Book Excerpt: Soldiers Once

My brother Jim was buried with full military honors on September 10, 2001, at Tahoma Memorial Cemetery in Kent, Washington. It was a brilliantly sunny day, the sky deep blue, the air washed clean by an early drizzle. The stark, snow-covered peak of Mount Rainier stood at majestic sentry. Rows of straight gray tombstones lined the deep green expanse of the cemetery as far as the eye could see, their spines erect in the hard earth. James Walter Schuler, staff sergeant, United States Army, retired, was fifty-three years old when he died.

We were a small group, seated on wooden folding chairs overlooking a tree-shaded lawn. It was mostly just family—our mother and her eight remaining children. Dad had been gone five years by then, his own flag-draped coffin long in the grave. He was a navy man, and his World War II experiences had been relegated to a few sentimental memories and a framed photo of his ship that hung in our living room.

But Jim’s journey had been different, his life and death complicated by war wounds that penetrated far deeper than the pieces of shrapnel that won him his Purple Heart. Jim might have rested more easily had his death come in a moment of combat, rather than unceremoniously in a lonely apartment.
Perhaps we would have cried less bitter tears, strangely happy to be able to call Jim a hero. But it hadn’t happened that way. Heroics performed during forgotten missions in the jungles of Vietnam were decades old, and the man we buried was long past the time when anyone saw him as a valiant warrior.

In our close-knit family, Jim was the snapped chord, the missing link, a man in hiding from his own people. Now we shifted uneasily in our seats as we gathered to lay Jim to rest. It had been sixteen years since any of us had seen him, and for most of that time we didn’t know where he was. His sporadic letters to our mother often bore no return address. We told ourselves he had abandoned us. We argued with our consciences, saying that he could have reached out at any time, insisting that we wanted him to. But it wasn’t true. We were tense in his presence, afraid of the simmering rage that sparked so suddenly when Jim drank. The last time we were all together, he had been violent. We were relieved when he left.

Unwilling to take any further action ourselves, we found it easy to blame the army, which we viewed as Jim’s surrogate family. After all, they had been the ones who’d taken him in. He had volunteered, and the army had accepted him. He’d been a lifer—twenty years in the service of his nation.

We expected the army to behave as a stern but loving parent, to rein Jim in, to cure him of his addictions and to temper his demons. This justification now seemed hollow. How could we think an enormous, faceless bureaucracy would hold our brother close, not only cleanse but reconstitute him, when we ourselves could and would not?

I glanced at my mother, seated beside me, her face an impenetrable mask of sorrow. But I knew precisely what was going on. She was tormenting herself, taking the blame for Jim’s failings, cataloguing the mistakes she’d made as her thoughts flipped through the calendar pages of his troubled life. She shouldn’t have done so, but she was unable to stop herself. Your child is still your child, even when that child is fifty-three years old, and guilt is a persistent demon. The script of life’s events never stops being written and rewritten, each time with a different ending, even as the finality of the coffin sits in silent judgment only feet away.

I’m sure Mom rationally understood that the tangles of Jim’s life and his sad, early death weren’t her fault. Nevertheless, there he was. And so, at last, she had failed him. In the long shadows cast by time and eroded by memory, logic fails, and so does wisdom. The heart will not be convinced. We listened to the prayerful drone of the priest. I stared down at the funeral program, whose cover featured the childhood photo of a redheaded imp wearing a devilish, toothy grin. We had chosen to memorialize Jim not as the stranger he had become, but as the boy we had once known.

Sweet, sweet childhood. When the end looms, the mind reaches back to the comfort of a time closer to the beginning. Those were the easy years, when my siblings and I were free to roam on long, lazy summer days—running through the sprinkler that was a fixture in our backyard, eating peaches straight from the tree, picking berries in the overgrown patches next to the railroad tracks, waiting for Dad to drive up in his milk truck so we could all cram inside its cold, galvanized-steel-walled world, comforted by the rhythmic clank of empty return bottles in loose cases, and the cool texture of the slick floor awash with melting ice. Our traumas then were no worse than a bee sting on a bare foot, or a sliver of wood embedded in a pink thumb. I’m sure my mother’s memory lingered on those times. It was irresistible. She wanted her child back, the darling boy in the photo, but he had been gone for a long time, his innocent, open face replaced by a darker, brooding visage. Her handsome son had disappeared to a place where she couldn’t reach him.

As the last plaintive note of Taps echoed across the field, the honor guard—three young men resplendent in their dress uniforms—raised their rifles toward the open skies and split the air with three loud cracks.

“Jim would have loved this,” my sister Joanne murmured, and we all shared a smile. It was one thing we knew for sure about our brother—his love of pageantry and the pride he took in his military identity. How pleased he would have been to see these fine young men with their formal bearing, their crisp uniforms, their obedience to honor, firing clean blasts into the air to send off their fellow soldier. It was a secular ritual, but it felt holy.

After the service, we made the long drive back to our mother’s house in Seattle, where we busied ourselves with food and drink and the familiar loud conversations that were a trademark of our clan’s gatherings.

There is a wall in Mom’s house, right off the living room, decorated with framed pictures of each of her children, in the order of their birth. Airbrushed high-school graduation portraits—the kind that look a little too perfect, cheeks a little too pink, eyes a little too blue.

Jim’s portrait stood out from the rest. There had been no high-school graduation for him; instead, he had joined the army. So, there was a picture of seventeen-year-old Jim in his military uniform. His thick red hair had been close-cropped. His chiseled face was set in determination. His eyes glowed with fervor, but it was something other than innocence that emanated from them. In his uniform, he looked much older than his age.

We ate, drank, laughed, and performed the full theater of “remember the time,” carefully choosing memories, skirting the fresher mysteries in favor of the beach scenes, ballgames, and innocent troublemaking of our youth.

It wasn’t our family’s way to pick at scabs. But in the days after we buried Jim, we might have settled in as a family and begun the task of figuring out exactly what had happened to him. We might have taken the time to contemplate Jim’s premature death—the way his life had begun to unravel on the fields of Vietnam thirty years earlier, and had kept unraveling after he’d finally done his twenty years and retired, like a long, slow death march towards alcoholism, poverty, and isolation.

We might have searched for a way to explain why a twenty-year veteran of the United States Army, who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam and collected a drawer full of medals, could have nothing to show for it but a small ceremony in a military graveyard and a ritually folded triangle of flag laid to rest in his mother’s arms.

We might have spent time in those days after we buried Jim going through the single box of belongings we’d retrieved from his tiny apartment in Killeen, Texas. We might have studied each medal and award, each letter of commendation detailing the heroics performed.

But we never had a chance. Another kind of tragedy intervened. The next day dawned  September 11, and Jim was blown from our thoughts with the explosive force of two airliners crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A new war was engaged, with an army of fresh names and faces. Banners unfurled in the windows of stores and on the bumpers of SUVs. They fluttered giddily in the air across freeway overpasses. The familiar chant spilled out from the soul of a nation blind to its meaning: Support our troops.