“So you are an artist.” Sargent Preganis stepped around to look over my shoulder. I sat cross-legged on the ground, with the wooden board on my lap. I had gleaned it from a discarded ammo crate. I had blackened it with my Zippo lighter, and was carving away areas of its surface with my knife when Preganis came over. I looked up at him, and the forest canopy seemed a mile beyond his head.

“Well, I try,” I said.

Preganis, tall and lean, had not been with us long. Ours was the newest squad in the Company, as the more experienced Preganis was put in charge of the handful of us new guys. This happened, of all places, out in the Vietnam boondocks, and in the middle of a search and destroy mission.

“Hey!,” said the Sargent. “It looks good.”

Would have been sweet of him to allow me more time to dig into the yellowish meat of my board, but he announced the advent of our packing up and hitting the trail. It was time to put things away. I rolled up my bedding and stuffed it into my rucksack, to be beneath the canned food that would make up the day’s meals. And my other pair of socks. In the bottom of my rucksack, beneath the bedding, beneath my larder, and a layer of rain gear, was the weight, alas, of goods that lacked urgency; the novel I had started back in a rear camp, a tablet that I still meant to write in, and, though reception was a joke for the time being, a small radio. The last thing to put away was the ammo box board. That fit tidily under the cover flap up top. I cinched it down snug.

By that time, Sargent Preganis had already loaded up and was waiting at the trail, and holding our place in the Company lineup.  His pack hung from its rack like a mere sack lunch compared with mine and, frankly, everyone else’s in our squad. He had in there the articles that fit any of our customary needs. It was just minus those cultural things that the rest of us had imported, and maybe a little food, and water, as we were still pretty heavy on the water yet, with canteens hanging and stuffed in and about our gear. He had tied in, the standard tools for living in our great out of doors; gas mask and shovel. He carried the same amount of ammo we did. But he didn’t ever appear to be carrying much of anything, and when the time came, he’d saunter up the trail, as easy as you please. We sat, slipped the straps over our shoulders and worked ourselves to our feet, and hurried after him.

The mountain’s name is Nui Kui. Translated, it is “That Mountain”.  It was ‘This Mountain’ to us. It passed just beneath our noses as we climbed. It is steep in places.. The trail passes around the thick bases of the towering trees, crosses the bare roots with the look of wear. Where it comes to patches of stone, it crosses as a trough formed by centuries of scuffing feet. It guided us relentlessly upward. Once, twice, we were prompted to leave it; to step into the leathery leaf tangle, which set off crazy clouds of flying insects, caused much bigger creatures to dash this way and that, only deepening our sense of foreboding. One cry, as Preganis pointed out, is that of a lizard.

Day ends early in such a place. As a Company of soldiers, we had dragged our tails up a day’s worth of mountain. Evening had us spread out into a defensive perimeter and dug in. Time for quiet conversation and chow. Between the salty grease taste of dinner and total darkness, I finished the ammo box board. It had everything to do with the experience of being a gullible kid in a wild place, an attempt to reach back and snatch some part of the active “scene” back home – and maybe some comfort in being gone from it. Along the length of the board, in my attempt at “psychedelic” style, there read: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club”.

“So what are you going to do with it now?” Sargent Preganis asked the following morning. “Now that it is finished.”

“Don’t really know,” I answered. To keep his skills alive, an artist will make a thing; and then he might just up and throw it away. “Doesn’t matter much.”

“Why not hand it over to me? I’ll take it home as a souvenir.”

We would be losing our squad leader soon. Preganis was close enough to leaving that he was more and more counting on it. Said he’d pack the board from there, on. So, when we moved out that morning the board was strapped across his back. It wasn’t all that heavy, of course. He carried it to the top of ‘That Mountain’, and even beyond there some.

Sargent Preganis (left), his souvenir, and some of the rest of us on Nui Ki, 1968