Posted by Kurt Wilde | Posted in | Posted on 10:19 AM
The image is still clear. After several days it’s still as securely cemented to the back of my skull as it was when my subconscious initially created it. It’s little more than an image. The events of the dream have faded, but the picture of you sitting next to me on a black leather couch, hair slightly obscuring the right side of your face casting a shadow over your eyes is as clear as ever. We were indoors, a house. Perhaps it was ours. Along with the image is an innate understanding that we are together and have been for a while, maybe even for years. I move a steady hand to brush the hair from your face and as I do a warmth feeling fills me. Then I wake up shivering. Who are you?
At 3:30am in the Korean mountains some twenty four miles from the demilitarized zone, the temperature is a stinging negative twelve degrees Fahrenheit. Absent from the tent extension to my Fire Direction Center (FDC) track vehicle is the mechanical drone and rush of warm air from the heater. It shut off at some time during the night. The cold air penetrates my body so thoroughly it feels like my bone marrow is steadily freezing into shards that scrape and poke at me from the inside.
When you wake up in cold that severe, you wake up gasping. Even though you’ve been shivering for an unknown period of time, the cold has stiffened your muscles as your body held a fetal position in an instinctive effort to retain body heat and it’s hard to move. All you want to do is go back to sleep, but you can’t, you’re too cold. So you get up.
The cold is what I’ll remember most from my first Field Training Exercise (FTX) here in Korea. Commanding my first convoy, emplacing upon the firing point, and hearing my FDC chief transmit my first fire mission to the gun line are all significant first time experiences that I’ll always be able to recall, but they are overshadowed in my memory. The constant stinging cold will always be what comes to mind when I think about my first FTX. It’s physically embedded in my memory. Even thinking about it now, I feel the blood withdraw from my fingers and when I close my eyes, I see you.
Photo Notes:
All images are original and from the author’s personal catalogue.
Image 1: Platoon Paladin battery emplaced on a snowy firing position.
Image 2: My field command center.
Image 3: My FDC. This is also where I slept.
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