Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  I’m tempted to add that what I also want from him (assuming our shared experience and friendship) is his insight into what we did in Iraq…if he has any advice to give…if he’s also experiencing nightmares and cold sweats in the dark. Mine would be an angry inquiry, to be sure, and I manage not to ask it, no more than I shout at him to grow up! to be a man for Chrissakes! to not play race cards with me! to see that black racism, not white racism, is the problem! My disappointment is maddening and hurtful, as is my resentment with him for acting like a thug, being incapable, after all we’ve been through, of being more mature.

  Having to give up on Dee as best man and probably as a friend, not daring to ask my mentor from high school (you, Mr. Roth!) to shoulder such an expensive trip, I turn to the lieutenant (a captain by now and CO of the troop!) who, though an officer, readily agrees and immediately squares away the time and location. My choice of him, as it gets out, compels me to endure charges of sucking up (Sherman) and selling out (Sergeant Noordwink), though their jibes are good-natured and each is pleased to attend as a crewmate whose good wishes at the ceremony come across as genuine.

  Captain Kline proves to be a fortuitous choice, given how well he performs and the neat things he says in a heartfelt toast he takes pleasure in delivering. “This may be the best soldier with whom I’ve ever served,” he says. And: “I can’t tell you how hard I’ve tried to get Sergeant Murphy to re-enlist. How much soldiers like him mean to the Army. I’ve promised him that I would see to it, personally, that he is promoted to E-6 if he agrees to re-enlist, but no luck. He wants to go home. Wants to go to college. Wants to be a high school history teacher. Which will be a good acquisition for any high school, anywhere, while I can tell you this: As I wish him and Lotte all the happiness in the world, his departure will be a bigger loss to the U.S. Army than it is a gain to anyone else.”

  Our honeymoon, traveling by train as tourists, is a kick (we have a great deal of fun with menus and hotels), while I must admit that I soon miss the action of training and working with my crewmates. (PTSD persists in the form of two serious nightmares in Venice and in needing to fake an interest in elaborate buildings and artwork I don’t care about at all.) My fondest memories of the time away are our relaxed breakfasts in hotels, reading the International Herald Tribune, pausing at bistros and stand-up cafes where, hiking about the canals and side streets, we pull up for strong coffee, flavorful snacks, fizzy drinks.

  Returning to Bindlach after five days, where I’m allowed to live off-post now as a married first-three-grader, Lotte and I rent a second-floor apartment that will allow her to walk to her job (which she will keep through September, beyond my shipping out) just as it allows me, in my time remaining, to hike to Christensen Barracks by 0600 each morning to pull days of duty and packing chores with my troop and platoon.

  No longer a teenage soldier (having turned twenty), I file for separation in October at the end of my three-year enlistment, the separation to take place at Fort Lewis. In the meantime, as my wife, Lotte will have traveled by train and bus to join me. (Per diem and travel expenses, I’m assured, will cover the cost for my family and me to return to the state of residence wherein I was inducted at age seventeen.)

  While undertaking packing details during the day for deployment to Fort Lewis, it occurs to me how much of an adolescent I continue to be, despite having become a married first-three-grader who has known a world of growing-up experiences in Germany and Iraq. Too young not to leave the army. Too young to remain. It strikes me as an ideal time to undertake college and marriage, given the maturation I’ve known as a teenage soldier. Time to move on.

  During a medical status review related to deployment, I find myself asked in a one-on-one with a female doctor if I’ve suffered feelings of hopelessness, or had any thoughts of suicide in the wake of my experience in Iraq?

  “Sleeplessness? Nightmares?”

  While the answer to the question is yes, I’m caught off guard and look at her in silence for a moment, uncertain what it may mean to me to speak the truth. Doesn’t everyone suffer PTSD, to one degree or another? How could you not if, with superior equipment, you faced defenseless Iraqi soldiers who had to be blown away for being slow to extract and wave a handkerchief or a remnant of a T-shirt?

  “It’s okay to suffer PTSD,” the doctor assures me. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s minor PTSD, and there’s full-blown trauma. The question, after Iraq, is if you’re having problems sleeping. If you’re suffering any impairment in your social or personal or occupational functioning.”

  I decide to shake my head and say no. “I’m fine,” I say.

  Having no wish to be stigmatized, or to be compelled to undergo therapy, I fudge my reply further by saying, “I suffered a few nightmares early on, but they’re gone now.”

  “Feelings of horror and regret? They don’t linger?”

  “No, ma’am, not anymore. I’m fine,” I lie, knowing that I’m messed up to a degree and have a ways yet to go, knowing that the flashbacks and nightmares and occasional day-mares remain with me still.

  “I’m going to enter ‘Minor PTSD,’” the Doctor says. “In case you’d like some therapy in the future. Just remember: You come up feeling like a ticking time-bomb, get some help right away. At your on-post dispensary, or through the VA if you’re out of the army.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. “Will do.”

