~ONE~

The man woke up slowly, opening his eyes and yawning. Blinking from the sleep, he looked up at the wide sky above him, as the blackness of night begin to retreat from the coming dawn. He drew a hand over his face, trying to wipe away the night’s grogginess. His eyes focused briefly on the last twinkling of a star as the sky above began to shift from dark black to blue black.

As he lay there, zipped up and looking through the hood of his sleeping bag. the chill in the morning air caused him to curl up and revel in the warmth of the bag. It was a good one, made with down, or some kind of light fiber fill. Comforted in the warmth, he drifted off again.

He awoke again as the light of the morning slowly came, giving definition to the trees and mountains around him. He turned over and looked around, slowly becoming more aware of his situation. He began to realize that, as familiar as everything seemed, he didn’t know where he was.

The glow from the morning sun was just beginning to touch the peaks of mountains on the Western horizon. The smells in the air were distinct and invigorating. There was a mix of smoke from the camp fire and the smell of the dew on the prairie grass around him. The morning dew covered everything that was exposed to the air, and rolled, dripping off the hood of his bag as he moved.

“Hmm,” he thought. “It must be waterproof.”

The drone of insects that filled the darkness was steadily receding as the sounds of daylight began to dawn. Now and then he'd hear the chirp of a bat as it twisted and turned in the air above him, echo locating, drawn to the insects that were, in turn, drawn to the light of the campfire. As the light dawned he'd see them flitting by, maneuvering to zero in on their prey.

In time, those sounds gave way to the morning calls of birds. Scissor tails would flit by now and then seeking out the insects that had been left by the bats. Looking over, he though he saw a line of trees at the other end of the field, with a large birds nest, like an Eagles nest, filling the crux a tall tree in the distance.

Waking up a little more, he took in a deep breath and found the smells of the open camp thrilling to his senses. It had been ages since he'd done this... Since he’d woken up outside. He'd stopped camping and hunting twelve or fifteen years ago.

He'd done everything he wanted to do by then. He'd shot his ten pointer and hung the head on his wall. He'd even been to Alaska once, but in time he'd become increasingly tired of the growing number of aches and pains that came from sleeping out in the open and on the ground. A soft bed felt better to his old bones.

Waking up now though, the air was so crisp and clean. It reminded him of the good old days. There’s nothing like waking up in the woods. Nothing… But somehow, this was even better.

Slowly, still tucked into the warmth of his bag, he raised himself up into a sitting position. He released the cinch in the hood and began to look around. He had no idea where he was or how he’d gotten here, but, for whatever reason, he wasn’t too upset about it.

He'd woken up in strange places before, not sure where he was or how he’d gotten there, but this was very different. He wasn't hung over. His mind was clear and calm. He didn’t know why, but he felt very relaxed and comfortable in this place.

As he looked around he noticed two other sleeping bags arranged around the central camp fire. One was unzipped and empty, but there was another figure in the third bag on the other side of the fire. The sleeper was turned over and facing away from the fire. Whoever it was, they were still soundly drifting through their own dream world.

The camp fire was burning steadily, with a nights worth of red coals glowing in the bed and a few fresh logs flaming up on top of them. Someone had obviously recently added them. He assumed the person from the first bag had stoked the fire when he got up.

He sat there for a moment wondering who that might have been, and what was going on, but then laid back, letting the laziness of the scene defeat him. He tucked himself back down in the warmth of his bag and continued to look up at the clear sky above him, the increasing glow of the dawn was dotting out more of the stars. Then, slowly, the weirdness of everything began to hit him. “Wait a minute,” he thought to himself. “What the hell is goin’ on?”

When he started to wake up more and move around in his bag, an all too familiar feeling came to him. He realized that he needed to urinate.

“Shit!” He thought to himself. “It never fails. You wake up warm and cozy, only to be forced out into the cold, wet grass by all those beers you drank the night before.”

