Jamie Stuart

It didn't seem right somehow to Jamie Stuart, he had always imagined that the journey to meet his ancestors would take the form of a dreamlike adventure, travelling vast distances in spring-like sunshine without feeling the chill of the breeze or the cold ground upon his feet, let alone the sharp pebbles underfoot. Death, it appeared, was to be no more comfortable than life itself. At least the morning frost seemed a little less harsh and the interminable screech of the scavenging crows had ceased for now. The fatal wound seemed to have disappeared completely. This, above all troubled him deeply. he should have had an honourable scar to show to his likewise departed kinsfolk, some trophy to mark his passing into the afterlife.

After a period of worried pondering he came to the conclusion that if his heroic wound had left no scar then perhaps his ancestors would be similarly free of the marks of battle and accept his honest version of the circumstances of his glorious demise and heap no scorn upon him after all.

 Gathering up his meagre possessions he set out confidently along what appeared to be a natural trail heading east under the rapidly rising sun.

*  *  *

 Morrelli

 Sgt. Morrelli chanced a quick look around the huge root of the mango tree that had shielded him from the carnage left over from the brief firefight. The ambush had been complete and decisive, his platoon had been decimated. The NVA had expertly sealed off the exits from the steep sided narrow valley, letting the doomed patrol get all the way in before closing off the entrance and opening fire with klasnikov rifles and close mortar fire, very professional, very effective. Morrelli had given the only order he could under the circumstances.

 Attack!!

 It had been a slaughter. The bodies of his latest command lay all about, broken and mutilated. Already the flies were busy on the corpses. He had been about to charge the slope toward the heaviest downpour of incoming fire in a last burst of madness, embracing a soldiers death, when the blast from a mortar shell had blown him between the roots, hiding his unconscious body from the merciless follow up action of the hidden attackers. He never heard the sporadic gunshots as the ambushers methodically finished off the few screaming survivors, ignoring the pitiful pleas for mercy, before taking their weapons and rations then slipping away silently into the dense jungle.

He had remained motionless for many hours after regaining consciousness, not daring to lift even his eyes in case the enemy had left behind a section to wait for him to collect his comrades identity tags, they had surely counted them in to the ambush area, the body count would have been one short. Out of necessity they could not wait forever and the patrol's pick up position was not too far away. When they failed to show the area would be swarming with gunships. The NVA had done well to get the radio operator first, the platoon had not had time to get off a contact report.

He glanced at his watch, at least four hours since the ambush, less than an hour to pick up. His best chance of rescue lay in getting close to the pick up point, three miles away still and he'd have to avoid the trail all the way. He knew it would be almost impossible to travel that distance through the jungle in the time he had left but he had no choice, he had run out of options.

 He rolled away from the huge root onto the soft carpet of dead leaves, ready to stand and begin the arduous journey, when the main artery running up the inside of his thigh finally burst. He looked down at the flooding redness in amazement. What he had thought was a sharp object under his prone body all the time he had lain between the roots, causing him acute discomfort, was in fact a piece of shrapnel, probably from the blast that had blown him into cover. It had been  deeply embedded in his thigh. Only the fact that he had lain so still with the weight of his own body keeping the piece of shrapnel firmly pressed against the artery had kept him alive thus far.

The moment he had moved the severely weakened artery had inevitably burst. He fumbled futilely in the wound with rapidly numbing fingers in a desperate attempt to staunch the deadly flow. Somehow the slippery end of the bruised vein escaped his weakening grasp time and time again. In the final seconds of his life, seconds that seemed an eternity in the distorted, surreal world of nausea and pain that washed over him, he gave up the struggle to staunch the flow, ebbing now as the pressure lessened and veins collapsed, signalling the coming end.

As he lay, still now, calmly awaiting the end, a sudden, vaguely familiar feeling of peacefulness entered his being, lifting his slipping senses back to total clarity. The nagging doubts which had plagued him throughout his life were swept away in a frantic orgy of re-organisation. Wildly disjointed episodes of his existence were torn apart and re-assembled in an incredible wave of sundering, cleansing and purifying as it washed through him. With the cleansing came revelation. Once more the time of retribution was at hand, the price of immortality must be paid. Only then could he rest. 

Visions of past conflicts permeated his fading consciousness once more, the flight over Nagasaki, Passiondale, Crimea, the Carpathians. Remembrance flooded through him on a tidal wave of recognition. Once again the entity that was Morelli, a mere sergeant in this short-lived conflict, embraced the wholeness of the complete being, gathering the sum of the parts once more at the moment of death. Only at the moment of death does reality reveal its true identity, only at the precise moment of the end of each transition can past triumphs be appraised, can failures be examined. There was much more to be accomplished, much to be avenged. He had carried the burden of war down the centuries and had come to rest this time in Asia. How his suffering would affect the outcome of this conflict was, as usual, unknown to him. The crimes he had committed had been atoned for, it was necessary to believe only that. It was time once more for oblivion. It was time for rest.

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