"THE WAR rages, in the script and in his mind, as Cameron prepares for the performance of his life."
Read the Transcript...Old Man:I’m going to tell you ‘cos I don’t think anyone else cares. They think me dying is a tragedy, maybe it is, but not for me, I wont care, I’ll be dead. And besides you wanted to know. It’s not too often an old man gets to tell a young man something these days, and it’s not too often they want to listen. Everyone else comes to me with tears and regret, but you… You come to me with a question. (laughs) When you were little you weren’t afraid to ask me about the war, so I told you. No one else brought it up. Now I’m dying, and they come and go and never mention this either. But you… You come to me and ask:
‘What does it feel like to be at the end of your life?’ (laughs)So I will tell you…
I’ll start back when I was about your age, when I first asked the same question… It was getting on the end of the war, we’d just taken Manilla. They sent us to clear out these little islands but we found no Japs, they were already gone or had committed suicide the way they did. We found this fine whiskey of all things, in their officer’s quarters. Single malt. So me, Ol’ Donovan and Luke sat on the beach and had a drink. I must have had a few because for some reason I asked ‘em what they thought it felt like when you were about to die.
Donovan:
This is it you fool. You’re always about to die.
Old Man:
We called him ‘Ol’ Donovan’, (laughs) but he was only a few years older than us. We’d grown old before our time from what we’d seen, you could see it in our eyes, and we all saw those days as probably some of our last. He sounded like an old man when he spoke on that beach.
Donovan:
I guess it’s a matter of how you sit with what you done. I’ve lived enough, can’t complain. Had a full life by my accounts. If the end comes on slow, if I’m lucky enough to get home, I reckon I’ll be happy to stay in, to be alone if so. Don’t reckon I’d be too fussed about a broad. Don’t see myself as much of a social man neither. I reckon I’ll just get myself away from the world, sit back and let what come.
And if the end comes faster. If I don’t make it back. I reckon I’ll be okay with that also, I’ve made my peace. Been alone alotta my life already, I think it helps some when it comes to the end. My affairs are in order as they say. (laughs) When death comes for me I wont need to be brave, ‘cos I wont be afraid. I’ll look forward to meeting him.
Old Man:
Then after a bit the other kid drinking with us on the beach spoke up. His name was Luke. Real young, lied about his age to fight.
Luke:
I’d like to go out like that, I hope I’m that brave, that strong, but I don’t think it’ll be like that for me. You know I keep dreaming ‘bout dying every night, and it isn’t calm, it isn’t courageous. It kinda reminds me of the way my lil brother was at the county fair when we was kids. He just loved those rides. I mean he really loved them. It was always funny when it came time to go. Momma would have to carry him home, kickin’ ‘n screamin’. It didn’t matter how late it got or how many times he’d ridden them already, he wanted more. Always another one. And if you tried to tell him different, he’d fight harder, or run off. He couldn’t understand why it had to end. Took the inevitable with no grace at all.
I don’t think that I’m afraid to die, I say that now, but I’m afraid that when the time comes, I’ll go out like that. Please God help me not to, that’s all I ask.
Old Man:
When Luke was killed, he went out brave as any man I saw, charging this machine gun. But you know he was right, he wasn’t calm about it at all. He met death head-on, howling and screaming like a madman. (laughs) He was a good kid.
In my life I’ve seen many people die. From an early age, friends have come and gone. And they seem to go either the way Ol’ Donovan said or the other way, that Luke was afraid of. In any case that’s how they seemed to be. Now that it’s come my turn, finally. Thank God, it’s hard being last. Now that it’s me, I see that it’s a bit of both what those boys said, on that beach, all those years ago.
(coughs/drinks water) Thanks. (clears throat/pauses)
I guess I was lucky. See, thinking you’re gonna die puts it all in perspective, and I got it put pretty early on. So when I got home, I set about getting what I thought was important. But even so, I still got to the end of the ride, not as desperate to stay as Luke, and not as content to go home as Donovan, sober enough to wonder about some of the things I could’ve done different, some of the dances I missed. But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change a thing. That’s the damn truth.
And it’s not all calm. It scares me, it seems too soon. But then I try to imagine if I got another ten or twenty years, and I think, to hell with that, I’m exhausted. And in many ways life has always felt too long for me. In many ways, I’ve been ready since that beach.
