RECOMMENDED READING
Like The Appearance of Horses. BY ANDREW KRIVAK BL Press | May 2023
I remember when then-Lieutenant Grayson told me on night patrol in the jungle once that his father used to say there is an intimacy with darkness some men discover when darkness is the only thing visible. It no longer becomes a beast to fear, or a threat from which to take cover, but a companion with whom one can sit and find peace. All that has happened in the daylight feels too loud, too distracting. It’s nightfall that begins to quiet the noise and pare down those distractions, until there is only what matters sitting right in front of you. Then, when morning comes, it’s as though the light that comes with it is light from 74
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the first day of your life. But it wasn’t until the evening one year later, when the newly promoted captain had come home on leave to bury his father, that he sat on the porch built on this same ridge and understood then what the man had been talking about. When Grayson returned to Camp Lejeune, he was given command of a Combined Action Group and did a third tour in Quang Tri Province in 1970, when most of the marines had already left Vietnam. I had just re-upped, and he was the reason I went back for my second tour, which lasted slightly longer than I had anticipated. I will tell you that as I sat there on the
porch with my feet tucked under me and my shoulders straight against the wall of the house, the dusk and all of its sounds everywhere around reminded me of Pennsylvania. How much I loved the mountains there. How warm it got in the day. How cool at night. What that felt and sounded like. When my grandfather built his house on the mountain in Dardan, my mother told me you could walk into