Prick of the Spindle: Nonfiction: Sommer: No We're Not from Texas

No, We’re Not from Texas (a personal essay)
by Bob Sommer

“It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.”

—from “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg

Two soldiers stood near center court on the empty gym floor, both wearing olive camouflage Army combat uniforms, desert tan boots, and black berets. Most soldiers wear the beret with a sharp, crisp peak in front, shaped somewhat like the greasy pompadours boys combed high above their brows when I was a kid. They drape the cap tightly to one side, flattening it against their heads. This seems to be their compromise with this unruly head covering, creasing into a disciplined, if unnatural, shape. The flouncy beret is surely the most unlikely of caps for American soldiers. Not only is it the head covering of choice for French intellectuals—should we call it a “Freedom Beret”?—but it is the cap most identified with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and, of course, Saddam Hussein and his sycophantic officers, whom we regularly saw in news clips until we brought democracy to their country. Anyone likely to volunteer for service in the United States Army would probably not choose a beret in the hat department of a clothing store, if they were even sold there, which they’re usually not. So the harsh creases and folds soldiers force on the cap have the unintended result of displaying a fundamental discomfort with it. Still, everyone in the Army wears the beret now—and no one could be mistaken for a French writer or Latin American revolutionary.

The two soldiers out on the gym floor were probably officers. I couldn’t tell from my seat in the stands. One soldier leaned slightly toward the other, his weight on one foot, a confident stance, but less than a swagger. A man with nothing to prove. Neither soldier was young. They talked, looked around, pointed to the open doorway in the rear and then along the striped blue mats that protected the varnished gym floor, plotting out the entrance of the incoming formation and the routine to follow.

A company of soldiers would soon march in, just hours off the plane that brought them from Baghram Air Force Base in eastern Afghanistan, by way of Kyrgyzstan to the north, where an old Soviet Union air base has been converted to American use, and then through Germany. Less than forty-eight hours ago my son and the others in this company had been in a battle zone. He was at his fire base until the penultimate day of his sixteen-month tour and told me later he was amazed at how fast things went once they pulled out of the Peche River valley and headed home. Indeed, while he and the others awaited their flight, they were called to formation to honor the first three casualties from their replacements as the bodies were marched before them to be flown out, a dark moment in their relief as the tour ended, an emblem, perhaps, of the conflicting feelings our military engagements raise, not only between parties or ideologies, but even within those who must fight them.

The stands in the gym were nearly full, and the anticipation high. As the wait dragged on, children became restless. The temptation of the wide open floor was too much, and a few kids began to run around out there. No one stopped them. Soldiers wandered around the gym alone and in pairs. The band straggled in, setting up at one end. Beneath the uniforms they were still musicians. A sax player warmed up with some jazz riffs, while a horn player teased the opening bars of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which he repeated several times, talking to another musician in between, explaining something, playing to illustrate a point. Still, the melancholy notes had a pleasing sound in the echo of the gym, and seemed fitting. Ballads have a way of finding your softest emotional spot, and the emotions were high in that building. The stands hummed with chatter, sometimes punctured by an outburst of laughter. Suddenly, a woman ran in, screaming to the gathering, to strangers and friends alike, “I saw him! I saw him!” People clapped. Nearby, I watched others turn the pages of Year in Review, a magazine we’d been given at the door along with a small American flag. Two people were quietly reading the last four pages, where the names and photos of those lost in this deployment were printed. Over seventy of them.

This was the second homecoming ceremony my wife and I had attended for our son in McGrath Gym, at Fort Drum, New York. The first was almost three years earlier, when he returned from a year-long tour in Iraq. We sat in nearly the same seats that night, toward the far end of the gym, close to the band, and up on the top of the stands at eye level with the narrow track around the perimeter. Little had changed. The track railing was colorfully decorated with the flags of all the companies in the division. Across from us, the words 10th Mountain Division (LI)† appeared on the track facing, gold letters on a blue background. Posters proclaimed the division’s motto: “Climb to Glory.” My photos from that night are all at nearly the same angle as our later visit, but that’s where the similarities end.

