I was sitting on the edge of my bed this evening, sipping a cooling mug
of tea and polishing my old black cowboy boots when I was hit by a flood of memories.
So many Friday nights, when my friends were partying or relaxing, I stayed at
home carefully starching and pressing my BDUs and polishing my boots for drill
weekend. So many Saturday mornings when normal folks were sleeping late, I slid
into my car before dawn so that I could call my platoon to attention in the
drill center parking lot at 7:30am.
My cowboy boots are old and ragged. They’ve been through
dust and mud and more than a few encounters with horse hooves. They’re beyond
repair but I’ll polish them and wear them to a fancy bistro tomorrow because
this is Texas and I can. My combat boots, which I no longer have, were almost
as worn. They carried a few cactus needles in the toes and the scars of many
marches and wrestling matches with razor wire.
I’ve been taking my daughter to jog at Camp Mabry lately.
She prefers that track, which is not crowded, to the mob on Lady Bird Lake trail.
We run and walk at her pace, and when we’re walking, I’ll tell her tales. How I
used to run my PT test on that trail, when it was still gravel. How we used to
go out into the woods to do our common skills training. How I spent Saturday afternoons
in the motor pool touching up the camo paint job on my deuce and a half and topping
off the water in the battery. How Bo twitched the laterals and crashed the 577
into the side of a Volkswagen in the parking lot. But I’ve never driven her
back to the building where we used to drill, or try to sneak in to see what it
looks like now. Some ghosts are best left slumbering. Everything is so
different now. The Army. The world. Me. It was such a huge part of me and there’s
nothing left but dusty fragments of memories.
Every year we have a
reunion. I’ve gone to a couple of them. I’m younger than most who attend. Some
that I remember in their arrogant and beautiful prime are dead now. Most are a
lot fatter and a lot more conservative than I remember. Did we really drink and
laugh and play cards and throw each other into the pool and then get up the
next morning and drive a convoy across Texas and set up a field SCIF in 100 degree
weather sweating until our boots were white with salt and even the musty warm
water in our canteens tasted good? Did we really hang laminated maps on the
walls of the tent and mark them with grease pencils and then encrypt our
reports with a code-book before radioing them in? Am I really that old? I look
at the faces of my former comrades at arms and feel oddly disconnected from
them and from my own past. In a lot of important ways I haven’t changed. But so
much has happened since then. Love. Loss. Careers. Parenthood. Politics.
Many of them stayed in the military until retirement. There’s
a comfortable continuity to that. Being part of a enduring community. Having a
consistent identity. Polishing the same pair of boots on Friday night, year
after year. I cut ties with my past when I joined the Army, and cut them again
when I left. I’ve reinvented myself over and over again. And I’m making plans
to do it again. It seems to be the way I’m made. I wonder if at some point, I’ll
decide, nope, this is where I stop. I’ve gone far enough. I rather doubt it.
I glance at my daughter’s flushed face as we jog and the
past falls away. She sprints ahead and I push forward, trying to keep up. Her red braid swings like a pendulum and I laugh out loud. Together we race into the cold wind.