He unzipped himself and stood up. He was wearing only his shorts and a t-shirt. The other camper continued to softly breathe as the man, now cold, barefoot and shivering, walked a few paces away from the warmth of the fire.

He looked around and saw that they were at the edge of an open field. There were trees in the distance, but he wasn’t going to walk all the way over there. He just took a few more steps away from camp, enough for polite discretion, and hiked up one leg of his shorts.

He twisted his torso from side to side as he walked, stretching out the kinks in his lower back. His arms were crossed, held close his chest as he worked out the morning’s stiffness. He realizing then that he didn’t feel any of the normal aches that he’d grown used to in the morning.

There was no pain in his shoulders or his legs. He lifted his knee up and felt it with his hand, and then stretched out his toes in the wet grass. There was no knee pain, and his feet didn’t hurt him as he walked. To his own amazement, he felt good! There was none of the nagging, familiar pain he’d slowly been forced to become accustomed to as he’d grown older.

After shaking off the dew, the man turned back towards the camp and surveyed the scene around him. That’s when he saw another trial in the grass. Another camper had obviously walked out and then back to the camp, leaving a trail in the dew. He began to search the horizon for any sign of this other man, but he didn't see him.

As the glow of the rising sun illuminated more of the world around him, the man could finally appreciate the details of everything. There were tall mountains off to the west, with a light dusting of snow on the peaks. There were thickly wooded foothills flowing out from the base of those mountains, merging the woods into the wide grassy plain.

The camp he’d woken up in was on one end of that plain, with more rolling prairie stretching out into the east. There was a low rise and a rocky outcropping there near the camp where the plains seemed to end abruptly, only to go on endlessly then on the other side, rippling like the waves of the ocean.

He turned and looked back at that line of tall trees standing nearby. He thought they must have grown up following the undulating track of a creek or river that flowed down from the mountains. The water would give life to the thicker vegetation at the edge of the dry grassland. To the east, he looked up at the low rise that stood not too far from the camp. He thought it looked like a small granite dome, jutting up from the prairie and obscuring the rising sun.

On the far western end of the plain, near the mountains, there were dark forms slowly milling around. At first, it looked like a herd of cattle. He wiped his face and eyes, looked again and realized they were Buffalo. Part of a huge herd, they steadily grazed on the tall prairie grass at the base of the foothills.

Standing there, he looked back toward the low rise in the east, where the sun was just about to break over the scene before him, and thought about walking over there to meet the sun's warmth. That’s when he noticed the trail in the grass.

Leading away from the camp, pressed down by footsteps that disturbed the dew, the earlier riser had made a sign in the early morning that anyone could follow. The man looked up at the top of the low dome and finally saw a figure in the distance. There was a person standing on a rock up there. He could see the man standing there, looking down at him. And then he watched as the figure turned away and sat down on a rock, facing the rising sun.

“Where the hell am I,” he thought. “And who are these people? Maybe that guy’s got some answers?”

When he got back to camp he looked down by his sleeping bag and found his own hunting clothes in a pack by the fire. He dug in and found all his familiar gear. His old boots were there, with his socks tucked into them. He pulled a pair of pants out of the bag, immediately realizing an old pair he’d thrown away years earlier.

“Shit,” he thought, “I threw these away years ago when they were worn out.” As he stepped one leg in and then the other, pulling them up and buttoned them, he felt the old, familiar softness. They fit perfectly. That’s when he realized how skinny he was.

“What the hell,” He asked himself aloud, then glanced in a panic at the sleeper, looking to see if he'd stirred. He hadn't.

The man sat back down on his sleeping bag, grabbed a small towel out of his pack to wipe the dew off his feet, pulled the socks out of the boots and put them on. They were his old boots from Vietnam. One of the few souvenirs he’d managed to bring back from the war. He’d worn them on many hunting trips in his own beloved mountains, but not in years and years.

“What the hell is goin’ on,” he wondered.

