“Fireworks on the Fourth”

by Milt Mays

Another damn Fourth in Colorado, like it means anything to me or most of the good old USA. Just another three-day weekend to get wasted.

Only you can’t even drink one, now can you, Doctor? Heal thyself. Yeah.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get drunk? For over a year, alcohol has made me sick. Probably cirrhosis or cancer of the stomach. Would be about right. Work my ass off for forty-one years, and now I’m a short timer—retire as a doctor in twenty-nine days and a wake-up. That’s how we said it at Mother B in Annapolis as a plebe screaming out Chow Call at the end of the hall. Only we always ended it with Sir. “Twenty-nine days and a wake-up, Sir.” I wonder if the plebes still do that with all their A/C, flat screen TVs, computers, Facebook, Twitter. Maybe they just text Chow Call. No pressure to memorize the menu, the movies in the Yard, how many days until graduation, how many minutes until formation.

No. I knew better. Some traditions count. Firsties still enjoy the power over plebes, and still count every day until graduation. That magic moment when all the work, the abuse, tears, parties, all of it paid off. Hats in the air, a blooming in your chest. My traditional wedding in the Academy chapel, flanked by the incredible stained-glass windows that told the story of the Navy and of Christ. Do I believe in either now? I want to.

I did love the USA. Loved it too much, I guess. A place of ideals, where dreams of justice and truth and hope came true. It used to be my favorite country. After medical school, I spent a lifetime helping those who believed like I did. Now it feels … gone.

At work, one prior Navy nurse says, “You’re so short you’re sitting on a dime.” The genius appointment clerk says he can’t see me anymore, I’m merely a few atoms. An astrophysicist at work in a VA clinic. He’ll soon discover the first exoplanet with life, be famous, and I’ll be going to chemo for gut cancer.

I’ve known colleagues who died before retiring. One got pancreatic cancer in his thirties and died a few months later, leaving a wife and two kids behind. Lucky guy. Didn’t see managed care, HMOs, or the VA go to hell, and take doctors with it.

My best friend in med school, greatest guy you ever wanted to know, practiced medicine the way I always wanted to: in a small town—saving lives, knowing his patients as friends—forced to quit medicine in his fifties—early onset Alzheimer’s. Died at fifty-five. Didn’t even know his son or daughter.

My VA doctor made it; worked past retirement age and then got prostatic cancer. He was contemplating travel and being with his nine grandkids and…. Now it’s surgery, rads, chemo and bible work. Even I would get religion at the end. Unless it came fast.

That’s what doctors are supposed to do, right? Dedicate themselves to helping people until they fall over with a heart attack. I thought that once.

Managed care, HMOs, the VA—they kill doctors. Slow. Like cancer.

Maybe I’ll go fishing in the Bighorn River in January, walk in without waders, seize up and float downstream. I’ll have to do it in the lower section so no one will find me for months, except maybe a coyote or black bear after the trout and eagles have their way. That would be fine. More than fine. I could finally get back to nature forever.

But I’m still above ground and have to deal with the damn Fourth. Joy.

It wasn’t really the thought of cancer that made me feel so much joy for life. It wasn’t the way medicine had turned down a road to the Twilight Zone. Our country was dying of a cancer we had brought on, and I could not change it.

I’d started thinking about this Fourth a few days ago when seeing patients. They are probably the reason I’m not already fish food. They give me purpose. And talking to them brought back a history of belonging to something that mattered. If ever someone needed help reentering this stupid world from a world that made sense, it was them.

There was a time I thought war made no sense. But coming back from war and having the people you defended spit on you? We don’t do that anymore, though. We now say to vets, “Thank you for your service.”

Better than “baby killer.” But I’ve heard “Thank you for your service” so many times it feels like blowing smoke up …. It’s not just me. Other vets, even though they appreciate a nice word, that phrase seems mere placation. Like, “Hey we don’t call you baby killers anymore, so we’re good.”