We had flown into Syracuse three days earlier for the Iraq ceremony, uncertain of what day he’d return and knowing no one from his company, soldiers or family members. Fort Drum is in northern New York State—the North Country, it’s called—just outside of Watertown, about sixty miles north of Syracuse and only thirty miles or so from Canada. The hotels in Watertown were full, so we checked into one near the airport in Syracuse. We had held off on buying plane tickets because the company’s estimated arrival was a moving target. For security reasons, the military doesn’t provide families with information about troop movements until the last minute, so we had to make our best guess, balancing the risk of missing the ceremony against paying exorbitant prices for last-minute tickets, or perhaps arriving only to find out we had days to wait. We took the cautious option, and sure enough, after we arrived, the day was pushed back, so we extended our hotel room and rental car, and changed our return flights, none of which was cheap. But we were long past thinking about costs. It really didn’t matter. We would be there when the soldiers marched in. My wife, a school teacher, was docked two days’ pay for the time off, and as if unsatisfied with that penalty, her school district also charged her the prorated cost of her benefits for those two days. The gouge in her paycheck that month was startling.‡ But none of this mattered. We’d lived through an awful year, and now it was over, and we would be there no matter the cost or inconvenience.

We drove north on I-81 to Fort Drum that evening in 2004 as the early dusk of September darkened the corridor of trees that enclosed the highway. The flight wasn’t expected until late. We ate dinner at a Cracker Barrel not far from the post, dismayed to learn that the restaurant closed at 10 p.m. It would be long closed when his plane arrived, and we knew of nothing else that would be open in Watertown in the small hours, at least no place a soldier could take his mother. Our night was just beginning. With nowhere else to go, we went on to the North Gate, where I wove through a maze of concrete barricades in front of the checkpoint. Once we signed in, we found the gym, where the parking lot was deserted and the building locked. We’d been told at the gate that the flight wasn’t expected until about three a.m., so we waited, for almost six hours, in the dark parking lot, wondering if we were in the right place and if anything had changed while we sat there. Sometimes a pair of headlights whooshed past on the black road. After we’d been there a couple of hours, a security vehicle drove into the lot and arranged wooden barricades around it (a good sign). Later a different vehicle appeared and rearranged the barricades, now fencing us in (better or worse?—now we didn’t know). At some point, I debated silently whether to relieve myself in the shrubs, finally including my wife in the discussion—for whom the shrubs were under no circumstances an option—and she voiced the very argument that was just about to lose my internal debate as I sized up the foliage, namely, the fear that we’d be tossed off the post if I was seen. Mercifully, a light glowed as the gym door opened and solved my dilemma. Inside I learned that preparations were indeed underway to greet the Iraq group, news I eagerly shared with my wife, who was grading papers in the dim light. Another hour passed, and then a truck roared by, coming from the direction of the air field, loaded with what I guessed (correctly, it turned out) were piles of rucksacks from the incoming company. Now other vehicles appeared, but they were fenced out by the wooden barricades. A woman climbed out of an SUV, moved one of them aside, and then a parade of cars followed her into the parking lot. Whatever the MPs had in mind for parking, it was plain that a wooden saw horse wasn’t going to keep this woman out. It was nearly 3 a.m., but families now poured out of the cars, children romping with excitement, and filed into the bright gym, where a soldier at the door handed out flags.

A gaggle of young wives with small children gathered in front of us, clutching mylar balloons and posters that shouted “Welcome Home!” A couple of the women appeared young enough to be just out of high school.÷ They lived on the post or in the sprawl of apartment buildings surrounding Fort Drum. Even when soldiers are not deployed, life is not easy here in northern New York. Winter is long and harsh, with “lake effect” storms and arctic temperatures blowing down from Canada, unimpeded across the wide plain of Lake Ontario. They had waited a year for this moment, waited in ways that my wife and I had not, living in reasonable comfort in a Midwestern suburb. A month’s pay for a private or a specialist, and even for a non-commissioned officer, comes to about the cost of rent, groceries, and little else. Debt is rampant. Exhausted charge cards, pay-day loans, usurious interest payments, and occasional help from parents and in-laws are how many young military families manage. The combat pay and tax relief soldiers receive for deploying into a war zone sometimes provide the needed extra to pay down debt that accumulated before deployment. One woman told me that with one more tour before her husband left the service, they’d be clear. He just had to deploy once more to Iraq or Afghanistan—now, with extended tours the norm, another fifteen months.