He made sure not to make any noise. He didn’t want to wake the sleeper in the other bag. He could tell from the size of the bag that this guy was big. He figured that he’d talk to this other fellow on the hill and try to find out where he was and what was going on, and do it before this third guy woke up. Maybe these two were together in something. He knew he could handle one guy if he had to, but maybe not two.

As he stepped away from the camp he looked back once more at the figure by the fire. Still soundly sleeping, his head was tucked into the hood of his bag. Only his nose and mouth were visible. The man had a thick mustache under his nose, and his mouth was half open. He was steadily breathing, still deep in slumber. Smiling down at the sleeper, the man put on a long sleeved flannel shirt, turned towards the rising sun and started to quietly walk towards the figure on the rise.

As he got closer, the sun finally broke over the low hill, hitting him with its warmth. But it also blinded him, making it harder to see where he was going. He paused and tried to shield his eyes with his hand and then saw that the man on the rise had turned, glancing over one shoulder to see him coming.

He hesitated for a moment, seeing the man turn back away, but then continued up the hill. As he walked up, his eyes focusing, a warm feeling of recognition began to glow through him. As he came closer, the man on the rise turned around on the rock.

The man on the hill spoke first.

“How you feelin’ brother,” he asked.

"Shit, is that you,” The first man responded. He recognized the man on the hill, but there was something very different about him.

“Yep, it’s me. How you feelin’ this morning?”

"Man, where the hell are we,” the first man asked. “What’s goin’ on?"

His friend smiled, looked down and burst into giddy laughter. The first man smiled. The laughter was infectious. The man on the rise stood up, shifting a rifle from his lap to one hand, and then to the ground, leaning it on the rock.

The two took a few steps towards one another and embraced. The man's tall friend hugged him hard, and then began to squat down. He knew what was coming, but as usual, it happened too fast. Before he could protest he was up in the air, locked in a bear hug, being shaken around like a rag doll.

“Oh no, don’t do that,” he protested. But then he realized, for the first time, it didn’t hurt. There were no aches and pains. The tall man put him down and smiled, a tear welling in his eye.

“How do you feel brother?"

~TWO~

The first man held his friend by the arm as the two greeted one another.

“I feel fine,” he said. “But what the hell is goin’ on,” he asked.

His friend looked down, drew his palm across his mouth and looked the first man in the eye.

“Well, it’s simple,” he answered. “This is all a dream.”

“What,” the first man asked. “Who’s dreamin’?”

“Well, I thought I was, He said. “But now that you’re up, I guess you are too.”

“What? How the hell is that possible,” the first man asked. “I mean, I can feel the sun. I can smell the dew and the grass, the smoke from the fire. It’s all too real, but I’m not myself. It’s like I’ve lost... 20 years.”

His friend smiled. “Well shit, why would you wanna walk around and try to have all this fun and still be all stoved up and shit?”

“Hey, fuck you!”… The first man looked away with a smile and they both laughed. He gestured back towards the camp and asked, “Well, OK then. You think you know what’s goin’ on. Who the hell is that?"

As he lifted his arm to point and the two looked back towards the fire, they both heard a bellowing sound. The third man was standing, unzipped from his bag, clothed and looking up at them.

“What the FUCK… and where the fuck,” the third man shouted.

They saw him lean down to the wood pile by the fire, pick up a decent sized piece of wood, part of a thick, heavy tree branch, and began to march up the hill towards them.

“Oh shit,” the first man said.

His friend put a hand on his shoulder, as if to reassure him, turned and began to walk down to greet the third man.

“John, how do you feel bother?”

The first man thought to himself, "Oh, Big John.” The concern melted away and he began to smile.

The question stopped the third man in his tracks. He’d seen the figures on the hill, silhouetted by the rising sun, but he couldn’t make out who they were. Waking up out in the open air, in the cold, not knowing where he was, he wanted answers.

