just a piece of fiction

[Elias Saaresto]

Adapted from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried - a beautiful book that should be read in its original state.

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Scout carried dogtags from his brother named John, the only one who had ever served in the military of his family. He wore them with pride and dignity. In the late evening, after a day’s match, he would go to his room and while reading in bed, stroke them for good luck. He would imagine rollerblading down the streets of Boston. He would sometimes sniff them, knowing that the scent of gunpowder was from his own work and not his brother’s service tour. His brother was now at a mental institution. John wrote home once before they diagnosed him unfit to return. On the letter were the words “They won’t stop coming” scribbled over and over again. The letter wasn’t about the war, but about the dreams of going home, Scout just knew it. The letter weighed 0.16 ounces. The dogtags weighed 0.46 ounces. Scout would play with the tags around his neck and would toss his comic book off to the side. He would have dreamless nights.

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were painkillers, can openers, pocket knives, sunscreen, lighters, matches, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 12 to 18 pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Heavy, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of “sandviches” stuffed with ham. Medic, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and disinfectant as well as an extra pair of gloves. Scout, who wouldn’t admit to being afraid but was very much afraid, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head out in Dustbowl in mid-August. By necessity, they all carried an extra set of clothes which weighed, more or less, 2 pounds. They carried emblems signifying how long they’d been on term; the men who had been around the longest carried just a bit more weight. Very few carried hats. Pyro carried a box of matches. Until he was shot, Scout carried 2 to 3 cans of radioactive BONK!, which for him was a necessity. Sniper, the most bearable of the bunch, carried blank postcards from Australia. Soldier carried medallions that he had crafted himself. Demoman carried his Scrumpy into battle because he couldn’t fight sober. Spy carried a deck of cards and often tried to engage the others in a game, only to stab them in the back later. Figuratively.

Almost everyone carried photographs. Scout carried a photograph of his brother John in uniform, shortly before his departure. He stood ramrod straight, all business and serious matters. After the click and flash, John regained character. He laughed and swooped down upon Scout, had pulled him into a noogie. Scout should’ve given him a photo before he left. An ounce of paper was more than a fair trade for a few ounces of reassurance.

What they carried was determined by field specialty.

As a street punk from the gangs of Boston, Scout carried a scattergun, a pistol, and his favorite aluminum bat which weighed 17 ounces. He carried the weight of a promise to return home to his mother.

As per his profession, Sniper carried a bolt-action rifle which weighed 8.6 pounds. He also carried the weight of his father’s disappointment, a burden which hung heavily against his chest.

As a doctor, Medic carried a satchel filled with morphine and plasma and surgical tape and sheet music and all the things a doctor must carry, including his bonesaw for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.

As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Heavy carried “Sasha” which weighed 330 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. In addition, Heavy carried between 20 and 25 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders.

The typical load for a man was 25 rounds. But Scout, who wouldn’t admit that he was scared, carried 32 rounds when he was shot and killed at Dustbowl, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 15 pounds of ammunition, plus the rations and water and BONK! and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Sniper, who saw it happen, had nothing more to say than that the kid just fell over like he usually did when he tripped. Except this time he didn’t get back up. It was like watching a rock fall – just boom, then down – nothing fancy or dramatic or even the least bit heroic – nothing special, Sniper said, the poor kid just tripped.

On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar odds and ends. Spy always brought his camera beard without explanation. Heavy brought carrots to improve his vision at Spy-Medic’s suggestion. Sniper carried his huntsman; ammo, he claimed, would never be a problem. Demoman carried moonshine and an unhealthy dose of paranoia. They all carried false hope that tonight was the night.

Other missions were more complicated and required Soldier’s “balls of steel” speech. In mid-August, it was their mission to destroy the tunnels in Dustbowl. To blow the tunnels, they crafted a bomb and threw it in a cart. Called it a work of art. They drew numbers. Before Scout died there were 9 men on the team, and whoever drew the number 9 would crouch beside the cart and inch it towards the tunnels. It would have been faster to push if more hands were on deck, but they needed to fight, too.

On August 16, when Spy drew the number 9, he stared at them in disgust but moved into position. Nothing moved. No clouds or birds or people. As they waited for the bell, the men roughed each other up, otherwise not talking, feeling sympathy for Spy but also feeling the luck of the draw.

Heavy ate a chocolate bar. Scout had a can of BONK! and ran around in circles.

