Soldier Boy

Soldier Boy

Streetlights began staggering on; dim, hesitant fireflies against the 6 o'clock dusk veiling the sky. They flickered briefly, dove back into sleep and then double-clicked on for their nighttime watch over the causeways. Their light was hazy, and buzzed with an electric consistency; soon to be accompanied by the flutter of moths and crickets, but for now performing solo. Above the burning bulbs, the Sun lazily drifted down, meeting the silhouette of Phoenix's last plane of the day.

Departing from the desert heat of Arizona, it would stop over in Raleigh long enough to refuel and give the captains a quick smoke and coffee break, and then migrate nonstop to the desert heat of Kuwait. The soldiers onboard would arrive in an undisclosed location, and ride drowsily in infantry-green transports to meet up with the 3rd Armored Division, just outside of Al Qaysumah. It could have been Al Jahran or Umm Qasr, the name wasn't what was important, in fact, it was meaningless - a city is just a dot on a map when it's that far away. Al Qaysumah was where their moms' sons were... where their wives told friends their husbands were stationed. It was the name they longed for in victory reports, and their worst dread in the ambush reports read monotonously throughout the day on live news feeds.

Nameless, eventually faceless newly hired reporters continued their tireless coverage, come rain, shine or better story. "... skirmish in the Al Wafrah Oil Field today, when members of the 1st Infantry Division and VII Corps merged with the 3rd Armored Division outside of Al Qaysumah..." Ears perked up; faces instantly drawn taught in apprehension toward the television screen. "... amid reports of guerilla activity, though later military officials announced the burning oil lines were from rioting nationalists, not as initially reported militant insurgents. The 3rd Armored Division was recalled to Al Qaysumah to rendezvous with the American and British 1st Armored Divisions..." Tense eyes and ears relaxed, but the thin worry lines would never really disappear. Tomorrow was another wait, another battle report and a new anguished breath held in until the detached reporter announced, "No casualties were sustained."

Tomorrow was grey in the distance, and today was slowly slipping away as soldier boys bunked in for a fourteen-hour plane ride that would land six hours after it left. The East was burning, and in the West wives, mothers, daughters and girlfriends slept uneasily.

It's just a dot on a map, until soldier boy doesn't come back.

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Katelynn stood on her porch, watching the streetlights accept their nightly guard over the suburbs of Phoenix while the Sun moved to warm Cathay and Sri Lanka; romantic locations she knew nothing about, save that she wished to be there - just not to be here. In the distance, a final-call plane sliced through clouds on its way East. Almost religiously, she followed it with seeking eyes, willing it to turn around, to land and bring their boys home. She was still gazing, still tracing its path of turbine-diced sky with her finger long after it had faded into the dusky Arizona horizon. Dejected, she leaned against a porch column; just a beam of wood on most days, but now a supportive friend. With a sad smile, she stared down at her sneakers, her eyes slowly moving toward the hand rubbing her stomach. It wasn't noticeable yet.

She and Justin had met at an art showing. One of her pieces, entitled "Friend, Nightingale," was on display; he was there to make mocking gestures with his buddies at the austere old men and women who populate showings of any sort in the suburbs.
"I really feel like this portrait captures the essence of neo-classical despotism," he said smirking, faking a British accent and over-accentuating "essence." The sculpture was titled "Wednesday Midday," and featured a woman checking her watch near a bronzed birdbath.
"Actually," Katelynn said, walking over toward the group, "it's a pretentious piece of shit. I'd be interested in hearing what you thought of this piece though," pointing to her own painting.
A few days later at one of the last coffee houses left in the 'burbs, he apologized for being such an ass - she in turn apologized for ordering the lobster the night before. By their fifth date, they had an unspoken agreement on exclusiveness. Their twentieth date was spent settling the arrangements on a rented house a few blocks from his brother.
They had a strange, enviable relationship. Friends compared them to and old ivy-covered lamp, "It starts with a few leaves at the base, and then before long it's wrapped itself around the light post and you can't tell where one begins and the other ends." They mostly called it love, and often forsook their friends' company to stay at home and do nothing, together.
Together they fixed up their rented home; her painting the walls, him distracting her, calling, "Kate!" from the other side of the house - just to ask when she got there how the painting was coming. Justin was the only person other than her Dad who could call her "Kate" and get away with it. She revenged herself by calling him, "Honey-bunches shnoogie wumpkins," in front of his buddies. They mostly called it love.

Justin worked as a mechanic in an auto-shop across town, while Katelynn painted murals on the children's room of a new church down the street from her parents. They would meet for lunch every Tuesday and Thursday with her Mom and Dad; talk about the weather, her newest paintings and the stirrings of trouble in the Middle East somewhere. Mondays and Wednesdays they were left to fend for themselves, as differing schedules prevented synchronized lunch hours. On Fridays, they both left work early to have lunch at the hot dog stand in the park and watch the ducks. Katelynn won over the hot dog vendor with her smile, and he eventually conceded to giving them a few old buns every time to feed the ducks with. They would walk hand-in-hand along the bank of the small pond until the sun went down, and then go home to do nothing, together.

For a weekend every month, Katelynn stayed with her parents while Justin went for his mandated National Guard training. He had signed up right out of high school with his buddies; the allure of the uniform and being able to say they had been to "basic training" had been too appealing to their 18-year-old sensibilities. He wasn't actually a grunt, with his mechanical background he'd been placed in the engineer corps. So, for a weekend every month, he dissembled tank engines and reverse-engineered foreign machine gun turrets. None of them really believed they'd ever actually get called into service.

