I awoke last night from a terrible nightmare. I was surrounded by soldiers reclining in stretchers or standing around lethargically. They were former students returning from battle. (I don’t know how I knew that.) I tried to comfort them, but they rarely spoke, just stared right past me. They looked lost – just vacant faces staring into oblivion. I approached one former student who seemed to be more in control. He was walking from soldier to soldier and providing aid where he could. I said, “Thank goodness! You at least have a little light in your eyes. Are you okay?”
He merely responded, “I’m here, and that’s all I can say.”
I awoke!
I don’t know what prompted this nightmare, but I suspect it has to do with a discussion I had with a current student last week who is considering joining the marines as soon as he graduates because he thinks this would be better than enrolling in college immediately. My nephew’s impending tour in Afghanistan may also have generated the nightmare.
All I know is that I sat as a teacher in the midst of so many emotionally and physically injured former students, and I didn’t know how to help them.
Amid all of my experiences during my long decades in teaching, I have never had a former student who died in battle. I have many former students who have served in all branches of the military, some who have attended the service academies, and a few who have made careers of the military, but I have never had a student who died in combat.
I hope I never do.
As I crawled back in bed and tried to sleep again last night, I kept thinking of my teenage years. I was in high school during the final years of the Vietnam War. I remember having a young teacher who had avoided the draft because of a teacher deferment. Three or four weeks into the school year, however, he was called up to service and was replaced by a soldier who had just returned from Vietnam. The new teacher didn’t know much about teaching, and about all I can remember about him is that when he was happy with our work, he did a backward flip at the front of the classroom. In normal times my parents probably would have requested that school officials move me to a different teacher, but he was a Vietnam veteran, and people appreciated his service and understood that he might need time adapting to the “real world.”
Until last night, I had never thought about what high school teachers must have endured during the Vietnam War, or World Wars I & II as they watched their students graduate and go off to war. I cannot comprehend how they must have struggled to bear the loss of those who never returned.
Just a nightmare was enough to terrify me!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott
