Peace Time

         Tina woke to see Todd sitting in the side of the bed, his head bowed. “Honey, what is it?”

         He said “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

         She moved closer to him. “It can’t be nothing. Something is bothering you. “

         He turned and gave her a rueful smile. “I’ll get over it.”

         “Can I help?”

         “I don’t think so. I need time.”

         “Time? You’ve been home almost a year.”

         He lay down again, his wrist over his eyes. “I keep remembering ~~ “:

         “You’ll always remember.”

         “I know. But sometimes it seems like it’s happening all over again. Like a do over but I can’t change anything. Sometimes I think the dream will end different this time and I’ll wake up and ~~ but that’s crazy. Nothing can change the past.”

         “It will get better. I know it will get better.”

         “I hope you’re right. “

         “Do you want to talk about it?”

         “Maybe I should. There’s so much I don’t even know how to describe. Not to you. You don’t know. I don’t want you to know.”

         “Please try.”

         He drew a long breath and then began speaking almost as if talking to himself. “There is that instant when someone who was alive isn’t alive anymore. I can’t describe it I just know when it happens. I saw it happen too many times.
         It was almost the endof the war. It was almost over. But the man who dies in the last hour of a war is just as dead as the one who -- I shouldn’t talk about this to you.”

         “Yes, you should.”

         Todd continued. “All right. The Germans were retreating fast. They were leaving their wounded on the field because they couldn’t take them with them. We were picking them up because what else could we do? We had to help hem if we could. They brought in this boy; he couldn’t have been sixteen yet. They were sending little boys and old men into combat. I guess that was all they had left.”

         He paused and took a deep breath. “When this boy was wounded they took everything he had. His coat and his shoes. They were out of supplies and couldn’t waste anything on someone who was as good as dead anyway. It was April, it was cold. He was all wet with his own blood and shivering. He was a child, Tina! He should never have been anywhere near a place like that! He was conscious and terrified.

         “They told those kids the Americans would torture them. They were told that so they wouldn’t surrender. He looked at me as if he wanted to ask what I was going to do to him. All of a sudden he wasn’t some stranger from another country and he certainly wasn’t an enemy. Right there in my arms he turned into Jake! He was my little brother, dying in my arms.

         “The others came and we got him wrapped in blankets and into the jeep to take him back to the hospital tent. He was looking at us as if he was begging us ‘don’t hurt me.’ As if any of us would hurt him! We wanted to talk to him and tell him he was safe with us but we didn’t speak his language.

         “He screamed when he saw the syringe in Pete’s hand. I guess he thought the torture was beginning. I held him while Pete gave him the hypo and while he went to sleep. We could see his wounds were too bad for us to fix. Even in a real hospital back home this was one they couldn’t save. By this time he was Jake as far as I was concerned and I was crying for him as I would for Jake. I knew the instant life left him and Jake was dead in my arms. I can’t forget that. I can never forget that.”

         “Sweetheart, he wasn’t Jake. Jake is fine.”

         “But that’s war. Every one of those too-young child soldiers was Jake. Do you understand that? Jake was home safe sleeping in his own bed going to get ready for the new baseball season, going to go to high school in the morning. That was where that boy should have been, too. But some insane old man changed all that and he was one more life one more tragedy in the whole world falling apart. That dead boy in my arms was not an enemy. He was Jake. I guess I was insane by then.”

         “No. I think what you were feeling was the only sanity in that place. You were where life was cheap and death was common and you knew life is precious and every sixteen year old boy was as precious as Jake. You were sane in the middle of it all and that’s why this memory haunts you.”

         “I guess that’s it. Well they took him away from me and he went in the tent where they put the ones -- the ones who were going to be buried. And things hotted up and we were busy for the next about eight hours. When I finally got to rest I was thinking about Jake who just died and Jake who was safe at home. There are times when you know you’ve just lived a moment that changed you. I never even knew his name because I guess someone took his tags when they took everything else, but he was Jake. Can you understand that?”

         “Yes, I can. “

         “Sometimes when I look at Jake I see him as I saw him then, bloody and cold and scared and -- dying. I see him going to school, learning to drive, playing ball, laughing, getting to like girls. Everything the way it should be. And I see him dying among strangers. All we could do for him was stop his pain. He never got a chance to live. “

         She held him as he wept.

         They said the war was over. Well. For some it never ends.

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