Jimbo was a huge man, with a flaming red moustache and a completely bald head. He absolutely loved “soldiering”, as he called it, and had joined the Army when he was just a teenager. It seemed like he had been everywhere and done everything and a friendlier human being never lived. He was also the platoon philosopher, and he had an uncanny knack for being able to put everything known to man into what he believed was the proper perspective. For instance, in the middle of a very scary firefight, he once crawled up to me and said, “Dying is no big deal, Fisher, absolutely anyone can do it!”
Jimbo believed that “everything is perspective and perspective is everything” and he would often drive me and just about everyone else in the platoon crazy with statistic after statistic (most of which I’m pretty sure he made up) which he used to support his most cherished theory, that none of us have the foggiest notion of just how good we have it.
“Do you know what it means to be born an American?” he once asked me. I obliged by shaking my head from side to side. “Just to be born in America,” he continued, “means you start off your life, economically speaking, in the top five percent of all the people on this earth. Now you just think about that for a minute. And if you’re born into a regular old family like me and you were, just a middle-class family, then that puts you up in the top two percent of all the people in the entire world!”
“How do you figure that, Jimbo?” I asked with interest.
“Well, just look at how all these poor people here in Vietnam live. And things aren’t much better in most other places in the world, either. Look at Africa, India, China, you name it. The majority of the people in this big old world can’t even come up with a decent meal for their kids to eat most days.” He then started to play nervously with his moustache, as he often did when he was feeling genuine sadness for those less fortunate than himself.
“You gotta stop carrying the weight of the whole world on your shoulders all the time, Jimbo.”
“It’s just that it drives me crazy to hear all the bellyaching that goes on around here. And it’s just as bad back in the world, too. People really need to start figuring out just how good they got it. We’re living in the best times that ever were. We got more books than any one man could ever read, medicines that keep us alive forever, and we’re free to do as we damn-well please.”
Jimbo was the only man I ever met who could stand in the middle of a putrid-smelling rice paddy, admire the scenery all around him, and say with conviction, “It just doesn’t get any better than this!”
One evening, just a few days before Jimbo was scheduled to rotate back to the States, I stopped by his hootch to thank him for all the great advice he had given me in the six months or so I had known him.
“I’m really going to miss you, Jimbo,” I said. “We’ll have to stay in touch.”
“Fisher,” he said, “I’ve been in the Army for more years than I care to count, met thousands of guys, and never stayed in touch with any of them, so don’t be expecting any letters. I’ll tell you what I will do, though. I’ll pass along the secret to staying sane in an insane world.”
By then I had come to have great respect for Jimbo’s way of looking at the world and I sat down on his bunk and listened carefully to what he had to say.
“You live in California, right?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered. “In Northern California, not too far from San Francisco.”
“Well, then you’re one of the really lucky ones, because you’ve got an ocean right next to you, although the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, the giant redwood trees, and lots of other places back in the world will do the trick, too. Anyway, Fisher, when nothing seems to make any sense, when you’re feeling as low as can be, you just hop in a car and head for that ocean of yours. Then plop yourself down in the warm sand, watch the waves as they come and go, and remind yourself that those very same waves will still be coming and going long after you and all your little problems are long gone and forgotten about. In other words, we all need to spend some time now and then reminding ourselves that we human beings just aren’t all that important in the overall scheme of things.”
“It’s all just a matter of perspective, right, Jimbo?” I asked, quoting his favorite saying and returning his warm smile.
“You got it!”