about her was exquisitely peaceful, but for some reason, I couldn’t escape a nagging sense of dread. As tender and exciting as it had been, I couldn’t help wondering whether there had been a trace of desperation in our actions, as if we were both clinging to the hope that this would sustain our relationship through whatever the future would bring.
Fourteen
Our remaining time together on my leave was much as I had originally hoped. Aside from the weekend with my father—during which he cooked for us and spoke endlessly about coins—we were alone as much as possible. Back in Chapel Hill, once Savannah was finished with her classes for the day, our afternoons and evenings were spent together. We walked through the stores along Franklin Street, went to the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, and even spent a couple of hours at the North Carolina Zoo. On my second to last evening in town, we went to dinner at the fancy restaurant the shoe salesman had told me about. She wouldn’t let me peek while she was getting ready, but when she finally emerged from the bathroom, she was positively glamorous. I stared at her in between bites, thinking how lucky I was to be with her.
We didn’t make love again. After our night together, I woke the next morning to find Savannah studying me, tears running down her cheeks. Before I could ask what was wrong, she put a finger to my lips and shook her head, willing me not to speak.
“Last night was wonderful,” she said, “but I don’t want to talk about it.” Instead, she wrapped herself around me and I held her for a long time, listening to the sound of her breath. I knew then that something had changed between us, but at the time, I didn’t have the courage to find out what.
On the morning I left, Savannah drove me to the airport. We sat at the gate together, waiting for my flight to be called, her thumb tracing small circles on the back of my hand. When it was time for me to board the plane, she fell into my arms and started to cry. When she saw my expression, she forced a laugh, but I could hear the sorrow in it.
“I know I promised,” she said, “but I can’t help it.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “It’s only six months. With all that’s going on in your life, you’ll be amazed how fast that goes.”
“Easy to say,” she said, sniffling. “But you’re right. I’m going to be stronger this time. I’ll be okay.”
I scrutinized her face for signs of denial but saw none.
“Really,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
I nodded, and for a long moment we simply stared at each other.
“Will you remember to watch for the full moon?” she asked.
“Every single time,” I promised.
We shared one last kiss. I held her tight and whispered that I loved her, then I forced myself to release her. I slung my gear over my shoulder and headed up the ramp. Peeking over my shoulder, I realized that Savannah was already gone, hidden somewhere in the crowd.
On the plane, I leaned back in the seat, praying that Savannah had been telling the truth. Though I knew she loved and cared for me, I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren’t always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us. Although I didn’t want to admit it, there was much about her I didn’t know. I hadn’t realized how my leaving last year had affected her, and despite anxious hours thinking about it, I wasn’t sure how it would affect her now. Our relationship, I felt with a heaviness in my chest, was beginning to feel like the spinning movement of a child’s top. When we were together, we had the power to keep it spinning, and the result was beauty and magic and an almost childlike sense of wonder; when we separated, the spinning began inevitably to slow. We became wobbly and unstable, and I knew I had to find a way to keep us from toppling over.
I’d learned my lesson from the year before. Not only did I write more letters from Germany during July and August, but I called Savannah more frequently as well. I listened carefully during the calls, trying to pick up any signs of depression and longing to hear any words of affection or desire. In the beginning, I was nervous before making those calls; by the end of the summer, I was waiting for them. Her classes went well. She spent a couple of weeks with her parents, then began the fall semester. In the first week of September, we began the countdown of days I had left until my discharge. There were one hundred to go. It was easier to talk of days rather than weeks or months; somehow it made the distance between us shrink to something far more intimate, something that both of us knew we could handle. The hard part was behind us, we reminded each other, and I found that as I flipped the days on the calendar, the worries I’d had about our relationship began to diminish. I was certain there was nothing in the world that could stop us from being together.
Then came September 11.
Fifteen
This I am sure of: The images of September 11 will be with me forever. I watched the smoke billowing from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and saw the grim faces of the men around me as they watched people jump to their deaths. I witnessed the buildings’ collapse and the massive cloud of dust and debris that rose in their place. I felt fury as the White House was evacuated.
Within hours, I knew that the United States would respond to the attack and that the armed services would lead the way. The base was put on high alert, and I doubted there was ever a time that I was prouder of my men. In the days that followed, it was as if all personal differences and political affiliations of any kind melted away. For a short period of time, we were all simply Americans.
Recruiting offices began to fill around the country with men wanting to enlist. Among those of us already enlisted, the desire to serve was stronger than ever. Tony was the first of the men in my squad to reup for an additional two years, and one by one, every other man followed his lead. Even I, who was expecting my honorable discharge in December and had been counting the days until I could go home to Savannah, caught the fever and found myself reenlisting.
It would be easy to say that I was influenced by what was going on around me and that was the reason I made the decision I did. But that’s just an excuse. Granted, I was caught up in the same patriotic wave, but more than that, I was bound by the twin ties of friendship and responsibility. I knew my men, I cared about my men, and the thought of abandoning them at a time like this struck me as impossibly cowardly. We’d been through too much together for me to even contemplate leaving the service in those waning days of 2001.
I called Savannah with the news. Initially, she was supportive. Like everyone else, she’d been horrified by what had happened, and she understood the sense of duty that weighed on me, even before I tried to explain it. She said she was proud of me.
But reality soon set in. In choosing to serve my country, I’d made a sacrifice. Though the investigation into the perpetrators was completed quickly, 2001 drifted to an uneventful close for us. Our infantry division played no role in the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, a disappointment to everyone in my squad. Instead, we spent most of winter and spring drilling and preparing for what everyone knew was the future invasion of Iraq.
It was, I suppose, around this time that the letters from Savannah began to change. Where once they came weekly, they started arriving every ten days, and then, as the days began to lengthen, they came only every other week. I tried to console myself with the fact that the tone of the letters hadn’t changed, but in time even that did. Gone were long passages in which she described the way she envisioned our life together, passages that in the past had always filled me with anticipation. We both knew that dream was now two years distant. Writing about a future so far off reminded her of how long we had to go, something painful for both of us to contemplate.
As May swept in, I consoled myself that at least we would be able to see each other on my next leave. Fate, however, conspired against us again just a few days before I was to return home. My commanding officer requested
