Kaleidoscope by Gretchen Stone

Author:Gretchen Stone [Stone, Gretchen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780595831272
Google: R82EIu0mXTMC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23408161
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2006-04-13T03:00:00+00:00

“War Song”

—Neil Young Lyrics

In the morning when you wake up

You’ve got planes flying in the sky

Flying bombs made to break up

All the lies in your eyes

BJ Brown

Fort Sam Houston

September 1966

Even today, I can’t recall the actual details of my life in the weeks after my brother was killed. All I can recall are the feelings. I needed to be alone; I couldn’t face my Mother and Father’s grief with my guilt. I didn’t know what Mimi expected of me. The sympathy her widowhood clothed her in erased her from me. Our families and friends surrounded her. Her Mother insisted she come home and stay with them. She was the widow, I was just the sister. There was no place for me in her life now. There wasn’t any place for me anymore.

After RJ’s funereal, I didn’t want anyone ever to call me Barbara Jane again.

When I walked into the recruitment office, I requested and got an official name change on my military records. Maybe they saw my family records; maybe they just saw the look in my eyes. Maybe they would say or do anything to get trained nurses to Vietnam. By my first week in Basic Training at Fort Sam Houston, I was BJ Brown. Boot Camp did not reward women for anything soft or feminine.

Basic Training was a blur. I resented the days off, the women who wanted to be my friends, the invitations to share a beer at the end of a long day. If there were any feelings of fear or loneliness, I piled hours of study and hard physical exercise on top of them like coats on a bed to make them disappear. Work was my valued companion, the only friend I needed now.

During those weeks, I was consumed with an urgent need to get to Vietnam. I wanted to breathe the air Bobby breathed, I wanted to see the train tracks where the ambush took place, I wanted to lie on the ground where he

bled to death. He was no longer RJ to me. He was the little brother Bobby who lived with me in those halcyon years in Missouri when it was just the two of us, and we had never moved to Michigan or heard of anyone like Mimi.

My sleep during those weeks was dreamless. My soul seemed to be in between realities, and I kept my brain too tired to remember the past or imagine the future.

At the end of six weeks I had marched hundreds of miles, I could competently read a compass and a map, and I was on my way to becoming an officer in the US Army. I was determined to forget I was a sister with no brother, but I would always remember I was a woman who would not ask for nor deserve forgiveness.

Lt. BJ Brown couldn’t marry her high school sweetheart, no family depended on her for support, but she could be the first woman in her family to serve in the military. I could defend my country.

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