He thought he knew the voice, but it couldn’t be. As he got closer, he looked the two men over, first the one and then the other. He saw it in their eyes at first, and then the way they stood. A wide smile grew on his face as the recognition began to dawn on him.

"Well fuck me in the ass," He exclaimed, tossing away the tree limb.

The other two smiled and the tall man replied, "Uh, no. There'll be none of that bubba!"

With that, they all three broke into loud laughter.

Sam, the tall man who’d woken up first, stepped down to his friend John and punched him in the shoulder, shoving him back. Laughing then, he grabbed John by the arm and pulled him up into the group. The three men stood across from one another atop the rocky dome, almost circling, looking one another over.

By now, the morning sun had risen half way into the sky, fully illuminating the details of the prairie and the far away hills. Its warmth was a great comfort, but all three men were feeling even greater warmth, like meeting old friends again after long years apart.

“What the hell man,” John asked, looking the others over and smiling. “What the hell?”

Sam had been waiting with anticipation for this moment. His old friends, John and Henry had finally woken up, but now they wanted answers. They both looked up at him and asked the same question, almost simultaneously. "What the hell is going on?"

"Shit, I don’t know," he answered. "How the hell would I know? As far as I can tell, we must all be dreamin’ or somethin’."

"Huh?" John looked at Sam like he was crazy.

Sam sat back down on the rock, and the other two stood over him. He tried to explain what he knew, to the extent that he could understand it himself.

"Man I don’t know,” He said. “OK, I had this idea while Abigail and I were driving back home from seein’ Henry there in Nashville. You know, I'm a history geek, and you both know how I feel about you guys, so I'm always havin’ these kinds of thoughts. What if, etc., etc., etc."

"For instance, wouldn't it be cool if we'd all met in another time. Or wouldn’t it be cool if we could all go back to the frontier days, only with you guys younger. You know, have us all three get together and have some adventure when the two of you were younger and less friggin' feeble?"

"Hey, fuck you," Henry said again, smiling. "We've both worked HARD to get this broke down!"

"Yea! No shit," John said, and they all laughed.

“You know what I mean,” Sam said. It sucks that we all had to meet when we were all old. We could have had so much fun if we’d just been younger.”

The others looked at one another and smiled.

“Well,” Sam said, stretching his arms out wide, “…here we are. Maybe I dreamed it up. Maybe I wanted it so much, it’s finally happened.”

“Yea? OK,” Henry said, “but where are we?”

“Wait a minute,” John said to Henry. “You mean you’re buyin’ this?”

Sam smiled and looked his friend in the eyes. “Brother, who knows? But here we are.”

Henry smiled and reached out to take John by the shoulder, squeezing it.

“Feels real don’t it,” he asked.

“Shit,” John grimaced and twisted his shoulder away from Henry’s grip. “Don’t do that.”

“Mm, hmm,” Henry muttered. “How’s yer gout this mornin’?”

John looked at him, then down to his leg and back.

“Uh, yea,” he muttered.”I don’t seem to feel it.”

"And you're not tied up to that damn oxygen machine, are ya," Henry asked.

“And you’re what,” Sam asked, “…about fifteen years younger than you were a while ago, when you fell asleep back in your own bed?”

John looked back and forth between the other two, a grin spreading on his face.

“So,” Henry asked, “…are you buyin’ all this?”

~THREE~

These three men had known one another for only a few years, but in that time they'd become very close friends. They were all bloggers, and had met through the web, reading one another’s posts and emails and following one another’s lives. In time they’d arranged to meet in person, and the friendship that had begun out of anonymity only grew, until they all began to refer to one another as brothers.

Sam Milan was a school teacher who’d spent his childhood in a military family, being moved from one base to another, from one set of temporary friends to another. Because of that, he’d never really felt securely at home anywhere. He’d been through lots of bullying, being the new kid in one school after another. In time, he’d learned to keep his distance from other people.