  “PTSD is serious. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she reassures me again.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” I add as I withdraw from her cubicle, wondering, on leaving the dispensary, if I really could be, or become, a ticking time-bomb? One thing I won’t become, I’ve decided (in anticipation of going to college) is a foolish college student committed to drinking and playing pranks as a way of life. It won’t happen, given where I’ve been and what I’ve seen and done. Not to me, because, whatever my age, I’m going to be the toughest, most knowledgeable historian my young students will ever have known.

  During our remaining weeks in Bindlach, 2nd Cav is all but overwhelmed by the chaos of packing for redeployment to Fort Lewis…on a half-century of service in Germany. Day after day, Christensen Barracks is further stripped and taped down for the return of the base to the German government, to be used, we’re told, for housing immigrants from the East in the ongoing mopping up of the cold war.

  For my part, I walk home each day to Lotte (or she walks out to meet me), and we take pleasure in shopping and cooking, and either watching TV or walking back to the base to take in an evening movie at the post theater. Given the complications of redeployment, we postpone buying a car until the army has moved me to Fort Lewis and set us free (with a modest pocketful of cash) to make our way on our own. By then, in September, I’ll have applications out to colleges (I have my eye on UMass Amherst). We intend to rent as close as possible to the university, to find jobs and begin building a life as I prepare for my first classes in January.

  Leaving Lotte with her parents for the weeks during which I’ll be en route with 2nd Cav to Fort Lewis (before she joins me in what will be a foreign country to her) it’s a comfort to spend my last two nights in Germany at her parents’ home, a stucco two-story dwelling in Kirchenleibach. Then it’s an escape to be on my own again on flying to the states with my unit. Thus my farewell to Germany, while I intend to make return trips with Lotte to visit her family, just as her parents plan to visit us in the U.S. when we’re settled and have a place.

  On a final visit to the mail room to post remaining items to myself in care of my mother, I send my last spiral notebooks to Mr. Roth. He has in his possession the dozen-odd I’ve written that I will recover at home, when I will also undertake a reading of history as I’ve known it throughout my coming-of-age years in Germany. Good preparation for college, I tell myself. An exercise in discipline (now that it’s over) that I’m happy to have pulled off…my singular regret being that my friendship with DeMarcus Owens failed ever to take. Farewell in any case to Germany and
to warfare in Iraq. Hello to peace, study, creativity.

  Toujours pret.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Living History

  Several months slip by before I hear from Jimmy Murphy again. His time has gone to the deployment to Fort Lewis, to serving out his final weeks in uniform, to buying a car and driving cross-country with Lotte to Amherst, where (after a short stay with his mother in South Boston) they find a second-floor apartment into which to move in January. With time on their hands over the holidays, in Jimmy’s wish to show Lotte around, he drives her north to visit me in Bristol, where I’ve bought a house into which Bert and her daughter, Haley, have settled with me in a contented co-existence that has Haley living her life for the most part as a devoted undergraduate at Plymouth State.

  All is well with us and with them, too. Jimmy and Lotte are a positive young couple on the adventure of their life, and it’s a treat to have them spend a day and a dinner with us. While I take them for an after-dinner drive around Newfound Lake, Squam Lake, and Lake Winnepausaukee, Jimmy mentions his journal, the master copy of which is securely in my possession.

  “All on a disk and backed up,” I assure him, just as I assure him that I’ll transmit a copy to him as soon as he’s online with a computer of his own in Amherst. He has a quote he wants to use to tie it off, he tells me. Something from his ongoing reading, which he promises to post right away so it can join the main draft. No mention is made of ever trying to publish the journal or of making use of it in any other way. A personal journal. A personal history. A diary. Something–for reasons as yet unknown–that we assume he’ll be happy in time to have created.

  To Lotte he jokes as we roll along: “If it weren’t for my mentor here, I’d never have kept a journal. Usually it was fun, but at times it was a pain in the ass. Hiking to the library. Trying to keep up on what was being said in newspapers and magazines. Always falling behind. Yeah, I got into it.”

  Weeks and months slip by as Jimmy blazes through his first semester at UMass and Lotte lands a GS 8 position as a translator with the on-campus U.S. State Department branch at the University. Both prosper. Lotte is beyond well- prepared for her role, which has fresh challenges coming her way, while Jimmy, as a nose-to-the-grindstone student, discovers that adding slates of summer courses to his schedule will have him eligible for his degree not in nine semesters but in six or seven, not in four years but in two or two-and-a-half.

  So it is, with funds yet available under the GI Bill, that he decides to undertake a master’s degree and to use his personal journal as the basis for his master’s thesis. The journal is a natural for the kind of thesis the UMass history department has in mind…an event or topic that can be supported and verified by both personal and academic research. By then he’s added a quote to the manuscript that ties off the event of the Gulf War and places it in historical perspective.

  August 1993. On the leafy slopes of Arlington Cemetery, Bush gathered with the families of the 390 American men and women who died during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, of whom 148 had been killed in action. A sergeant sang “The Last Full Measure of Devotion,” and the doleful blare of “Taps” swept down the hill toward the river, echoing and re-echoing among the endless ranks of tombstones.

