You Can Have Two of Three

Bright morning sun shines off the gilded surfaces of the Omni’s grand lobby. In the adjoining Starbucks, weighed down by the effects of the prior night of drinking, our party of four discusses the preparations for a wedding taking place in the afternoon.

“I should head over to the Crowne Plaza to meet my sisters,” says Suzanne, the mother of the groom.

Behind us, a grey-haired man of towering height with wide shoulder and a slender waist pours heavy cream from a stainless steel carafe into his venti coffee. At the statement, he turns his upper torso. His navy suit is meticulous. His smile is radiant.

“Are you talking about our competition?” he asks, the question jovial and any associated blow less than glancing.

“The rest of the family booked too late. It’s a popular weekend.”

The man fumbles with a lid before picking up the cup and turning to face us with a halting, hitched movement in his leg. “Well, we’re glad to have you with us,” he says, explaining that he’s one of the Omni’s many managers.

“It’s a great hotel,” Suzanne responds. “We’re really enjoying our stay.”

“Glad to hear it,” the man replies. His face abruptly switches focus. His light-colored eyes sharpen, honing in on my torso as he shuffles closer and closer, until I can read his burnished gold name tag: Will Brown.*

“What’s that on your shirt?” Will asks, his eyes squinting to see the detail. “Those are medical symbols, aren’t they? The snakes.”

My mottled green t-shirt is emblazoned with the Operation Ward 57 logo, a stylized version of the caduceus, and the organization’s motto: “For the wounded, the fight never ends.”

I tell Will about the group and its mission of supporting the gravely injured men and women who are airlifted from a foreign war zone to a new battleground, Ward 57 of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where new amputees undergo a harrowing array of surgeries as they begin a painfully slow journey back to something like normal.

As I speak, Will’s oversized smile retracts. By the time I’m done, he has turned a critical gaze on my husband. “Your hair is too long,” he tells him.

Sporting a face full of scruff and hair that far exceeds regulation length, Evan shakes his head. “I’m not in the military.”

Will looks puzzled. “What do you do, then?” he asks.

“I’m an electrical engineer.”

Will frowns and purses his lips as he tries to work this equation.

“I used to work for the Army,” I offer. “When I left, I started writing a book about the war in Afghanistan. It’s a love story. About the toll that going to war takes on today’s war fighter and his family. It’s something most of us don’t get the chance to see in detail.”

Will’s mouth begins to sag with a heavy weight. His eyes fill with tears. “God bless you,” he says. “That’s beautiful.”

In an effusive spray, Will starts to share facts about his own life. He tells us about his time as a paratrooper, and his bum knee — the result of a high school football injury which was exacerbated by all the times he was dropped over foreign battlefields. “Battle of Panama,” he explains. “I have a surgery at the VA** next month.”

After this statement, Will is hit by some rogue realization. He bends awkwardly to examine the center of my body, where my arms are wrapped around my waist. The movement makes him wince in pain, and he rights himself. “Well, where is it?” he demands.

In confusion, I tilt my head and widen my eyes. “Where is what?”

“Your ring,” he says.

“Oh, no, when I was with the Army, I was just a civilian; I never went to an academy. But my dad did, Naval Academy, class of ’78.”

“West Point,” he replies, “’77.” He holds up a hefty service ring adorned with a massive stone in a clear, glinting blue.

Will’s ring looks nearly identical to the one my father wears. Just seeing it, I can almost feel its heft. I used to slip my dad’s service academy ring on my hand whenever he took it off to wash dishes, mow the lawn, or swim in the pool. When I was little, it fit over two of my fingers with room to spare. As an adult, it’s still too big for my thumb. Even if it only exists in my head, I’ll never escape the symbolism.

“Wow,” I manage. At just one year my father’s senior, Will looks at least a decade older.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Gee, you look so young,’” he says, his levity now fully restored.

We all laugh, and Suzanne takes the ensuing silence to offer a quick goodbye as she scoots out the side door to keep up with the wedding day timeline. The rest of us stay rooted to our spots.

“You might know my aunt,” I tell Will. “She was in the first class of women at West Point.”

He brightens even further. Will, as it turns out, was an instructor at the school when the first women arrived on campus. I offer my aunt’s name, and the name of her classmate-turned-spouse. Will recognizes neither. As if he’s gotten a wild hair, his happy nostalgia is quickly overcome by bitterness.

“When the women came to West Point, things changed,” he says. “Before, the expectations were the same for everyone. West Point was the great equalizer. But when the women came in, there were different expectations for different people. It was the start of a decline in standards across the board.”

The disappointment slices through Will’s voice while he goes on, but when the topic is worn out, his ire retracts. He happily peppers me with questions about my background, still genuinely perplexed about why a young civilian woman would have any interest in writing about war.

I prattle on, and because my audience is so receptive, I even let slip the kernel of an idea I’ve been toying with, that I’d like to start writing stories about service veterans’ personal struggles in and after war.