Because of that, he’d always felt more comfortable with younger kids, and had learned early on to keep people his own age at arm’s length. So, as the people his own age began to move from adolescence to young adulthood, he stayed behind, safe in the comfort of his own solitude.

By the time he grew up, it was as if he’d somehow missed the stages of childhood socialization that prepared young people to get along with others and evolve into adults. To anyone who saw him, he seemed to be a big, confident, normal guy. But inside, much of the time, he still felt like a scared kid.

After years in school and building a life as a teacher, he’d developed an external, professional air of confidence. When he was teaching, standing in front of a class, he owned the room. But that confidence was only a thin shell that hid all of his old childhood uncertainties.

He’d never learned to get along with other people on a social level. When he wasn’t with his family or in class, he was alone, and assumed he always would be. One persistent fantasy he’d had for years was of walking out to the end of a logging road and spending the rest of his life in the wilderness. Something about that had fascinated him ever since childhood, when he’d seen his first movie about mountain men, and read a book about Daniel Boone.

He’d started blogging a few years before waking up that morning in the camp. Up late one night after work, as usual, surfing the net, he'd discovered his first blog by accident. From that one site, clicking on the avatars of other commenters, he'd discovered other bloggers who felt similarly about the world and whose posts were fun to read. Some of these people were younger than he was, and some were older. There was amazing humor there, and occasionally a profound observation. He kept up the reading for a week or so, saving the links to the best blogs to his Favorites.

In time he found the blogosphere to be an amazing world unto itself, with networks of friends who posted their opinions about the events of the world or their personal lives, and "Lurkers" who didn't blog, but surfed other people's blogs and commented from time to time. He spent a long time as a Lurker, posting long comments on a few blog posts, until one of the bloggers responded to his comments, telling him he should start his own site.

He hesitated, starting one briefly, only to erase it. He was hesitant to get more involved with these people, and to take on yet another chore in his busy life. He’d never really had much of a social life, or allowed himself to open up to anyone like this before. He really didn’t know any of these people, but somehow, the fact that they were at the other end of his computer wire took most of the fear out of the social contact.

When he finally started his blog and began to post things there about his life, he found that it was easy to talk with people who commented, who’d become his friends. The anonymity of the medium, the distance, allowed him to get past the defenses he’d learned to put up over the years. He wasn’t sitting across from the people he was talking to, looking into their eyes. That made it easier, somehow, to move through the walls he’d put up to protect himself. Pretty soon, those walls began to crumble. The safety of his loneliness was a crutch that he’d leaned on heavily in his life. Now, without him really realizing it, all of that was ending.

Pretty early on in the process he'd found Henry's blog. The two men hit it off fast. They were about 15 years apart in age, but they found they had similar views on life, religion and politics, and similar tastes in music and movies. Their friendship and intimacy grew over the space of a year to the point where they found they were posting for one another, to share things with one another, and they were disappointed if the other didn't quickly reply or post a comment. One thing that drew Sam to Henry's blog was the amazing life story he was slowly revealing.

Sam had always felt that he'd never really done anything in his life. He’d never taken any chances. He’d never really lived. It wasn’t true, but it was how he saw himself. Henry, on the other hand, had lived an amazing life, the details of which he was working his way though in the blog. He said he was putting it all down so that when he passed away, his family would have a record of everything he'd done, and whatever wisdom he'd realized about it all along the way.

Sam found himself drawn to the story, and to the wisdom. He’d always yearned for a big brother in his life, longing for someone he could trust who could teach him how to live and guide him to manhood. Through Henry’s stories, he finally began to feel that connection. He clicked over every day, reading and checking comments, looking forward to each new tidbit that Henry would reveal in the next post.

~FOUR~

Henry Maddux had grown up in the 1950s and early ‘60s in a small, rural town in Eastern Tennessee. The place and time he described in the blog sounded a lot like Mayberry to Sam, and the growing numbers of people who were reading and enjoying his stories. His early years seemed idyllic, with time spent playing sports, fishing and swimming in the local rivers and lakes, hunting and tracking in the local hills and wilderness, and chasing the local girls in school. After graduating from high school in 1965, he'd volunteered for the Army. He wanted to be a Ranger like his Uncle.

