Democracy In Albany

By WILLIAM P. O'CONNOR

When I was nineteen I was stationed in a remote Laotian village on the Mekong River. I was an Irish kid from the Bronx, over twelve thousand miles from home. It had been a twenty-two hour plane ride to get, "in country" and another four excruciating hours strapped to a cloth harness in the perimeter of a cargo plane to get to Nakhon Phenom, a town  Bob Hope called, "the armpit of the world." My first day in town seems surreal now. I remember walking up a dirt road and gaping at a yak being prodded by a toothless woman in a sarong.

Sadly, I remember even more clearly the nausea in my own well-fed stomach, as I turned a corner and was confronted with throngs of swollen bellies huddled on the side of the road. Attached to the swollen bellies were revoltingly emaciated bodies with twig like arms extended for food. The voices belonging to the bellies wanted money: money to buy food, money to make the pain of hunger go away.

I had some money, not enough for their needs, not all of them. "Do I give all I have?" I thought, "How else could I claim to be human?  But what about tomorrow? There won't be any fewer of them tomorrow." I was only nineteen and I had no idea when I signed my enlistment paper a year earlier that this dusty dirt trail in a remote village I had never heard of was where I was destined to have a head-on collision with my humanity. A boy should not have to make a decision like this. I loved my country in a way maybe only an immigrant can. I felt I owed it everything and when my country led me to believe I was needed to stop communist aggression, I was happy to settle my debt.  ...