The letter came while Katelynn was visiting her parents. Justin stared at it for a long time. Initially, he brushed her questions off as him just having a rough day, but eventually he showed it to her. Her face afterward made him wish he hadn't. His guard division was to join the 3rd Armored in Kuwait; someplace called Al Qaysumah. He had a week.
She begged him to not to go, to find a way out of it. Eventually she just cried in her room while he sat on the porch, head in his hands, wondering what he was going to do. In the end, there was no real choice about it. He packed a satchel full of necessities, filled an envelope with pictures of her and promised to write every chance he got. Kate's words begged him not to go; her eyes pleaded for him not to get killed. "I won't," he said quietly, holding her before he left for the Phoenix airport. "I won't."

As he stared out the window, unable to make-out anything but ever-smaller brown and black squares criss-crossed by grey veins of concrete, Katelynn stood on her porch and silently watched him fly away to a desert on the other side of the world. Her parents would attribute her sickness and strange-behavior to Justin's absence, and largely it would be. As he left her to fight, maybe to die, her only means of comfort was to stare at her hand absently massaging her stomach. It wasn't noticeable yet.

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Somewhere off in that great dark world, Megan knew, a giant metal bird was tearing off through the sky, carrying her Daddy and his friends to a foreign land. It would be hot there, Mommy said. Megan asked why Daddy had to go there, when it was already hot here.
"Because your Dad has to fight some bad men who want to hurt people."
He had given her the biggest hug ever in the history of the world before he'd left, and she thought he was crying, maybe. Daddy doesn't cry though, so it must have just been her. She stood on her porch, feeling the vibrations of the bird jumping into the sky and flying away. She could hear its engines whirring faster and faster; she could smell the exhaust twirling from the plane and then dying into the already thick layer of ozone over Phoenix. Megan gazed desperately towards "the sky," wishing her Daddy would come home. She missed him already; she was scared. She closed her eyes tight, as she had so many times before, counted to three and then opened them, hoping against hope. The world was still dark. She was still blind.

She remembered snippets of "color," she thought - mostly "red," and pain. When she was born, an infection from complications in the pregnancy had settled into her eyes. Before the doctors realized there was a problem, irreparable damage had been done. It had been the nurses who figured it out. Megan didn't coo when they'd bring a bottle; didn't scream when they'd bring a needle. Her parents didn't care. They loved her, and she, in all of her newborn innocence, loved them.
Learning to adapt had been the hardest part. Never having experienced sight, Megan didn't have to deal with losing it. Still, there were little setbacks that reminded her that she was special. Her first step had been cut short by ramming headfirst into a table leg; her first word, appropriately, was, "Ouch." She worked to learn Braille. There were just so many things that she couldn't grasp, things like "color," "mountain," and that great, mysterious "sky." She liked space, though. Megan would have her Mommy stay up late reading her stories about astronauts and space explorers. Her first poster would have been of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon - if she had known what a poster was.

There were a lot of procedures, a lot of tests; basically a lot of "I'm sorry's" when Megan was a baby. They had tried electrolight stimulation, five different kinds of medication, had even talked about cornea transplants. No more surgeries, no more doctors and no more hospitals they eventually decided. The bills were beginning to rack up as well. Megan's dad joined the Army, they promised to help with medical expenses and provide insurance on Megan while he was in the service. He took a tour around the East Indies, even saw a little bit of action during an uprising in Myanmar. Once he was released from active duty, he transferred back to the local National Guard division in Phoenix and settled his wife and daughter on a ranch just outside of the suburb lines.
There were still a few bastions of the West, the way things were before cookie-cutter homes and sterilized, homogenized sub-divisions began springing up. He was an old-fashioned man, and was happy on his ranch with his family, happy turning away the developers that came around every few months wanting to buy it up.

Talk of war, trouble in the Middle East, stirred up old memories and older pride. When the letters started going out, he drove down to the Army office and volunteered to join the Phoenix boys ordered to meet the 3rd Armored. He didn't have to. His tour of duty was already up, and he had a wife and a child now. He was an old-fashioned man, though, and so he settled in with his friends and neighbors on a big metal bird to go "the bad men." He left his shotgun and a friend's dog at home, though, just in case any bad men showed up there. They wore five-gallon hats and sported fancy boleros, but they were bad men all the same.

He explained to Megan that he had to go defend America (The country that Arizona is in. Countries are like really big states.) across the ocean, and that he might be gone a long time. He told her to be a big girl, and take care of Mommy and her new doggy friend while he was gone; that he would bring her something back from "Kuwait." She asked him who "Al Qaysumah" was, and whether he was a bad guy. "Maybe, honey," he said with a sad smile. "Maybe."
Megan watched her Daddy fly off to fight a "war" with unseeing eyes. There were a lot of things she couldn't understand in the great dark world. Pain was not one of them though, and because of that she was scared.

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The streetlights were glowing stoically, and a little girl on the west edge of the suburbs began missing her Daddy, not wanting the sun to go down and commence her first night without him. Across town, a young woman disinterestedly massaged the head of a paint brush, it was more convenient than a rabbit’s foot, and wished fervently on lone stars quietly glowing in the darkening sky. Between the two, and on all points of the compass in Phoenix, similar people, wives, grandmothers and daughters walked dispassionately back inside their homes and began the long wait for soldier boy.

It’s just a dot a on map.