When the alarm sounded, Spy rushed for the cart. Amazingly, he made it to the end without a single scratch or tear in his suit. All he had to say for himself was, Naturally. Right then, Scout was shot in the head by a rocket. There was blood everywhere. Pieces of Scout. Is not possible, Heavy exclaimed, Scout is dead. Scout is dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound – the guy’s dead.

They carried with them the death of a man just barely in his twenties.

[Elias Saaresto]

Several years after the war Sniper came to visit me at my home in Texas, and for a full day we drank coffee (his was decaf) and smoked cigarettes (cheap stuff the Spy would’ve scoffed at) and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried in our lives. Spread out across the kitchen table were maybe a hundred old photographs. There were pictures of Medic and Heavy and Spy and Soldier, all of us, the faces incredibly proud and naïve. At one point, I recall, we paused over a snapshot of Scout, and after a while Sniper rubbed his eyes and said he’d never forgiven himself for Scout’s death. He’d seen the RED Soldier in his scope, hesitated for a moment and gone for their Pyro instead since it was our Spy on the cart. It was something that would never go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain things. Then for a long time neither of us could think of much to say. The thing to do, we decided, was to forget the coffee and switch to beer, which improved the mood, and not much later we were laughing about some of the craziness that used to go on. The way Heavy praised his “Sasha” as if it were his baby. Medic’s sheet music. Pyro’s matches. By midnight we were both a little drunk, and I decided there was no harm in asking about his parents. I’m not sure how I went about it--just a bit of small talk--but Sniper looked up in surprise. “You science types,” he said, “you’ve got long memories.” Then he smiled and excused himself and went up to the guest room and came back with a postcard. It was from Australia.

“Remember this?” he said.

I nodded and told him I was surprised. I thought he’d never sent a single one.

Sniper kept smiling. For a while he stared down at the postcard, his eyes very bright, then he shrugged and said, “Well, I did. After Scout died, I had to . . . This is from my mum. Replied within a week.”

They’d ate lunch with each other, he said, after the war when he went home. Nothing had changed. She still loved him. For five or six days, he said, they spent most of their time together. There was a family reunion, and then a wedding for a cousin, and then after the festivities they took a walk around the neighborhood and talked about his life. Sniper was a mercenary now. A skilled assassin, although killing hadn’t been the point, and he had made off with a paycheck that allow them all a comfy retirement. He told her he would never get married, he said, that no one suited him or vice versa. He didn’t know why. As he said this, it occurred to his mother that there were things about him that she would never know. His eyes were gray and neutral. Later, when she took his hand, there was a light pressure in return, and later still, when she told him she still loved him, he kept walking and didn’t answer and then after several minutes looked at the night sky and said it was getting late. He walked her back to the house. For a few moments he considered asking about his father, but instead he laughed and told her how during the war he’d done something very stupid. His mother closed her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest, as if suddenly cold, rocking slightly, then after a time she looked at him and said she was glad he had come home. She didn’t understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and his mother said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things. At breakfast the next morning she told him she was sorry. She explained that there was nothing she could do about it, and he said he understood, and then she smiled and gave him a hug and told him never to leave again.

Sniper shook his head. “It doesn’t matter where I am,” he finally said, “She loves me.”

For the rest of his visit I steered the conversation away from his folks. At the end, though, as we were walking out to his van, I told him that I’d like to write a story about some of this. Sniper thought it over and then gave me a little smile. “Why not?” he said. “Maybe he’ll read it and ring me up. There’s always hope, right?”

“Right,” I said.

He got into his van and rolled down the window. “Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and dashing, all that stuff. Best shot ever.” He hesitated for a second. “And do me a favor. Don’t mention anything about--”

“No,” I said, “I won’t.”

[Elias Saaresto]

The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember Christmas at the fort. I remember how it started with an armistice. Our Soldier shared a drink with the RED Demoman. When the two passed out side-by-side, Sniper shook his head and said, "War's a cruel mistress." He sipped from his mug forlornly. "One day, for Chrissake. And then we have to do it all over again."

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

I remember Heavy and Medic playing chess every evening after ceasefire began. It was a ritual for them. They would take a table in the mess hall and get the board out and play long, silent games as the clouds blew past. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were white pieces and black pieces. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or deserts. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There were rules. There was a winner and a loser.

I'm forty-nine years old, and a bit of a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember; it hurts to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Pyro tumbling off the edge of a cliff, or Medic's cold face framed by the snow, the wrinkles barely noticeable, and then his hand drops. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

But the war wasn't all that way.

