The Photograph
Author: Shiloh
I couldn't help myself,-
couldn't take my eyes off her.
She was a very pretty girl,
blonde hair falling softly over her shoulders,
blue-green eyes, beautiful smile...
about sixteen, and very much a young woman.
She was having her picture taken with her father.
Her mother stood with the camera,
telling her daughter to move back a bit more,
focusing the lens,
then she said,
"All right now, hold Daddy."
The pretty girl's smile grew a bit tighter,
her manner turned a bit more sober,
as she turned to be sure where her dad was.
Trembling slightly, she slowly raised her hand,
her index finger extended,
and touched her father's name
where it was engraved in The Wall.
(It was the last picture she would have
of her and her dad together.
The only other one she had
was taken when she was eighteen months old.
He was holding her, one last time,
just before he left for Vietnam.
He was a Navy pilot,
and he had been shot down over Hanoi.
That's all she knew about him.)
After her mother took the picture
the girl turned her face to The Wall,
cradled her head in her arms against it,
and she cried... quietly,
alone with her thoughts.
Her tears flowed down her grown-up, little-girl cheeks,
onto the polished stone of The Wall,
and onto the walk at the base;
the purest of offerings
for the memory of the father she never knew.
She was sixteen,
and in most ways a grown woman,
but at that moment she was the little girl
who needed, so desperately,
to be held and comforted in the arms of her daddy.
She'd grown up needing him.
and she would always need him.
And she would never, ever,
be held by him again.
------- Author's Notes -------
(...Major Mike O'Donnell became an MIA on 24 March 1970)