Part Two.

War changes everyone and everything it touches, and even some things and people it doesn’t. It moves borders and changes the faces on currency and the colors on a flag. It encourages some people to be brave and some people to be cowards. It brings out human kind’s best qualities and their worst. I was fifteen when the war started and twenty when he came home. I had read and watched a lot about this war by then. Maybe it was because in California we were so unscathed and I felt like I had to touch it somehow. We made no great sacrifice, few of our sons and daughters were in harm’s way, and this wasn’t a war for leftists and liberals. It was for patriots and Texans, people I didn’t know. But I followed it. I followed it from KBR to Colby Buzzell to 4,000 American soldiers dead. Maybe I used this war to escape the one in my head or the one in my living room, and kitchen, and dining room and every other room that was sheltered in my parent’s home. It’s easier to watch someone else’s war than to fight your own, I realized.

That May I was tired of school and of fog. I had spent the last summer in the city chasing scraps of sunshine and sitting on the couch with my roommate watching reality TV. I came home that May for a new job, to spend time with my family, to save money that I would have been spending on shit I didn’t need. The week I got back I headed over to my best friend’s house, his sister’s, and I met him, finally. I also met her, the girl with the care packages and her heart on her sleeve. The four of us went to dinner in his open Jeep. We talked about history and made fun of our waiter and I swore too much, like always. He didn’t sit next to her at the movie later. He wouldn’t, even though she pleaded a little. The next day his sister told me he had broken up with her and I felt a guiltless satisfaction in the center of my chest. That was the moment when I finally allowed myself to hope, even if it was just for a moment. I hoped that everything would fall into place and we would fall in love.

In the love story that takes place in my head, a soldier sits in his fox hole at night, reading and re-reading letters from his girl back home. She waits patiently and he tries not to die. He looks up through the rain and shell fire and sees her face looking back at him through the clouds of fog or smoke and that gives him hope and keeps him alive. Maybe I am more of a romantic than I give myself credit for. Anyway, this was a different kind of war. This war was in dust and dirt and enemies rigging car bombs without wearing their country’s uniform. Most of us, somewhere across a continent and an ocean and a world away, didn’t pay attention. We kept having birthday parties and eating cake, we kept driving from coast to coast, from home to work, pausing maybe every once and a while to listen to the President, or a General, or a body count. But more often then not, we didn’t pause at all. No one told us to give or sacrifice for the war effort because mostly, at least where I lived, we didn’t think we should be at war and so we didn’t think we should give to war. I didn’t think we should be sending boys off to the desert, just to drive around and wait to die. At least that’s what I read and heard it as, but then, what did I know about war?

I learned a lot about this war from him in a short amount of time. I learned that no matter how many books I read or documentaries I watched, nothing broke my heart more than listening to him tell his stories. Sitting in my back yard one night, everything dimly lit by a small lantern, listening to his stories, my brain fought every muscle in my body. It took everything I had to stop myself from rushing over, from sitting knee to knee with him, from holding his hand. I didn’t do any of that, though. I listened patiently and watched his expressions. He told me his stories without flinching, like he was telling me about a camping trip or a conversation with his father. He acted nonchalant, but all I saw was hurt. All I wanted to do was touch him, to hold his face in my hands, but I held back.

The way he spoke about it all reminded me of myself. Like me telling stories about my family, how crazy or dysfunctional we all were. I talked about my brother going to rehab like it was a day at the mall. The really bad stuff, the stuff I tried to forget, I didn’t talk about ever. But here was someone speaking like I speak and maybe there were things he didn’t tell me, too. We told stories the same, we kept it all bottled up the same. His stories aren’t mine to tell, but they’re in me now, too. Maybe that is why either of said anything at all, to lessen some of the pressure that had been built up inside us. If we didn’t ease up on it a little every now and then, one of us might explode.