Like when Scout relied too much on the BONK! "How are you holding up?" somebody would say, and Scout would give a bright, toothy grin and say, "I'm doing real good, like freakin' unbelievable."

If you weren't fighting, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Struggling to remember tunes. Strumming off chords. The sun and the heat and the endless sand. Even in the tunnels, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders (Scout tried to pull one over Medic.) You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the rising dunes stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. Like your heart. Then your brain. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad as intestines fly over your head. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your Soldier-grade balls of steel would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.

I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-nine years old and I'm writing war stories. My daughter Laura tells me it's an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a rainbow unicorn. In a way, I suppose, she's right: I should forget it. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. When writing, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you. That's the real obsession. All those stories. My stories. Their stories. Our stories.

Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.

Here's a quick peace story:

Spy goes AWOL. Skips off to Spain and finds himself a pretty Latina for the night. It's a great time-The sweet little thing loves him to death-the man gets whatever he wants whenever he wants it. The war's behind him, he thinks. Just a horrible nightmare. But then one day he rejoins his team out here. Can't wait to get back into action. Finally Sniper asks what happened with the woman, why so hot for combat, and Spy says, "It was the stability. It felt so comforting that it hurt. I want to hurt it back."

I remember Sniper smiling as he told me that story. He left something out, I'm sure, but even so I caught the gist of it. Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some war-torn battlefield, getting your ass kicked by those goddamn varmints, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs-the whole world gets rearranged-and even though you're trapped in a war you never felt more stable in your life.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:

Sniper lying on his back one night, watching the stars, then whispering to me, "I'll tell you something, Engineer. If I could have one wish, anything, I'd wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it's okay if I never get my degree. That's all my old man talks about, nothing else. How he can't wait to see my goddamn degree."

Or Scout teaching a dance to Pyro and Demoman, the three of them whooping and leaping around on a piece of cardboard while the rest of us looked on with a mixture of fascination and derisive laughter. Afterward, Demoman said, "So where are our lasses?" and Scout said, "Shit, I don't know. We'll get you one after I find one first!" and Demoman thought about it and said, "Yeah, but where are our lasses now?"

Or Soldier adopting a stray dog - a dingo pup - saying it'd make a fine war hound in due time. The only problem was that the poor creature only had three of its limbs. Soldier kept feeding it table scraps until the day Medic strapped the puppy to a table and squeezed the syringe.

The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was around thirty-nine, brought down by Scout, and as a consequence things often took on a cynically serious atmosphere, like a workspace dedicated to cubicles. The gloom could be overbearing, but things never went so far as to make Soldier cry. Like when Medic euthanized his puppy. "Why is everyone looking at me like that?" Medic said. "It might have had rabies."

I think I was the only one who understood right away that Medic had done the poor pup a service. Soldier, too.

[Elias Saaresto]

This one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my child, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a confession. Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For months I've had to live with it, will continue to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to hope, comes in finite quantities, like an inheritance and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage: Being the one to set Soldier straight when he went off on a tirade, the one to haul Demoman to bed after he ran out of scrumpy, the one to put out the fire before Pyro burned the place down. It offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward: Being the one to look away first when Medic raised his voice, the one to make an excuse when Heavy called for a group hug, the one to tell Scout to hush up after he awoke from a nightmare. It justified the past while amortizing the future.

In January of 1968, several months before a trip to see old relatives up in Minnesota, I was drafted to fight a war I didn't understand. I was forty-eight years old. Not ready to retire, sure, and still as sharp as a tack, but even so the nameless war in the middle of nowhere was to me incomprehensible. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a game? A game of selfish pride or inhumane greed? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened after ceasefire was called? Was RED the villain, or a hero, or both, or neither? What about the new recruits? What about Scout? My team was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the mess hall and into every waking moment of our lives. The only certainty was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when men go to war they must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of their cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

The draft notice arrived on January 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I remember, cloudy and very quiet, and I'd just come in from mowing the lawn. My wife and daughter were having lunch out in the kitchen. I remember opening up the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things at once – I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it. A mistake, maybe – a foul-up in the paperwork. I was no soldier. I was an engineer. I spent more time with a wrench in my hand than a shotgun. The sight of blood made me queasy. I was almost fifty, for Christ sake. If they needed fresh bodies, why not draft some doggone-waste-of-space street punk whose only ace was in physical education? Or one of those Australian loonies, or one of those renowned Russian mercenaries, or someone who actually wanted to fight? There should be a rule, I thought. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with other crazed gunmen and help spill blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.