The group in front of us chattered and bubbled. They had weathered this together, and now their husbands were just outside the building, gathering at the open doors on the far side of the vacant gym floor. One woman admired her friends’ mylar balloons and said she wanted to bring one too, but they cost three dollars at the PX. Too much. She drove to the Hallmark store in town, but they were fifty-cents more there, so here she was, just herself and her little girl, explaining her empty-handedness to her friends. Such openness about money was plainly common. It was also likely that the balloons bobbing in the air and adding to the color of the spectacle were accruing 21% interest with VISA or Mastercard.

Three a.m.—and the band exploded into a John Philip Sousa march as if it was a sunny Independence Day. It was surreal. Outside, beyond the parking lot, the post was quiet and dark, very dark. It is a large, thickly wooded military base, with buildings and barracks and warehouses spread all around its confusing loops, and expanses of woodland and fields in between. In the midst of the surrounding stillness, the building glowed, noisy and lively, with cheering and applauding and the band playing, all of it drifting into the night at this bizarre, unthinkable hour as the returning company marched in, four abreast, to stand at attention through speeches and recognitions, while family members searched the formation for their soldiers.

On the far side of the gym, four posters with photos were taped to the folded bleacher seats, handwritten in magic marker. One each for the men who’d been lost from this company.

A neighbor walking her dog stopped one afternoon while I was mowing the lawn and asked me about the service banner in front of my house—a single blue star on a field of white with a red border. My mother had once told me that the only time she ever saw my grandfather weep was the day he hung a service banner in his front window when my uncle left for the Navy in World War II. Back then, on any given block, many homes displayed service banners. They were a familiar sight. A gold star is substituted for blue if the service man or woman is killed. According to custom, only the immediate family should display a service banner. My neighbor thought it meant we were from Texas.

During my son’s first deployment, I took to writing letters to local and national newspapers. I even appeared on NPR, criticizing the epidemic of yellow ribbon magnets that had sprouted on cars and SUVs. To me, they had an angry, jingoistic look. Few of the drivers had anything at stake in these wars, yet the magnets declared in the imperative that others should “Support the Troops!”—whatever that meant. The right-wing blogosphere had a field day: “Hey Sommer—Shut the F*ck [sic] up and just support the troops,” shrieked one blogger. Another complained that NPR had offered yet one more “traitor-lover angst piece in the face of victory in Iraq.” (Mind you, this was in early 2005, nearly two years after the mission had been “accomplished.”) Sean Hannity’s office at FOX e-mailed a request for an interview, digital drool almost seeping through my computer screen, and conservative radio shock-jock Michael Medved called me a “moonbat”—all of which confirmed my take that such symbols, along with gratuitous displays of the American flag and colors, had more to do with politics than troops.

But having a soldier deployed to the Middle East gives you gravitas, I was learning, partly derived from the fact that it’s less common than I imagined. In this age of militarism and nationalism, it would seem unlikely that anyone could say, I’m glad I finally know someone with a family member in the service, but people have said just that to me many times. Only a thin sliver of the population shares in this country’s military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this was a regular theme in my letters, which outnumbered many times over the ones that were printed. What stake did anyone else have?

“Barbaric yawps,” Whitman might have called them.

A frustrated, angry parent howling into the wind.

Willy Loman on the heath.

But the howling was digital and the wind filled with the chaotic noise of the media. I awoke each day to new outrages. The country had gone shopping, just as our leaders said to do back in September of 2001, while we were still grieving from the catastrophes of that month. Shopping would heal us. Now, four, five, six years later, we were shopping on steroids. The stock market had rallied to new heights. Tatooed, over-accessorized women whose natural hair color is long forgotten paraded across TV screens and newspapers, famous only for being famous. Everyone could name the finalists on American Idol. And one athlete or another had just signed a contract for more than the GDP of an African nation, almost any African nation.

