A shuttle rolled up to the gate and an electronic voice announced the Atlanta flight. My heart began pounding, for no reason at all.
“That’s my flight,” he said, taking hold of his bag and preparing to stand.
“Ken—” I didn’t want him to go. I’d never see him again; I’d never known anything so firmly in my whole life. We had a few moments. How could I beg him to stay alive? Stay alive long enough to play “Taps” at my funeral. It wasn’t right, to ask him to make that sacrifice for me, to be the last one. Let fate decide, as it always had. Don’t think about dying. He looked at me, waiting expectantly for whatever it was I was going to say. Kill me, kill me and bury me now, who will play “Taps” when you’re gone?
I held my hand to him. “Ken, take care.”
“John. You too.” He shook my hand firmly. The shuttle boarded, and he was gone.
They all walked away, in the end.
When I was eighteen the draft came, I was made a soldier, and we fought, huddled in trenches, smelling gunpowder and blood all around us. No matter how many planes dropped bombs and satellites fired missiles, people still had to fight on the ground with their hands. War called for blood, blood had to be spilled, until war itself died. Or was reinvented.
When I was twenty-one, my battalion pushed through to Beijing and stood guard when the armistice was signed. The film is famous: all of us—American, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, EU and soldiers of a half-dozen other multinational contingents—gathered in Tiananmen Square and piled our guns outside the walls of the Forbidden City as the generals watched, smiling and shaking hands. And it was over.
That young man in Beijing had been thinking of age. The age of the c
ountry I was in, the nations gathered, the flags, the hatreds that had brought us here. The age of the walls, almost buried under the mountain of weapons. The age of the ritual we performed. Military ritual was powerful. Nothing matched it. Nothing else had ever made me cry, not even the birth of my children.
My granddaughter who usually met me at the shuttleport was away on a business trip, so I took the monorail home, to a one bedroom retirement condo with a view of the mountains. Sometimes I sat and stared at the peaks for hours. This time of year, a solid mass of white snow covered them.
I checked my voice messages right away. I thought I’d get the call already, that Ken was dead, that I’d have to get on another shuttle tomorrow and fly to Florida. But that was stupid.
My routine, interrupted less and less by funerals this past year, usually returned to normal quickly after one of these trips. Every morning, weather permitting, I walked in the county park behind my building. I took along my old pair of binoculars and dog-eared bird guide, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to look up a species in this area. I’d followed a half-dozen generations of red-tailed hawks who made the park their territory. Afternoons, I maintained the family internet site. I had two children, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild scattered all over the country. Along with a couple dozen cousins, we kept in touch by posting to the site: photos, letters, gossip. Saved them from travel to reunions. I also read. At a loss for what to give me at holidays, my family gave me book disks because I’d read anything. If nothing else, I’d read what Alice would have liked. She died ten years ago. I still rolled over at night and woke up when I didn’t feel her beside me.
The morning after my return from Paul Hoover’s funeral, I didn’t walk. Wrapped in my robe, a cup of morning coffee in hand, I found myself sitting in front of the west-facing picture window, staring at the mountains. After hardly moving all day, I watched the sunset. The moon arced over, glowing three-quarters full in the rich blue twilight. With my binoculars, I could make out the strings of lights of Artemis Base on the shadowed quarter. I could just stop eating. The automatic cleaner that came once a week would bump against my wasted body sprawled in the armchair.
Seemed a shame to live through war, to last this long, and think of suicide now.
When we slogged through miles of rice paddies, I thought only of a glorious MRE and a dry blanket. I tried not to think of the future. I’d paid my dues, served my country. I’d put it behind me, forget the uniforms and medals, heat and wet and wounds and illness, look on war forever after as a thing that happened in movies.
Seventy-odd years later, I still saw that boy, wet from toe to scalp, hungry, sunburned, covered with bug bites, aching inside from the emotional wounds of burying a best friend the day before, and marveled at how naïve he could be, to think that he would forget. To believe—to wish—that this would not change him.
I wanted to go back and tell him there would come a time when he would wish so hard and so fruitlessly for another man who understood.
I kept watch. The ritual of daily life. My grandchildren were busy. Volleyball games, bad grades, good grades, college dances, job interviews—some things never changed. I avidly soaked up the smallest piece of news. Ben, my youngest grandson, was growing tomato plants under black light for a science project. He posted the pictures on the family website. Growing was a charitable term; the poor things looked shriveled, like old men. Marcie got her license for a second baby approved. So that’d make two great-grandchildren. Bragging rights at the community center. I thought she was too young, and I’d told her so. At twenty-three, she had her whole life ahead of her, why worry about kids now? But she wanted kids, so there. Everybody wanted kids, now. After the plagues, no one was worried about overpopulation.
There had to be something better to do with my time than interfering in the lives of my offspring.
My son and daughter, attentive children, sent emails asking how my trip went. I was halfway through writing my automatic reply—fine, fine, just fine, no problem—when I stopped, deleted it.
Alice used to pester me about writing an autobiography. She meant it as a joke, making fun of me because I was a fan of military memoirs. I’d read Caesar, Grant and Sherman, Patton, MacArthur, Churchill, Schwarzkopf, God knew how many others. From nowhere, the idea came to me again. I’d bill it as the world’s last military memoir. The last soldier tells all.
But I didn’t want to start it. I wanted to believe I’d die before I finished. Or maybe I was afraid that I’d actually finish it and still be alive to appear on talk shows.
My kids didn’t need to hear this sort of thing from a crotchety old man. I didn’t need them looking out for me. I started the note again: I’m fine, a little tired, but fine.
I was the one who kept watch.
I’d kept watch, waiting for—shock, danger, the enemy. For the moment when I was needed, so that I would be ready. I was still doing it, worrying when I didn’t see my pair of hawks in their favorite tree, when my kids missed a week of email.
In the army, I kept watch for death, waiting for death that rained on us in the form of missiles, that snatched us from under the earth in the form of mines, that killed us with fever in the night, that crept invisibly with poisonous gasses. Every inch we walked, we watched. Every night, I hardly slept; the buzz of crickets sounded like jet engines to my tense hearing.
What killed most of us, and what finally killed the Pan-Asia Conflict, wasn’t the weapons of mass destruction—we’d had them for decades and never used them. Most nations seemed content to brandish the threat of chemicals and bioweapons without actually deploying them. Enough defenses had been developed to make their worth doubtful, and the danger to their own troops was always a consideration. In the end, disease killed more people than died in the two world wars combined.
A fast-mutating strain of streptococcus developed that was resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, a dozen other antibiotics. This plague could be cured—in laboratory conditions, with expensive, experimental medications. But during the war several million soldiers from a dozen countries were traveling all over the world, living in primitive conditions, exchanging their infections as they went. The plague mutated and new cures had to be developed. In a short time, a half-dozen different strains had invaded most of the population.
Once, countries fought as if their supply of soldiers was endless. By the end of Pan-Asia, generals staged battles in which no troops were healthy enough to fight. They faced a choice: they did not have the resources to fight both the war and the plague.