My uncle told me a war story.
I remember reading “The Things They Carried ” by Tim O’Brien for the first time. In a nutshell, it’s about soldiers in the Vietnam War. The first chapter is dedicated to the things the soldiers chose to carry with them, like slingshots, extra pistols, or their girlfriend’s pantyhose. My uncle was in the same war, so I asked what extra weight he chose to lug around with him.
He remembered sitting up at night to keep watch. The air was dry, and he had his head tilted back to keep his nosebleed from running. His fingers were rough and the scars he has now had been callouses then. “The sky was all stars and blackness,” he said, “so I didn’t have to fear no rain.” The chill of water on his skin, or the heavy drench of wet clothes was the least of his worries, though. He just didn’t want to get his picture wet. He kept it in his pack, hidden in the smallest pocket. On nights like this, when the only damage could come from blowing dirt and sand, he would pull it out. It was a picture of his fiancée.
I never knew he had been married. He smiled when I said so and started to pat his legs to a beat in his head. “I didn’t marry her,” he finally said, “I got a Dear John.”
Dear John letters are letters that solders receive while they’re away from their girlfriends at war; they’re break up letters. I didn’t know anything about this girl or anything about this young version of my uncle who fought wars and looked forward to dry nights with a slightly torn, black-and-white picture. But I wanted to. I wanted to ask him who she was, how they met, and when he asked her to marry him. I wanted to ask him how he proposed – did he get down on one knee or did he set up some elaborate gesture that won her over. I wanted to ask when he knew he loved her. You could blame it on me being a girl, or whatever you want, but I wanted to hear the full love story, including if he had ever seen her again.
But I didn’t ask.
He was looking at me with sad eyes. I had brought back memories he liked to touch when he was alone. He kept rubbing his knees and his body was rocking slightly with the motion. I wondered if I was making him nervous, if he was afraid that I would ask these questions and he would have to share something but do so with the shame of knowing she left him.
I wasn’t going to force him to tell me, even though I knew he would. But I had asked him what he carried, and there was one more question I needed to ask. What did he do with the picture after getting the letter?
“Kept it,” he said. “Imagine running down to a creek and searching around for something to wash yourself with. A leaf or anything. You’re dirty, one time I was dirty with blood that wasn’t my own. You’re not proud of yourself. It was my first kill and I thought the blood would never get out from under my fingernails. It’s like I thought that if I scrubbed quick enough, God would never know what I had done. There had never been a time in my life when I wanted to hide, but right then? All I wanted to do was duck under that water, which hardly met my knees, and hope that all the muck would brown it enough so that no one would see me.”
When he realized he would never be able to hide in a place where the game of hide-and-seek is a second nature, he got out and looked at the picture. He considered tearing it up. The keeping of that picture was the only thing he could control, the only decision he could truly make. And he kept it. When guns and shrapnel shoot pointlessly around you and the only hope you have is that maybe you’ll knock out and won’t feel any pain, things got clearer. He told me that he learned to focus, notice details that could save his life, and everything stopped being solid. Everything was clear. And what became clear to him, when he had the corners of that picture in his fingertips, was that she was alive. There were people out there, people he loved, who were alive. While he and his brothers risked their lives every day, waking without knowing if the shadows in the night were real or imaginary, or if that click was the chatter of their own teeth or a gun – this girl was alive.
He never told me her name and I never asked. I think it’s better that way. She’s a symbol, in my mind, and symbols don’t need names. Her picture gave him drive, reminded him that in this Hell, there was a fantasy-land where people didn’t know how to make bombs or clean a weapon. There was a home somewhere, beneath the same stars he looked at her picture under. In America, they couldn’t see the stars as well, couldn’t count them, but they also didn’t have to worry if the shooting ones were flares set on their lives.
