Page 11 of Road Refugees

“Right. Not easy to just abandon everyone and fly back home.” If that sounded like a weak-ass excuse, it was. Even back then, I was overly driven. Wracked with guilt at not being by Jessica’s side at the end, I whipped myself even harder. “It would’ve been a lousy life for a wife. Basically raising kids on her own.”

“You could’ve gotten a civilian assignment,” Gunther said. “Lots of guys get stationed in Frankfurt to be with their wives.”

“But she died,” Eloise pointed out.

I was glad when my phone on the nightstand rang. I picked it up just to avoid responding to Gunther’s truth. I could’ve requested a transfer to somewhere like Frankfurt, a giant party except with wives and kids.

“Slappy!” I cried, turning to the wall. Gunther and Eloise continued to talk—about me, no doubt—in low tones. “What’s shaking, my man?”

Slappy gasped for breath. I couldn’t tell if he was sobbing, in a panic, or running from something. “Cap’n! I just can’t do this anymore. I’m going AWOL!”

“What?” I shouted, scaring silent the gossipers behind me. I’d never heard Slappy speak like that, that I could remember. He always just said fuck the army, and that was the extent of it. Because we agreed on that issue, we stayed friends. But I could not let him throw away his career, his reputation. His country that doesn’t give a fuck, I reminded myself. And having a broken arm probably didn’t lighten his mood. “No, Slappy, no! Where are you?”

“I’m at the High Dive in Fort Carson. I’m telling you, man, I’m never going back!” The High Dive was our watering hole.

“Who’s with you?”

“Tun Tin and ‘Ears’ Watts, but I’m telling you, Cap’n, they can’t talk me out of it. I got a room next door and I’m not returning to base.”

“You’ve got only, what? Three months left of your tour? You can get an Honorable that way, Slappy! Can’t you just hang in there for six more months? Just use fucking birth control so that doesn’t happen to Chloe again under their watch.”

“No, man, no! I can’t hang in there for six fucking months, Town! I’m just a scarred blackened shell of my former self, and they want me to go to Fort Benning and train those POGs, and I can’t! I just can’t.” Here he devolved into that hollow, tearless kind of sobbing, like a collapsed accordion. POG meant Person other than Grunt, and these giddy newbies were sometimes the worst to train, all full of themselves, lacking caution.

“Chloe’s gonna join me here, she’ll get a moving company set up, and we’re going back to Williamsburg. We’re just gonna vanish, poof, like that. Cap’n, what they did to us is unconscionable. Unconscionable.”

I agreed, of course. Forcing a woman to give birth to a deformed child out of some warped idea of pro-life, that was unconscionable. Knowing ahead of time what would happen, Slappy hadn’t even touched the child. He couldn’t bring himself to pick her up. It was like watching a seagull with a broken wing pathetically dying over days, weeks.

In the end, I talked Slappy down off his cliff—I hoped. Like with Jessica, I could not tear myself away from my present situation to drive to Fort Carson and shake some sense into Slappy. The incident reminded me how fragile we all are, how close to the breaking point. It jolted my elation over bonding with Linus. Linus wasn’t a cure-all pill, but I had to rely on the faith I did have in him.

I was discovering that my joy lay in serving and loving others. I was doing a service to my brothers in arms by letting them blow off steam at my condo. I’d developed deep, lasting bonds with them, as I would with Linus. I had to hope the happiness I felt with Linus wasn’t just oxytocin but a sign of something higher than me.

Unlike my zealous parents, I couldn’t pretend to have a faith that didn’t exist. But I had to stay true to the allegiance I did have to those around me.