A letter by a fellow citizen appeared at a propitious moment in our local paper in the summer of 2004, during my son’s Iraq tour.

“Good Iraq news!” the writer exclaimed. A “positive article on Iraq” had recently appeared on the front page. It was, she said, “long overdue.”

“The United States,” she preened, “has done a wonderful job of improving lives in Baghdad, getting power grids running, schools back in session, businesses open again. Life is better than before.”

Sixteen months, 900 American deaths, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths after the invasion (and with the presidential campaign in its last throes), many believed, like this woman, that the mainstream media—no doubt, the “liberal” mainstream media—was suppressing all the good news from Iraq.

Here’s what happened at my house two nights earlier:

The phone rang at 2 a.m.

My wife and I had a ritual before the lights went out each night. She leaned past me to make sure the phone was on my nightstand. She had to check because I would forget. I don’t know why I got the duty of having it there, since she was more conscientious than I, but I did.

Weeks, sometimes months, passed between calls and e-mails from my son. I’ve been sometimes asked whether I got an e-mail every day or at least every week from him. Maybe other soldiers had this kind of access, but ours didn’t. He was at a small, remote forward operating base (FOB), and the company’s only satellite phone was available about once a month.

The phone’s chirping blended into my dream that night, though it startled my wife instantly awake. The key-pad blinked insistently in the darkness.

Traces of my dream lingered as I found the TALK button and then heard static, an open line, nine time zones between me and the other end. My greeting echoed in the metallic wormhole that corkscrewed all the way from our bedroom in Kansas to Mesopotamia. The echo would be alive tonight. Sometimes we didn’t have it, but mostly we did—our own voices resounding back to us like pernicious choruses sung in the round, drilling their way into our heads as we formed sentences and lost the syntax before we could finish them, trying to follow our thoughts to closure. Also, the lag was alive, the gap between him talking and me hearing it, and vice versa. We usually had only ten minutes. But my son’s attitude was pretty good about all of this. He would remind me how tough it was for soldiers in World War II. No phone calls home then, no internet, no Goretex, no sweat-wicking underwear. At least we could hear each other’s voices.

But tonight was different. His voice was at once vacant and panicky, his first concern that we’d been worried, panicking ourselves because of the news he assumed we’d seen. The FOB had been hit.

Mortar attacks were a part of daily life at this FOB, which guarded a power plant south of Baghdad. The chow tent was hit in another attack, but fortunately the only casualty was that the troops went back to the universally detested meals-ready-to-eat until it was rebuilt. The insurgents had the advantage of setting up on the other side of the Euphrates River and lobbing rockets into the base. My son told me that they were crappy shots, and as dangerous as the mortars were, they seldom hit anything. The insurgents could then pack up and be gone before a rapid-response team ever got outside the wire and drove to the nearest crossing. Putting in directly on the river would have been suicide, leaving the teams vulnerable to an attack, loaded down with body armor and equipment as they were. But on this day insurgents poured over forty rockets into the camp, destroying most of it and killing two soldiers.

He said thinly, “We have nothing left but the shirts on our backs.”

The photos later released by the Army showed row upon row of smoking, twisted metal-frame cots; mattresses disintegrated; tents gone. The rockets had found the ammunition bunker, setting off a blaze that consumed everything. Naturally, he assumed an event this big had been all over the news. In fact, it had happened five days earlier, and he was now calling from another location, first, to make sure we knew he was alive, and second, to ask us to send anything we could—running shoes, hygiene items, anything. They had nothing left. Clothes, equipment, personal belongings—everything was gone.

With our son’s deployment, my wife and I had turned into something beyond news junkies. We combed websites daily for news about Iraq, from The Watertown Times, which covered Fort Drum, to Al Jazeera, which sometimes had more information than leading domestic services, and a lot in between. We hadn’t missed this incident. It wasn’t reported. Nothing. Nada. Days after the event, a couple of lines appeared about the two soldiers who died, but even this didn’t say they were in his unit.

