To Live

by C. G. Cooper

  Elmore Thaddeus Nix came home to a conflicted nation. But rather than push his memories away, he embraced them. He had no choice but to do so. They made him whole.

  Then came the medal. Lowercase m. The medal ruined everything.

  “That’s right, Sam,” Franks was saying. “Our friend Nix saved my ass and the asses of one hundred and seventy some shit-stained Marines.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “So, what’s the letter say?” Sam asked.

  Elmore barely heard the question. They were coming faster now, the faces of his long-ago friends. Cincinnati Steve, Charleston Charlie, and his favorite, Jersey Joe.

  He, along with then Sergeant Franks, had been the only ones without a nickname. Nicknames made time pass. Nicknames simplified everything. When you told stories about Cincinnati Steve, it was about all the funny or stupid things he’d done. If you called him his real name, Steven Romaninski, it made it all too real. For boys in muddy trenches, plodding one weary foot in front of another, war was like playtime - scary, deadly and profound - playtime, but still detached from the real world. It was “the disconnect” from that world that sent so many of Elmore’s comrades to their deaths afterwards.

  “The letter’s an invite, Sam.” Franks was looking at Elmore now, that damn NCO stare, the one you couldn’t look away from. It spoke to your foundation, struck you right in the soul’s jugular. The stare played on Elmore’s conscience now more than ever.

  “I’m not going,” Elmore said with a flat voice.

  “Yep,” said Franks. “We’ve sent Nix a letter ever year for the last twenty and the old soldier hasn’t answered a single one.” He turned to Sam now. “Can you believe that? Elmore Nix, nicest guy you’ve ever met, the glue that kept us together, silent as the grave.”

  A crow clacked outside and Franks turned to look out the window.

  “What’s the invite for, Mr. Franks?”

  A slight smile appeared on the man’s face. To Elmore, it was a look of contempt.

  The eyes glared hotly at him, and the man said, “We want to say thank you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nighttime.

  Franks was gone, but Sam remained. She’d called her mother to say she’d be home late. No apparent dissent there. Elmore didn’t ask. He never did. Sam’s business was Sam’s business.

  “Eggs and toast good for dinner?” she asked. “It ain’t a five-star meal, but I’m pretty good at it.”

  He was feeling better now, more like himself. The fluids had restored him. Like sloshing water that tasted like iodine from a dented canteen. Rain you couldn’t drink. Streams swollen to fill rice paddies. Plodding along in waterlogged boots, praying to make it to the next checkpoint, then much closer to a beer with the boys.

  “Yo, Thaddeus, you with me?”

  “Eggs and toast is fine,” Elmore said, walking away from the bed. “And yes, I’m with you, Sam.” She was staring at him again. He didn’t like it. They’d been equals and now he was the old man. How had the tables turned so quickly?

  Right, the damned letter.

  “Wanna give me a hand?” she asked, motioned to the kitchen.

  “I think I’ll sit and watch.”

  He’d just taken a seat at the kitchen table when he noticed that someone had cleaned the kitchen to a nearly acceptable standard.

  “We need to make a grocery run,” Sam said, head buried in the fridge.

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” he said, though he didn’t much feel like it.

  Sam went about cracking eggs, stirring them until the stovetop was hot enough. Then she sliced in some butter and cooked away.

  The eggs were a little overdone, the toast a little under, but it was food, and his body craved it. Before he knew it, he was asking for seconds. There was plenty. Sam had made enough for six people. He plowed through it, surprised by his ravenous hunger.

  “So,” said Sam, “are you going to go or what?” The girl knew how to lob a whopper across the table.

  “I said I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “I’m not talking about the grocery store, dopey.”

  He leveled her with a “let it go” stare. It didn’t work. She was Sam and he was Elmore Thaddeus Nix.

  “You know what I’m talking about. They just want to honor you. Forget honor. They just want to say thanks. Why don’t you want to go?”

  How could he explain it to her? It wasn’t that she was decades younger. It wasn’t that she was a girl. It wasn’t even that she hadn’t been to war. He would’ve told the truth to Franks if given the chance.

  “I don’t want to go. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  “No.” She sat back in her chair and folded her arms. She looked like a mother grounding a disobedient child.

  “It’s just a bunch of fuss, Sam.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not about you, Elmore Thaddeus Nix. It’s about giving them the opportunity to thank you. Are you just scared to be in the middle of it? Is that what it is?”

  “Sure. I hate being up on stage. Stage fright.”

  She didn’t catch his lie. “We can work on that. I can help.” Her wheels were turning now. He could see it as plain as if her face were made of glass, revealing the cogs and whirls of her mind behind it.

  “I don’t want to go, Sam.”

  “We’re going.”

  He shook his head. “Excuse me. We?”

  She smiled, a look of triumph. “Ye-ah. I’m, like, going with you?”

  “Who said?”

  Her smile broadened. “Mr. Franks said I could.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sam left at a quarter past seven. And Elmore sat in his living room wishing she was there. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her everything.

  But this was his age-old dilemma. He was the stoic. That’s what Eve called him. He never complained or made a fuss. Eve would rib him for that, saying it wasn’t natural to keep it all in.

