Only the Rain(57)

This went on two or three nights a week. Regis must have memorized the Fire Guards’ routine, because he was fast and slick and was always back in his own bunk when necessary. We all started avoiding both of them as much as possible, Stewart as well as Regis. That’s something I could never figure out. It was almost like we blamed Stewart too, or were terrified of catching his bad luck. Or maybe we were just too afraid to be kind to him. I think about it now and I just want to throw up, that’s how disgusted with myself I still am.

The only thing the rest of us did was agree to give Regis the lowest rating on evals. And we put the reason for the rating in the comment section. I don’t know exactly how many of us actually did it, but enough that the DI and platoon sergeant interviewed both Regis and Stewart the next day. Neither of them even came back to clean out their lockers, not until the rest of us were out on the firing range.

After that the DI was tougher than ever on us. Like we were responsible for it happening in the first place, which I guess maybe we were. By graduation the rumor was going around that Regis had been transferred to another platoon, but Stewart got sent home on a medical discharge, though we all knew that was BS. I guess the Army wasn’t willing to get rid of a killing machine with as much potential as Regis. Figured they’d just redirect his energies to more effective mayhem. The guy’s probably an LT by now.

For some reason I feel like I needed you to know about this. Don’t ask me why. You always seemed to like me for some reason, which I could never understand, a bright guy like you. Anyway, now you know. I never deserved a minute of your friendship.

I wonder what ever happened to Stewart. I could probably find out, but I’m sort of afraid to go looking. Once a coward, always a coward.



You always told us every time something bad happened, whether to us or by us, you always told us to not think about it. Try not to think about it, you said. But you thought about it, Spence. I know you did. The way I’d catch you looking at us sometimes, that sadness in your eyes like you knew something we didn’t. Thing is, we knew it too. Shame. Grief. Fear. Disgust. There wasn’t one of us over there who didn’t know it and feel it every single day.

Thing is, they shave our heads and dress us in the same clothes and try to make us all look alike—hood rats and farm boys and poor white trash and everything else we were before they threw us all together. Then they drill us and teach us to shoot and fight and they do their damnedest to make us despise the enemy. They program us like machines so we’ll use our weapons like the voice for our fear and anger and hatred, the only voice they let us have. The only one that will get us a word or two of congratulations from the company commander.

But deep down we’re all still men. Boys, really. Deep down we all miss our homes and families and just want to get back to them in one piece. We all just want to feel loved and safe again, want to sit at the table with people glad to be with us, people who don’t hate us because of the uniforms we wear, people who don’t want to kill us.

And when some of us do come back in one piece, and we take off the uniforms and let our hair grow out, and we try to look like we were never in those places and never did what we know we did, deep down there’s a poison in our blood that will never go away. More than ever now we just want to be loved and safe but there’s always a dirtiness inside us. It won’t wash out and the more we try to not think about it, we only think about it more.

That’s what they really did to us, Spence. Every single one of us. Every war they’ve ever made us fight. They start by shaving our heads, but it’s our souls they destroy.



For quite a while now I haven’t been sure I’m going to be able to hold myself together. I keep thinking about what a good little boy I used to be, never getting into any real kind of trouble, doing everything Mom and Gee and Pops asked me to do. Growing up right with Jesus, as Gee used to say. And now the things I’ve done since then. Most days I can’t even look at myself in the mirror.

It’s getting a little better lately, though. For one thing, I keep getting busier and busier, and it’s good to have stuff to focus on. I got that job at Lowe’s after all. The manager called me out of the blue, said he’d run through all the other applicants and not one of them stacked up very well against me. I’d only been there a month and they offered to send me to North Carolina for their management training program.

Cindy’s belly keeps growing, of course, which means I spend more and more time helping out with the chores when I’m at home. And having a girl in first grade—who’d have thought a first grader could be involved in so many activities? I can’t imagine what it will be like when she hits junior high.

Pops and I still talk on the phone a couple times a week, not saying anything we shouldn’t, only asking “How you feeling today?” and stuff like that. I brought up the way he was behaving the night of Shelley and Donnie’s wreck, the way he’d been walking lopsided and mentioned he’d had a little pinch in his chest, but he wouldn’t talk much about it. “Getting old,” was as close as he’d come to admitting something was wrong with him. “Getting older every day.”

Last week I tried to get him to go to a thing Dani was having at school, a little poem recital thing her teacher set up, but he said he was down with a bug and wanted to stay close to the toilet. Dani recited a poem called “The Caterpillar” that she’d been practicing at home all week long. I even know it by heart now too from listening to her practice. She did so good at the recital. Both Cindy and me had tears in our eyes watching her. Isn’t that silly, Spence? To cry over a children’s poem? I still tear up every time I look at the photos I took on my phone.