With Your Shield Or On It

I am letting my husband sleep this morning for selfish reasons. He has been so ever attentive that I have had no time to write or read or even think about anything but our rehabilitated relationship. It will take some time to get a prospective on this transformed husband I seem to have acquired. My left shoulder aches from sleeping inextricably trapped in his arms at night. We have been out four nights this week, and my lungs are filled with stale smoke from the bars, my feet blackened from dancing for hours in my socks on the cobblestones in Shockoe Bottom, and my diet compromised with a lot of Guinness, Harp, Stella, and other lagers. I can see clearly that I have a problem with too much happiness. I must have become comfortable with my general level of background angst, enough so that it seems like a void in my life when it is missing. I have lived long enough to know that these honeymoons do not last; that no one has to rush out looking for tragedy, as it will find you no matter how well you think you are hidden.

The rush to tragedy in mind, I have tried to write about the wedding of our friend’s son for my family blog, but the opinions I have about the war just overwhelm me. I don’t want to sound critical of his choices because I truly respect the courage required to place your life in harm’s way. I equally hate the fact that young men give their bodies to be weapons of the war, and cannot comprehend that he can leave a beautiful young bride alone to travel around the world to kill men he does not know, and cannot ever understand. In this war they are called “ragheads”, but in previous wars they were called “gooks”, “huns”, “nips”, “krauts” and a thousand other names, but never, never the accurate term of “men”. They cannot kill men and sleep at night in the scorching desert heat. When this boy was a year old I watched his parents pull him protectively away from the danger of a sharp edged coffee table. I now watch in amazement as they show a fierce pride that both their sons are Marines; that their precious boy could go and die for some cause I do not grasp.

That’s all I have, no answers, only questions. I doubt that anyone will be surprised to find that I come from a long line of strong opinionated women. My grandmother told me that she remembered a feeling of relief when women finally got the vote, because she knew it would be an end to war. She had tons of suffragette sheet music in the bench of the pump organ that sat in her parlor. She taught me to sing them along with her as she played enthusiastically on that beautiful Victorian antique. Much of it spoke to the belief that women would not send their sons to fight a war, but of course she did not have the opportunity to study history like her grandchildren. Since the time of Sparta there have been plenty of mothers who felt their patriotic duty more strongly than their maternal instincts. My own sons do not know how thankful they should be to their fierce great grandmother, the first of many fiery Aries that seem to be karmatically placed in my life. She was the reason I stepped up to protest Vietnam, the reason I actually cursed at the military recruiter who tried to get my son to enlist when he was still in high school, the reason none of my children ever considered a career in service.

How to reconcile the sweet nature of my dear friend to the image of the Spartan women remains a mystery to me. Her father was career military, a Colonel in the army. Her husband volunteers to don uniform and take the place of a young soldier in Afghanistan each holiday season, so some other mother’s son can be with family for Christmas. These are the friends I hold most dear of any I have known in my life. Our children have grown up together and we have shared each other’s joys and sorrows, but we all have an implicit understanding that we do not critique each other’s lifestyle. If anything happens to the boy I have know since the moment of his birth, my grief will be as if he were one of my own. I listened silently as my friend told me about the best man at the wedding, the one who will have the back of her own child when he travels to Iraq this month. He is soon to be on his fourth tour and is only home recovering from wounds. With a bullet in his body, he killed eight “ragheads” in a firefight some months ago. His wife is expecting a baby soon, but he will not be home to see his first child born. I listen to the words, showing only the emotions she wants to see, but in my heart I cry silently, and I wonder where the war will be when his baby turns eighteen.