Soldier's Art

Memorial Day fields

Image by Moncho from Pixabay.

I am a bay of self-awareness: a tarp stretched wide and far over lawn. I’ve looked through a window and never seen the window, and in this new house with new ghosts, I would be lying if I said I felt all the usual moroseness.

After many years it’s different. The dull ache of brothers buried, ancient breathing, gunfire rattle of lungs.

Mortars splash like killer whales, sending black bodies on top of immovable ocean, carving out blue and black water, dirt, wave and mud, red smears like paint on artists thumbs.

This is time: music written on paper, whistled and carried by hemlock and pine. It flows both directions. It’s guilt when the sharp pain dulls to a throb. Because moving on is another way of forgetting, another way of leaving a fallen comrade, which we don’t do. This isn’t about me.

But I’m the one alive, aren’t I?

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I’m reminded of a Memorial Day not so long ago when I went into the woods and didn’t come back. Left Bret hollering on the steps while I marched into a downpour. Somehow it felt like every desert I’d been in.

Coincidence is too big a word with too much inelegance to explain the density of death: I need it to mean something.

But it doesn’t. Death is rainy weather for no reason, death is an umbrella forgotten on the beach, a plastic cup or Styrofoam plate—inarticulate, inert, without meaning. It fails to comprehend the language of feeling and ignores my shouts.

Rain, like death, is supposed to mean something.

It hangs silent. Like a bedsheet held by clothespins. And her husband is away, and the kids are grown, and the country is too large, and the draft is coming, and there’s the echo of a rifle shot from a few miles away. A gust of wind affects shin tall grass.

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I climbed, with my pack of beer and memories, to the top of the hill. Limbs smacked and clawed my face, then I broke through the bracken onto a road that ran the mountain’s crest. I walked to the first gate and cracked a beer. Drank it hard and fast. Thought about Rob.

I always think about Rob first because he was the first to go. Andy is next. Then Gutierrez. But Gutierrez was alive when I took my walk in the rain. Today he is not.

I walked the road to a property boundary and crushed down the fence with my boot, then marched through a defile between thick woods to where the trees stopped. I saw a farmhouse and made it the objective.

I worked it like a target, surveilled from the woods, made cloverleaf reconnaissance, and performed the rituals.

Then I cracked another beer and thought about patrolling and infantrymen and the way it felt to have a heavy pack on my shoulders.

I followed a draw then found another fence and stamped it into wet yellow grass. The sky was filled with gravel that met the horizon and made a fissure. In the fissure was a country road.

I walked a couple miles until I found a struck and dying deer. I pulled my pistol and shot it once in the head, then pulled the carcass off the road.

By that time the sun was lost in trees. I thought about Rob and Andy and the deer, and still understood none of what makes a man a man. I hiked home, said hello to Bret then made myself a drink.

I never talked about that day again.

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Now I have my own field, carved and mottled behind my house. A good field. Strong, clean, made for soldiers with heavy packs in rain.

This morning, I saw Rob and Andy patrol across the field, weapons at the low-ready. I heard mortar fire like killer whales, and mud erupted like Pollock paint, and red smears were on thumbs.

They drew closer. I saw Rob’s easy smile, Andy’s blue eyes, Gutierrez’s shy face. Good soldiers in a good field. And the woods were filled with smiles and eyes between the trees, and it was just like every desert I’d been in.

None of this is about me. But I’m the one living, right?

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This is for all fallen service members of any nation. Service knows no distinction. Rest in peace.

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Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20xx, a work in magical realism. I write on Substack.