The Hero Business

Lying in the field behind my grandfather's house in the Hill Country, one hot summer night, I waited on his get-home whistle. It might've seemed late to a ten-year-old, but probably wasn't more than an hour after sunset. Lying on the ground, my battered hat for a pillow, I searched the sky for any of the constellations I'd seen in the book my grandfather'd carried out from town. The charts printed on the crisp pages couldn't begin to describe the mass of lights above me, no more than the swirling green constellations of the last of the season's fireflies blinking through the tops of the grass...Lying behind my grandfather's house, over thirty years ago now, watching the stars wheel across the sky, I felt at peace with the world. In all fields since, from elephant grass in Vietnam to scrubby deserts in New Mexico, covered in mud & dust & the blood of friends and enemies, rained on & fired on & shit on, in rice paddies & cotton fields & mine fields, I've never had that feeling again...