Yet some of the veterans killed people, sometimes kids, women, so that service seems … not exactly what they had in mind. But even though that plagues them, that wasn’t the worst. It was coming back to isolation. They no longer belonged. They couldn’t reach out and touch their brothers in arms and know they were safe. They were alone in a sea of loners who said, “Thank you for your service,” smiled and walked away.

So maybe just don’t say, “Thank you for your service.” Make sure we actually do something for them, too. Don’t walk away. Do something solid to make them feel they belong again. A job would give them a purpose to live in a world that has no place for them after they’d had a definite purpose and goal each day for years. And others that believed in that purpose. In war. They “fit in” with their buddies, watching their back, knowing their buddy would watch theirs. In war. It’s up to us to change their belonging to the military and war, to belonging to us and peace.

Ideally, they’d thought about defending Freedom long and hard before volunteering to save our asses from those behind the Iron Curtain, or the guys who pervert the word of Allah to kill infidels. Or the next bully who wants to take away Freedom. Because there will always be another war.

I was once optimistic that war would one day end. Like those tra-la-la candidates for Miss USA—“What is your goal in life?” said Bob Barker. “Oh, world peace. Definitely,” said the lady in the revealing bikini, her white-bright teeth even and straight, sparkling in all the glory of a one-percentile lifestyle in the most powerful nation since the Roman Empire. Then Bob’s next question, “What would you say to our veterans out there?” Yeah.

No, the only way to help those who defend us is to give them a purpose to live and contribute to the USA in a different, but just as important way. More important for them. Make them a part of the group again. Take their mind off what they’ve done. How can I say this? I’ve seen too many that are only left with a VA pension after making disability a career, taught by their senior veteran advisors from another war who figured out the only way they could make it back into some sort of monetary reality after serving in Vietnam. “You gotta keep hounding the VA, man. Just keep it up and you will eventually get that 100%.”

What do you expect, if they can’t get a job and all they have is the pension?

Too many because even a few is too many.

You still reading? Okay. Try this on.

I feel a little sleazy after I see one of them, and try to document how bad it is, contributing to their jobless addiction.

But most veterans suck it up and get on with it. They get a job and make something of themselves. They have the will. They have the underlying personality that allows them to survive and put the war behind them. Or maybe they get real help, not just lip serviced. They reach out and someone actually does something. Did you ever consider they don’t want the government they volunteered to fight for to owe them anything? They volunteered. They knew it would be hard. They knew they might have to kill other human beings.

They knew …. How can anyone know, really, truly, about war.

They can’t. Some just had the ability to survive and move on. But many were the weakest, psychologically. They just wanted to get out of a bad situation, get money for college, or escape a bad life.

The American Indians know. Or so I’m told by Sebastian Junger in Tribe. American Indians don’t let their weak-minded members enter the service. Only their strongest go, to prove how brave they can be. When they come back to their tribe, they are reentered into their society, given a purpose, a job, and are treated with honor, not told to file for a VA pension.

But, I’m not in your shoes, all you private employers. I work for the government. And I’m done. You’ve worked hard to earn that upper one-percent salary. A veteran with PTSD who might wig out is chancy. You might lose customers, or good employees. It takes a special kind of business leader to get around that. I get it. They get it. That’s why none of them want to go on the psych meds they need. Why would an employer give a job to a veteran on psych meds?

Another reason I’m done. I’m tired of crying after seeing another veteran who can’t get a job after they were part of that other one percent, the one percent who protected our lifestyle over the last two years. In a desert dodging bullets and pinballing around a Humvee after IEDs exploded. I’m tired of seeing them give up with a bullet in the head. 22 a day. 22 a day.

Yeah. And what is that one percent now protecting? A country that is about to implode.

Whatever. I have to decide whether to watch the fireworks on TV or actually go out into the evening and fight the parking and crowds to see the fireworks “for real.”