While Henry’s father was emotionally distant and usually gone, away working on different jobs to keep his family going, Henry’s uncle Paul, a big, burly man who'd fought in Europe in the Second World War, provided a fathers love and teaching to the little boy. Having no family of his own, he’d happily taken Henry on. He'd taught him everything he knew about tracking game and using a rifle, about driving a fast car, and about what it takes to be a man in the world.

He'd shown the boy around the hills, teaching him about the wilderness and the history of the area. He’d filled the boys head with stories of his adventures with the local women, with the local authorities, and his experiences in the war and combat. To the growing boy, mesmerized by the stories, Paul stood ten feet tall, and was probably bullet proof.

As Henry grew older, the two had spent more and more time at the Uncles hide out in the woods, were he and his partners kept a still. In time he'd shown Henry how to make good whiskey, how to drive fast around the curvy roads that distinguished his East Tennessee mountain home from any other part of the country, and how to outrun or evade the revenuers.

In the absence of his real father, Henry's uncle Paul had provided him with the love and example he seemed to need, filling the hole in the boy’s heart and providing him with a strong, solid foundation to grow from. By the time he got to high school, he was making runs now and then and getting a cut of the profits. He gave most of the money he made to his mother, but used some of it to take out a few of the local girls on the weekend, and to bet on the races at the local drag strip.

Driving his uncle’s old Ford fast around those mountain roads, he’d learned quickly about the joys of speed and a big, loud engine. The boxes in the trunk would always be loaded with jars of his uncle’s special brand of moonshine, and then covered with an old army blanket his uncle kept in the car.

On the weekends, a few of the local girls taught him a few other things in the back seat of that same car. I should say, they taught one another, shedding the awkwardness of youth in the heat and sweat of that back seat, or on that blanket, laid out by the cool waters of a local creek where the local teenagers would all go to park.

When he graduated from high school and the time came for him to leave home to go to boot camp, his father had been gone again. He’d landed a good, long term job with the TVA in another town, and he was too busy to be there. Instead, he’d given his wife a fist full of money for the boy. When she gave it to him the morning they got ready to go meet the train, he almost turned it down. Then, with her insisting and making excuses, he folded it and put it in his pocket. When that clear and crisp fall morning came, his mother, his younger brother and his uncle Paul waited with him at the station for the train.

His mother sat next to him and held his hand in her lap as they sat there, trying to be a dad and give him advise. She was almost overcome with worry about her boy. He was going off into a wider world for the first time. She asked him again, as she’d done a hundred times, was he sure he’d packed everything. Meanwhile, his uncle stood out by the tracks, staring off into the hills beyond the rails and the town, his back to the others.

Henry couldn't help but stare at the back of Paul’s head, wondering why the normally garrulous man was suddenly so distant. When the train came rolling into town they all got up and began to say their goodbyes. Henry walked up to his uncle and the two men stood apart, the others looking on. Henry’s uncle took him by the hand and gripped him tight. He thought he could see tears in those old blue eyes.

"Well Pawpaw, I guess it's time."

As a little boy, Henry had had trouble pronouncing his uncles name. It always came out "Paw", and eventually evolved into an affectionate nickname, "Pawpaw". In time, as he’d grown to see his uncle as more of a big brother, the two had grown close, calling one another by their first names. But this morning, as the emotion of the moment washed over him, something made Henry use the old sentimental name. He smiled up at the old man, holding back his own emotions. "You take care of Momma and Fred and I'll be back."

The old man looked him in the eye, deadly serious. Henry had not seen this kind of look on Paul’s face since he’d almost been caught by revenuers on a run about a year earlier.

"You keep to yourself, you hear? Don't ever let them sign you up to nothin'!" He was squeezing Henry's hand now, and gripping the boy’s shoulder with his other hand.

