Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [17]
I am losing America, I thought as I lay in bed that night. I got caught out on the other side, stayed out there too long, and now I can’t get home.
I would put on a dress and sit in a restaurant that shone and clinked, but I was sure that everybody could see the filth in my face, and hear it in my voice. I was just a web of skin and underneath were dirty hospitals, naked rocks, cold wind, the bullets and shit and desperation.
Everybody wants to hear war stories. They expect the stories to be funny and brave.
It must have been incredible, people said.
Weren’t you scared?
What did your poor mother say?
You are so lucky, they said.
I am lucky, I would repeat, yes I am so lucky. Yes Afghanistan. The people were friendly with us. Really. Even the food was good. Yes, really. There’s something in the light there, a magical quality. An amazing country. Really. No, I haven’t read that, but I should. I know. I don’t know. I am just really lucky.
I was a puppet jabbering in my own hand, filling dead space with words.
I went to see my grandfather in Virginia. He had sounded old on the phone. “A new world order.” He kept saying that. He took me out for dinner and as we sat there drinking whiskey, he started to talk about World War II. He’d joked about it before, about athlete’s foot and drunkenly throwing a Russian soldier down the stairs of an officers’ club. But now he was describing his march across Germany.
The bombs left so few houses intact, he said. When we got tired, we just walked into any standing house we could find and evicted its inhabitants. We sprayed bug killer on the beds, unrolled our sleeping bags, and slept.
I tried to imagine my grandfather, this old man in a tailored suit, peeled of half a century and trudging across Europe, young and uncomfortable. Tried to imagine a war like that, and all the people who had come home to have families and jobs and forget.
“How did the families react to you? Were they scared?”
My grandfather gave me a pointed look. “We had just conquered their country.”
But what was their attitude as they left?
“Sullen.”
Later that night, we sat in the thick quiet of his condominium. The lights of the city quivered in the Potomac far below, marble monuments scattered across its banks like dropped toys. My grandfather scratched at the Washington Post crossword, murmuring to himself. I stared at him, wondering how long years of war had faded inside of him. He was bringing up these stories, I thought, to signal to me that I would survive, that we would all survive unless we didn’t, that war was a condition and part of the continuum. It was something I had touched, and something the country would pass through, and other things would come later. What was the secret to putting war aside, I wanted to ask him. Was it three Scotch whiskeys, taken religiously with dinner? Was it church every Sunday? Was it years? I was too embarrassed to ask, and so I asked him about bigger things.
“How many Americans died in World War II?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine a lot.”
“More or less.”
“Four hundred, five hundred thousand,” he suggested.
“So the World Trade Center was minor, then, after all.”
“Well, yes,” he said. “Except.”
His reading glasses came off.
“America hasn’t known war since Sherman marched through Georgia and left devastation in his wake. That was a war,” he said. “Those of us who went to Europe, we knew, because we saw it. You know now, too. We have that in common.
“But America didn’t know. So that was the worst thing to happen to America in 150 years. And in that context, it is important.”
His enormous grandfather clock clicked and ticked, an hour turned over. He turned his