My fellow citizen’s letter appeared in the paper that Sunday morning.

More good news was needed, she said. More good news!

My outrage spawned. How could I respond? Where would I even begin?

Her complaint wasn’t really about information, I realized. It was about ideology. The newspaper should deliver the news she wanted. Until the “good news” had appeared, the paper hadn’t been fair. (Dare I say it?) It hadn’t been balanced. Finally, the other side had been printed. Readers should decide the truth, not newspapers. This is a democracy, after all. We vote on what’s true.

Relativism had mutated. The truth was mitotic; it now divided and re-divided itself. But what did it mean when there was no news, when battles were fought, bombs exploded, people died, and no one heard? An entire base destroyed and no one knew! Perhaps that was how truth cells would now divide: one new cell a smiley face and the other stillborn.

While my wife attended church, I wrote my letter, and within days my response stood where my fellow citizen’s had, in the same column, the same font, a couple of paragraphs on the letters page. An angry yawp. A still birth. Nothing changed. Three years later, in April 2007, my son’s company was pinned down in Afghanistan, engaged in a desperate fight that they eventually won, killing an important Taliban leader, Habib Jan, before it ended. Twenty-one soldiers were recommended for the Bronze Star, but we saw nothing of this in the news either; we didn’t even hear of it until he told us on a phone call. His disappointment was palpable, as was his astonishment when he called about the mortar attack in Iraq. They were fighting for their lives, doing the work they thought the nation had sent them to do, and there was nothing. Another still birth. Neither the battle nor the Taliban leader were ever mentioned in our local paper. A few curt paragraphs appeared on the website of one cable network a week after the battle. Rosie O’Donnell’s departure from “The View” trumped everything. What did this mean? What were we really doing in these places? Some of our leaders claimed this was Armageddon, but it got less space than the police blotter in the local section of the paper.

3:26 a.m. Someone drove off without paying for gas.

4:10 a.m. A car was vandalized.

At church that Sunday morning, while I banged my letter out with my fists, my wife mentioned the mortar attack in a conversation with another church member—just a conversation, a response to the question What have your heard from your son? Much to her surprise, and somewhat to her embarrassment, an e-mail went out, and within days the church raised almost $1,000 to send shoes and hygiene items to the soldiers in my son’s unit.

I asked him, on a phone call one time, what’s it like there, in Iraq? What’s it like to be there?

He said, “You know how when you’re in Colorado or somewhere out in nature, and when it’s quiet, you can hear the Earth breathing? Well, there’s none of that here. It’s just dead. Everything is dead.”

He was gaunt and sallow when we found him on the gym floor after the formation of returning Iraq soldiers broke and a joyful chaos flooded the court. My wife clutched him for so long that he finally looked resolutely at me over her shoulder as if to say, “What can I do?” But our joy and relief were tempered by the changes in him, especially his pallor and weight loss, as if all he’d seen and done and lived through had drained some of the life from him each day, as if, with another month or two there, he might be little more than a dried stalk.

The year ahead was difficult. Crowds, noise, human moiling—these frightened and disturbed him. There’s more, but it’s not mine to share. The next year was difficult.

We went to Longway’s that night, a diner a few miles from the post—a place the soldiers like, but where a visit to the bathroom jeopardized my appetite—and we sat for an hour in a booth, and then my wife and I drove the sixty miles back to Syracuse, a white-knuckle ride through the sunrise and into the rush hour. We collapsed at the hotel, too wired to sleep, but when we finally did drift off, a business meeting down the hall awakened us for good. We slept through both legs of our flights home that day.