I remember the rage in my stomach. Later it burned down to a smoldering self-pity, then to numbness. I hid the draft notice from my wife.

I spent the spring of 1968 working at an oil rig in my hometown of Bee Cave, Texas. The rig required constant maintenance due to its shoddy design, and for eight hours a day I stood watch, waiting for something to spring loose. By the end of the day, I was drenched in oil and the only part of me not swimming it in was my eyes. Goggles were a necessity, and a rubber apron, but even so it was like standing for eight hours a day under a lukewarm oil-shower. At night I'd go home smelling like gasoline. It wouldn't go away. Even after a hot shower, scrubbing hard, the stink was always there – like a cloud of smog just hovering around me, threatening me. When I had free time I locked myself up in my workshop. I felt isolated; I spent a lot of my time alone. And there was also that draft notice tucked away in my wallet.

I sometimes felt the fear spreading inside me like weeds. I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do – taking aim at another human being and pulling the trigger.

At some point in mid-April I began thinking seriously about Canada. The border lay a few hundred miles north of Worthington, Minnesota, an eight-hour drive. Both my conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break for it, just take off and run like hell and never stop. In the beginning the idea seemed purely abstract, the word Canada printing itself out in my head; but after a time I could see particular shapes and images, the sorry details of my own future – a hotel room in Winnipeg, a battered old suitcase, my wife's eyes as I tried to explain myself over the telephone. I could almost hear her voice, and my daughter's. Run, I'd think. Then I'd think, Impossible. Then a second later I'd think, Run.

It was a moral split. I couldn't make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared ridicule and censure. But most of all, I feared what the corporation would do to me.

My hometown was a close-knit community, a place where tradition counted, and it was easy to imagine people sitting around a table down at old Mimi's Café at Galleria Circle, coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly zeroing in on the old engineer fellow, how the selfish man had left his wife and daughter without even an explanation. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on fierce arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were writing me off as someone they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them – I held them personally and individually responsible.

I was bitter, sure. But it was so much more than that. The emotions went from outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage. I felt a sickness inside me. Real disease.

Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How one morning, watching my extended family chat about nonsensical things while I still held that draft notice in my wallet, I felt something break open in my chest. I don't know what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a physical rupture. Quickly, almost without thought, I walked to the guest room without excusing myself. I remember packing my things and carrying it down to the kitchen, standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at all the foreign objects around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink and white kitchen counters. The room was full of bright sunshine. Everything sparkled. My life, I thought. I'm not sure how long I stood there, but later I scribbled out a quick note to my wife.

What it said, exactly, I don't recall now. Something vague.

Have something to do, will call, love Dell.

I drove north.

It's a blur now, as it was then, and all I remember is velocity and the feel of a steering wheel in my hands. I was riding on adrenaline. A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it – like running a dead-end maze – no way out – it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think to do. It was pure flight, fast and mindless. I had no plan. Just hit the border at high speed and crash through and keep on running. Near dusk I passed through Bemidji, then turned northeast toward International Falls. I spent the night in the car behind a closed-down gas station a half mile from the border. In the morning, after gassing up, I headed straight west along the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated one life from another. The land was mostly wilderness. Here and there I passed a motel or bait shop, but otherwise sumac. Though it was still May, the air already had the smell of August, everything warm and alive. I remember a huge blue sky. Off to my right was the Rainy River, wide as a lake in places, and beyond the Rainy River was Canada.

For a while I just drove, not aiming at anything, then in the late morning I began looking for a place to lie low for a day or two. I was exhausted, and scared sick, and around noon I pulled into an old fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge. Actually, it was not a lodge at all, just eight or nine tiny yellow cabins clustered on a peninsula that jutted northward into the Rainy River. The place was in sorry shape. There was a dangerous wooden dock, an old minnow tank, a flimsy tar paper boathouse along the shore. The main building, which stood in a cluster of pines on high ground, seemed to lean heavily to one side, like a cripple, the roof sagging toward Canada. Briefly, I thought about turning around, just giving up, but then I got out of the car and walked up to the front porch.

The man who opened the door that day changed my life. How do I say this without sounding sappy? Blurt it out – the man saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without even trying at all. He stepped aside and gestured towards the concierge's desk. He was there at a critical time – an impressionable beacon of light. Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper way to thank him, and I never have. Maybe one day I'll work up the courage to do it in person. But for now, this story represents a small gesture of gratitude months overdue.

