Snapshot of a Soldier, a Boy

The pajama pants were old. They must have been old vestiges remaining from the first days of my final growth spurt, when I was sixteen or seventeen. They were a little small, but not so small that I couldn’t wear them comfortably. They were a rather austere pattern of plaid in dark blue and dark gray. They were made of flannel and were close fitting with the waist line and the cuffs made of elastic. They were a little rough from too many washes. They were dear to me and the sight of them nearly brought tears to my eyes when I first opened the package from home. They were reminders of softer days and something incorruptibly innocent. They were childhood pajamas.

Dirty hands looked like sin on their soft old folds.

I washed my hands and watched the water turn a pale gray in the sink as it swirled away from my whitening hands and down the drain. I knew it had been a long time since I washed my hands, a long time since I’d felt anything so pure as to warrant clean hands. I ate my food with filthy hands. I shook my filthy hand in hands equally as dirty. I thumbed through old newspapers and magazines that were twice as dirty as my hands were. Really there is nothing clean about war, even the things not normally associated with it are dirty. In war the newspapers, the food, the equipment, the clothing, everything is dirty.

A note, clean and white with the purest intentions from home, a note not grimy and gray from a thousand hands, a note all for me and nobody else. I sat back down in the bombed out corner in the bombed out house in the bombed out city in the bombed out country and I read what the note had to say. Nothing really. Thought you might need some of these things, so I went into your room and took some things and sent them for you. I don’t know if you use pajamas, but I thought just in case I’d send the oldest pair of pajamas I could find. I was signed by my mother. My poor ignorant mother, I didn’t use a second set of clothes, much less pajamas, everyday I wore the exact same things, and it was dirty and filthy and stinky but so was everyone else.

I felt an overwhelming sense of pride and pleasure in this note. No, not what it said in ink. What it was. A piece of clean white paper from America. From home, free of the basic germs and diseases that plagued this new nation. Free from everything evil, like my pajamas.

Tomorrow we will leave this house, this great comfort in this great hell, and I will sleep in the muddy holes again, but tonight I have a house, and a stripped bed to sleep in. Tonight I have pajamas.

The bomb that falls and shakes dust from every fixture in the stripped house is too far away to be of any concern. I leave the bathroom that still has running water and move back into the room I share with three other men. They are all downstairs, in the room with only three walls, just staring out of where the fourth wall should be and smoking. They are there with the rest of the social people in the platoon, the rest of us non-social types are hidden away in various rooms in the once magnificent house. You see once war comes there is no longer any magnificent thing but millions of once magnificent things, I was once like the house, and I am now more like the house than before, I was once magnificent.

I was once a great boy on the scale that boys are measured. I was taller than most, I was bigger than most, I was faster and stronger than most, I was a star athlete, I’d had more girls than most of the other guys had had, but it was no slight to the other boys that I knew, I just did better with girls. I was smart and I had a bright future, because this is, above all else, how a boy is measured, by the brightness of his future, I had a very bright one and very accomplished past. War I’d heard is a magnificent trial for a boy, except the problem is that’s how many young boys see it as, a trial. It is no trial, for a trial is to be overcome and will eventually better you, this is not war, you can’t overcome war anymore than you can be expected to overcome gravity. And it will never never never never never better you. It is merely a matter of how much it will damage you. I was once a magnificent boy.

These pajamas remind me of that. They remind me of the room I had in my mother’s house. They remind me of the nights spent in long silent thought. I thought I had the world beat because I thought about it so much. But that isn’t how it works. You can’t think your way to just anything. Knowing how the world works isn’t knowing how to work the world. The flannel folds reminded me of the music I would listen to for hours at a time sitting on my bed in my room. The books I read. The people who would sometimes come up to see me, my mother, my brother, my sister, my uncles, my aunts, my grandparents and my friends. A little thing like these pajama bottoms I never once figured into the great scheme of things, but here they are affecting me like nothing has in a long time.

I remember the girl that came up to see me once while I wore these pajama bottoms. How she thought it was nerdy of me to wear pajamas. How she had once been like me. How now no one is like me anymore. How the many men I’ve known were like me, how they weren’t. How pajama pants can make me feel like this.
I try to remember the last time I wore them. I can’t, it must have been sometime when I was seventeen. It may have been when the girl came up to see me. And I think of her and I think of everyone I once talked to when wearing the pajama bottoms and I don’t want to live anymore, not this way.

I have known for a long time that I won’t live anyways, why continue this pain? Why know that they are all at home safe and happy and laughing and singing and dancing and having sex and falling in love and doing all the other things the real living people are doing and I’m here left only with the partial satisfaction of breathing this dirty air and eating this dirty food. No this isn’t how the living live, only the dead would ever live the way I’m living. I must be dead, so why not just get it over with and die?

There’s a tear at the bottom of the left leg on the pajamas bottom. I remember when that happened. I smile in the moment before realizing the moment is long gone. The moment had been nice and it had been nice to remember for a while but now it was just painful. All the happy things you once knew will become painful when you leave and aren’t able to ever come back.

I venture to finally take the pajama bottoms completely out of the box. I lift them clear of the box and look at them as I hold them up in front of my eyes. It’s just like I remembered it and if I don’t let anything into my view except the pajamas I can almost imagine I’m at home still. But there’s still the distant roar of bombs. I lay the pajamas down on the small bed stripped of everything except a dirty standard issue field blanket. I look into the box for more things like the pajamas. An old t-shirt to wear with the flannel bottoms but nothing special about this t-shirt. No endearing uniqueness to it, no lasting memories of it, just a regular white t-shirt.

I go back into the box. Nothing. There’s the good luck charm I carried around for years as a kid, a simple wheat-back penny that I have no real memories of. A couple of books I liked when I was younger, stories now too distant to me to be worthwhile. A number of equally useless impersonal objects that were once very personal. Many things that were once price-less. But nothing that is worth anything anymore. Like the carved gilded full-length mirror in the corner of my room, once immensely prized to the house, a classy furnishing that the owner probably was very proud of, but now it’s not worth anything because it can’t be sold, nobody’s looking to buy a mirror when bullets and bombs are the things to be marketed and it’s too big to carry out as a souvenir so it’s just a useless piece of shit now. This is how all those little things are to me. But for some reason these pajamas are priceless, like the bed in the house that still retains usefulness even in war.

I let the pajama bottoms fall to the bed and I breath in my share of the dirty air in this dirty war and I think about what my friends are doing now and think of how I get to do so few of the things the living people do. How pajamas have become the greatest thrill of my day, there is no thrill in combat, just fear, just fear that wasn’t there before and won’t last but it’s intense and violent in your body when it’s there. Eventually they say the fear starts to take hold and then it’s there all the time and not just during combat. But fear is not laughter, not joy, not sex and not happiness.
Sometimes the only way you can tell you’re still alive is because you’re still afraid. I don’t want to be that way anymore and maybe if I wear these pajamas I can forget about the fear just long enough to feel normal again. Maybe tonight I’ll finally get some sleep.

The funny thing is I never really had any attachment to these pajamas until this night.