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Three Day Pass

James Ross Kelly

    What was for Lionel Hightower, the bonus part of his Northern California duty station, was that it was only seven hours on the freeway from his home. Home in 1970—a grounded splatter of familiar oppression, home with everyone from his high school now locked into a job at the plywood mill and kids and mortgage payments, the girlfriend he left when he entered the Army, having married the son of the man who built Disney World in Florida—not too long after the dear John letter, he received the explained change of heart in sorrowing detail.
    “I wish you well in your Army career,” she had written.
    His parents and a ten-year younger sibling were a seven-hour drive to visit. But generally, instead of seeing them, he several times ended up drinking with his friend, Monroe Sykes, from High School. Three times that year, Sykes tried to get him to take LSD. Twice he’d declined.
    “Yeah why not,” Lionel said the third time.
    Shortly, Lionel found himself in a grove of tall Douglas Firs. An hour later the continuum of the universe as a part of himself changed how he looked at everything for a drug-induced lapse in mundane time. There was something we were all connected to. He was home, home in the physical sense, having been around the world and culture-shocked several times. He was home in the Oregon that had sent him out like some ancient Greek to find himself at war—or whatever he was supposed to be doing. He hadn’t thought about what he was supposed to be doing up until that time. Lionel saw that he had stopped thinking about it for too long of a time. A mile from where he sat was a railway that hauled logs out of the small town twenty miles away through the little farm-town he went to high school in. He hunted deer a mile from this spot. There was wind blowing through the canopy of these Douglas Fir, whistling in a harmonic unison and he believed he saw the stars start to falter, then felt them hit the ground and move and sway and there was a oneness that was all else. He was experienced—just like Jimi Hendrix.
    The LSD having dissipated, he drove back to his California base, a long quiet ride down I-5 and a cut-off at Willows, and down into Santa Rosa and on 101 to Petaluma and then out toward Dillon Beach and his duty station. He found his company clerk and asked for the 1049 form that was a request to be transferred to the Republic of Vietnam. He assured Lionel he was getting it in, at the right time, as he’d requested this each year and had been denied each time, but now he would go probably in late November, the Company Clerk had said. Lionel took the form that he’d filled out neatly in Government Issue ball point pen and tore it up. They’d had their chance to send him over there. The little piece of paper on Monroe’s hand had changed everything. Lionel would be out of the Army in six months. He was experienced—just like Jimi Hendrix. But Jimi Hendrix was dead.

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