In Silent Water

________________________

It was called Operation Desert Shield.

You were flying troops into Saudi Arabia. It was an incongruous sight. An airliner, flight attendants serving meals before the in-flight movie as the L-1011 arced across the Atlantic, the jet full of fresh young faces headed to yet another war.

Four stripes on your sleeve now, you sat in the left seat. You were looking out over the curving earth that lay ahead, watching the moon rise from a distant horizon, and you leaned forward to look down on the clouds that covered the ocean almost eight miles below. A KC-10 and four F-15s were refueling off to your left, and you turned and looked at them with wonder in your eyes. Why do we continue to do this to one another?

Not so many years ago this vantage above the clouds would have been reserved for the Gods, yet here I am, gliding on silver wings above the earth of our fathers, carrying limitless potential across the face of creation to bring death to life once again.

Is this all that I am?

Now you watch as sleek jets line up to drink fuel at 41,000 feet, and all you can think of is how amazing the Big Dipper looks out here, so far from the works of man. So far away. The moon lifts out of the orange mire of the earth and begins another innocent journey across the sky. You wonder if she's out there, swimming in faraway seas, looking at your moon - and thinking of you.

But here in this life, there is my love for Sarah. It binds me to life, though it be ever so brief.

__________________________

The desert heat is overwhelming, even in November. You're walking around on the blistering concrete of tarmac at the King Khalid International Airport, marveling at the architecture while the ground crews service the huge Lockheed. Despite the enormity of the airport, everything is eerily quiet. Nothing moves, nothing wastes energy in the omnipresent heat, and the irony of the situation isn't wasted on you. Everywhere around you the sands seem to drift on top of oceans of crude. This new war - your next war - will be about this stuff. Young men will die asserting ownership of this stuff. Thousands of pounds of this stuff are being pumped into the beast you'll fly back west tonight, where billions of gallons of this stuff are being burned in the cars that move back and forth between jobs that are - by and large - predicated on a never ending supply of this stuff. Blood money. Nothing more, nothing less.

You walk back up the beige metal stairs on the side of the Jetway and lunge back into the air conditioning. It's so hot out in the heat that the sweat evaporates from your skin before it has a chance to cool you, and the expected chill when your body hits the cool inside air doesn't come. You shake your head and walk back into the aircraft, stop off to use the forward head, then walk back into the cockpit. The Flight Engineer is cycling through the hydraulics - checking pressures - while the First Officer enters coordinates into the inertial navigation system for the first leg back to Frankfurt. You sit in your seat, and squint into the late afternoon sun that slants into the cockpit, and you unconsciously rub your eyes.

In the darkness of the moment, you feel her presence in the cockpit. You feel her eyes on you, questioning you.

"When will you learn?" her voice asks. "Your presence here is pointless."

Startled, you look around. The first officer is staring at you.

"Learn what?" he asks you.

"What?"

"You asked me, 'when will you learn'," he says accusingly. "Learn what?"

"Skipper, I heard it too," the Flight Engineer is saying, and your stomach lurches at this revelation. "But it was a woman's voice. Didn't you hear it?"

You look at them blankly, not wanting to invite them into your private delusions, then you shake your head and turn to the radio console at the top of the instrument panel and begin entering frequencies.

"Skip, you didn't hear it?"

You ignore the question.

"Walt, you didn't say that?" your co-pilot asks you.

"I didn't say anything, Stewart, and I didn't hear any . . ."

Your lie is cut off by a gentle laugh that cuts through the air like a knife. You look at the other two men in the cockpit and you see them looking at the ceiling, clearly alarmed at what they hear.

"The day may yet come," the surreal voice says, filling the close air with quiet dread, "when you have no time left to learn."

The air in the cockpit grows very cold. You turn back to the radio panel and enter the frequency for Departure Control.

_____________________________

"Delta two-one heavy, taxi to position and hold."

"Two one, Kennedy," you say into the radio as you advance the throttles a bit. The 767 rolls onto runway two two right.

"Delta two-one heavy, clear for take-off. Contact Kennedy departure on one two seven point three."

"Two-one heavy, one-two-seven point three." You advance the throttles to full take-off power. The New York skyline looks pristine on this crisp September day, and the big Boeing lumbers down the runway. The co-pilot is calling out your speeds, first V-one, then rotate, and you pull back on the stick. Slowly the nose comes up and the ground recedes.