Even after all the memories of the war began to clog my thoughts I can close my eyes and return to the porch at the Tip Top Lodge. I can see the young man staring at me. Vince Lawson: twenty-two years old, lanky and tall and mostly hot air. He wore a red t-shirt and gray sweatpants. In one hand, I remember, he carried a wooden bat, a baseball in the other. His eyes had the same bluish gray color of a razor blade, the same polished shine, and as he peered up at me I felt a strange sharpness, almost painful, a cutting sensation, as if his gaze was somehow slicing me open. In part, no doubt, it was my own sense of guilt, but even so I'm absolutely certain that the young man took one look at me and went right to the heart of things – a man going through a midlife crisis. After I asked for a room, Vince made a little clicking sound with his tongue. I remember smiling at him. I also remember wishing I hadn't. The young man shook his head as if to tell me it wasn't worth the bother.

"The guy who runs this place starts dinner at five-thirty," he said. "You eat fish?"

"Anything," I said.

Vince scoffed and said, "You better. I helped catch it."

We spent six days together at the Tip Top Lodge. Just the two of us. There were no boats on the river, and the wilderness seemed to withdraw into a great permanent stillness. Over those six days Vince Lawson and I took most of our meals together. In the mornings we sometimes went out on long hikes into the woods, and at night we played Scrabble or listened to records or sat reading in front of the big stone fireplace. At times I felt the awkwardness of an intruder, but Vince accepted me into his generation without fuss or ceremony. He took my presence for granted, the same way one might've sheltered a stray cat – no wasted sighs or pity – and there was never any talk about it. Just the opposite. What I remember more than anything is the man's willful, almost ferocious silence. In all that time together, all those hours, he never asked the obvious questions: Why was I there? Why alone? Why so preoccupied? If Vince was curious about any of this, he was careful never to put it into words.

Vince Lawson was no hick. His room, I recalled, was cluttered with baseball paraphernalia, especially that of the Boston Red Sox. He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and that was without spelling out all those crazy slang terms he kept throwing at me. One evening, just at sunset, he pointed up at an owl circling over the violet-lighted forest to the west. "Hey, Conagher," he said. "There's Jesus." The man was sharp – he didn't miss much. Those razor eyes. Now and then he'd catch me staring out at the river, at the far shore, and I could almost hear the tumblers clicking in his head. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.

One thing for certain, he knew I was in desperate trouble. And he knew I couldn't talk about it. The wrong word – or even right word – and I would've disappeared. I was wired and jittery. My skin felt too tight. After supper one evening I vomited and went back to my cabin and lay down for a few moments and vomited again; another time, in the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and couldn't shut it off. I went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn't sleep; I couldn't lie still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the beach and quietly push one of the boats out into the river and start paddling my way toward Canada.

I'm not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can't remember. During that long spring I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.

Some of this Vince must've understood. Not the details, of course, but the plain fact of crisis.

And suddenly it clicked. It was early evening, and we'd just finished supper, and over coffee and dessert I asked why he was here. For a long while the young man squinted down at the tablecloth.

"I ran as far as I could go. You know?"

I was motionless at first, paralyzed by shock. Then I nodded.

Vince kept his eyes on the tablecloth. "I kept thinking it was some sort of sick joke. So I played along. Before I knew it, I wound up here. And then I realized something." He leaned back in his chair. "It doesn't matter where you go. They'll find you."

"Who? I'm afraid I don't understand."

He raised his eyebrows. "Sure you do."

"I might if you were a bit more clear, son."

Vince shrugged and began clearing the table. For a time he fussed with the dishes, whistling to himself as if the subject had been settled.

I moved to pay the check and he came back, snatching the receipt from me. He grabbed his wallet and opened it. Out fluttered a draft notice.

The man knew.

• • •

On my last full day, the sixth day, I took the young man out fishing on the Rainy River. The afternoon was sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came in from the north, and I remember how the little fourteen-foot boat made sharp rocking motions as we pushed off from the dock. The current was swift. All around us, there was a vastness to the world, an unpeopled rawness, just the trees and the sky and the water reaching out toward nowhere. The air had the suffocating scent of August.

For ten or fifteen minutes Vince held a course upstream, the river choppy and silver-gray, then he turned straight north and put the engine on full throttle. I felt the bow lift beneath me. I remember the wind in my ears, the sound of the air whistling, my own whistling, a reflexive response. For a time I didn't pay attention to anything, just feeling the cold spray against my face, but then it occurred to me that at some point we must've passed into Canadian waters, across the dotted line between two different worlds, and I remember a sudden tightness in my chest as I looked up and watched the far shore come at me. This wasn't a daydream. It was tangible and oh so real. As we came in toward land, Vince cut the engine, letting the boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. The young man didn't look at me or speak. Bending down, he opened up the tackle box and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to himself, his eyes down.

