The Moment by PFC S.W. Carbone
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Daddy at Camp Cooke
Out of it all---came this moment for the soldier. The moment that in a sense was silly and yet sublime. That made him want to giggle but also to expostulate, this delicately balanced instant between the birth of a hysterical giggle and a sober inclination to propound, to analyze. This split desire segment of time when he saw the world through two glasses, one cloudy white, opaque, the other clear and transparent.
The smoke seared shell that entered his body sizzled with a white heat and at the same time numbed him like a cube of ice. Dimly, the flickering emanations from his brain told him that the shell was the cause of this haywire, cockeyed state of being alive in death and dead in life. In the moment came the suspension of all thought processes, the crossroads of emotions, the frozen traffic of impulses and then...a blurring whirl of fact racing with fancy, fear struggling with courage, pain somersaulting with pleasure, reason doing handsprings with insanity. Ever faster spins the disc until every shade of feeling is as one. Life becomes solvent and the universe absorbs it.
At the precise ashen grey moment when the sands of life are being blown away in a fitful rearing dance, a mother looks at a picture of the soldier. She looks with a fearful intensity, trying to coax the printed image before her to step out of framed immobility. Her yearning has reached the last thin barrier between imagination and reality. It is a moment when the tears on her cheek glisten in ornamented sorrow, when desire gives way to aching pain.
The same moment descends the shaft of dust-laden sickly sunlight through the window of a little café. There is enough light to spare not one detail of untidiness: the long runs of brown on the sides of the coffee urns, the dull grease coated frying pans, the blotches on the wall where scores of flies have been swatted, the cheap, shabby show window with its fly-specked card indicating that ladies are welcome. The moment records the café owner and a customer, absorbs a single syllable of their heated griping over rationing, taxes, how to win the war. In its time-allotted span it also contains one sharp note from Begin the Beguine playing on the radio, one feeble hiss, more like a sigh, from the valve on the coffee urn, and the scraping of the customer's shoe as he tries to get in another lick.
As the moment alights on the three scenes, it sways in the wake of a million other varied ones. Then they are all submerged by the little higher wave of the next moment.
My father wrote that in 1942, and I just came upon his manuscript in my files, neatly typed and double-spaced on tissue-thin sheets of paper. What a fine writer he was! I believe this story was printed in the Camp Cooke Clarion and was turned into a theater piece and performed at the base, but this is its first appearance on the worldwide web, and I am honored to publish it. My father was a brilliant man, and I can only imagine what he might have achieved if he'd been given the chance to get a college education, pursue his interests, and explore possibilities. His dreams were displaced by the responsibilities and challenges of a hard life, but he could not have been a more loving and devoted father. I miss him every day.