Paul had been standing there, looking out at the familiar hills, listening to his sister try to give advice to his young nephew. He quietly cursed his brother-in-law for not being there for the boy, and found himself wishing he could roll back the years. He knew that something precious was ending.

The wide eyed boy, full of love and adventure that he'd raised in those hills was going away, and he knew that boy would never come back. Oh, he figured Henry would be OK in the service. He was a smart kid, and he knew he'd taught him enough to keep him safe. But the happy, innocent boy they were sending away to the outside world would never come back. He knew what was out there, and cursed himself for telling all those stories over the years and making it all sound romantic.

He suddenly felt a shiver from the cold of that long ago winter day. He saw his best friend's head explode one more time in his mind’s eye, clinching his eyes tight and letting the tears roll down his face. Henry had never seen his Uncle like this. It frightened him a bit. Stepping a bit closer, he spoke quietly, trying to sooth the old man’s mind.

Standing there, Henry looked at the soiled coveralls, and he soaked up the smells of chewing tobacco, sweat and aftershave that he would always associated with this old man. Decades later, when one of those smells wafted by, he’d be taken right back to one fond moment or another… or to this moment.

"Hey, I'll be fine,” Henry said. His uncle looked away, staring back off into the hills. “Don't worry about me. I won't do nothin’ stupid,” he said. “Hell man, it's only four years. Not even that long, really. I'll be home on leave before you know it. Save a big batch of 'shine for me and I'll make another run when I get back."

Both men smiled and hugged tightly, and then Henry stepped up onto the train and made his way to the platform on the last car. As the train rolled out of the little station, Henry saw his family wave goodbye, and then watched as his uncle took his mother by the arm and lead her away, his little brother following.

As he watched his uncle and mother walk away he thought to himself that the two of them had never seemed quite so old before. His little brother hung back from the others, still waving and watching the train roll away. Henry stood on the back of the train, waving, until the train went around the bend at the edge of the valley and the little town finally disappeared out of sight. As it did, he finally lowered his head into his arm and cried.

*

Henry loved boot camp. The physical training and shooting were fun, and he was meeting all sorts of people from other parts of the country there. It was like he'd graduated to adulthood, and a wider world had been opened up for him. He was reveling in it. He adapted quickly to the stress of it all and dove into the school work, devouring it with a new excitement that high school had never held for him.

Early on in his training, Henry's Drill Instructors had seen something in him that the others seemed to lack. They really didn't have to get him into shape. The hills of home had done that. They didn't have to teach him how to shoot. His uncle Paul had done that. Furthermore, there was a seriousness in him that seemed to set him apart from the other kids, all 18 years old, most of them away from home for the first time and scared to death.

His demeanor, the way he acted towards the others, and mostly the quiet, observant confidence they saw in him, made them think that they might be able to do something special with this one. They decided in the end that Henry would be a perfect candidate for the Special Forces.

The Green Berets were an elite group, and still fairly new in 1965. Henry had heard about them when he was in high school, when thousands of them were being sent to a distant war in Asia to try to defend some little country from Communism. He read the brochure the Drill Instructor gave him and found that they sounded a lot like the Ranger outfit his Uncle had served in in World War Two. So, without much thinking, and without telling his Mother or Uncle, he agreed to go.

He flourished in the training there too, as he had in boot camp. There was a new excitement in everything he did. He was going to be part of something elite, that few other men would be able to share. About half way through it all his curriculum shifted to survival training. He loved it! It came easy to him and seemed natural. Creeping through the woods, hiding and tracking… it was like being back home, hunting in his own familiar hills.

On the one hand, he got a huge charge out of the fact that he was now a part of something elite. He also loved the fact that he wouldn't be dealing with the regular army. He wouldn’t have to depend on any of the other men he’d gone through basic training with. In time, he'd developed a general disdain for most of them. They seemed silly and immature to him, and he got the distinct impression that most of them saw him as a dumb hick.