It struck me then that he must've had the same thoughts. The same fears.

I remember staring at the young man, then at my hands, then at Canada. Twenty yards. I could've done it. I could've jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this, I can still feel the tightness. And I want you to feel it - the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You've been drafted, you're scared, and there's a hand squeezing pressure in your chest.

What would you do?

Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would you give up? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

I tried to swallow it back. I tried to smile, except I was crying.

Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told this story before. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the chest-chokes.

At the rear of the boat Vince Lawson pretended not to notice. He held a fishing rod in his hands, his head bowed to hide his eyes. He was crying, too. And what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had become a pitiful fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream. Bobbing there on the Rainy River, looking back at the Minnesota shore, I felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a drowning sensation, as if I had toppled overboard and was being swept away by the silver waves.

The little aluminum boat rocked softly beneath me. There was the wind and the sky.

I tried to will myself overboard.

I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now.

I did try. It just wasn't possible.

They would find me. They had already found me. They could do anything to me. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Fear, that's all it was.

And right then I submitted.

I would go to the war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was scared not to.

That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.

Vince Lawson cried louder. He dropped the fishing rod. His eyes were shining and wet. He couldn't speak. He was there with me and he understood. We were each other's witness and that was our undoing.

After a time the young man rubbed his eyes against his sleeve and turned the boat back toward Minnesota.

I don't remember saying goodbye. That last night we had dinner together, and I went to bed early, and in the morning Vince shared breakfast with me. When I told him I'd be leaving, the young man nodded and said he was doing the same. He looked down at the table and smiled.

At some point later in the morning it's possible that we shook hands - I just don't remember - but I do know that by the time I'd finished packing the young man had disappeared. I saw him again in late January hovering over Medic - more specifically, Medic's dying body. I could have shot him while he mourned over his actions. But Heavy beat me to it and for that I was glad, so very relieved.

It was cloudy the day I left Tip Top Lodge. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Dustbowl, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

[Elias Saaresto]

One morning in late August, while we were out in the courtyard around the fire, Spy and Soldier got into a fistfight. It was about something trivial and just plain stupid - a missing shovel - but even so the fight was vicious. For a while it went back and forth, but Soldier was much bigger and much stronger, and eventually he wrapped an arm around Spy's neck and pinned him down and kept hitting him on the nose. He hit him hard. And he didn't stop. Spy's nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a firecracker, but even then Soldier kept hitting him, over and over, quick stiff punches that did not miss. It took three of us to pull him off. When it was over, Spy had to be carried to the medbay, where he had his nose looked after, and two hours later he was up and about.

In any other circumstance it might've ended there. But this was war, where men carried guns, and Soldier started to worry. It was mostly in his head. There were no threats, no vows of revenge, just a silent tension between them that made Soldier take special precautions. He tried to keep track of Spy's whereabouts, especially when he cloaked. He growled when people got too close; he kept his back to the wall while eating in the mess hall; he avoided situations that might put the two of them alone together. Eventually, after a week of this, the strain began to create problems. Soldier couldn't relax. Like fighting two different wars, he said. Nowhere was safe: Spies everywhere. At night he had trouble sleeping - a skittish feeling - always on guard, hearing strange noises in the dark, imagining the smell of smoke in the air or the pressure of a knife against his back. The distinction between good guys and bad guys disappeared for him. Even in times of relative safety, while the rest of us took it easy, Soldier would be on edge, weapon in hand, watching Spy with quick, nervous eyes. It got to the point finally where he lost control. Something must've snapped. One afternoon he began firing his weapon into the air, yelling Spy's name, just firing and yelling, and it didn't stop until he'd rattled off an entire magazine of ammunition. Nobody had the nerve to go near him. Soldier started to reload, but then suddenly he sat down and held his head in his arms and wouldn't move. For two or three hours he simply sat there.

But that wasn't the bizarre part.

Because later that same night he borrowed a pistol, gripped it by the barrel, and used it like a hammer to break his own nose.

Afterward, he showed Spy what he'd done and asked if everything was fine between them.

Spy nodded and said, Of course, things were fine.

But in the morning Spy couldn't stop snorting. "He's batshit insane," he said. "I stole his precious shovel."