A Lover's Lament(34)

I wish I could tell you that I’ve never driven drunk, but that would be a lie. I didn’t change much after leaving Tennessee. And as ashamed as I am to admit it, I got worse once I moved to Pennsylvania—and worse yet after my grandmother passed away. Mom lost her shit completely when grandma didn’t leave a penny to her name, and it all went downhill from there. I started smoking all the time and drinking. I fell in with the wrong crowd. I just wanted anything other than to be there with her in that f*cking trailer.

It was my twentieth birthday, and I was on my way back from a bar with my buddy. I was drunk and nearly unconscious in the passenger seat when my friend, who was also plastered, ran into a telephone pole going fifty in a thirty-five. The doctors said the only reason I avoided major injury was because I was passed out and wearing a seatbelt. My buddy wasn’t so lucky. He broke his C-2 vertebrae and has been a quadriplegic ever since. His entire life changed that night, Katie.

Even though I walked away from the wreck, my life changed that night too. I’ve had tremendous guilt since then and often think about the harm we could’ve caused others. To think we could’ve done something like what happened to your dad—to your family–it rocked me to my core. It still does. I joined the Army soon after that. I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I didn’t want to be defined by those actions, and although I knew you were long gone—that I had effectively pushed you from my life—I still wanted to be worthy of you.

The man who took your father’s life could have easily been me a few years back. What’s worse is that I hadn’t even experienced combat yet. We spend our days here immersed in death—women, children, and loved ones killed on a daily basis—and when we go back home, we aren’t the same as we were when we arrived. We become numb, our emotions sedated. Death becomes merely a noun, something we neither process nor heal from.

I make no excuse for the man who killed your father. Maybe he is a monster, one of those who kill with pleasure. Maybe he’s a young, dumb grunt who has no regard for the sanctity of human life. Or maybe he’s one of many who drink away the pain they can’t begin to understand. No matter the circumstance, a life was taken—the life of a wonderful man—and for that I am so incredibly sorry. I can only imagine that that soldier is sitting in a cell at this moment wishing he could take your father’s place.

I’m thinking right about now that I’ve probably done more harm than good. I hope I haven’t heightened the ugliness you see in all of us, me especially, because that wasn’t my intention. I only hoped to explain the potential side effects of playing Russian roulette with roadside bombs and bullets for an entire year. And then another year, and another, and another ...

Don’t treat your grief as we do. Don’t let it simmer until, before you know what’s happened, it’s boiling over the edge. Don’t let this one man and his actions change who you are and who you were meant to be. Don’t let him own your existence.

I know it must be hard, Katie. I’m no expert; I just know I haven’t been doing it the right way. Hell, I don’t even know what the right way is. But I do know that by hanging on to all this stuff and burying it deep down inside, it’ll all catch up to me one day. I can feel the cracks forming already, and I know the foundation will eventually come tumbling down.

I hope to hear back from you. I really enjoyed your letter, although it’s possible that it might be the first letter in pen pal program history where a soldier was called a ‘f*cking dick.’

But seriously, thank you for writing. And thank you for not letting the past dictate the future.

Sincerely,

Devin

[email protected]



The letter falls from my hands, the papers floating aimlessly until they come to rest noiselessly on the ground. My mind is racing at warp speed as I work to process his words, but I can’t. There’s too much, too many emotions, too many things he said that I wasn’t prepared to hear or read, and now I can’t seem to focus on anything at all except this overwhelming, indescribable emotion that’s creeping its way through me.

My brows furrow when I think back to the letter that I wrote him and the callous things I said without abandon. And yet here he is, this soldier—this man who should feel like a stranger but doesn’t—fighting for our country, living in his own version of hell every single day, trying to give me peace. He clearly has his own cuts that run just as deep, if not deeper, than mine, but he’s offering me comfort in the only way he can—with his words.

I don’t regret expressing my feelings in the letter I wrote, but after reading his response, I feel like I don’t deserve his compassion. I want it though. God help me, I want it.

I squeeze my eyes shut as his words drift around in my head.

So to answer your question; are we all monsters? No, we’re not. We are fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. We are dreamers, lovers, and God-fearing men.

But the majority of us are just like you … people dealing with something so traumatic, so heartbreaking, and so horrific that the heart never quite learns to mend.

Lieutenant Drexler’s face pops in my head. I’ve only seen it once, pictured on the news, but it’s been branded in my memory and now I can’t help but wonder. Does he have a precious little girl or boy running around who will now grow up without him? Will his kids mourn the loss of their father the way I have mine? Does he have a wife who is scared and lost and lonely? Is his mother crying herself to sleep every night because the son who safely returned from the battlefield will never really return home now?