“I’m not necessarily looking for tactical details — what happened on the battlefield and when,” I explain. “I want to know about the things that affected people personally, that stuck with them. I think that’s where the deepest stories are, the ones that every man and woman in this country can understand.”

Will’s face is as ashen and somber as I’ve seen it. I fear that I’ve upset him.

“If people knew how terrible war was,” he says gravely, “We wouldn’t have war.” He chokes on some obstruction in his throat and succumbs once more to his tears.

Watching him cry, my own eyes begin to fill. I reach out to touch his arm. “You can’t cry, because then I’ll cry,” I say, wiping away the moisture already tracking down my cheeks.

“I should let you all get on with your day, leave this old man to his troubles,” he says, attempting a smile. “God bless you.” He turns painfully towards the bright reception hall, but halfway around, he hesitates. His countenance is firm and his lips are pursed as he faces me again. “The people you talk with,” he begins, pushing through the shakiness in his voice, “How do they handle it?”

“How do they handle what, exactly?”

“How do you live with yourself after all that you’ve done? You’re working with imperfect intelligence, the fog of war. The people you’re in charge of die. You can’t save everyone. And when you…the people you kill, you never forget them, their faces. They had families, children…” His words dissolve.

Will sets his face hard together but his lips soon begin to quiver. This is no longer the same man whose booming happiness filled each cubic inch of his tall, broad frame. Somehow, a switch has been flipped.

“A lot of people I hear from struggle with that,” I admit. I share a few stories of one close friend, whose life has been indelibly marked by the losses he experienced in the Global War on Terror.

It takes effort for Will to push his head up and down. It’s as if his joints have rusted. He tells me about his own family — his daughters and sons-in-law and their experiences in our country’s most recent conflict — before taking off with a story of his own.

“When I was at West Point,” he tells me, “We had to take a wide variety of classes, things you wouldn’t expect: philosophy, English, foreign languages. We had classes on manners and dancing. We wore our dress uniforms around the campus every day — the gray wool with the starched, high neck. We were officer gentlemen. Not anymore.” Will shakes his head, unconcealed distaste on his face. “I went back recently. They wear their camouflage around campus. They don’t have to take all the subjects and classes we did.”

In the space between seconds, Will once again changes tack to get back on course. “We had this philosophy teacher — a very intelligent man. He told us, ‘I’ll give you that God exists, but you have to choose two of the three: he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. You can never have all those. You can have two of three, and that’s it.’ I’ve struggled with that for years. He was right, but I struggle with it. How do I live with myself? I have so much guilt…killing people, all that rage I felt. My wife knows about it, but my children…I could never tell my children about that. The doctors at the VA, they want me to go on Prozac. I can’t do that. I won’t. What kind of human being would I be if I didn’t feel terrible for all the things I’ve done? I wouldn’t be a human being anymore,” he spits.

Will shakes his head sharply, as if trying to dislodge the memories. His face is wrinkled, his mouth sputters. Tears again gleam in his puffy eyes.

A muffled noise comes from the walkie-talkie attached to his arm. Halfheartedly, he leans his ear towards it.

The static interruption gives me a moment to gather my thoughts. No matter how many times I find myself on the receiving end of these unexpected and heartfelt outpourings, I feel that my own responses are inadequate. I struggle to say the right thing; my words always let me down. Today is no different. I ask Will if he has read Karl Marlantes’ What It is Like to Go to War, which details Marlantes’ struggle to return to civilian life after Vietnam, and the need for increased transitional assistance for those returning from war.

Will tells me, categorically, that he does not read those kinds of books. He pulls out another memory. “When I came back from West Point, my whole town was so proud,” he says. “No one from my area had ever gone to a service academy. I went back to my old high school and met with one of my teachers, a real sweet woman. She said to me, ‘Will, West Point builds character.’ I thought about that.” Tears once again cloud his sharp eyes. “And I told her, ‘No, ma’am. West Point reveals character.’ You see, my parents built my character. West Point just polished it.”

Will starts making the choking noise again. He presses his lips together, and behind them his jaw goes taut as he clenches his teeth. Tilting his head, he fixes his gaze on the ceiling to keep gravity from doing its work. He remains frozen like this for several seconds before he snaps back, his head upright once more. He presses his ear against the walkie-talkie and pretends to speak into it, joking with a vengeance, “Command ship incoming.” Looking back up at us, he apologizes. His eyes are now clear. “I’ve taken up enough of your time,” he says again. “I should let you go.”

“Thank you for sharing those memories with us,” I tell him. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed talking with you.” Desperately, I hope that my words are enough to convey the distinct privilege it has been to hear such honest, unvarnished truth from a man who doesn’t know my name; whose name I only know because I read the tag on his chest.

Will nods at all of us in turn. Then, he touches me lightly on the forearm. “God bless you,” he says, for what feels like at least the seventh time.

As I watch Will haul off, his injured leg doing its heart-shattering drag, I wish I could ask him which two-thirds God he means.

*Name has been changed

**Department of Veteran’s Affairs