Maybe that’s what it means. Strawberry fields. Little round red fruits, plump, pulpy, squashed, oozing thin red juices and small seeds. Maybe that’s what it means. Strawberry fields. A field, maybe a marsh, maybe a jungle. A landscape strewn with strawberries oozing red liquid, bodies strewn oozing red tissues. A speckled oasis of young bloody boys wrapped in camouflage to armor them against bullets. Young bloody boys armed with machine guns aiming through a haze of poisonous gas and grenade smoke. Boys wearing thick black boots to save their flat feet from infestation and rot from hours standing, squatting, laying, walking, running, beating in the marshes, in wet worlds. Men walking through fields of bloodied bodies, a precipice of friends, commanders, enemies, others. Strawberry field’s of Vietnam. The strawberry field’s of a war unforgiving, unforgotten, and accepted to be misunderstood.  

            Broken bloody boys returning home lay in their white linens, in their hospital gowns, side by side, a row of strawberries patched up and left gutted. Broken boys find their families, find their houses, their cars, their clothes, their beds that they used to sleep in and dream of becoming firemen, policemen, astronauts, rocket scientists. Broken men who sleep under their baby quilts, the familiar smell of boyhood filling their heads. 

            They dream about those strawberry fields. 

            Close your eyes now. But when you close your eyes you dream. You see those bloody strawberries littered, those bloody comrades, those bloody brothers, those strawberries of Vietnam. 

            They stare at you when you walk down the street. Maybe it’s your pajamas, maybe it’s those raggedy slippers, maybe it’s the fact that it’s four in the afternoon and they haven’t seen you for four years and you’re walking down the sidewalk in your pajamas. 

            Get up and put some clothes on. But the clothes aren’t yours anymore, the ones hanging in the closet, in the room, in the house. You dress yourself in camouflage, place your helmet atop your head, and halter your weapon. This is yours now. This is what you’ve been given in exchange for your sanity. Dear Uncle Sam, expenses paid, sanity – use of right ear, a kidney - two toes, two fingers, one soul sacrificed. 

            I close my eyes and see the fields. I see the marsh, the jungle, the field and those red strawberries. I feel cold steel on the roof of my mouth and I agree with it. This is mine. I feel my finger pull tight on the trigger, my heart races in excitement, I feel that I can be home again where nothing is ordinary and everything is strange, where your heart never stops racing, where your comrades are, where those strawberry fields are. 

            You feel your finger tighten and you feel the trigger click back. You don’t feel anything anymore, it is bliss.