The Silence

A convoy rumbles along the street under the moonlight below my quarters. It's never quiet at Bagram, but I've long since tuned out the round-the-clock activity of the primary support hub for the Afghan theater.

I stare down at the condolence letter I'm still trying to write to Corporal Gonzalez's family. What I want to say just isn't coming out right. My wastebasket is filled with crumpled-up draft after draft. This is my third straight night of trying.

It's almost midnight. In a couple minutes I will be forty-two years old, at least according to local time. What time is it in California? It always takes a moment of concentration to remember Afghanistan is twelve and a half hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time. At one time I would have waited for the "real" new day, but I no longer see the point.

The clock clicks down towards midnight. I only have water, so I pour myself a canteen-cup full. I raise it in a toast right as the clock ticks on twelve. I pretend it's scotch. In my mind the scotch is dry and smoky, somewhat spicy, and goes down smooth. I feel its warmth immediately spreading.

"Do they need soldiers in Heaven?"

~.~.~

Right after I ETSed from Fort Benning in August of 1991, I tried to start my drive to California but was too hung-over. I got as far as Auburn before I decided I needed to try again the next day.

That night I ended up in a little bar near my motel. It was dark inside and it took a couple moments for my eyes to adjust. A long narrow bar leading to a pool room in the back made up the bulk of the interior. A sweaty and overweight bartender poured a draft for a group of probably underage college kids. There were three guys and a girl. The girl wasn't pretty, per se, but she clearly enjoyed being the center of attention. They took their pitcher into the pool room.

There was another guy, in his 40s, crew cut and wearing mirrored sunglasses, who sat alone at the bar. He watched the grainy television and ate peanuts while working on what looked like a quadruple vodka tonic. I took a seat a couple stools down from him. He glanced at me without much interest as I ordered a beer.

"Why do you keep staring at me like I got t**s?" he finally asked, irritated at the way I kept looking over at him. "Do I turn you on?"

"I know you."

"Congratulations."

"You were my drill sergeant back in the day."

"You and ten thousand other little sh**s."

Sergeant First Class Roberto White.

SFC White sits in on a folding chair in front our platoon as we do PT. He bites into an apple. "It's mind over matter, gentlemen... I don't mind and you don't matter."

The weight of my ruck increases exponentially as we hit the eighteen-mile mark. A five-ton passes us. SFC White sits on the rear bumper. He calls out, "That which does not kill you WILL make you stronger... but it's still going to hurt like a son-of-a-bitch!"

It's two Sundays before graduation. No training is scheduled and we are relaxing. SFC White strolls through the barracks, hands in pocket and asks, "All right, who's got the porn? Someone's always got porn at this stage. I don't want to get you in no trouble, I just want something to read. I'm bored."

I flip a coin with my battle buddy and lose.

"You owe me a playboy."

The sunglasses came off. He squinted to look closely at me. "Yeah? Which issue?"

"June 1983. Marianne Gravatte was the cover, Jolanda Egger the centerfold."

SFC White turns the magazine centerfold sideways and squints at it in the blinding sunlight. "Front-leaning rest position, move!"

Completely drenched with sweat, I drop yet again to the push-up position and push.

SFC White slowly flips the page.

"Serious cuties those two."

"I really wouldn't know."

"Ackers, Akers..."

"Occam."

"Some sh** like that. Yeah, I remember you."

"Let me buy you a drink."

He shrugged as he put his sunglasses back on. "Free country."

I bought a round, and then another as we talked all things military. He told some hilarious stories about clueless recruits from his time as a drill sergeant, and then other anecdotes from other duty assignments. It was like he hadn't had someone to talk to in a while. I also noticed that just as I hadn't wanted to say much about Panama and Iraq, he didn't say much about Vietnam.

There was a story about him that had circulated during Basic: That in Vietnam he was one of six to make it back from a thirty man patrol. I waited until we both had a good buzz going to ask.

"It was a hell of a way to get promoted." SFC White looked down into his vodka tonic. He didn't say anything else for several moments. "It was a damn cluster-f***..."

We were interrupted by the girl.

"Got a light?" she asked me. Clearly emboldened by all the attention she was getting from the guys she was with she stood in front of me with a look I wasn't unfamiliar with.

SFC White slid a lighter over to me.

I lit her cigarette, but was annoyed at the interruption. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"What's your name?" I ask her.

"Michelle."

I gestured for Michelle to lean in close. "Look, Michelle," I stage whispered. "I don't want to talk to you right now. But later on if you want to f***, I'm in room one ten across the way."

It took a moment for what I said to sink in. She stared at me open-mouthed. For a moment looked like she was going to respond, but she just turned and rejoined her friends. They huddled around her, and from the way the guys kept glancing over at me and sizing me up, she clearly was describing what I had said to her. In the end, they decided to simply leave.

Michelle looked straight ahead as she passed by me, the guy in a ball cap stared daggers, the other two kept their eyes on the ground as they shuffled out the door.

Once they were gone SFC White said, "You owe Charlie here fifty bucks."

"What for?"

"Thirty for running them off... they were good for at least another thirty dollars worth of beer. Ain't that right, Charlie?"

