Dear John

My dad was uninterested in their value. His eyes would dart away whenever I mentioned it, and I soon remembered what I'd somehow forgotten: that to my dad, the pursuit of the coins was far more interesting than the coins themselves, and to him each coin was representative of a story with a happy ending. With that in mind, I racked my brain, doing my best to remember those coins that we had found together. Because my dad kept exceptional records, I would scan those before going to sleep, and little by little, those memories came back. The following day, I would recall for him stories of our trips to Raleigh or Charlotte or Savannah. Despite the fact that even the doctors weren't sure whether he was going to make it, my dad smiled more in those weeks than I ever remember him doing. He made it back home the day before I was set to leave, and the hospital made arrangements for someone to look in on him while he continued to recover.

But if my stay in the hospital strengthened my relationship with my dad, it did nothing for my relationship with Savannah. Don't get me wrong--she joined me as often as she could, and she was both supportive and sympathetic. But because I spent so much time in the hospital, it did little to heal the fissures that had begun to form in our relationship. To be honest, I wasn't sure what I even wanted from her: When she was there, I felt as if I wanted to be alone with my dad, but when she wasn't, I wanted her by my side. Somehow, Savannah navigated this minefield without reacting to any stress I redirected her way. She seemed to know what I was thinking and anticipate what I wanted, even better than I did.

Still, what we needed was time together. Time alone. If our relationship was a battery, my time overseas was continually draining it, and we both needed time to recharge. Once, while sitting with my dad and listening to the steady beep of the heart monitor, I realized that Savannah and I had spent only 4 of the last 104 weeks together. Less than 5 percent. Even with letters and phone calls, I would sometimes find myself staring into space, wondering how we'd survived as long as we had.

We did make it out for occasional walks, and we dined together twice. But because Savannah was teaching and taking classes again, it was impossible for her to stay. I tried not to blame her for that, except when I did, and we ended up arguing. I hated that, as did she, but neither of us seemed to be able to stop it. And though she said nothing, and even denied it when confronted, I knew the underlying issue was the fact that I was supposed to be home for good and wasn't. It was the first and only time that Savannah ever lied to me.

We put the argument behind us as best we could, and good-bye was another tearful affair, though less so than the last time. It would be comforting to think that it was because we were getting used to it, or that we were both growing up, but as I sat on the plane, I knew that something irrevocable had changed between us. Fewer tears had been shed because the intensity of the feeling between us had waned.

It was a painful realization, and on the night of the next full moon, I found myself wandering out onto the deserted soccer field. And just as I'd promised, I remembered my time with Savannah on my first leave. I thought my of second leave as well, but strangely, I didn't want to think about the third leave, for even then I think I knew what it portended.

As the summer wore on, my dad continued to improve, albeit slowly. In his letters, he wrote that he'd taken to walking around the block three times a day, every day, each journey lasting exactly twenty minutes, but even that was hard on him. If there was a positive side to all this, it was that it gave him something to build his days around now that he was retired--something aside from coins, that is. In addition to sending letters even more frequently, I began to phone him on Tuesdays and Fridays at exactly one o'clock his time, just to make sure he was okay. I listened for any signs of fatigue in his voice and reminded him constantly about eating well, sleeping enough, and taking his medication. I always did most of the talking. Dad found phone conversations even more painful than face-to-face communication and always sounded as if he wanted nothing more than to hang up the phone as quickly as he could. In time, I took to teasing him about this, but I was never sure if he knew I was kidding. This amused me, and I sometimes laughed; though he didn't laugh in response, his tone would immediately lighten, if only temporarily, before he lapsed back into silence. That was okay. I knew he looked forward to the calls. He always answered on the first ring, and I had no trouble imagining him staring at the clock and waiting for the call.

August turned to September, then October. Savannah finished her classes at Chapel Hill and moved back home while she began hunting for a job. In the newspapers, I read about the United Nations and how European countries wanted to find a way to keep us from going to war with Iraq. Things were tense in the capitals of our NATO allies; on the news, there were demonstrations from the citizens and forceful proclamations from their leaders that the United States was about to make a terrible mistake. Meanwhile, our leaders tried to change their minds. I and everyone in my squad just kept going about our business, training for the inevitable with grim determination. Then, in November, my squad and I went back to Kosovo again. We weren't there long, but it was more than enough. I was tired of the Balkans by then, and I was tired of peacekeeping, too. More important, I and everyone else in the service knew that war in the Middle East was coming, whether Europe wanted it or not.

