a thing that pulls one toward a core of unbearable heat and pressure.   Defy the ground and taste the currents of the upper air.   Live within a fleet, blue cosmos of cold and wind. Never return to the world's surface of pain.

The story returns to me, different aspects emphasized after so many years.   This often happens at crucial moments in the progression of my life.   McDonough would understand, but he is dead.   His tour of duty was endless.   He had no opportunity to find the ocean.   The ocean consumes me.   Twenty years later, I still return to the Pacific, sailing when I can.   The inner pain of the war falls away on the long fields of sea and sky, moves away into the night stars, nailed hard into the revolving constellations.   Spread of beauty in the wind's warmth.   I find the occasional islands, marks in time, the punctuation of years' passage.   On these places of stability, I remember for myself, and for McDonough, the wreckage of life that was Vietnam , and the loss of all peace that pertains to the past.   Every landing on a beach is the first landing on the shores of South Vietnam , and I think that on the islands I will find the habitations of the dead, McDonough and all the others, shifting calmly through the small groves of palm and sand.   Elysian Fields.   Gate of ivory, gate of horn.   Ceremony of blood to invoke the souls long lost.

I see McDonough in the shadows of night, at times, but never clearly.   He haunts my life, was my life.   The waters speak of him with a soft sibilance of mourning.   I could not have left the war without him, though I have never truly left the war. I sit and consider the bird in flight.   It flees from my sight.   I stand and walk toward the church, flooded with memories of conflict and resolution.

We were concealed in forest after the massacre.   I bled heavily from my wound.   The bullet remained in my gut, as McDonough had no way to remove it.   We had been running day and night, and my hallucinations were becoming more intense.   The trees seemed to be breathing, mist and steam streaming along the trails and through the clearings we passed.   Light and dark were interminable and had lost all meaning.   We waded and swam through swamp after three days of escape; through signs of old killings, through the skeletal remains of some mass execution.   Skulls protruded from the mud, bony hands raised in final supplication.   In the last light of day, these dead seemed to move in terror and resurrection, surrounded by clouds of biting insects and the red wound flush of sunset.   I felt we would join these lost in a prayer of dying.   We fled through the field of bones to the welcoming green of the other side, in fear of being revealed to the creators of this open grave.   Hundreds of futile dead collected in my mind.   I would carry them out and forever.   I could not shake the haze of possession and confusion.

The forest melted at night, dissolving a mass of bruised foliage and wood.   At these times, we usually heard the distant sounds of voices and gunshots.   I could not say whether they were real or effects of shock and delusion. We know we were being followed, knew the trail was a North Vietnamese highway, from the signs of their presence-pits with punji sticks and deserted underground shelters.   We sped past, though the echoing calls of bird life and screaming monkeys.   South Vietnamese bodies were hung form branches along the path, decomposing in silence, but for the wildlife and wind.

The shots came as we passed through a deserted village of grass huts and surrounding rice paddies.   We hit the ground as burning fire scored the grass walls and dirt around us.   They came howling.   We ran to the trees as bullets passed us. They had traced our path from the temple.   Shattered stone returned to my mind as everything slowed around us as we ran.   The temple was the motionless origin of terror.   I will remember that temple for the rest of my life.   It was the beginning of a cosmological transformation, beginning and end, creation and destruction.

The air shattered around us, sun skipping across the sky, through the foliant refuge.   We lost the trial, slashing through the undergrowth, through thick leaves and the webs of carnivorous spiders.   McDonough yelled at me to follow, though my wound had begun to bleed again.   I felt the warm wet of blood seeping out of my body and I cursed war, and the visions of statuary, stone encrustations of what I later learned were images of Krishna and Arjuna from the Indian epic the Mahabharata.   Thousands of years ago Arjuna had questioned a war, a conflict of human families.   He was told of necessity; of inescapable fate; of dharma; of divine determination of mortal life.   I had shed any belief of the necessity of this conflict.   Fear ruled my soul.

We came to another village, this one inhabited by a single woman, as if the rest of the villagers had fled.   She spoke to us in Vietnamese as she moved baskets of rice into a storage hut.   We had had no food for days, and attempted to acquire some from her, after we had checked the houses of the village for any other presence, as she yelled and tried to stop us.   McDonough and I concealed ourselves in one of the huts and cooked rice from her baskets.   He rewrapped my wound.   She sat in the hut and watched, her eyes never leaving us.   She held out a hand for food, to eat with us.   Her hands shook as she took rice from me.

We spent the next day hidden with her.   I began to understand that she held no loyalty to either side of this conflict.

