Fourteen
Nash
When I worked for the tourism department in Boston, I partnered up with the local college on a project with students attempting to humanize the history of the city. Turns out, there are quite a few people in this world who believe that the things that happened before us don’t really matter much today. Who don’t see the parallels of then and now or how history so often repeats itself. The students had free rein of how they chose to do this, but the culmination of it was a city event called The History Between.
Students set out to do this in a variety of ways. One showed the progress of beer over time, offering a huge sampling of brews at the final event. That, naturally, was very popular.
Another made a variety of chowder recipes—chow-dah, as he insisted on pronouncing it—demonstrating the evolution of flavor.
But the one that stood out the most, at least to me, was the girl who interviewed local veterans about their love stories, recording them then playing video highlights on a loop.
She asked my opinion; I told her to do it.
Her plan was to tell only the most hope-filled stories of love in war in a way that felt relatable and inspiring to everydaycivilians.“Everyone understands love. It’s the most relatable history there is. The history between two people?”She grinned. “Can’t beat that.”
She was a romantic, sure, but so am I.
You see, I’d always believed the history between two people was the best history there was. The stories of two individuals coming together and sparking a change to the entire blueprint of history always proved to me that people were never meant to live life alone.
The student interviewed over thirty local veterans, but the one that stayed with me all these years was with an Air Force pilot, Captain David Blairs, who fought in the Vietnam War.
Only months into his deployment, Blairs was shot down over North Vietnam and taken prisoner where he was held for over seven years as a POW in the Hòa Lò Prison in Hanoi, later nicknamed Hanoi Hilton.
He wouldn’t tell the student what happened to him within those walls, said there wasn’t enough good to be romanticized there, but it was what came after that really mattered. That made everything he went through worth surviving.
When he was finally released from that prison camp, his injuries were so severe he had to first go to Clark Air Base in the Philippines to receive treatment in order for him to be stable enough to make the trip back to the United States. When the time came, he went to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California for the remainder of his care. In his hospital bed, pumped full of meds, malnourished and exhausted beyond belief, and over two thousand miles from home, he heard a woman’s voice echo down the hall.
“I was told he was here”was all she said.
He didn’t need to see her face or even hear his own name on her lips to know who it was. Even though they were only marriedweeks before he was deployed and only knew each other months before that.
Seven years of not hearing his wife say a word, and he still recognized her voice, even as weak and out of it as he was.
“A song you never forget the lyrics to”is what Blairs had said in his interview about hearing her that day from his hospital bed.“One that gets stuck in your head until you finally get a listen.”
I’ve thought of him over the years, wondering if it was simple wishful thinking that let him recognize her voice or if that’s just how us humans are wired. If the people we love imprint themselves so deeply into us, we’d recognize the sound of their voices anywhere, no matter how much time passes. No matter what happens in between. No matter where in our own histories they find us. If some people come into our lives and become so intertwined with us that they’re simply part of who we are.
I wondered if he thought of his wife’s face when he stared at the ceiling in the room where he was held captive, night after night, year after year.
I wondered if he thought of every little choice, moment, and conversation that led to him being shot out of the sky, wishing he could be granted one do-over in life.
But mostly, I wondered if he ever tried to forget her but simply couldn’t comprehend a life where he existed and she wasn’t part of it, promising himself if he ever got to see her again, he’d fight like hell to never be away from her again.
Because though I’ve never had chains around my body or come face-to-face with anything even as remotely heinous as he did in that prison, I know what it’s like to not be with the person I want most in the world. Know what it’s like to have a life with someone one day only to be forced to tell her goodbye the next.
There’s more to his story—there always is—but that’s not what matters to me as I stand in front of a group of tourists,familiar yet new as they listen to me tell the old stories I’ve come to love.
Because now I understand how Captain David Blairs felt when he heard that voice.
I pull the sunglasses from my face, but it isn’t necessary.
I’d recognize the sound of my wife’s voice anywhere.
Fifteen
“Ilove questions,” Nash says, sliding an arm of his sunglasses into the neck of his shirt, smooth. “Ask away.”
While he mustn’t recognize me, I’m momentarily paralyzed by how much I recognize him. By calling his name after so many years of not. By seeing that Nash-brown shade of his eyes. Unable to move or think or make any words form, I just stand there and stare at him through the lenses of my sunglasses. The heat and the tourists and the busy street of Charleston vanish. His eyes and the decision to keep looking are the only two things that exist, just like the first time I saw him all those years ago.