We decided to drive this time. Again, there was guesswork, but now we were wired. We belonged to a networking group. Wives, parents, families—all chattered on the Web about packages sent and phone calls and e-mails received; about tragedies, much about tragedies, as word of deaths and injuries came back from Afghanistan; about CNN and The New York Times, for being too liberal. Photos of children, dogs, and birthday parties were posted and admired. Emotional, flag-waving, God-blessing-of-America admonishments to remember that the troops were heroes fighting for our freedom were often repeated. But there was also information: letters from the commanders, memos, updates, links to other websites with news. Photos came back from the FOBs, from the lookout posts, from the air bases, from places you can’t find on Google Earth.

We had befriended Krissy, the wife of my son’s squad leader, and she called often. We heard about life at the post, about family briefings when bad news came back, about dramas among the wives, and much about her baby, in whom my wife took a special interest, sending gifts and welcoming her e-mailed photos. She was a chatty and gritty woman, with an exhaustive knowledge of military life, growing up an Army brat and having already divorced another soldier. We valued her friendship. She lived on post, where the view from her apartment was now consumed by the new Wal-Mart that had sprouted across from the North Gate since our last visit to Fort Drum.

We planned to leave Kansas on a Wednesday, trying to nail down the expected arrival date with about the same success we’d have had hammering a glob of mercury on formica. But we thought we had it, and then the call came, from our “call-out” group leader, Carmen, who also lived on post and had a husband deployed. (We belonged to a “call-out” group, too!) The date had been moved up, moved “to the left” on the calendar. We wouldn’t make it if we waited until Wednesday. We had to leave today, Tuesday. Now, this afternoon. We would leave, and we did.

Three mornings later, Carmen called again, while we were driving east on the New York State Thruway, now just a few hours from Watertown. Would we come to a barbeque at her apartment that evening before the ceremony?

An invitation. We had somewhere to go this time.

The morning had been overcast, with rain spritzing occasionally, but it cleared out into a warm and humid June evening by the time we found Carmen’s apartment on a narrow street among the nests of apartments and duplexes on the post. Carmen was a cheerful and warm black woman with a shy little boy of about three. Her husband wouldn’t be on tonight’s flight, yet she had gathered her group, including Krissy (whose husband also would not be on the flight because he’d given his seat up to another soldier), to celebrate. The entire brigade had been returning over the prior three weeks—3,200 men, coming back in waves from a sixteen-month, extended deployment as seats on chartered planes came available. Unlike the last time, our son wouldn’t be with his own company; he’d be filling a seat on a plane with whoever else was there.

The apartment was close, cluttered, busy with people crowding into the living room and spilling out onto the front lawn, a space about the size of a single-bay garage. One set of parents from Virginia wore matching tee-shirts silk-screened with their son’s basic training photo, a glum face, with his utility cap pulled low and the flag behind him. They smoked cigarettes from the same pack and bluntly shared their son’s troubles with self-discipline and school, troubles they hoped the Army would resolve. I sat beside a reticent teenager from Chicago whose brother was returning and talked sports with him. He wanted to get some food but was afraid of losing his shady seat in the lounger. His sister, sitting across from him in the glare of the late afternoon sun, was the likely interloper. Cigarette smoke surrounded us. Wives from nearby apartments appeared with platters of food and extra chairs. In the driveway next door the rear window of a vehicle was soaped with the words “My Dad will be home in 7 days”—the number in the box to be updated daily. Carmen, who had, without doubt, stretched her budget for this gathering, made regular announcements about the plane’s status while she brought salads and desserts outside. A man from Tennessee prodded chicken and ribs on the grill, while his future son-in-law, a lanky kid in a baggy tank top and backwards baseball cap, stood nearby. His future mother-in-law reminded everyone frequently that we should thank the Lord for being here, for the weather, for the incoming flight.

Cross-currents swirled all around us.

Fundamentalism and flag-waving commingled with the profound human need for community. And beneath all was the knowledge that the soldiers on this flight had not died while others had, a reality that swirled in its own cross-currents. The casualty list in the back of our Sunday paper each week carried the unprinted stories of all the families who do not get to attend homecoming ceremonies.

