📍 Part 7: “Where the Wind Waits”
Spring came slowly to the Tennessee hills.
It brought soft rains—not the punishing kind Blake remembered from the jungle, but gentle, cleansing ones that made the land smell like rebirth. Crocuses poked through dead leaves. Birds returned. And the new dogwood at the edge of his property bloomed like it remembered what the old one never forgot.
Blake kept walking the path every morning. It wasn’t long. Just from the back porch to the edge of the fence, past the shed, past the spot where the trunk of the fallen tree still lay half-buried in the ground like a spine.
Buddy wasn’t there.
But he was.
In the way the breeze shifted the grass.
In the pause Blake took before stepping onto the old trail.
In the habit he hadn’t broken of glancing back, expecting to see a black-pawed shadow trotting behind him.
By mid-March, the VFW post in town invited Blake to speak. They had read his letters. Displayed his story in a glass case by the flagpole. Folks had started calling it “The Buddy File.”
He hadn’t spoken in front of people in years.
He said no.
Then two days later, changed his mind.
Because if he didn’t say it out loud, who would?
The night before the event, he stayed up reading the sixth letter again.
The one he wrote after the tree fell and the box came back.
“*Buddy,
If you find your way back to me, I won’t ask questions.
I won’t try to understand how.I’ll just say thank you.
And I’ll let you go when it’s time.*”
He folded the page, slid it back into the tin, and set it on the nightstand beside the photo from ’70—the one Mendez had given him. The one where Buddy wasn’t even centered in the frame.
Just there.
Watching.
Like always.
The day of the talk, Blake wore a tan jacket and the same boots he’d walked in every day since Buddy had disappeared again.
He didn’t prepare notes.
Didn’t need to.
The crowd in the small hall was mostly older folks. Veterans. Wives. Grandchildren. A few young people who looked like they’d wandered in by accident and stayed because something about the room felt like truth.
Blake stepped up to the front slowly.
Hands in his pockets.
Voice calm.
“I didn’t come here to talk about war,” he began.
A few chuckles.
“I came to talk about rain.”
That got their attention.
He told them about the smell of wet gunmetal and bamboo.
About the nights when the rain fell sideways and the ground bled.
About the dog that walked into his life without asking for anything but a scrap of pork and a place to sleep.
He told them about the sniper.
The wound.
The limp.
The loyalty.
And how, decades later, that same dog—or something like him—came back.
He didn’t say reincarnation.
Didn’t say miracle.
He just told the truth.
“The thing about war,” Blake said, “is that it takes pieces of you and hides them in places you’ll never find again.”
He paused.
“But sometimes… something comes back and brings one of those pieces with it.”
He ended with a simple line:
“His name was Buddy. He didn’t belong to anyone. But he found me anyway.”
When he sat down, the room was quiet.
No applause.
No whispers.
Just the weight of a hundred hearts remembering something they hadn’t thought about in years.
And that was enough.
After the talk, a woman in her seventies approached him.
She carried a cane and wore a pin with a faded photo of her brother—killed in ’68, she said, outside Huế.
“My brother used to write about a dog,” she whispered. “He never named it, just said, ‘The dog’s still with us. That means we’ve got another day.’”
Blake’s throat tightened.
“What unit was he in?”
“First Marines,” she said. “Quảng Ngãi.”
He closed his eyes for a second.
Then smiled.
“He knew Buddy too.”
In the weeks that followed, letters came in.
Not to Buddy this time—but about him.
Veterans who had read Blake’s story or seen the museum exhibit sent short notes:
“We had one like him in Da Nang. Saved three guys before a mortar got him.”
“Ours was named Hank. Looked just like yours.”
“Sometimes I think I see him in my dreams, same scar on the leg.”
Blake kept them all in a shoebox.
He called it the Second Life box.
Because somehow, Buddy had become more than memory.
He’d become a thread.
A reason.
A place for grief to rest without having to carry a rifle.
One morning in April, Blake sat on the back porch with a cup of black coffee in one hand and the shoebox open in his lap.
He added one more letter to the pile—this one from a boy in Minnesota, no more than twelve, who’d found the museum article online with his grandfather.
*“I never knew dogs helped in war. I hope mine would save me too.
I’m gonna name him Buddy.”*
Blake laughed for the first time in weeks.
A real one.
From the gut.
He folded the letter and tucked it in the box.
Then looked out over the yard.
The grass had started to grow wild around the dogwood again.
That evening, a storm rolled in. Not violent. Just one of those long, drizzling Tennessee rains that tapped on the windows like fingers remembering an old rhythm.
Blake didn’t flinch.
Didn’t reach for his cane.
He just opened the back door and stepped outside, letting the rain soak into his shoulders, his scalp, his boots.
He stood still and let it come.
Like he had all those years ago.
And for the first time since that cursed and blessed jungle, he didn’t feel lost in it.
Behind him, something brushed against his leg.
He didn’t look.
Didn’t need to.
He just whispered, “Good boy.”
And walked with the rain.