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Sara OhlinDISAPPEARING SENSESYears ago in the first quiet of a winter morning, before the house awakens to warmth from the fireplace and movement of its inhabitants, my sister, brother and I sit at the top of the staircase in our fleece pajamas and fuzzy animal slippers. “Is it time yet?” my brother asks. “We have to wait for dad to get up,” I say. "Comanche 2, we need your help... Receiving fire!" We snuggle next to each other and wait. My mom, up before all of us, has put the sweet crescent rolls in the oven and the delicious hint of sugar and cinnamon reaches my nose. We peak outside from the upstairs windows and watch the puffy white snowflakes blanket the neighborhood. Enough snow to silence the entire world into peace, I believe.We giggle with anticipation and try to guess what presents await us under the spruce tree. Secret presents, praying for snow, and the glorious anticipation of waiting while our bodies warmed and the scent of cinnamon sweet-rolls sidled up the stairs and teased our noses. I see them now, the Christmas traditions of my childhood, sealed up in the glass snowball one shakes upside down to set the flakes in motion. With each new Christmas that approaches, those traditions get buried deeper in the rooms of memory I begin to doubt. One Christmas a few years ago I returned to Ohio to visit my family. Christmas Eve we sat eating dinner together. My dad looked worn down and tired. I focused on my steak, not wanting to see loneliness, and loss smudged into his hollow eyes. “Hey,” he said as dinner ended. “I have a story I want to tell you.” Worn down and tired, I thought, but still telling those stories. I sat on one of the matching loveseats across from my brother and mom. My dad sat next to me. Without even realizing it, I began my tune-out. I looked around the room. A huge stark wreath, made of dried baby’s breath branches, hung on the wall. Photos decorated pine coffee tables and shelves. Everything seemed colored in shades of nothing, barren.  “It was one of the craziest days in the war,” my dad barreled into the scene. “I was the Air Mission Commander, the link between the Scouts and the Cobra gun ships. His face took on a glazed look.“Over our radios we heard this call for help from Damage 5-1 Alpha. I answered, ‘Damage 5-1 Alpha, this is Comanche 2, over.’ ‘Comanche 2,’ he yelled, ‘we need your help…Receiving fire from three directions!’ ‘Damage 5-1, we see the tracer fire. We’ll see what we can do.’” My father spoke this dialogue between himself and another man as if auditioning for a masterpiece. “I ordered my gun ships to make several passes, but it was really dangerous. Each time my men got close they received fire too.” A dull ache from my cold feet ground its way into my body. A pain that was dense and almost numb at the same time. Just like the numb I had built around my body over the years. “We refueled twice that day. It was the longest day of my life,” my dad continued. “One time the fuel guys threw sandwiches in through the window of the cockpit.” I heard my father’s words one by one. I tried to process the story, but it did not reach into my bloodstream; nothing was clear. Men, frantic and yelling above the roar of the helicopter walked into my imagination. The sound of gunshots in every direction left a muffled echo in my head. Like the static of a needle on a record with no songs. “Finally it got too dangerous so I said, ‘Damage 5-1, enemy fire is trailing our choppers, and we’re losing daylight fast. We have to leave you’ ‘Please don’t!’ “We’d been flying for over eleven hours in such an intense situation and we knew the outcome would be horrible. But we had no choice. It was awful.” I drank my tea to warm me, but I can’t remember the flavor and the heat did not reach my feet. My body stayed chilled. My father kept talking. “A month later I was in Long Binh eating dinner with a visiting officer. He told me about this intense situation he’d recently been in, how he didn’t think he or his men were going to make it out alive. They were on the ground; fire came at them from everywhere, even the army choppers had to pull away. Amazingly, the Air Force jets came in, tore up the place and got them all out. “I said back to him, ‘Jesus, we had this crazy situation very similar to that down around Cai Lay a few weeks ago.’ “The officer got this shocked look on his face, then said, ‘Oh my God! You’re Commanche 2! You saved our butts; I’m Damage 5-1 Alpha. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here!’ My dad slammed his hand down on the arm of the couch and laughed in excitement. “Oh I couldn’t believe it!” he said, “Damage 5-1 was alive.” A happy ending, I thought. For a moment I wished I had listened more closely, to all the nuances that really make a great story. Tracer fire shooting back and forth, the smell of sweat and fear, the haunting panic in a man’s voice over the wires. But I was trying so hard not to travel backwards. I no longer looked forward to my father’s stories. Anymore I didn’t even know why. Was it that he was always re-living instead of just living in the present without regrets and ghosts trailing him everywhere like automatic weapons fire through the dark of night? There is not one scent, not one odor or tiny whiff of anything I can connect to that Christmas. I rubbed my feet, the cold pain made stronger by my damp skin It was a dense, throbbing ache; it hurt to touch them, but I rubbed them none-the-less, purposely feeling that unyielding pain, because all my other senses were disappearing and I needed desperately to hold onto something. Two days later my dad and I sat at the airport waiting for my flight. After a few moments of familiar, uncomfortable silence my dad said, “Hey, I should tell you this story about Damage 5-1 Alpha.” I looked at him in awe and wondered, can you hear yourself? Don’t you remember telling this the other night? I looked out the enormous airport windows towards the glaring gray monotonous winter sky of Ohio nothingness. “Do you know?” I wanted to ask my father, “Do you know your senses are disappearing?” Sara Ohlin lives and works in Everett, Washington. Her work has appeared in ImageUpdate, an online companion to Image, A Journal of The Arts and Religion; Full Circle, A Journal of Poetry and Prose and Anderbo.com. She is on the review board for Trillium Literary Journal and she has recently completed a memoir about growing up listening to the stories her father told from his experiences as a Vietnam helicopter pilot. Photo: Vietnam, ca. 1965. Helicopter and soldier approaching target. Viet Nam Photo Service. NARA via pingnews. 10:48 PM - 22/6/2007 - post comment
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