The Helmet From Sudden Victims

The helmet had a brown side and a green side cover, depending on terrain.

The Helmet, a brief story from my collection Sudden Victims, is part of an unfinished novel, The Holey Grail, about my fictional character Maxwell Monk, his Vietnam War experience and PTSD. I may never finish the novel. I work on it when I get the urge, but that part of my past is hard to deal with at times. Maxwell's father wanted to name him Chip, but his mother wouldn't go along with such cruelty. That part is fiction, but because the novel involves my family history, I have been reluctant to probe the real truth behind the story.

The Helmet is based on a true incident from the day I arrived in Vietnam. Due to neglect or lack of checking equipment, the Marine passing out gear handed me a helmet with a small entry hole on one side and large blowout hole on the other side. When I turned it over, the helmet had splattered brains and blood in it from a through and through gunshot wound.  The Marine who wore that helmet could not have survived such a wound. If I had put it on my head without looking, I would have probably gone nuts right there. As it turned out, that first view of brain matter let me know that I was not immortal and in the scheme of things I was expendable and no one but my family would care that I had even existed.

So the story about the helmet does fit the theme of Sudden Victims because at that moment I did become a victim of war and the horror that would come to pass. This was just a first taste of the terror such slaughter inflicts on young warriors back in the day of the old Marine Corps.

Sudden Victims (Kindle and Paperback)