Seven Thousand Miles ... and Two Feet Apart

It was early summer 1967, I was eleven years old, and, sitting on the edge of a dock, I dipped my legs into the chilly, murky waters of the Calaveras River. I could barely see my feet.
Seven thousand miles away in a Saigon hospital, John Q. Soldier sits on the edge of his hospital bed, his legs hanging over the edge. He has no feet.
I was daydreaming that day of becoming the next Bob Gibson, fastballer extraordinaire for my favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals.
John, had nightmares that night of when he returned home and his favorite girl saw the two stumps where his feet used to be.
I looked out across the river, my skin a golden brown courtesy of the Central California sun, and watched as an Egret poked his beak in the mud searching for a meal.
John looked out of his hospital window, his pallid skin akin to alabaster white, and watched as a little girl, perhaps six, dug thru a garbage can trying to find something to eat.
I soon began to get hot and threw my body into the refreshing water, my legs churning, doing the frog kick, and looking at the world from a waters level view.
John soon began to sweat in the sweltering heat and humidity and was taken to a bath where a nurse placed him into a tepid tub of water. His stumps wriggled. He’d do no more frog kicks.
I crawled back on the dock, that wonderful feeling of being chilled on one side and warm on the other, as my body absorbed the radiating heat off the wooden surface.
John was wheeled back to his bed, already beginning to perspire, where the rapidly diminishing effects of his bath were briefly relieved by the new layer of cool linen recently applied.
I spent the rest of that glorious afternoon luxuriating between dock and water, thinking of baseball and Mom’s fried chicken, momentarily lost in a few passing billowing clouds.
John spent the rest of his day twitching and turning on sweat soaked sheets, thinking about his feet hurting, which he knew weren’t there, temporarily sidetracked by screams of other patients.
I had Mom’s fried chicken that night with mashed potatoes and creamed corn and then sat and watched the news with my Dad. The news guy gave a total of dead and wounded in Vietnam.
John, one of the wounded, didn’t really remember what he ate that night except that it tasted like what he ate the night before. He listened to a radio. Credence Clearwater was doin’ “Run Through The Jungle.”
I now sit, 43 years later, with great pain in my still functioning legs and feet and think often how I’d like to go back to that dock, soaking up sun on that early summer day of 1967.
John, sits in his dilapidated wheelchair out in front of a grocery store, holding a sign that reads “Vietnam Vet needs help.” A chic lady passes him and silently comments that he smells. An older man puts a dollar in John’s can.
I want to go back to 1967. So does John. Just a little bit earlier than me.