Snapshot

Were the colors faded back then?

I'm looking at the photograph. It's a Polaroid taken in a bar. He's standing there in his olive drab, with two of his best friends. They're all raising their glasses, amber liquid dark against the shine of the mugs. The mirror behind them is mostly lost to the camera's flash, but two small Asian women can be seen leaning into the shot. One is wearing what looks like a maroon tube top, the other is in a seafoam green dress. Both are fit, almost pretty. Certainly, by the standards of soldiers, they're pretty enough.

I know that this was taken sometime in the seventies. After these men, smiling, toasting, relaxing, had seen their fill of jungles and hell.

"Honolulu," is written in smudged sharpie, long-since gone from black to brown.

No names are listed, or dates. But I know which one is my father. I know which one is his best friend, Spence. Even without seeing the name embroidered above the pockets of their uniform shirts, I'd recognize them anywhere.

What I recognize even more, though, are their eyes. The faraway look that denies the smile. The lies they tell themselves that everything will be fine. They put Saigon in the rearview, and it's all good if they can just make it through these last couple of hitches to hit the magic twenty year goal.

The truth is, they're still staring at 1968, when there was no rank on those collars. Shadows of days when the only important job was to survive loom even in the flash of a Polaroid. All they wanted to do was make it home.

But the better parts of them stayed.

The browns and greens, the flesh of those men and women in the photograph, the mahogany of the bar top--it's all colorized-going-sepia.

Like so much memory.

The colors don't really fade.

We do.