I’d been there “for real,” done that … Okay, the closest I got to real fireworks, ever, other than sparklers, bottle rockets, and black cats, was a quarter mile away. The last several years I graduated to watching about five miles away from a hill inside my car. A/C on. Safe, comfy, no bugs, no crying kids. Drive up, watch fireworks through the windshield, drive home, go to bed. There. I was patriotic. Easy.

I hated the thought of getting too close—you know, close enough to see them lighting huge rockets that could take off their arm. There was the parking, the whining kids, the crazy boys, the danger of homeless people—so I never did it before. But this year was different. Not sure why. Could have been my daughter was all alone and needed some type of celebration to lift her spirits. Could have been I needed my piss-poor attitude revised. Maybe it was that last patient I saw two days ago …

He’d drifted from odd job to odd job after Vietnam, not able to take authority well, wigging out at bosses. But he was good with mechanical things, having honed a burgeoning ability with the Navy Seabees, building just about anything. Between VC attacks. After he got home, his wife and daughter left him due to his PTSD anger issues and inability to keep jobs. But, he kept trying. He came to the VA and actually got help, learned how to cope, got back with his daughter, started new jobs building houses, and is now able to look back and be happy that he served and lived. He believes that Freedom is a worthwhile venture. He was a reason I’d worked for the VA. He has hope. It could happen.

Maybe even to me.

Yeah.

What would it take? To not feel the good old USA was going down in flames with a presidential race starring a bigoted, lying buffoon against a political careerist who knew all the right things to say. With a Congress that could barely pass two laws a year. With an economy that could only recover with the government injecting billions of dollars of aid to bankers who cared more about their next ten-million-dollar bonus than keeping their employees working.

I parked the car—as it turned out, not too hard really—and we took our chairs and blankets and walked to find a place to view the fireworks. The sun was getting low, but the asphalt still radiated the day’s ninety-five-degree heat like desert sand. In two easy blocks, we walked past the comfortable and usual stop at the golf course. I wanted to stop and plant our chairs right there, far away from the maddening crowds. More patriotic than watching the Boston Pops on TV. When the finale started, I would pick up and get outta there before the traffic. And back to my wonderful life.

My daughter had other ideas. We kept walking. And walking. A tad more than two blocks. Come on, girl.

We entered crowds with kids, next to the lake where floated the barge for shooting off the fireworks. Amazingly, the kids weren’t screaming. They laughed and skipped and traced figures in the air with sparklers. Crazy boys rode their bikes acrobatically while shooting bottle rockets off their heads.

But look. Those homeless-looking, bearded guys would likely wait until it got real dark and mug us. Soon, twilight and the lake would bring out the West Nile mosquitos. Could we please go back to the golf course?

We found a spot, pretty easy, tucked under a tree, twenty feet from the lake, blanket on a few tufts of grass in front of a parking lot with backed-in trucks. The sidewalk in front was full of walking people.

I looked at my watch. Another stupid half hour until the fireworks.

I stretched my neck and looked around.

The trees surrounding the lake fluttered leaves like green coins in the night breeze, their shade cool, the grass a deeper green, and as soft as velvet, the sky wide and blue, the blue of Colorado skies that seems to penetrate your brain, something you just don’t see in the East. Teen girls with short shorts and red-white-and-blue glow-stick necklaces, giggled and flirted with the crazy teen boys on their bikes. A Mexican toddler wet his feet in the lake, giggled and ran back to jump into the arms of his fat Mexican, probably illegal, mother who caught him and kissed him and laughed and gave him a red-white-and-blue popsicle. Why did I care if she was illegal? Was I one of those who wanted The Wall? Jesus. I gotta get a grip.

A wrinkled, old skinny white guy walked hand-in-hand with an equally wrinkled old and limping wife. They smiled at each other and talked in low murmurs. He wore a red-white-and-blue, tie-died tee shirt, she the same with sling purse spangled in white stars on a blue background. The homeless-looking guys drank amber beer and crowded around their Harleys with their girlfriends and other guys, laughing and talking and gesturing to the occasional pre-festivity private fireworks fired off from the neighborhood behind us. Small American flags stuck out the back of their sparkling Harleys, gently flipping and flapping in the night breeze. Okay, they had Harleys, probably not homeless. They were white, Indian, Latino, black, and wore tee shirts that spoke of service in Army or Marines and had beards and long hair or buzz cuts. Most had lots of tatts. Probably vets. Did I think all vets were homeless? I sure wish I could get drunk. Maybe I could get a beer from them.

