The World Played Chess

by Robert Dugoni

A purpose, I have learned, is rarely found, but revealed. Only when I do not search does the purpose become clear.

Every minute of every day is a gift, and growing old a privilege, not a right.

The world, it seemed, had been busy playing chess, While I had played checkers . . . and ignored the rest.

Someone once said that failure is easier to live with than regret, and it pierced my heart like an arrow. Dreams are hard to catch, aren’t they? Especially if you don’t have the courage to try.

Because William taught me that you can’t expect to be treated as a man if you act like a child, and that every life is precious and can be lost in an instant of stupidity or bad luck. He taught me not to waste the opportunities I had, because so many young men never had a chance at them, never had the chance to grow old.

William had tired eyes in 1979, the eyes of a young man who had grown old well before his time. Todd did also. It was as if they had lived a decade in that one year, and when they returned home, the world passed by without so much as a pause to glance at them. Maybe that’s why William had thrown out his medals. They didn’t mean anything to him, because they didn’t mean anything to the world that passed him by—certainly nothing positive. Vietnam was the war everyone wanted to forget. So did he, apparently. And someday, I realized, when I’m gone, my plaques and certificates will also be just sad memories that my wife and my children will have to decide what to do with, reminders of who I had once been. And it will hurt them to throw away the box with the mementos of my life lived. I won’t do that to them, hurt them that way. I’ll throw the box out someday, just like William, so they don’t have to.

That’s Nam. It’s easier to say goodbye when you aren’t friends.”

“Never take anything that doesn’t belong to you or that you haven’t earned,” he said, sliding into the car. “You never know who you’re stealing from, and what that money means to them.”

“Growing old is a privilege, not a right.”

One more thing for Charlie to penetrate if he wants to kill me.

“You don’t cheat death,” William said in the garage of that remodel during one of our talks. “You think you do, but you don’t. Death finds you.”

I thought of William’s statement to me that the difference between living and dying was nothing more than dumb luck. Was he right? Had dumb luck saved Beau’s life and cost Chris his?

Together we tried to make sense of a senseless situation.

he could have been somebody, but that he’d never had the chance.

“Regret is so much harder to live with than failure,” William said. “You got a chance to be somebody and to do something. Man, I envy you.”

“Never get in a fight if your heart isn’t in it. You’ll lose. Especially if the other guy has something to fight for. This guy did. His honor. You didn’t. You’ll get yourself and others killed.”

We’ll both make it out of the bush, out of the Nam. We’ll both escape this hell. I say it. I think it. I don’t believe it.

a part of him wished he had died, that it would have been better to have died that day than it had been to live with the guilt.

He needed a fresh start, a place where he wouldn’t be reminded of what had happened, of death. He needed a place far enough away that he couldn’t be called home to every family function or crisis.

“What you choose to do with your life is now up to you. Find your passion. Then find a way to make a living at it. Do so, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Most of all, remember that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, but only a moment to destroy it.”

Sometimes bad luck is really dumb actions or inaction. You can make your own luck by making smart decisions.”