Wordless by Robert McGowan

The Author reads his own short story.This story features in the printed version of the March 2008 issue of Skive Magazine.www[dot]skivemagazine dot]com---Light griefs are loquacious,but the great are dumb.—SenecaDavid Abel, when he came back from the Nam, came back mute. He never afterward spoke a word to anyone. Not because he'd made a decision not to talk, but because within a few weeks of his return to civilian life he became suddenly and involuntarily unable to.The essential facts are recorded in a succinct and passionless few words in his medical records. Having become voiceless, he'd written out in longhand for his psychiatrist an account of the incident. For his civilian psychiatrist, it's important to note; David wouldn't reveal the matter to anyone in the Army, not even later to the docs at the Veterans Administration.What happened was this: one day on the way back to his Mekong Delta base camp from an errand to Saigon, riding along a dusty road in a jeep driven by another soldier, their having been slowed nearly to a stop by pedestrian congestion on the outskirts of the little village of My Tho, they were shot at from somewhere beyond the crowd. In the resulting panic, a child, for who knows what reason, ran out toward the jeep, followed by a young woman running frantically after him. David mistook the girl's charging after the boy for part of the ambush and instinctively pulled his .45 from its holster and fired a single bullet into the girl's heart, killing her instantly. It's recorded that David feared she had an explosive hidden in her hat, a traditional conical nón lá, which she carried at her waist, and which was not uncommonly used in this way by the Viet Cong in suicide attacks against Americans, the invaders. In the very instant the girl dropped to the ground, the same instant in which David saw she'd been hiding nothing whatever, the jeep driver jerked the vehicle to attention and sped them headlong away from the commotion, running off into the roadside ditch to bypass a flock of rattled people, and kicking up so much yellow dust that no-one could for several long moments have seen anything around them. David and the driver made no report of either the attack on their jeep or David's killing of the girl, and unaccountably the Vietnamese in My Tho made no report either, so that the US Army never learned the incident occurred.David, never very resilient anyway, even before the Nam, had throughout the remaining two or three months of his Vietnam tour rigorously suppressed his anxiety and remorse about the event, but on return home his emotion came forward and rendered him silent. Wordless. As by some self-inflicted punishment for his lethal misjudgment in My Tho. Psychogenic aphonia was the diagnosis one of his doctors made, others settling on variants of that disorder or related ones. They anyway in time assessed his condition as chronic, unlikely in the foreseeable future to respond to treatment. None of them had been able to elicit a single vocal syllable out of David despite his eager cooperation with their efforts and his wish they'd succeed. His conscious wish, that is, his outward wish; his doctors would have postulated the presence in his murky psyche of some concealed yet overruling component that implacably refused to permit him speech no matter how earnestly the rest of his brain desired to have it ...Read the rest of this story by buying the March 2008 issue of Skive Magazine.www[dot]skivemagazine[dot]com

Channel: Entertainment
Uploaded: November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am
Author: dabble778

Length: 09:46
Rating: 4.33
Views: 704

Tags: arts  film  Magazine  Matthew  McGowan  performing  Robert  short  Skive  spoken  Ward  word  

Video Comments