The colors of back then, the sounds from that time, the smells from those days, they hang not on the edges of memory. No. They live in the center of moments ago. Unchanging over years, constant in their content, unrelenting in their persistence. Refusing to submit to the eraser of the past.
The colors of me are brown. I am brown. My pale, freckled Irish skin is brown. From the sun, and also from the earth in this compound that is powdery, dry, and lifeless. It clogs the pores of my face and my scalp, clings to the backs of my hands, my neck, my ears. I wonder if I will ever be clean again.
The Dak Bla is brown, sluggish, silted. I can almost hold its water, so full of other things, in my hands. It barely oozes between my fingers or slips by the grassy banks that contain it.
The clothes I wear are brown. The trucks and jeeps and tents and sandbags around me are brown. Even my airplane, my Bird Dog, is brown. A brown that makes no statement. It is not supposed to. This drab hue is meant to be nondescript. To not call attention to itself, but rather to lose itself in everything around it. A brown that isn’t seen, because it is everywhere. A brown