  For what had they died, those 390 Americans? What cause was worthy of their sacrifice, or that of the 458 Americans wounded in action, or the 510 allied casualties? With the shooting now over, the reasons at last seemed clear: the conflict had been waged on behalf of cheap oil, friendly monarchies, and Washington’s strategic goal of preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power inimical to American interests in the Middle East.

  The Persian Gulf War was neither the greatest moral challenge facing Americans since 1945, as Bush had declared, nor the pointless exercise in gunboat diplomacy portrayed by his severest critics. The truth lay somewhere on the high middle ground, awaiting discovery.

  –Rick Atkinson, Crusade

  As a minor hit in the history department, Jimmy’s thesis is taken in hand by his adviser, who hopes to place it for publication as a personal account of the Gulf War. Publication is a new hope for Jimmy, if not one in which he invests any distracting dreams or fantasies of fame and fortune. His dreams have been going to teaching, while the immediate benefit of his thesis is that it has him receiving offers from each of the three teaching positions for which he applies, a process that has him and Lotte remaining for the present time in Northampton, allowing her to retain her position in Amherst where she has gained two promotions in grade for the quality of her work.

  It’s as they are planning a summer graduation trip to Germany to visit Lotte’s family that Jimmy finds himself stirred enough by his recurring memories to undertake a computer search for DeMarcus Owens, last known to him to be on his way to civilian life in Baltimore. Hoping to make contact via email, Jimmy cannot find an email address online, though he is able to identify a telephone number for a DeMarcus Owens in metropolitan Baltimore. The experience is one, prior to the visit to Bindlach with Lotte, that he adds as a postscript to a journal of military life and warfare he has entitled Coming of Age. His entry:

  To a female voice answering the phone in Baltimore, I explain who I am and say, “A few years back, in the army, I was acquainted with a DeMarcus Owens from Baltimore? While we were in Germany.”

  “You calling from Germany?” the woman who has answered wants to know.

  “No, from Northampton, Mass. Dee and I… DeMarcus…we were buddies in Germany, and in Iraq. I’m calling to say hello…to see how he’s doing. I’m going back to Germany to visit some family. It’s had me thinking about old times.”

  On a pause, the woman says, “This Dee’s wife. What is it you want with him?”

  Finding her more suspicious than friendly (not unlike Dee), I try to soften my appeal by being more forthcoming. “We were friends in the army,” I say. “I lost track of him when I got out…at Fort Lewis. Remembered that he was from Baltimore. I was wondering how he’s doing. What he’s doing. That’s all. Thought I’d dial some numbers and give it a try.”

  After another pause, in no way persuaded, the woman says, “Maybe he in the shed. What’s yo name again?”

  “Jimmy Murphy,” I say. “2nd Armored Cav,” I add, in my ongoing attempt to tiptoe through an apparent racial mine field.

  The minutes begin falling away. Three…five…as many as ten. Then the woman is on the line trying to tell me (I can tell she’s attempting to fabricate a reply) that DeMarcus wasn’t in the shed after all. That he must have left to go somewhere. That she doesn’t know when he’ll be back.

  I get it, see in my disappointment that it is as it has always been. A white guy who talks like a white guy is not going to get through to a black guy on a call from the past. Dee knows who I am but has no wish to speak to me. Is apparently more irritated, embarrassed, resentful of my call than I imagined he would be. Has told his wife (or sister or mother) to say he isn’t there. A white guy from the army. A soldier who wasn’t his friend at all though he had said he wanted to be.

  “Will he be back anytime soon?”

  “You never know,” the woman says.

  As in the beginning, I get it. Go away. Don’t be calling this number again.

  Not knowing what else to do, I say, “Thank you,” and hang up the receiver.

  So it is that my friendship with DeMarcus Owens concludes. Declining to be my best man, declining to say hello. If it’s white guilt or black guilt, a cultural chasm, or even shyness, I don’t know. I know only that he has no wish to be friends, not even after some years have passed and we should be able to put aside any differences we may have had and acknowledge our common past.

  I get it.

  And, of course, I don’t get it at all.

  In Bindlach, going on a bus ride and a walk during our visit to Kirchenleibach, I find Christensen Barracks abandoned but for a caretaker living in a duplex that, in my day, was reserved for field grade officers near the main gate. No MPs
are on duty checking IDs and motioning vehicles in and out. Weeds are growing in the cracks in the sidewalks, the grounds are no longer maintained, and young soldiers are no longer practicing into the night on simulators, shooting hoops at the base gym, bussing into Bindlach and Bayreuth with eyes out for native women to have and to hold.

  It’s a feeling of odd regret and loss that has me seeing how meaningful this world was to my coming-of-age years. Striving for maturity. Experiencing friendship and love. Warfare and revulsion. Failure and rejection. And growth… never more apparent than on this visit, going out from Lotte’s parent’s home on a Saturday morning to have a look at where I opened my eyes as an innocent teenager a lifetime ago.

  About the Author

  THEODORE WEESNER, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “Writer’s Writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Best American Short Stories. His novels, including The Car Thief, Winning the City Redux, The True Detective, and Harbor Lights, have been published to create critical acclaim from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times to name a few. He lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.