Who Am I?

Every day I wake up, and I never know who I am or where I will be.

Who am I? I am a young soldier caught in the heat of battle. I’ve suffered unbearable cold as a colonial soldier in the Revolution, a Civil War prisoner at Andersonville wishing to die, trapped in a fox hole with a festering wound during the Great War, landing at Normandy, hoping and praying that if there’s a God above, he will protect me, curled up in a cage, near death, taunted by Vietnamese children.

I am a middle-aged black man who escaped from the wreckage of a slave ship, hunted by white settlers and Indians, traveling the precarious back roads of the south during the civil war, unable to prove that my white owner freed me upon his death, homeless during the Great Depression, having lost my family to illness and my forty acres to a ruthless banker, a recovered addict in the 1960’s, a street musician playing for hand-outs.

I am an ancient woman in a county nursing home, mute and wheelchair-bound, unable to protest the daily abuse I suffer at the hands of the aides and the indifference of my grandson who is waiting for me to die so he can loot the rest of my meager assets.
And I am an eleven-year-old girl, an Orphan Train Rider headed for an uncertain future, a foster child “adopted” by a cruel family who parcels me out to work all day in a dark, dangerous factory, a ward of the county, locked away in a hospital that harvests the organs of “unwanted children” to repair the bodies of more fortunate rich children, the newly adopted daughter of a rich single father who takes me for weekends alone at his lake house.

I never know who I am and where I will be. Nearly every day, I wake up as one of these people and I must daily negotiate my way to safety. Sometimes the change can take place at any given moment. Today, I am at the lake with “Daddy”. He is good and kind to me, but I have this deep-seated mistrust, echoes, but not distinct memories from my other experiences as an orphan and foster child, that he, like so many others, will violate me in some way.

I’m in my tiny room in the lake house. I’ve never had so many nice new clothes. I picked out two new one-piece bathing suits, one bright pink and the other lime green to compliment my developing figure. I slip out of my shorts and tee-shirt and panties and stand in front of the full-length mirror admiring my blossoming body. Two slight bumps enhance my sensitive little nipples. I smile with pleasure as I notice the light dusting of pubic hair between my legs. I hear a knock on the door! The knob is turning. It’s “Daddy” asking if I’m ready to go to the lake. Quickly, I open the closet door and duck in to cover my nudity.

In an instant, I am transported to another lifetime. I’m lying on a mortician’s table. I’m shivering to my core. I sense that I have been here for hours. I realize that it is happening again. They’re stealing parts of my body to give to some little rich girl. I raise my head and see the rough cuts on my upper body, the incision carelessly sewn together, proof that my life is of no consequence. And I’m starving! Have they left me here to die?

I hear a small gasp nearby. I’m not alone. It’s Seth, one of my many foster brothers. I think at first he is shocked by the jagged incision, then I realize it is my nudity that has drawn his attention. Seth is fourteen. We are as close as foster siblings can be, protecting each other from abusive adults and the older foster kids.

“Seth, help me!”
In an instant, he’s by my side, helping me sit up, helping me pull on the simple shift dress he’s brought to cover me up. He helps me off the table. I lean on his shoulder as we escape out the door. Outside, the noise is deafening. A Baby Huey helicopter is landing nearby. Marines are jumping out before it hits the ground, firing in all directions, killing Vietnamese soldiers, civilians and children. Tears well up in my eyes.
“Thank God, they’ve come to take me home”.

They lower my cage to the ground. A green beret holds his nose at the stench of me. My left foot is gone. I’m deathly thin, riddled with parasites. I scream with pain as they try to unfold me to lay me on the gurney
“Don’t worry bud, we’re taking you home”.

The medic gives me a shot for the pain. Before I fade away, I see the young girl hovering nearby, the one who’s been saving me scraps of food, the one who’s kept me alive all this time. I reach for my dog tags, separate them, give one to her.
“Come and find me in the US”, I say in broken Vietnamese. Then I’m out.

I wake up someplace cold and dark. The floor is moving. I’m on a ship, a huge ship. I look around me and see cots, hundreds of cots lined up in rows. On the cots, men lie moaning and screaming, many looking stiff and dead. There are too few exhausted nurses, moving through the rows trying to comfort the men. I overhear them. I’m in the heavy casualty area, the ones not expected to live. I feel an agonizing pain in my chest. My left foot feels numb. I look down and see that my left leg is gone at the knee. I remember now, hundreds of landing vehicles disgorging men on the beach, the sergeants yelling to keep moving, the swell of pride to be part of D Day. Men are falling all around me. I keep going, then I’m hit too. As I stumble over other bodies and fall face-first into the sand, I ask God, was this his plan, sacrifice hundreds, no thousands of men to surprise and vanquish the Nazis? A pretty, hopelessly tired nurse, her face numb from the horror and death around her, leans over to wipe my brow, comfort me. I close my eyes, ready to die.

I awaken to the smell of cow shit. I’m on a straw pallet covering the dirt floor of a crudely-built split-log barn. A woman stands over me, hands on her hips, surveying the mass of sores, some drying, some still oozing, all over my body.
“Fever’s down. If the pox don’t get him, that foot’s going to get him sure as hell. If we don’t take the foot, the leg is going to go and what good is a farmer without a leg? How did I get here? All I can remember is months of bitter cold winter, no blankets, no food, men huddled together in front of a paltry fire to keep from freezing. Then the fever and the sores and the stench of men dying, the ground too hard to bury them, so we left them and moved on. Long out of ammunition, we kept our worthless weapons for clubbing and stabbing the enemy if we ever found them. The posters read “Liberty and Justice for All. Join the fight to wrest control of the colonies from the British.”