Night. The airplane discharges its soldiers into the cool spring air. Home after nine months of toil in a far-off desert should bring relief, but a young soldier exhales only exhaustion. His chest somehow both heavy and empty. He holds his eyes to only half open, and weariness penetrates his bones. Despite long flights, spent mostly asleep, he wants only to drop his bags and collapse on a bed – a proper bed – and drift into sleep without even taking his clothes off or crawling under the covers.
He knows what to expect, though. Formations, speeches, marching. The battalion commander’s speech will probably start with, “I’ll be brief.”
He walks down the tarmac in darkness, in a line of his fellow soldiers. Darkness is more typical to them than daylight since night vision technology had rendered obsolete so many daytime operations.
A white-walled, tin-roofed hangar looms at the tarmac’s border. Inside, a hundred families await the return of children, lovers, and parents. The soldiers file quietly through the hangar doors. Inside, a writhing mass of expectant faces greets them, wrapped in the colorful chaos of civilian clothes, of tears, of flags.
Without a second thought, the soldier finds his place in a tidy rectangular formation of rows and columns. The stilted cadence of Army command speak fills the hangar.
“Atten, shun!”
“Parade, rest!”
“At ease.”
The battalion commander strides to front and center.
“I’ll be brief…”
For a moment, the image flattens. The sea of faces renders itself suddenly two-dimensional. The soldier disconnects from his surroundings and sees only frenetic smiles, bared teeth, and eyes gleaming with light reflected from active tear ducts. For a moment, horror strikes the soldier. These faces are not real. None of this is real. His gut runs cold with a sharp sense of danger.
Muscles tense, the neck constricts, and breathing grows strained. The soldier stands more at a rigid parade rest than at ease, using tension to keep from shaking. He hopes this will pass.
“People won’t understand what you’ve been through,” says the chaplain, during one of the post-deployment don’t-hit-your-wives briefings. His audience feigns attention from aluminum bleachers, curved backs supported by arms resting upon knees, staring at empty hands that still feel the rifle’s weight.
“Unless they’ve been to war, they just won’t have a basis for comparison. They won’t be able to put themselves where you’ve been, and you’ll make yourself angry if you try to force it. Best to connect with them on whatever level that they’re trying to connect with you. It’s the connection that matters. You can build on that.”
The soldier rubs his palms to remove the feeling of a rifle’s hard plastic grip. His passive gaze wanders across the floor, the walls, and space in general.
Home. Three thousand miles from base, six thousand from the bloody sandbox. Cool breezes temper the memory of the desert sun.
The soldier’s parents hug him for an uncomfortably long time. Tears make their eyes shine, and he shifts his gaze to the impassive mountains beyond the airport windows. Despite having had two weeks to adjust, the soldier still squints in the light of his new daytime environment.
The post-war dinner conversation begins as expected.
“It must have been so hard.”
“You’d be surprised. It’s mostly pretty boring.”
“You were never in any gunfights, then?”
It’s not the question the soldier wants to answer, but he supposes that it is the one that everyone will ask. He reckons that this can be one of the connections, upon which he can later build.
“I actually was. It’s funny, though, I didn’t even realize that it was happening the first time. C__ and I were in our ambulance in the convoy, and we started hearing a metallic clicking from the patient compartment, which is armored. We started talking, trying to decide which part of the truck might be breaking. Finally, our radios clicked on – they had outfitted us with this new system that had a lot of bugs – and someone was calling us: hey medics, you guys wanna return fire?
“We looked outside, and sure enough, there were a couple of pickup trucks with guys shooting at us, and everyone in the convoy behind us was firing back.”
The soldier looks down and laughs at the memory, at the absurdity of it all.
His mother looks down and re-folds her napkin in her lap.
“Did I tell you,” she says, “that we got a new fridge? Much more energy-efficient than the last one.”
Photo by Giorgio Parravicini
New fridge syndrome is a term for an inability to share in another's experience. --Forest Ray
The Author
Forest Ray is a journalist and former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne. His short stories have appeared in Every Day Fiction and O-Dark Thirty. Until recently, he lived on the road, traveling throughout Latin America with his wife, in a camper. He currently lives in Long Beach, California.
Forest Ray, Long Beach, CA
Thanks, Sam! I certainly hope to publish more in short order. Cheers!
Great writing Forest. I'll be sure to stay tuned for more. Hope you are doing well!