Friends

I’ve never been able to rely on the security of friends. When I was young, we moved so often, my “friends” were an ever-shifting group of new faces, some barely known long enough to remember their names, most never known long or well enough to be true “friends”. I was young enough then to rebound and keep trying, each time we moved into a new neighborhood, seeking out those who were not outright hostile, working at not being too “new” or “different”, making every effort to fit in and belong. Sometimes those efforts paid off in what, for me, were real friendships, but, alas, we would move again and, like Sisyphus, I would begin my trudge up Mt Friendship once again.

In high school, after high school, after high school, the strain of this constant immersion in new social situations clashed with my own growing self-awareness in socializing. At a time when young people are beginning to take their first mature steps into the social hemisphere of their lives, I was still at the crawling stage. I knew things, but I didn’t know people, at least not much beyond the cruelty of strangers I had experienced all too often as the “new kid”. I was more alone, in the midst of crowds, because I didn’t know when someone might be kidding, anymore than I knew when they were being sincere. I developed a shield of sarcasm, smart-aleckiness and superiority as defense mechanisms to cope with and cover for my social inexperience and blunders. The more I flailed around, the more mistakes I made and, of course, the more I was penalized by those who, after all, had gone through these baby steps some time before.

School doesn’t last though, and, once again, we moved on. I’d had enough, though, and left home through the only avenue available to me, by joining the army. In the Army, a different set of rules were enforced, although again I didn’t quite have the necessary requirements. Strength and physical prowess were more highly regarded than intelligence and cunning; unfortunately for me, my age prevented me from taking advantage of the opportunities those skills might have offered. My friendships in the army were, by nature, fleeting, again, and those in VietNam particularly so, for good reasons or other, due to the circumstances of the situation. My best friend during that time died a matter of weeks after returning from RVN. Others weren’t lucky enough to get out of the country, but that was expected, even ghoulishly joked about. We were young and didn’t expect to live forever, no matter how immortal we might have felt. A conundrum to end all conundrums, much like whistling past the graveyard, which in this case was populated by others just like us, by guys we’d known and shared a cigarette, or a warm beer, with only last week. Added to the mortality rate was the normal, for the VietNam Era military, rate of turnover due to what was called “rotation“. Those lucky enough to survive the meat grinder were scheduled to return, or “rotate”, home one year after arriving at the gates of hell, also known as Cam Ranh Bay, for most of us. The closer, or “shorter” to the date one got, the more careful, the less willing to tempt fate one also became. This had a inescapable effect on friendships, in part due to understandable self-preservation, in part to the hardening of the heart to avoid the pain of the loss of another friend and fellow combatant. Your friends celebrated your “short”-ness, exulting in your escape from the clutches of death as a sign of their own potential redemption.