Diana,
I am in Sydney Australia on R&R with Bernard Knox and Rodger Cumberland. We have been doing tourist things during the day and going out at night. We mainly go out to bars in an area called Kings Cross which is near the city. It's like their version of Times Square only smaller.
Knox had been drinking hard and whoring from the moment we set down. Then he complains about these chicks the next day, how ugly they all are, how he can't get rid of them.
On the first night, I found a girl I could spend five days with. I am choosy that way. It cuts down on your chances of getting the clap. You know how many times Knox has seen the base doc? (He is definitely a repeat customer. Ha ha ha).
Anyway, the girl I am with is one of these hippies. Beads, mini skirt and all that. She thinks Vietnam is wrong but she isn't holding me personally accountable for it which is refreshing. She had taken me all around the city. The Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay and The Rocks. I paid for dinner in a few nice restaurants and for the hotel. In exchange, I get laid regular and a tour guide. She had some of that LSD stuff everyone is talking about these days. It was just a little bit of paper but man I'll tell you...after I swallowed it, for the next 9 hours...well...I can't explain some of the things I saw. Like cartoons running around inside your head. I lost track of who exactly I was. That tiny bit of paper made me laugh, then cry, then almost shit myself with fear. It definitely changed my thinking on everything. I made a promise to myself that, if I didn't get killed during the remainder of my tour, I would not return to selling carpet in San Diego.
Also I would not go back to Helen because she bores me to tears and I am only lying to myself when I say we will be happy together. I will figure out how to run my own life. Since day one it has seemed like my parents, school, the military, Helen-they have all been there, one after the next, telling me what to do, how to think.
I told the hippy girl about this and she just laughed and said what those people always say, 'do what makes you happy man'.
I am writing this down in black and white just so that it will exist somewhere in the external world beyond all the confusion inside my head. We all owe ourselves a life don't we? A real life.
It is getting light now, the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings and my hippy girl is sleeping peacefully. When I am finished with this letter I will put it in an empty bottle and seal it up. And then, after I shower and finished getting stowed away for deployment, I will throw this bottle in the Sydney harbour. It will be good to know these words are out there in the world somewhere. It seems like the right thing to do at this moment. This bottle and these words it contains have no pre-determined destiny. They could go anywhere. And I must follow this example.
Corporal Lance Whitely Hernandez.
October 15th, 1971
Bert,
So this letter was found in Samoa. Floated up on little tourist beach lined with palm trees. A British Priest found it. He was doing some missionary work out there. You know how many churches are in Samoa?
Anyway, this was the kind of Priest who is allowed to screw in order to procreate. He had his kids with him: two daughters and a son but that's not really relevant to what I'm telling you Bert. The main point was all this happened in 1994 so it had taken that bottle 23 years to travel from Sydney Australia to Samoa. Where it had been in those 23 years is impossible to say.
Anyway this Priest, he meditated on the soldier's letter for a while, then wrote his own account of things on another piece of paper. The priest mainly talked about his aspirations to do God's will, the singing at night from the local village, the church he was building, his hopes for his kids and some of the tropical fish he'd seen out on the reef. Nothing earth shattering. It wasn't like he had some dark secret to get off his chest.
Then he put both his and the soldier's letter into a new bottle and threw it back into the ocean. And god knows how those two letters ended up here in San Francisco 14 years later, framed and mounted on the wall of the bar but there they were.
You know me Bert, I drink in that place everyday. Have done for years. All during that time I've never given them framed letters much thought but on the night that asshole Danny 86'ed me, I pulled the letters down off the wall and just walked out the door. I took the letters home and forgot about 'em for a month or two. There was no reason for it. Maybe I just wanted a little piece of that bar (I pour money into that register year after year and this is the way I'm treated? Fuck you Danny).
Anyway one day I looked up this Corporal Hernandez online and there he was, living down there in San Diego. So I get his address and I sent his letter back to him. Doesn't cost me anything. The price of a stamp is all. And I include a little note of my own, asking him how it all turned out cause I was curious. Out of politeness, he called me a few weeks later. He thanked me for returning his letter. He told me things had turned out pretty much as he expected. I left it at that. Didn't seem like he wanted to go into too much detail. The priest didn't do so well. He died two months after he threw the bottle back in the ocean. Standing on a tropical beach, admiring the glory of God's handy work and a coconut dropped on his head. Good night Irene! Hell of a way to go if you ask me. I found his obituary in the Samoa Observer.
Anyway, I lost his letter somewhere. Back of a draw? On a bus? Who knows?
Eventually, the manager at the bar was gracious enough to let me return (what a joke). That's it for me man. Write when you can. Let me know if you need any money.
Frank.
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