Box with no sides 9-12-08

Box with no sides 9-12-08
Peter Macdonald 465 Packersfalls rd Lee NH 03824 603-659-6217
I have lived my entire life in a Box with no sides. How can that be? Waking up in a military hospital with no memory at all of whom I am or where I came from the mind allows you certain avenues. When a person has no reference to memory to explain how to react or understand what is going on, you go somewhere that it is safe. The safety of a box with no sides is so enormous yet the security can be so contained. Living 31 months over seas (after I woke in the hospital) during my Marine Corps tour allowed my mind to grow. Simple lessons as to what a nine sixteen wrench was, or always knowing everything there is about my M-16, or take orders and follow them no matter what, the list just grows because you are in a controlled environment. Your men’s life always comes after the mission, things are exploding, jets are coming at you doing over six hundred knots and stopping with in fifteen feet of you, life seems to complicated. Riding on a convoy as the only person that spoke English, deep into the bush delivering surplus supplies to friendly camps. Seeing and living in sub-human conditions that you believe is normal across the world. The pain from my first combat related injury that you have to ignore because you learned that Marine’s don’t feel pain. Feeling great because you are finely a Marine because you killed the enemy in hand to hand combat. Living through a sniper attack while TAD. Becoming a Sergeant and ordering men to situations you knew that they would not come back with no feelings or compassion. You are blown off a runway during another Vietnam offensive breaking your back but you continue the mission leading your men until complete. You can do all this because nothing is real. The Box protects you.
I had studied and learned through the mail as much as I could about school and the United States. I was excited when my tour ended and I stepped off the plane at SF airport only to have a girl spit on me and call me a baby killer. Reading bill boards in English and seeing “round eyed girls” became my fascination. Meeting a family (my family) that I had never seen before, whom welcomed me to a land that was strange. Soon I was deemed a social out cast and became isolated and with drawn. A friend that said we went to high school together just got out of the Air Force a few years earlier. He identified my difficulty in adjusting back here in the “world” and gave me a room to live in. He got me in college and helped me learn how to live in a civilized society. I had a hearing disability, a memory problem and broken back so life had it’s obstacles. Two years after discharge I am declared a disabled Veteran. The VA pumps me full of medicine, my guilt for coming back alive grows. I am in a land that I do not belong. Is this real or is the box with no sides to tight. I learned helping others when not on a mission during my tour was a way to adjust and learn. I started volunteering every day to help others. I started getting involved in our government and continued school. I learned about the Constitution, while trying to learn how other people remember things so well.
I volunteer to help people (any person) and the NH government persecutes me. The VA stops my medical and the newspapers keep my experiences a secret from the public.
Has the Box with no sides been a coffin that I had no memory to reference from? Is the box so tight that it is telling me that I never really woke up in that military hospital?
Peter Macdonald Sgt USMC Semper Fi