Shattered Image by J.F. Margos Read Free Book Online Page A

me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry…”
    They were very dry—a symbol for those long dead.
    The prophet continues, “Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.. and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army…behold they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts…Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves…and shall put my spirit in you and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land…”
    Place you in your own land…
    The dead lie on the jungle floor for thirty years or more and what’s left by the time they are discovered and brought home is a pretty disheartening sight. The recovery teams mark off the supposed “burial” sites like archaeological digs. They trowel slowly and carefully within the dig and “exhume” each and every little piece of anything that looks as if it might have belonged to a human or one’s body. They tag everything, bag everything and ultimately bring it back to American soil. They bring it all back to the U.S. Army CILHI labs at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii. There, forensic anthropologists, forensic odontologists, DNA lab technicians and, sometimes, forensic artists come together to help identify the remains of the missing. We are all the new undertakers of the post-Vietnam era. You don’t need a real undertaker just to put “rocks” in a box. Sadly, that’s what most of the remains look like.
    That was what was eating at me now—rocks in a box. Now they might be someone I knew. It’s one thing to put your hands on the skull and bones of a stranger and try to ID them and bring them some level of peace, and their families some level of closure, but it is something else altogether to contemplate placing your hands on a skull that may have housed the thinking brain of a friend—a skull that held his eyes, ears, mouth and the nose through which he breathed the breath of life itself.
    Teddy Nikolaides used to tilt his head back and laugh out loud with absolute joy. Did the skull I would cast in Hawaii once reverberate with that laughter? The burden of determining that answer now lay solely with me. If I determined the remains belonged to someone else, it would be a huge blow to me and to Teddy’s family. If I determined theremains belonged to Teddy, we would all have to deal with the reality of his death. Since that fateful day in Vietnam, his death had not been confirmed in any tangible way. There had been no real closure. He just flew off one day and never came back. I sighed and polished off the rest of the root beer that was in the bottom of my mug. I had another frosted mug in the freezer and it was time for a third.
     
    It was early morning, when I was startled awake by the word “Mom!”
    I looked up to see the sun filtering through the lowhanging branches of my backyard. Initially, I couldn’t remember where I was or what I was doing there. The first thing I realized was that my feet were cold. Then I realized there was a tall, strawberry-blond man standing over me, but I couldn’t see his face due to all the backlighting from the sun. He was wearing a gun in a holster that hung on his belt and the sunlight glinted off of a gold detective’s badge. I recognized my son’s voice, and then I remembered where I was and what I was doing there.
    “I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to get the smelling salts.”
    I shielded my eyes with my hands and squinted so I could see his face.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I thought maybe you had some kind of spell.”
    “Don’t be smart. I just fell asleep.”
    “Well,