How many would hit the deck with the first boom of fireworks? Really? I shouldn’t be a doctor for anyone, much less veterans. Good thing I’m retiring. Go home. Forget patriotism.

The streetlights came on, lighting the rows of port-a-potties on the road across the lake. There were a few stars and a gibbous moon to the east. It had been a long time since I’d been outside at sunset. I used to love camping. What had happened to me?

These people seemed to be used to the outside after dark. I just stared at the moon.

I didn’t notice any mosquitos.

But now I saw it. Great. We were way too close to where they would light off the fireworks. Too close to see through the low hanging tree branches that would block most of the view. Perfect.

Then it started. Couldn’t see much. But the sound … It shook my heart, a deep bursting of pent-up chemicals invented by the Chinese, gunpowder used for over eleven-hundred years, replacing spears and knives and clubs to more efficiently kill people. Millions of people. I plugged my ears.

The colors were vibrant against the night sky. But the trees were in the way. Not sure why, but I took my fingers out of my ears, got up, walked back into the street, behind the trees. I walked around and stood behind the Harley crowd. 

The brilliant sparkling colors, the booming sounds and beating in my chest of each exploding spectacle. Jesus. This was pretty cool.

After the first few eruptions, oohs and ahs from the crowd. Then cheers and whistles and screams of joy when things really got cooking.

It was different from any other Fourth. Something unfolded inside.

The thump in my chest, the smell of charred black powder, the buzz in my head, the colors, the colors, the colors, and flash against the night: all sensations crammed me so full it felt I might burst. I looked back at the crowd on the other side of the street. All faces upturned, relaxed and happy. Even the dogs sat and watched. We were all part of something special. A red-white-and-blue special. A country of all kinds built on a singular idea: Freedom.

Stupid. Yet, somehow, without drugs, without alcohol, fireworks on the Fourth seemed to reach inside and pull my entire Navy life, my entire patriotic belief in an idea that had built this country, through my gut, my heart, and into my brain. Warm. Full. Joy.

I lifted my eyes to the sky and enjoyed the ache in my neck. I thought about putting my fingers back in my ears. But, no. The annoying, constant ringing would be worse later, but I didn’t care. This was too good.

The finale of countless bursts of color and sound and cheers—I’m not sure what everyone else felt, but my eyes were blurred from tears and I shouted, “Yes!” It had been a long time since I’d felt so great, felt that blooming in my chest. Better than throwing hats at Annapolis graduation. A lot better.

Did everyone else feel this way? Was I imagining this? I looked around. People’s eyes shone in wet splashes; they were smiling or laughing or cheering or clapping. It wasn’t just another chance to get wasted. It meant something. It. Actually. Meant something. To everyone.

I didn’t care if I retired tomorrow or in five years, if I got cancer or had a stroke. The kids weren’t crazy. The Latinos weren’t all illegal Mexicans or fat. All the old people weren’t wrinkled and skinny. The bearded guys with tats weren’t homeless. The vets weren’t jumping for cover and hovering under tables. All these people weren’t here to just get wasted. They weren’t bad people. 

These people, we, will not let our country, Freedom, go under, no matter what the presidential outcome, the job situation, or antics of Congress or Wall Street. They matter, we matter because Freedom matters.

Fireworks on the Fourth. Oh yeah.


Milt Mays graduated the Naval Academy in 1976, then went on to medical school and a career as a Navy Family Physician, and then the VA primary care. He has published several fiction novels, fiction and non-fiction short stories, and poems, most related to war or veterans. See his website at https://miltmays.com.