"Kennedy departure, Delta two-one heavy."

"Two-one heavy, turn right to two seven zero, clear to climb to seven thousand."

"Two-one heavy to two seven zero, clear to seven." You're gently banking to the right and you flip on the cabin intercom. "Ah, ladies and gentlemen, Captain Hansen here. Just a quick howdy from up here in the front office. Those of you on the right side are going to have a real nice view of Manhattan. When we get up out of the chop we'll turn the seat belt light out, and update you on our . . ."

"Skipper, what's that guy doing down there, there on the river . . . about two o'clock?"

You look down and see another 767 screaming across the Hudson, and you follow it as it slams into one of the World Trade Center towers.

"Ah, two-one heavy, we've just seen a United 67 hit the World trade Center."

"Two-one heavy, say again."

"Delta two-one heavy, repeat, we've just seen another a/c hit the World Trade Center."

"Ah, roger, two one. Turn left to two three zero, climb to flight level two two zero, contact Philadelphia Center on one three one point seven. Good day."

______________________________

The whole world seemed to fall apart after that September morning.

You retired a few years later, right after your country invaded Iraq. You watched from afar this time, however, though you still trained pilots transitioning into the 767 for a few more years, until that first big heart attack nearly took you out. You got serious about exercising again, even started to jog a little after the docs gave you the green light. You tried to play golf, but it bored you. An old war buddy invited you to go sailing with him down on the Gulf one December day, and you liked that, that feeling of gliding, of flying through water, and suddenly you missed flying, and it hurt. You thought about it enough to talk Sarah into buying a boat one winter day while vacationing in Tampa.

God, what bounds does love know. She's been so patient with me.

The mood in the country is subdued. After the calamity of Iraq and the subsequent invasion of Iran, energy prices have tripled, inflation and unemployment are seemingly out of control, and the government seems tense - almost twitchy - like a fish out of water. Dan, your oldest boy, has been flying F/A-18s off the Stennis for months when word comes that his plane has gone down in that other Gulf, and not an hour later word comes over CNN that the Stennis has been hit by Iranian Silkworm missiles and is on fire, sinking. The United States retaliates with low-yield tactical nuclear weapons on the Iranian forces that threaten to sweep into Baghdad, and both China and Russia threaten to use nuclear weapons on America.

Word comes the next day that Dan has been picked up by a British mine-sweeper and is fine. Dictators in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. pull back from the brink, and a sense of sanity returns to the political arena, if but for a short while.

Later that spring, Dan, your oldest boy, brings his wife and newborn daughter to Key West to visit you and Sarah. The two of you have been cruising the Gulf Coast of Florida ever since the Second Missile Crisis. It just seemed the safe thing to do.

You moor the boat and rent a car, pick them up at the airport and drive them back to the boat. Once everyone is aboard and gear stowed, you putter out of the harbor, intent on making Fort Jefferson in the Tortugas by the next morning. Dan stays up with you that night, and as you watch waypoints come and go on the GPS display over the wheel, you talk about the ties that bind. It's the first time the two of you have talked like this in your life.

"You were shot down once, weren't you, Dad?"

"Yeah. Wasn't one of my better days, but I guess you know what I mean."

He chuckles, then you feel more than see that he's looking at you intently. "What happened?"

"My squadron, the old VA-165, had just hit a rail depot near Haiphong. SAMs and AA were pretty real that day, and my A-4 took a bunch ground fire, began to lose fuel real fast, but I had enough to make it back to Yankee Station. Barely. A couple of patrol boats got in my way, though. They shot the crap out of that little bird; I barely got off a distress call before she started to come apart and I punched out at about eight thousand . . ."

"How fast were you moving?"

"I don't know, son. I seem to remember getting close to six at one point when I was evading the first boat, and after I got hit I wanted to climb as high as I could before I ejected. Call it maybe four, four fifty. Why?"

"Nothing. Go on."

Well, I guess it was pretty text-book. Hit the water, about half the Tonkin Gulf went into my belly, and I made it into the raft and got on the radio. Helo picked me up about a half hour later."

"What about the patrol boats?"

