Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,18
up the back door of the kitchen, and from an exhaust fan a burnt, fleshy smell blew our way across the asphalt. The real world had come back, and with it all its tawdriness. We were just two teenagers sitting in a truck in a grimy back parking lot in Zachary: a skinny fifteen-year-old girl with stringy blond hair and a striped polyester blouse, together with her eighteen-year-old Cajun boyfriend with a scruffy mustache who lived in a trailer with his father and couldn’t find a job and so had done what poor boys have done for ages.
Sure, the army has a bad rep these days, Tim was saying, what with Kent State and all. But like the sergeant told him, a smart man could see which way this thing was headed. Already they were cutting back on troops. The whole shebang would probably be over before Tim even got there. He should grab this opportunity while he could because he wouldn’t get another chance. And better to enlist now than to get drafted, because then you didn’t get any choice at all where they sent you; then you were really screwed. Sign up, and any career he wanted, it’d be his. He liked radios? Fine. They had a school for that. Electrical engineering, medicine, auto mechanics—hell, playing the clarinet—you could do just about whatever you wanted with the army.
I couldn’t believe Tim had fallen for all this, and I told him so. “That’s nothing but a bunch of crapola. That guy’s giving you a line.”
“It’s true. I got it in writing,” Tim said. “It’s like a contract.”
“You signed it already?”
He nodded. I only had a year of high school, and the only thing I knew about the war in Vietnam was what I saw on TV, but even I knew it wasn’t something any sane person would want to sign up for.
“I can’t believe you went and did that!” I said. “The army? My god, Tim. What are you thinking? You can’t really be that stupid.”
Tim yanked his head back like I’d slapped him. He blinked at me, then turned away and stared out the side window, swallowing.
I felt terrible. I knew how fragile his self-esteem was, and to call him stupid was about the worst thing I could have said. I was reaching to touch his shoulder when he swung back to face me. His eyes were wet with hurt.
“I did it for you!” he cried in a hoarse voice. “Don’t you understand? It’s for you! It’s for you!”
He had done it for me. Even then the idea didn’t quite make good sense, but I was only fifteen, as hungry for affection and romance as any fifteen-year-old. I rested my hand on his knee in apology. “Tim. Sweetie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” As we slowly began to make up I continued to protest, but feebly. “Of course I don’t want you to go,” I said. “You could get yourself killed over there!” In the end, though, it didn’t take much persuasion for me to see his enlistment as he wanted me to see it, a testament of his love.
He took my hand and kissed the scar on the inside of my left wrist—the scar I’d gotten for him—and pressed it to his heart. I did the same, kissing the palm of his hand—the hand of a soldier now—and laid it solemnly on my chest. Our actions felt weighted with something deeper and more serious than passion. We weren’t children anymore; we were adults, in the adult world of war and battle, guns and tanks in faraway foreign countries. My brave soldier boy, risking his life for me! For me!
Well. That’s what it is to be young and stupid, I suppose, isn’t it? Boy or girl, you believe anything anyone tells you as long as it’s wrapped up in noble-sounding words, and only because you’re so desperate not to feel so young and stupid anymore. And in spite of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, this never changes, apparently. I watch those poor, hapless boys on TV marching off to Iraq—because they’re nothing more than boys, really, just Tim’s age—and I wonder who put them up to this. What can they be thinking?
As for myself, I know how I would answer Tim today. I would say, “Don’t you dare do this for me. Don’t you dare do that in my name and call it love.” Do it for your own dumb ideas of bravery or