Michael O'Meara

I Vietnam lingers in the shadows of the mind, like an old addiction, hidden from view, but always there, cemented in place by heartbreak and loss and shame. It lives in the blood and seeps into the bones. It becomes you and you it. It works you relentlessly, until the world seems strange without it. Continue Reading

I stood at what would fulfill the legal requirement of attention, but relaxed enough to let him know I wasn’t intimidated. He looked slightly older than my twenty years. A slim yellow bar stitched on both collars of his perfectly starched khaki shirt gave him legal authority over me, and compelled me to stand and Continue Reading

It had only been twenty-six hours since departing Fort Lewis and already I was standing by the side of a dirt airstrip in Camp Eagle, wondering what comes next. An hour later a jeep pulled up and a friendly looking guy said, “O’Malley?” I said, “O’Meara.”  He said, “Get in.”  The open air jeep looked Continue Reading

I knew the captain hadn’t made the call to switch my MOS from mortars to grunt. A clerk back in the states somewhere had done it, probably because of a glut of mortar men, who tended to make it all the way through, while the infantry needed constant replenishment. I thought his, ‘welcome to the Continue Reading