During that time, the letters from Savannah still came somewhat regularly, as did my phone calls to her. Usually I'd call her before dawn, as I always had--it was around midnight her time--and though I'd always been able to reach her in the past, more than once she wasn't home. Though I tried to convince myself she was out with friends or her parents, it was difficult to keep my thoughts from running wild. After hanging up the phone, I sometimes found myself imagining that she'd met another man she cared about. Sometimes I would call two or three more times in the next hour, growing angrier with every ring that went unanswered.

When she would finally answer, I could have asked her where she'd been, but I never did. Nor did she always volunteer the information. I know I made a mistake in keeping quiet, simply because I found it impossible to banish the question from my mind, even as I tried to focus on the conversation at hand. More often than not, I was tense on the phone, and her responses were tense as well. Too often our conversations were less a joyous exchange of affection than a rudimentary exchange of information. After hanging up, I always hated myself for the jealousy I'd been feeling, and I'd beat myself up for the next couple of days, promising that I wouldn't let it happen again.

Other times, however, Savannah came across as exactly the same person I remembered, and I could tell how much she still cared for me. Throughout it all, I loved her as much as I always had, and I found myself aching for those simpler times in the past. I knew what was happening, of course. As we were drifting apart, I was becoming more desperate to save what we once had shared; like a vicious circle, however, my desperation made us drift apart even further.

We began to have arguments. As with the argument we had in her apartment on my second leave, I had trouble telling her what I was feeling, and no matter what she said, I couldn't escape the thought that I was being baited by her or that she wasn't even attempting to alleviate my concerns. I hated these calls even worse than I hated my jealousy, even though I knew the two were intertwined.

Despite our troubles, I never doubted that we would make it. I wanted a life with Savannah more than I ever wanted anything. In December, I began calling more regularly and did my best to keep my jealousy in check. I forced myself to be upbeat on the phone, in the hope that she would want to hear from me. I thought things were getting better, and on the surface they were, but four days before Christmas, I reminded her that I'd be home in a little less than a year. Instead of the excited response I expected, she grew quiet. All I could hear was the sound of her breathing.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, her tone soft. "It's just that I've heard that before."

It was the truth, and we both knew it, but I didn't sleep well

for nearly a week.

The full moon fell on New Year's Day, and though I went out to stare at it and remembered the week when we fell in love, those images were fuzzy, as if blurred by the overwhelming sadness I felt inside. On the walk back, dozens of men were clustered in circles or leaning against buildings while smoking cigarettes, as though they had no cares at all. I wondered what they thought when they saw me walking by. Did they sense that I was losing all that mattered to me? Or that I wished again that I could change the past?

I don't know, and they didn't ask. The world was changing fast. The orders we'd been waiting for were given the following morning, and a few days later, my squad found itself in Turkey as we began preparing to invade Iraq from the north. We sat in meetings where we learned our assignments, studied the topography, and went over battle plans. There was little free time, but when we did venture outside of camp, it was hard to ignore the hostile glares of the populace. We heard rumors that Turkey was planning to deny access to our troops for use in the invasion and that talks were under way to make sure they wouldn't. We'd long ago learned to listen to rumors with a grain of salt, but this time the rumors were accurate, and my squad and others were sent to Kuwait to start all over.

We landed in midafternoon under a cloudless sky and found ourselves surrounded by sand on every side. Almost immediately we were loaded on a bus, drove for hours, and ended up in what was essentially the largest tent city I'd ever seen. The army did its best to make it comfortable. The food was good and the PX had everything you might need, but it was boring. Mail delivery was poor--I received no letters at all--and the lines for the phone were always a mile long. In between drills, my men and I either sat around trying to guess when the invasion would start or practiced getting into our chemical suits as quickly as we could. The plan was for my squad to augment other units from different divisions on a hard push to Baghdad. By February, after what already felt like a zillion years in the desert, my squad and I were as ready as we'd ever be.

At that point, a lot of soldiers had been in Kuwait since mid-November, and the rumor mill was in full swing. No one knew what was coming. I heard about biological and chemical weapons; I heard that Saddam had learned his lesson in Desert Storm and was retrenching the Republican Guard around Baghdad, in the hope of making a bloody last stand. On March 17, I knew there would be war. On my last night in Kuwait, I wrote letters to those I loved, in case I didn't make it: one to my father and one to Savannah. That evening, I found myself part of a convoy that stretched a hundred miles into Iraq.

Fighting was sporadic, at least initially. Because our air force dominated the skies, we had little to fear overhead as we rolled up mainly deserted highways. The Iraqi army, for the most part, was nowhere to be seen, which only increased the tension I felt as I tried to anticipate what my squad would face later in the campaign. Here and there, we'd get word of enemy mortar fire, and we'd scramble into our suits, only to learn it was a false alarm. Soldiers were tense. I didn't sleep for three days.

