Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell Read Free Book Online Page A

I’d also done prints of each photograph.
    Private Hollister picked up a card from the top of the deck. “Your pictures looked pretty good to me. Or TJ’s pictures, I guess I should say. I bet hell like them a lot. Did your folks like ’em?”
    â€œYeah, I guess. I mean, my mom hung two of them on the refrigerator, so I guess she liked them. This new batch looks pretty interesting, from what I can tell,” I said, discarding and picking up a card from the deck. “It’s hard to tell exactly what you’re looking at when you’re looking at a negative. Definitely people, but I think there might be some of helicopters this time.”
    We played five hands of gin, with Private Hollister coming out on top, three hands to two.
    â€œI guess I’ll go print those pictures now,” I said. “The negatives ought to be dry. I hope there’s some good stuff. Like maybe a combat picture orsomething. Maybe some North Vietnamese prisoners of war. Sgt. Byrd taught me some Vietnam talk when we worked on the last roll of film. Like an ambulance is called a cracker box and you call the enemy Charlie or Mr. Charles.”
    â€œYou know, Jamie, there’s something—” Private Hollister started, stopped, coughed. “There’s just this one thing you ought—” He stopped again. “Forget it. It ain’t important.”
    â€œAre you sure?” I asked him, itching to get to that film.
    Private Hollister nodded. “Nothing that can’t wait till later.”
    I made contact sheets of both rolls of film. Last time I’d printed all the pictures, but this time I decided to be more picky. Once I’d developed the contact sheets, I sat down at a table in the darkroom with a magnifying glass to go over each picture and see which ones were worth taking the time to print. As I’d thought, there were plenty of pictures of people, lots of soldiers—holding beer cans or sleeping or lying on cots reading magazines. There was a trio of pretty nurses, and thedog he’d taken a picture of before showed up again, this time with a bandanna tied around its neck.
    I was starting to get bored. Since I didn’t know any of the people, their pictures didn’t mean anything to me. But then an image caught my eye. Three medics were carrying a wounded GI on a stretcher toward a helicopter. In the foreground was another soldier, only he was looking away from the helicopter, like he didn’t want to see what was going on all around him. The wounded soldier had bandages wrapped around his chest, and there was blood seeping through them.
    That was the picture I wanted to print.
    It’s a funny thing, printing a photograph, because when you’re in the process of doing it, you’re paying attention to the tiniest things, like the fingers on a hand, trying to get them to show up in sharp detail, or bringing out the shadow falling across somebody’s face. Each little piece of the picture is like part of a puzzle, and the more defined you make everything, the more your picture tells a story.
    For some reason, I got all involved in bringingout the details on the soldier’s face, the one who was looking away. He was probably headed back to get someone else, but the way the camera caught him, it seemed like he couldn’t bear to look at the man the medics were carrying to the helicopter. Maybe because his was the only face I could really see, I kept wanting to look at it, kept wondering what he was thinking about.
    And then my eyes drifted up to the wounded soldier. There was a lot of blood coming through the bandages wrapped around his chest. Did TJ know whether or not he made it to the hospital alive? Was he alive now? Back in the States? Or back in a combat zone?
    I spent an hour printing the picture, trying it again and again until I felt I had it right. I brought it out to show Private Hollister. “Isn’t this amazing?” I asked