“How about pizza instead?”
“God, yes,” he said, covering his face with his hands in agitation and leaving them there for a long time. I watched him carefully over the new few weeks, and he knew I was watching him. I fought the urge to reach out and touch him all the time, for whose reassurance I don’t know.
More things leaked out over time. One afternoon we were hiking in Sequoia National Park and Ross started pointing out plants you could eat and places you could hide. If you’ve got your field spade or a knife, evidently, you can scratch out a shallow trough and bury yourself in leaves and dirt. In snow, there are ways of covering your tracks and carving out a shelter. In sand, there are ways of using a parachute to build camouflage. “You can hide pretty easily in lots of exposed-seeming places,” he said, “as long as you don’t move or look like a human body.”
If SERE was to teach Ross how to hide, how to separate within himself to protect what was most valuable, even under extreme duress, then life as a military spouse was teaching me a faint echo of the relationship equivalent—how do you protect the core of intimacy at the heart of a marriage while at the same time welcoming into it all the possibilities of a life at war?
Was this what I signed up for?
CHAPTER 5
Both of my grandfathers served in World War II, and they provided me with two contrary versions of what military service was like. Both were young and poor, and both volunteered—among boys their age, it was what everyone was doing, going off to fight the “good war.” My maternal grandfather, Ray, was an Army Air Corps pilot who, due to a delay in training caused by an injury to his hand, missed the opportunity to see combat and instead served out his time stateside as an instructor pilot. Ray was full of wartime stories of high adventure, dangerous pranks, and bucking against authority, most too good to be entirely true. My paternal grandfather, Bill, was an Army infantryman who fought in the Pacific theater in New Guinea and Luzon and was later stationed in Japan after the atom bombs dropped. He never talked about the war. Growing up, I knew he still had nightmares, and I’d once seen the long whitish scar running along his side when he was changing shirts in a hotel room, but I was twenty-one years old before I worked up the courage to ask him anything about it.
He told me the scar was from a mortar blast that killed the man huddled right beside him in the same foxhole, his best friend at the time. The skirmish was over a stolen American howitzer that Japanese troops were using to fire at Bill’s platoon. After the blast that killed his friend, Bill’s gun jammed, but he managed to fix it and pick off the men firing the howitzer. His platoon had been decimated, but since they had recaptured the howitzer, Bill’s commanding officer told him he was putting him in for a Silver Star. While Bill was at a field hospital getting his wound treated, the rest of his platoon, along with the commanding officer, were killed, and any talk of awards for valor died with them. I asked if he felt disappointed. “I wasn’t over there looking for medals,” was all he would say. He spent another year doing long-range reconnaissance patrols, the kind of ten-and twenty-mile hikes behind enemy lines that get assigned with a loose expectation of return, before boarding a boat headed to Japan, part of a fleet of men slated to be the first wave of a ground assault on the Japanese mainland. It was considered a death sentence, but then came the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bill got assigned to walk patrols in Hiroshima after it was leveled. “It looked like a cornfield plowed under. A whole city.” He was twenty-one years old, my age at the time of our conversation.