The Mountain

I remember when we were young that this central Texas hill was always called the mountain. It was really a hill, but to my gang of friends it will always be known as the mountain. The mountain stretched for almost a mile in length and was the steepest on the north side which happened to be the side we played on the most. On the top here was a large round water tower with graffiti painted on its walls. Hearts with initials, love and peace signs painted along side words of hatred. I wondered how they had painted them so high up on the walls. Below the mountain was the cow pasture that sometimes had some cows in it and always a bunch of jack rabbits. With bows acquired from the local Five and Dime Store, we would pull the rubber tips from the arrows, sharpen them in a pencil sharpener and proceed to run as fast as we could always expecting to bag a jack rabbit. Needless to say we didn't even dent the population of rabbits with our expert hunting skills. But it was the mountain that drew our attention the most as the built in playground for our war games. Cedars nestled in the rocks created our ambush points and our forts. We always had to have a fort or a base to plan missions. Vietnam was raging in the far east and since most of our fathers were there or had come back, war games was always a fun past time. Our bullets were always imaginary and never drew blood. Part of the game was who could die the best after being ambushed from behind the cedars. Bam bam bam your dead one of us would yell. The one shot would flop and crawl sometimes getting back to their feet to be shot over and over and in true Hollywood fashion die flopping on the ground hand outstretched to the sky. But in our games we have the luxury of jumping back up to play again. We could not ever picture the reality of real war. Our fathers did not share these truths with us. To this day my Dad has only told me three different stories about Vietnam, none containing any violence. He was there for a total of about four years in two tours between the years of 1965 and 1970.