Penny for Your Thoughts, Part 1 by J. Scott

My campus is a nice campus. We have lots of paved brick and a good supply of Jesuits dressed in white gowns, white hoods, wrapped together by thick white rope. Strategically placed statues guard the campus: Indians (Native Americans), more Jesuits, Roman and Greek gods, poets, a guy named Ted, and a potbellied goblin. My favorite statue is a bronze one of Robert Frost, cast in a moment of inspiration right outside the library. He sits, pen in hand, contemplating, searching for something, looking up at nothing in particular, grinning as if to say “life is good.” Seeing Mr. Frost like that every day makes me happy, and I thank him for that. I wish more students looked like him. I mean, I wish more students looked frozen, speechless, harmless. Some days, I’ll walk through the center of the student body in between classes, taking a deep breath and reminding myself,
“They’re just babies.”

But I’ve had a hard time doing that lately; I’ve always had a hard time putting that thought into practice because it reminds me too much of crowd control in Iraq, which reminds me of M16s and concertina wire, which then reminds me of Bagdad, ambushes, shooting dead dogs, and taking pictures of the dead and the dead we shot. And you don’t need to show symptoms of an epileptic seizure while having a flashback, like most movies depict. You just have to be in the right place at the right time, which for me happens to be my campus on any given day.

So my walks to and from class are occasionally done on the sidewalks outlining my campus. Sometimes, however, a diesel truck might drive by and blow that sweet reminiscent smell of Hodgie-truck exhaust into the air, the grim perfume, the all too familiar smell of war and invasion, of burnt pita and burning oil and dried shit and fresh piss all mixed together to create a special kind of scent only you and maybe that guy over there wearing his unit’s tee-shirt might know about. And then I’m back to square one again, trying to remember and forget about a war still budding, the war still working its mysterious fog in and around the civilian-sector I’ve crossed into, that fog that followed me off the plane and into my room and under my bed and into my lungs. All the meanwhile I see gargantuan elephants stamping on the minds of combat veterans worldwide, killing us slowly, killing the ones who breathed in the fog that crept out from under the tent flaps, inhaling it, holding it, not releasing it. These are the ones who innocently and not so innocently wanted a peek, just a peek at these large beautiful elephants they all went to see one day.