She was hiding for the sake of survival, having been abandoned by her family during the course of the war.   She held to us desperately, speaking Vietnamese rapidly with tears flowing from her eyes.

I found the memorial the first year after it had been completed.   I had finally returned from the Pacific to the east coast of America , without contacting any of my family, who had pleaded for my return.   The place was a Mycenaean monument, descending into the earth in engraved darkness, like a tomb of regret and memory.   The ancient Greeks had worshipped their dead heroes beneath the ground, as if attempting to contact entrances into the Underworld, seeking the rivers of darkness and the fields of lost souls, threnodies sung to those committed to eternity, to those perceived as divine.   Mortality mourned, the hero dedicated to the heart of a culture and the transcendence of death through memory.   I walked the declining ground through the crowds who made traces of engraved names from the black, stone wall.   The dead, the missing, the unforgotten.   Glory disregarded for stark eulogy.

Winding through the darkness,

As if enclosed in the womb of the earth,

Shattered shades fold inward, colourless, foaming,

Soft with aureoles of sound, music,

Rustling, fathomless, the night of tomb

Like an ocean of near silence,

In its long emptiness of sanguine separation.

A tyranny of the grave,

Worshipped below

Mycenaean idols,

The last of life's freedom drawn to motionless.

The gestures of ceremony, fragile;

Stone enclosing tracing fingers,

A finality of the poem, within,

Leaving transparent eulogies on walls of innocence.

I found McDonough's name carved into the wall, listed like every other.   I lifted a lily from the ground, placed it below his name, and photographed. I could not weep.

After the Test Offensive, McDonough was reassigned to another platoon.   They were sent into the northern jungle.   The nature of memory weaves within the monuments of our lives, in the things that we hold, such that there is always a present existence in what is past.   Things are made to remember, to explore what is gone.

McDonough was killed north of the border.   His platoon had been sent out to reconnoitre and call in bombing sites.   They were crossing a river when the Viet Cong opened fire from the far shore.   McDonough was shot, wounded, and died in a prison camp with other members of the platoon He lost his life in a bamboo cage, shot in the head by a North Vietnamese fanatic when he refused to go in the hole with the rest of the survivors.   Some had survived the firefight at the river, and had brought the story of McDonough's capture back to American command.   Some of the MIA's at the prison camp had escaped and brought back the story of his death.   The prison camp - guns to the head and scheduled executions.   Time up to the neck in swamp.   Starvation. Insanity and hallucination.   Time impossible to perceive.   McDonough had taken most of the torture for the rest: knife cuts, bamboo slivers underneath the fingernails, demands for confession of war crimes.

The senior North Vietnamese officer had held the gun to McDonough's head, coercing him into the hole, into the swamp.   McDonough refused for the final time.   And the end.   His blood covered the rest of the prisoners.   Resistance was pointless, but they would remember him.

I heard the story in Hawaii , before I left to sail.   I immediately found a boat and set out on the water, moving west.   The Hawaiians I had met had taught me to sail in the way of ancient Polynesians.   Going back to America was impossible after McDonough's death.   I forgot my family and everything that was America and sailed for any deserted island I could find.   I planned to spend years in the Pacific, out on the water, until I could bear to find home.

After months at sea, I came across French Polynesia , inhabited islands resonant with the colours of the tropics.   I met a woman there, and stayed for awhile.   I took up smoking opium to pass the time, taking the drug in the old way, as a connection with a non-technological past.   It had been offered to me in a bar in Tahiti .   The woman had taken me there, introducing me to the drug.   We smoked together.   I lived in a comfortable captivity.   She would not let me leave.   We made love on the beach, her siren song impossible to ignore.   Finally, after a time of ruminating on the war, I closed my ears and set out, stocked with opium and a pipe.

The sea called to me, haunting me with its sibilant voice.   The water was the only thing which truly soothed my pain. I heard it speak on the open ocean, directing me onward with divine suggestion.   Smooth stained glass on good days, the floor of a vast, open cathedral.   I could worship out on the ocean.   I could slip silently into the flowing, and feel the sea road moving with the wind, and the isolated islands on which I stayed were occasional moments of reminiscence and descents into nothingness.

I came back to the east coast, eventually.   I had travelled through the Pacific and Indonesia .   And there was no where else to forget the past.   I could not forget.   The memorial gave me some distance.   It could take some of the burden of memory.

Today, the war floods back to me, and I envy the osprey.   Clear flight from the surface of suffering.   He lives with no boundaries, no weight, no temple to tie him to the earth.

I enter the church, kneel before the altar, and say a prayer for McDonough.