"Oh, a couple of Phantoms on CAP blew over and messed 'em up a bit. One of the birds, from - 96 I think - went down. Some Skyraiders came in and finished off the boats."

"Did anything happen to you in the water. I mean, that's when you got shot up, right. Weren't you bleeding?"

"Oh. Yeah. I guess I try to forget about that part. I must have been bleeding pretty bad, cause, you know . . ."

"That's OK, Dad, you don't have to talk about it if you don't . . ."

"No, son, it was a long time ago. It doesn't hurt anymore, you know."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. Well, anyway, there was a shark that gave me a pretty bad time. Used up all my dye on the son-of-a-bitch, and one of the patrol boats got a round in close and shredded the raft, and I got tossed in right about the time that shark got, well, more than curious. Anyway, I think another round must have hit the shark, cause it kinda . . . well . . . just disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"Yeah."

"Dad. That doesn't ring true."

"Yeah."

"Did she say anything to you?"

Your heart skips a beat. "What did you say?"

"You heard me, Dad. Did she say anything to you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Forget it, Dad."

"What did she say to you?"

"Dad?"

"Maybe you better start from the beginning, son."

"Not much to tell, I guess, Dad. Couple of Sukhois jumped me while I was returning from a hop over Kuwait City. It was about three days after the Republican Guard moved into Kuwait, before all that nuclear bullshit. One of the missiles hit somewhere aft and shit just started flying off the airplane. I was in a high cruise, you know, about f-l twenty, maybe four fifty knots and all of a sudden the ECM starts honking and then a missile warning. It happened way too fast. Anyway, I'm on my way down, looking at the sun going down. I remember the horizon, back toward Kuwait, the fires. It looked like a medieval scene, you know, like out of Dante."

"That's war, son. Man killing man, usually in the name of God."

"Yeah. Must suck being God, you know. Always catching the blame for our fuck-ups. Anyway. I'm in the raft and all of sudden the sky lights up with flares and an old Antonov lumbers over, and some Gomer with a mini-gun opens up on my raft. Water all around the raft starts to explode, you know, and I know, I mean really know that right then I'm gonna die . . ."

Your heart is thundering now, remembering those frozen moments forty years ago when you, too, knew death was coming for you, and wasn't going to take no for an answer.

"That's when she came, Dad."

You can't speak, can't even open your mouth. Your chest is growing tight.

"She grabbed my hand, pulled me under."

Everything is swimming now, the world has stopped making sense.

"She told me she was waiting for you, that you were her destiny."

You grab your chest, the pressure is bad this time. "Son," you say quietly, "go get me my pills. Mom knows which one."

"Dad? You OK?"

"Yeah. Just get 'em up here. I'll be alright in a minute." You watch your first-born slip quietly down the companionway and move forward to your "stateroom," and a few moments pass before Dan and Sarah are both climbing back up into the cockpit. Your wife, the other woman who kept death away those many years ago, hands you a tab and you slip it under your tongue. The acrid taste annoys you with it's implications - as it always does - but she wipes your forehead with a cool cloth and before too long the moment passes. Truly there are no ties strong enough to hinder love. You drift in the moonlight.

"You want me to drive for a while, Dad?" You remember where you are.

"Yeah, maybe you oughtta." As your son slides behind the big stainless wheel, it feels like a changing of the guard. You sit and watch these two people, these two souls so central to your happiness, yet you wonder what waits for you out there in that night. Suddenly the feeling is very clear. There's nothing to be afraid of.

You are her destiny. You always have been.

_____________________

The next morning breaks clear; a small front has passed through in the night, and today's sky is so clear and blue you can see stars for an hour after the sun breaks the horizon.

Only at sea . . .

Before long you are dropping the anchor in the clear, shallow water, and when things settle down you go forward and start inflating the Zodiac. Maybe time enough before lunch to take little Dan for a walk on the beach . . .

By mid-day the sun has warmed the boat, and you think the ancient red brick of the Fort has a comforting feel to it. Something so intimately linked between men and their fortifications, something so tenuous - yet so permanent - and now here you are with your son, warriors both. Yesterday's war, and today's. But you stand in the sun and think for a moment, and that uneasy feeling returns. We're linked by something far more disconcerting than the past and the present. Something so . . . unfamiliar. Something so precious.