Soft city boys, most of them, they didn’t seem to know anything about guns or the woods. He quickly developed a feeling that he didn’t want to ever have to depend on men like that for anything, but particularly for his own survival. In the Special Forces, it would be different. The men there were the best of the best.

These men didn’t judge him because of his accent, or because of his rural, southern background. They came from every part of the country, but they all shared a common toughness. The fact that he was there, making his way through the training, was enough for most of them. He and the men of his team would be brothers. They would depend on one another, out there against whatever or whoever they were put up against.

During the training, Henry found himself thrown into the same team with a young soldier from Louisiana named Luther Davis. Even though they came from different backgrounds, the two Southerners soon found that they got along with one another better than they had with any of the other men they had to deal with. In time, through the shared struggles and trials of their training, pulling for one another, the two developed a deep friendship.

Like a lot of young men in those days, Davis joined the army to get away from home. Like a lot of Southerners, He’d joined the military to find a way up and out, allowing him to extract himself from the destiny of Sharecropping, mining, or whatever dismal future life seemed to have in store for him. He’d found very quickly though that the problems of home had followed him into the military.

He’d excelled in the training just like Henry, but he’d faced significant issues with several of the other White men he'd been assigned to work with so far. It was the mid 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and the army, as usual, was full of men who freely displayed the prejudices they'd been brought up with, and used their power to try to keep men like Luther in their place.

But Henry was different. His uncle had raised him to understand that all men were the same under the skin, and that the things that really differentiated one man from another are internal, not external. His uncle had learned that on the battlefield in World War Two. Character and integrity were the things that mattered. Paul had taught him that a man was worthless if he couldn’t be depended on to be honest and decent in the mundane dramas of life. Before long, Henry and Luther were not only serving together, but they were rooming together. Their relationship grew closer and closer over time, and by the time they finished their training they’d formed a tight bond of brotherhood.

By then, the conflict in Southeast Asia was obviously on the agenda. About the same time Henry had left home for Boot Camp, President Johnson had escalated American involvement in the war by sending combat troops in to augment the work of the thousands of Special Forces troops who’d already been there fighting for years.

Ever since the mid 1950s, Army Special Forces troops and CIA agents had been training and leading the locals, trying to keep the country from being overrun. Now, Henry and Luther were going to be sent into those forested hills. They’d help train and work with the local hill tribes, trying to locate and eliminate enemy guerrillas who were engaged in operations against local officials and supplying the guerrilla effort through the Ho Chi Min Trail.

When they finished their training, Henry and Luther were assigned to something called the Studies and Observations Group, or SOG. It was an elite group of Army Special Forces, Air Force Air Commandos and Navy SEALs, who were always at the tip of the spear in Vietnam. He and Luther would be dropped into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, near the border with Laos. They’d spend the next year silently walking through the wilderness, scouting the activities of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Regulars along the trail, gathering intelligence and setting the enemy up for air strikes. They’d be accompanied by a group of Montagnard natives, who they would live with and train.

*

Reading about these experiences in the blog, about a life so different from his own, it sounded to Sam like Henry had lived through a fascinating, almost ideal time. The stories Henry told tripped all the flares in Sam's imagination. It made Henry seem ten feet tall. He was John Wayne, only real. Truthfully, the central appeal was the fact that Henry had displayed the courage that Sam felt he’d never displayed. He'd taken chances and reaped the benefits of those chances, which was something Sam felt he'd never had the courage to do.

But Henry knew different. There were lots of things he’d done and seen that he didn't reveal to anyone in the blog. As their friendship evolved though, Henry opened up to Sam, telling him about some of those things. That encouraged Sam to open up even more to Henry, and before he knew it he was telling this man some of the deepest, most hidden secrets of his life. The two men found in time that they'd formed a bond that went beyond friendship. Sam started calling Henry his "big brother", and Henry liked it.