  Even Eve didn’t fully understand.

  Elmore Thaddeus Nix enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, in 1968, just after the Tet Offensive. His peers were running for the border, entering Canada, asking for college deferments, basically doing anything they could to stay out of uniform. He knew one young man who stood in the middle of the high school gym class, hoisted a forty-five-pound weight over his head and slammed it on his foot. That had worked, but the guy had never walked the same again.

  Elmore didn’t remember much of the process. He did remember that there seemed to be a certain excitement amongst the Marine recruiters. “We’ve got a live one,” he heard them say from a back hall where he waited to get checked out by the Navy doctor.

  His mother had a fit. She railed and cried. He tried to hug her, tried to make her understand, but he didn’t even understand himself. It was some kind of compulsion, a pull he couldn’t fully explain.

  So, he went to boot camp. Parris Island should’ve been one of the worst experiences of his life. The drill instructors were cruel, pushing their charges to extreme exhaustion and sanity.

  But Elmore Thaddeus Nix, now Recruit Nix, sleeping in the cot closest to the squad bay door, finally felt like he belonged. Parris Island was his awakening. It happened all at once. He was home at last. There was the screaming spittle and thousands of push-ups, but he was home.

  Here he was judged by his actions, by his successes and failures, not the failures of his father. No, these drill instructors, these sadistic bastards, were tearing him down and building something else in its place. Elmore might’ve been the first in his platoon to really understand it. And it probably wouldn’t have played out that way if it weren’t for his bladder.

  In the middle of the night he rose to hit the head. Swift and stealthy he went. The Marines were America’s ninjas, able to slip by a battalion just to take a squirt.

  He’d been halfway through his relief when he heard the crying. At first, he thought it was one of his fellow recruits. He knew them all by their names
, born given and DI given.

  Recruit Nix strained to hear the location of the crying. It was coming from the squad bay. It was coming from the air vent. It wouldn’t be the first time curiosity pulled him to a revelation.

  He cut through the squad bay, nodding to the recruit standing watch. The kid was almost asleep on his feet. He made a show of caring, but it was obvious he didn’t.

  Recruit Nix charted the path as best he could. He didn’t know why. The sobs could’ve been a recruit from another platoon or another company. A couple of turns and he heard it – the sobbing of someone who didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help it. The involuntary spasms of human grief.

  And then he was there, staring around the corner at two drill instructors, one with a hand on the shoulder of a Marine whose body shook, his head buried in his hands. It was his drill instructor, Sergeant Stacks, who was doing the crying.

  “He’s gone, Gunny...”

  The gunny was their company gunnery sergeant, a man named Stillwell who’d already done two tours overseas. Gunny Stillwell was a living legend standing among mere mortals. Even officers gave him space.

  But at that moment, he wasn’t the towering figure the recruits had come to know. He wasn’t doing one-armed pull-ups or hauling an injured recruit out of a fighting pit with one chiseled arm.

  “I’m sorry, son,” he said.

  “He was my brother, my best friend.”

  A nod of understanding from the demigod. More crying from Sergeant Stacks.

  “This won’t be the end of it. You know that. They’ll bring his body home and you’ll grieve. You’ll hold your momma’s hand and toss dirt into that hole. But you just remember this, that’s not him. He’s a Marine, goddammit. And just like the hymn, your brother is standing watch now, guarding heaven’s gates.”

  Sergeant Stacks looked up, his face twisted in grief. “He don’t belong in heaven, Gunny. He belongs here.”

  “I know, Marine. But God‘s got a plan for all o’us. And shit, it ain’t for any o’us to decide what it is. C’mere, son.”

  Then the larger Marine did something that Elmore would never forget, something he saw time and time again when he did his own tour of duty. The war hero, the tough as nails Marine who probably called generals by their first names on the golf course, stepped closer and hugged that grieving drill instructor. Like a father. Like a brother.

  The next day, everything was back to normal. Sergeant Stacks was the same mean old cuss he’d been before Recruit Nix witnessed his undoing, but now Recruit Nix, and more importantly, Elmore Thaddeus Nix, understood the yin and yang of the human psyche.

  He graduated somewhere near the top of his class. Recruit Nix was motivated, but not too motivated. Any smart Marine recruit understood that lesson. Never highlight yourself. Never volunteer. The Marine Corps would highlight and volunteer you for plenty. No need to help the Green Machine.

  Elmore arrived at Parris Island a mixed-up kid with a half-assed mission in life; he left a Marine – a changed man. With his eagle, globe, and anchor, he departed with the first real sense of who he was at his core.

  He smiled at the memory. Not one in a hundred Marines would admit to loving their time at boot camp, and he would never admit it out loud. And there were days when he was lost in some long-ago memory, that he envisioned going down to the recruiting station now. He could still do at least ten pull-ups, had decent mile run time, and knew his way around a pushup.

  But such fantasies were merely the backwash of memories that could never be retrieved in the flesh.

  Time to sleep, Recruit Nix, he thought to himself.

  But he didn’t go to bed.

  As he floated off to unconsciousness, his memory of the Marine Corps melded with Eve’s words.