Deeper in Iraq, skirmishes began to break out, and it was then I learned the first law associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom: Civilians and enemies often looked exactly alike. Shots would ring out, we'd attack, and there were times we weren't even sure who we were shooting at. As we reached the Sunni Triangle, the war began to intensify. We heard about battles in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit, all being fought by other units in other divisions. My squad joined the Eighty-second Airborne in an assault on Samawah, and it was there that my squad and I had our first taste of real combat.

The air force had paved the way. Bombs, missiles, and mortars had been exploding since the day before, and as we crossed the bridge into the city, my first thought was amazement at the stillness. My squad was assigned to an outlying neighborhood, where we were to move from house to house to help clear the area of the enemy. As we moved, images came quickly: the charred remains of a truck, the driver's lifeless body beside it; a partially demolished building; ruins of cars smoking here and there. Sporadic rifle fire kept us on edge. As we patrolled, civilians occasionally rushed out with their arms up, and we tried our best to save the wounded.

By early afternoon, we were getting ready to head back, but we were assaulted by heavy fire coming from a building up the street. Pinned against a wall, we were in a precarious position. Two men covered while I led the rest of my squad through the shooting gallery to a safer spot on the other side of the street; it struck me as almost miraculous that no one was killed. From there, we sank a thousand rounds into the enemy's position, laying absolute waste to it. When I thought it was safe, we began our approach to the building, moving cautiously. I used a grenade to blast open the front door. I led my men to the door and poked my head in. Smoke was heavy, and sulfur hung in the air. The interior was destroyed, but at least one Iraqi soldier had survived, and as soon as we were close, he began shooting from the crawl space beneath the floor. Tony got clipped in the hand, and the rest of us responded with hundreds of rounds. The sound was so loud that I couldn't hear myself screaming, but I kept my finger squeezed, aiming everywhere from the floor to the walls to the ceiling. Chips of plaster and brick and wood were flying as the interior was decimated. When we finally stopped firing, I was sure that no one could have survived, but I threw another grenade into an opening that led to the crawl space just to make sure, and we braced outside for the explosion.

After twenty minutes of the most intense experience of my life, the street was quiet, except for the ringing in my ears and the sounds of my men as they puked or cussed or rehashed the experience. I wrapped Tony's hand, and when I thought everyone was ready, we began backing out the way we'd come. In time, we made our way to the railroad station, which our troops had secured, and we collapsed. That night, we received our first batch of mail in almost six weeks.

In the mail, there were six letters from my father. But from Savannah there was only one, and in the dim light, I began to read.

Dear John,

I'm writing this letter at the kitchen table, and I'm struggling because I don't know how to say what I'm about to tell you. Part of me wishes that you were here with me so I could do this in person, but we both know that's impossible. So here I am, groping for words with tears on my cheeks and hoping that you'll somehow forgive me for what I'm about to write.

I know this is a terrible time for you. I try not to think about the war, but I can't escape the images, and I'm scared all the time. I watch the news and scour newspapers, knowing you're in the midst of all of it, trying to find out where you are and what you're going through. I pray every night that you'll make it home safely, and I always will. You and I shared something wonderful, and I never want you to forget that. Nor do I want you to believe that you didn't mean as much to me as I did to you. You're rare and beautiful, John. I fell in love with you, but more than that, meeting you made me realize what true love really means. For the past two and a half years, I've been staring at every full moon and remembering everything we've been through together. I remember how talking to you that first night felt like coming home, and I remember the night we made love. I'll always be glad that you and I shared ourselves like that. To me, it means that our souls will be linked together forever.

There's so much more, too. When I close my eyes, I see your face; when I walk, it's almost as if I can feel your hand in mine. Those things are still real to me, but where they once brought comfort, now they leave me with an ache. I understood your reason for staying in the army, and I respected your decision. I still do, but we both know our relationship changed after that. We changed, and in your heart, I think you realized it, too. Maybe the time apart was too much, maybe it was just our different worlds. I don't know. Every time we fought I hated myself for it. Somehow, even though we still loved each other, we lost that magical bond that kept us together.

I know that sounds like an excuse, but please believe me when I say that I didn't mean to fall in love with someone else. If I don't really understand how it happe

ned, how can you? I don't expect you to, but because of all we've been through, I just can't continue lying to you. Lying would diminish everything we've shared, and I don't want to do that, even though I know you will feel betrayed.

I'll understand if you never want to talk to me again, just as I'll understand if you tell me that you hate me. Part of me hates me, too. Writing this letter forces me to acknowledge that, and when I look in the mirror, I know I'm looking at someone who isn't sure she deserves to be loved at all. I mean that.