The water is so clear it looks like a swimming pool . . . very shallow, too. Maybe ten, fifteen feet. You look over the side and watch as a school of bright yellow and silver fish drift by, their passage marked by flickers of splintering sun dancing off their backs. You move your hand to shade your eyes, and you just catch your little grandson as he crawls over the cockpit coaming and waddles over to the lifelines and in a moment he is gone . . . over the side . . .

"Dan . . . overboard!" you yell as you make your way aft. You can see the little boy's form floating down to the coral heads that dot the seafloor, and in a flash you are over the side knifing into the water. The current is taking him, and you watch as his little body moves away from you, and you start to kick furiously, try to catch up with your future as it drifts toward the deep blue water of the Florida Straits.

It hits hard this time, the vice in your chest, and you struggle for the surface, struggle to gain the air that will sustain you, but he's so close. If you give it your all, maybe you'll get to him.

Your world starts to turn white as your brain fights to use all of the oxygen left in your veins, and you reach for the boy. There, no, almost, NOW! Yes, you have him. You fight for the surface, holding the little boy close to your chest all the while, and you break into the light, and you both cough and spit. The sun feels so good, and the boys wet skin on yours feels so right. You are so connected through time to the boy, one of a line that stretches back through time to heaven only knows how long ago . . . You start to swim against the tide, back toward the boat. You realize you've been swimming against the tide for a long time. Maybe since that day. Maybe for all eternity . . .

The pressure in your chest is unbearable now, and you turn to look at your boat. No one has seen you . . . no one is on deck . . . no help is coming. You look into the little blue eyes . . . they look into yours like yours once did - oh! - those many years ago. The shock of being alive, the trust found in the arms of a savior.

The crushing blow hits, you struggle to keep your head above the water - the little boy's face looks at yours with trust - and from somewhere you find the will to struggle back toward life. You hold him to your chest as your pull with your free arm, pull the past and the future through the arc of time.

Dan is on deck, looking around. He sees you, he sees your arm waving, sees your distress, and he dives into the water. Swimming with the current he is soon with you, and now the three of you are together in the waves, your hands joined in a circle of life. The water is as warm as blood, and you are cold.

"Are you alright, Dad?"

"I don't think so."

"Yes, he's ready. Aren't you?"

The three humans turn in the water, turn to the voice, her voice.

You look at her. She hasn't changed. Not one thing about her has changed in the four decades that have passed since you last saw one another. The copper-colored eyes, the shimmering bronze of her eyes, the luminous blue skin. But you've never associated the voice with the vision, and now you know that the voice you heard twenty years ago - sitting on the ramp in Saudi Arabia - was hers.

What was she trying to tell you?

"The day may come when you may have no time left to learn."

Why was she trying to tell you? You? Who am I?

"Dad? Dad?!"

What role was I supposed to play? What have I turned my back on?

You see the world around you for what it is. Men will never learn from their mistakes, the past isn't prologue. The past is the present is the future.

"Why him?" you hear your son asking, pleading. "Why now?"

This world recedes from your view, and a brutal coldness grips your chest. You hear waves washing against eardrums, and in an instant of furious light the universe is collapsing in on itself in. You are spinning, you know you are leaving this place, yet you know you have made your choice, lived this life on your terms.

"It's alright, now." It is her - her voice - and it feels so familiar. Your time was at an end in that world - this you know now . . . It is so clear now.

"You're with me again, my friend. You've come back to me."

"Yes."

"I tried to tell you. We all did?"

"Yes."

"They can not learn. Their time always comes to an end."

"So sad."

"No, my friend. It is their choice. But you are with me now. We will never part again."

"So lonely. They are so lonely."

"Yes. And that is the truth of their choice."

"Why? Why would they choose loneliness . . . when all is connected?"

"Oh, my friend! Can't you see it? Only in the end, when your time was short did life grow precious, only then did the sacrifice of human principle become obvious to you. Only then was human blood precious. You went to them as nothing, the human was as new to you. You took their form, you embraced their concept of thought. Your actions became as if preordained. You chose war. You chose sides, affirmed your humanity when you chose to sunder the connection all life shares, affirmed that humanity is doomed to live a life that is nasty, brutish, and short."