  Live, Recruit Nix. Live.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  School precluded Sam from coming over the next morning. That didn’t mean she couldn’t call. And she did, precisely at seven am.

  “Elmore Thaddeus Nix, did you make a decision?”

  “You mean about breakfast?”

  He could imagine her rolling her eyes.

  “No, about the letter. You need to tell Mr. Franks whether you’re going.”

  Oh that. But of course he knew what she meant.

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well you better hurry. I’m sure they’re waiting to hear. And you don’t want them to go to all the trouble if you’re not coming.”

  Right. All the trouble.

  “Don’t you have homeroom to get to?”

  “We don’t have homeroom, Elmore Thaddeus Nix. Jeez, what are you, like, a hundred years old?”

  It made him smile.

  “Almost, Sam.”

  He heard her laugh, probably tried to muffle it with her hand.

  “I’ve gotta go. Okay if I come by after school?”

  “Sure.”

  He busied himself that day. Swept and mopped the kitchen floor. The fridge gleamed and the counter sparkled, he moved on to the next room.

  Around the house he went, leaving a path of clean tidiness. He lingered on the guest bedroom. Memories there. Best not to think on those now. He passed it by, moved on to the master.

  He’d made it to the living room when he saw the envelope with the invitation, sitting on the coffee table right where Sam had left it. It was overloaded, stuffed with who knew what. They seemed to get thicker with time. The same deal each year. The logo stamped on the outside. That blasted medal.

  He figured the invitation just got thicker, fancier, like they sourced it from some faraway forest where only the rarest trees were good enough to give up their lives for a Medal of Honor recipient.

  He passed the duster over the coffee table, avoiding the envelope like it might catch the feathers in a puff of fire. Around and around he went, thinking.

  It was all in the past and Elmore wanted to leave it there. But if it was in the past, how could it hurt him now?

  He made the final call on his fifth pass around the room. A neat, barely perceptible ring of dust still surrounded the bulging letter. He set the duster on the floor, no need to get the table dirty again. Then, ever so gingerly, he picked up the envelope and flipped it over. It was heavy, weighted with a pre-stamped envelope, no doubt. Leave it to a pseudo-government organization to pay too much for paper. What a waste.

  Do it, something whispered. He looked all around as if he might be caught in an incriminating act. Open it, the whisper said.

  Elmore shivered. He was going crazy. That had to be it. The cancer was eating him from the inside out. Well, if that was the case, maybe he wasn’t even standing in the middle of the living room staring at a bloody envelope like a lunatic.

  Before he knew what he was doing, the envelope tore open. No saving the packaging like he did, even with junk mail. No, sir. This one ripped in a diagonal corner to corner.

  Like Charlie Bucket unwrapping his golden ticket, Elmore Thaddeus Nix stared down at his deeds. There was the thick casing of paper in his hands, but it was just another package. There was the embossed logo, the officious proclamation so familiar and yet so foreign.

  But it wasn’t this letter, the one from some brigadier general Elmore didn’t know. It was what was inside the womb of the official letter that pulled him in. Note paper, yellow, white, crumpled in places and torn in edges, uneven and imperfect. A stack of them. It felt like dirty trash in Elmore’s hands.

  So, cast them away, he told himself. Nothing to see here.

  He just stared.

  And then he unwrapped them and laid them on the table, one by one. Familiar names and barely legible writing. He paused to steady the flow of adrenaline in his limbs that made him want to bolt from the house and never stop running.

  Read.

  So he did. He read them all, and his life cascaded back to a time when there was a distinct purpose to Elmore Thaddeus Nix’s existence.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The day he arrived in Vietnam,
three men in the very platoon Private Nix was reporting to, died.

  They were having a memorial ceremony when he and five other freshly-shaved grunts and their gear arrived at the battalion headquarters. All six just stared and stood at an uneasy attention. Private Nix caught sight of one of his new companions, a pizza-faced kid who looked no more than fifteen. The boy was trembling. And so were a couple of the others.

  Private Nix didn’t shake. He didn’t cry. No, he just stared, absorbing what he could. Weary troops with tear-stained faces lined in ragged formation. The boots and rifles and bayonets sticking in the ground. The ceremony of it, the reverence of the entire gathering. He couldn’t hear the words; they were too far away for that. But if he had tried to edge in closer, he knew with gut instinct that he would be entering a cobra den. This was a conclave of grief that naturally shunned outsiders for their inability to share in it. So Private Nix watched, and Private Nix learned.

  When the sergeant major gave the final word of dismissal, and the Marines disbursed – to where Elmore didn’t know – a hulk of a man approached, a battered cigar nub sticking out of his mouth.

  He marched over like he could stomp out a mountain range. He looked them up and down.

  “You the boots?”

  It was the too-eager one, the kid from Tallahassee who answered.

  “Yes, sir. Private—”

  The sergeant shut him off with a glare. “I don’t care what your name is right now, Marine. All I want to know is that you were assigned to this unit.”

  “Here are our orders, Sergeant,” Elmore said, handing the Marine a stack of papers. The sergeant gave them a quick once-over, grunting intermittently.

  “Who’s Jasper, Brian K?”