Characterizing these wars—if that, indeed, is what they are—is difficult when you’re looking outward from within the isolated places where those who fight them live, when you’re among the families directly touched by them. Coffins return that no one sees; homecoming ceremonies take place in the middle of the night; catastrophic, global events that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions, unfold, but a tap on the remote will make them disappear. Invisibility is without doubt one characteristic.

Unlike World War II, which brought rationing, Victory gardens, and ubiquitous service banners; or the Cold War, in which every child in America knew how to duck and cover; or Vietnam, during which the draft could reach indiscriminately into almost any home, the wars we’re now fighting allow many the option of indifference. Shopping may be the ultimate metaphor for how these engagements affect most Americans, who can simply choose what and how much to consume and leave the rest on the shelves. Sacrifice is optional. Support for the wars has, in fact, largely depended on muting their impact. In a weird irony, the charade of “normalcy” and the absence of sacrifice are how citizens are supposed to contribute. But the universal impact of earlier wars had the additional benefit of forcing people to decide how important they were, whether they were worth fighting, whether those responsible for sending troops to fight and perhaps die were indeed forthright in their dealings and competent in their decision-making. Universal sacrifice was also a referendum on war.

My wife and I became myopic because so much interference had to be filtered from our vision. Our nerves were raw. A strange car in our driveway could be driven by a man or woman in a Class-A uniform who would emerge with an envelope, or it could be someone just turning around. We focused on what needed to be done in each moment, just that moment—jobs, chores, sending the next box to our son, writing him a letter, packing Christmas boxes for the squad. But the noise from beyond our tunnels resonated within, full of absurd contrasts to the narrow reality in which we lived, leaving us with a fearful wonder at how bizarre the world around us was. The sudden death of a former centerfold model or a radio shock-jock saying something shocking about a women’s basketball team seemed far more pressing than wars raging in two countries. We were tumbling around in an Orwellian nightmare like clothes in a dryer. Victory Gin flowed through the TV cable. Ignorance was adulated and knowledge belittled. Our leader was elected because he’s a guy you’d like to have a beer with. He sounded like a schoolyard bully with a grudge when he conducted what passed for international diplomacy.

Shopping would save us.

Apathy, not terrorism, was the gravest danger we all faced.

It is almost a commonplace among soldiers that ultimately they aren’t fighting for a cause or policy; they’re fighting for each other, for themselves, fighting to come home alive. No one talked politics at the barbeque.

As we sat in the stands later, my wife chatted with a woman who had come alone to meet her husband and I looked through the back pages of the Year in Review, where I studied the photos of men from my son’s company to whose families we had sent sympathy cards during the past year. It was the first time I’d put faces to some of these names. Imagining my son’s face on the page came all too easily. We received thank-you notes from a few families, which came like gentle tugs of acknowledgement from the far ends of the fragile threads that connected us. I had to buy three cards on one occasion. It was unsettling, just handing them to the clerk, who didn’t seem to notice that I was buying three sympathy cards at once as she bagged them and gave me change. It seemed like the sort of thing someone would notice, but she didn’t.

Footnotes:
†Light Infantry

‡A year later my wife appeared before the school board and spoke to this issue with a packed house behind her. She received a standing ovation, and the policy was subsequently changed.

÷If my comments about gender seem generalized, it’s because infantry regiments are exclusively male. Women still do not serve in combat units.

Read Cynthia Reeser's interview with Bob Sommer in this issue.

Read a review of Where the Wind Blew in this issue.

Bob Sommer left the financial services industry over two years ago to resume his life’s ambition to write. He was an academic before joining an international investment firm in 1990, publishing widely in literary, scholarly, and commercial publications, including Hudson Valley Magazine, The Archive, American Literature, Southern Humanities Review, American Book Review, New Letters Review of Books, Centennial Review, New England Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, Mosaic, Untitled, and others. He has published three books: Teaching Writing to Adults (Jossey-Bass 1989) a textbook, The Heath Literature for Composition (Heath 1990) and Where the Wind Blew (The Wessex Collective 2008). He has appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered as a guest commentator and is currently a freelance columnist for the Kansas City Star. Bob is a graduate of Marist College and took his Ph.D. at Duke University.