Epic Moments: An Essay
© Special Guest: David Leeson
They are epic because they bring change either through the exhilaration of an accomplished goal or the exhaustion of those where we failed. In the end they may be both. Like it or not, they are there and we climb them simply because they unavoidably loom before us.
But what happens when those epic moments transcend all convention of what most of us call normalcy? What if they rise before us in such regularity that we no longer ponder the moments at the top because our eyes are already focused on the trail to the next? This was my life once.
Those moments occurred in such rapidity that they blurred into a haze of zooms and pans until the distinction between truth and fiction was relegated to the sound of a shutter. I reasoned that if it could be photographed, then it must be real. I remember those days almost as though they were one. But, not all of them were found in foreign wars.
I remember the horror of seeing my first shooting victim on a hillside near Abilene, Texas. It was late and the air was cool. The only sound I remember was the flick, flick, flick of a squad car's flashing lights lighting the scene like macabre theater. A sheriff's deputy leaned over the body and held his flashlight to one side of the victim's distorted face, eyes still open and fixed in that indescribable gaze of the dead. "Looky here," he said with a slight chuckle, "The bullet went clean through." As he said it, the flashlight pressed tightly to the left of the man's temple shone through to the deputy's hand held on the right temple.
Another time came when I was in Angola and looked upon the shattered body of a man in tattered clothes. There was no way of knowing why he had died but his last moments were clearly visible through his posture, that terrible look in his eyes, and the way his hand, frozen in front of his face, revealed the bullet which had ended it all leaving him scattered across the sand in beads of blood and bone. I stood there for a long time, transfixed by his fearful end.
The epic met me on the road to Basra on the outskirts of Kuwait City in the days following the country's liberation from a tyrannical invading force. Each time I encountered these things I wondered anew why I had not been prepared; a true sign of insanity to repeat the same action expecting different results. The body of an Iraqi soldier was curled fetus-like upon his knees, his skin frozen like ice, though scorched and burned. Others were scattered in twisted shapes but I barely noticed as the scene slowly faded and my feet were on the trail again.
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