The Helmet and Sudden Victims

The Helmet from the Sudden Victims collection... you never see brains in a helmet in a John Wayne movie.

The Helmet had a green side or a brown side depending on terrain. Order from Amazon.com

(GUIFORD, IN) - 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.

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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