Charlie the bartender nodded his agreement.

"And the other twenty?"

"That's for being a dumba**. You don't ever be rude to a woman."

~.~.~

The following summer, while driving to Florida to hook up with Davis and his Uncle Reggie, I spent a couple days at SFC White's place, chopping firewood and drinking his beer.

"You're going f***ing where?" he asked me after I split a log.

"Liberia."

"What the f*** for?"

"To build a church."

"Ain't that some sh**?"

After a long day of chopping wood and clearing underbrush, we sat on his porch having drinks and smoking cigars. He'd just gotten finished telling me what had happened to him in Vietnam.

"You must have hated them," I said, mostly just to say something to break the silence.

"No, I didn't hate them," he replied. His answer surprised me. "Though God knows how many of them f***ers I ended up killing."

SFC White put aside his drink and went into the house. He came back out with a black case. He set it on the table between us and opened it, revealing a Purple Heart.

"Back in Saigon, they took out sixty of the sixty-four pieces of shrapnel that were in me. When they pinned that on me in the recovery ward, I asked why they weren't giving me sixty-four Purple Hearts. They thought I was joking, but I was f***ing serious."

SFC White sat back down and looked at me for a long moment. "Do you know the difference between anger and hate, Jacob?"

"I'm not sure."

"You will. At least, I hope you figure it out." He waited for me to say something in response, but instead I picked up the case to give the Purple Heart a closer inspection.

"Speaking of churches..."

SFC White clearly struggled with the choice of whether or not to say what he was about to say. He started hesitantly, but then it just kind of poured out:

"A couple years ago, I was driving on this back road just south of here, over that way, and I passed by this little church sitting in the middle of a field."

The little church, unpretentious, is surrounded on all sides by sun-drenched cotton fields. He gets out of his car to look at it.

"It was a black church, which I guess is neither here nor there, but in any case I ain't church-going man. I'd driven by it a bunch of times without giving it much thought, but that day I felt a strong compulsion to stop and go inside."

Just a few rows of pews facing a podium. He doesn't know what to do. Eventually he sits.

"I looked around and just sort of listened. I'm used to hearing the silence, if you know what I mean, but this was a different kind of silence. It was peaceful. Then, and it surprised the f*** out of me..."

Tears.

Only a few at first, but the floodgates open.

"Now, I'm not the crying type. I ain't never cried like that before, or since, but I just couldn't stop. I bawled like a baby. At some point the pastor, a big black guy about my age, came in and saw me, but left me alone."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'll get out of here."

"Why don't you just sit there and take all the time you need?"

He doesn't know how to respond, but makes no move to stand.

The pastor comes to him, indicates the pew. "May I?"

"Please." He slides over to make room for the pastor.

"You're a vet, aren't you?"

He can only nod.

The pastor points to himself. "The Big Red One, sixty-eight to sixty-nine."

"I was in too many damned units to name... sorry for cussing."

"Don't worry about it. It's all right to cry, you know."

"It is?"

"I like to think of it as God's way of helping us understand when our fight is over."

SFC White's cigar had burned down almost completely. He knocked the ash off, puffed on it and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"We talked for a little while longer," he said.

He comes out of the small church, surprised to see it's nighttime.

"I thanked Pastor Jackson for his wisdom. And I left."

It was several moments before I could think of anything to say.

"You go to church now?"

"F*** no."

~.~.~

I put down my canteen cup of water to rummage inside my footlocker until I find a brown manila folder. I take the folder over to my desk and open it. For years, SFC White used to send me these long rambling letters every couple of months. SFC White had spent almost all of his life without anyone who was willing to listen to him, had been too embarrassed to go back to that pastor who had seen him cry, and I guess all the things he really wanted to say had just kind of accumulated under that tough exterior of his. In writing to me he finally found an outlet that worked for him.

It was a never-ending source of amusement for him that I became an ordained minister, even if a Unitarian Universalist one. So much so he started going to UU meetings to "see what the hell had gotten into me." He met Bonnie at one of those meetings. And oddly enough the letters subsequently tapered off.

The first letter I pull out is the one SFC White had sent me when he met Bonnie. She was an 'uninformed, unreformed and unrepentant liberal-hippie-commie chick' his age, but otherwise 'all right.'

Setting that letter aside, I pull out the card he sent me for my thirty-fifth birthday, just after he had been terminally diagnosed with prostate cancer. "Happy birthday, dumba**..."

I presided over his funeral in 2001.

It starts to dawn on me that something isn't normal. I look around., and what it is suddenly strikes me: I don't hear anything. All noise has ceased.

It's not the bad kind of silence, like when you're in a crowded room but feel alone. It's the other kind, where you feel connection, not absence. Everything is peaceful.

I smile.

The moment is all too fleeting as the sounds of Bagram quickly come rushing back. A C17 cargo plane is landing, causing the building to shake.

I put SFC White's letters back in the manila folder, and the folder back into my footlocker. I really should be hitting the rack because although it's my birthday, it's still going to be a full-duty day. However, I sit back down at my desk.

I know what I'm going to write to Corporal Gonzalez's family.