He was the youngest of two, his brother serving in the army as a paratroop sergeant. Jesse was older, and in Clay’s mind, tougher. When Clay announced to his brother that he had joined the Marines, Jesse seemed to understand even then that the younger brother had something to prove, to make up for all the fistfights, all the youthful bullying that Jesse had been called upon to prevent. In the mining town of Silver City, New Mexico, a man was defined by his toughness, and Clay had not been the biggest or the strongest, not in school, and not in his own home. Their father was a vicious brute of a man, who hated life and struck back at his own misery by striking first at his sons. When Clay enlisted and announced to his parents that he wanted to go to war, his father’s response had been an uncaring shrug, no ceremony, no pride. Neither Clay nor his brother had been surprised. Far more difficult for both boys had been the tearful wrath of a terrified mother, the woman who had stood as much ground as her frail spirit would allow, absorbing the endless abuse from the man she had married. Clay had never shaken that from his mind: one awful night after dinner, his proud announcement that he had enlisted to be a Marine, and his mother’s response, a shocking surprise, this quiet-suffering, soulful woman exploding with angry tears. Clay still didn’t understand that, the furious attack aimed at her youngest son. To the eighteen-year-old, it had seemed grotesquely unfair that his mother would expect her precious boys to stay close at hand, and that just by leaving, he was abandoning her to a life she could not escape alone. Jesse had been as supportive of Clay as any older brother could be, had stood between Clay and his mother with calm assurances that everything would be fine, that the Marines would do Clay some good, teach him to be a man, teach him to be a better man than her own husband. And so Clay had had no second thoughts, had made his escape, had taken the train westward to San Diego. He could not know that within months, Jesse would fight that same battle again, this time for himself. Clay had wondered if it had been worse for his older brother, if Jesse had been infected even more strongly by the guilt of abandoning the family. It was a horrifying dream to realize that his mother expected either of her boys to stay in that horrific place, to be her family, sacrificing any boyhood dreams only to work in the copper mine, destined to mimic the suffering and the decay of their father.
But his mother had finally softened, and within weeks of his enlistment, her letters began to reach him. The first piece of news was that Jesse would go to Europe, would jump out of airplanes, and later, Clay learned only that his older brother had quickly risen to sergeant in the new Eighty-second Airborne Division. Clay had been amazed by that, but then, he knew his brother would have something to prove as well, would have to accomplish anything that would prevent him from sinking back into their father’s life in the copper mines. Clay had wanted to hear all about that, the whole idea of jumping out of airplanes not only wondrous but utterly insane. But there could be no letters directly between them from a world apart, just the tidbits of news his mother would pass along. It came mostly in a trickle of sadness, but Jesse was at least alive, had fought through the campaigns in Sicily and then Normandy. As Clay labored in the clean white offices of San Diego, there had been a glint of sunlight in one of her letters, a cheerful announcement that Jesse was coming home, the paratrooper’s war over. But Clay did not want to write to his brother, not yet, not while he endured the embarrassment of sleeping on white sheets in soft beds. Once free of the hospital, the office work had drained him of his dignity. The daily routine had seemed to be designed to inflict a more agonizing death on an eager Marine than any enemy weapon could. Clay could never admit to his brother what his duty had become, and so he lied about it by not writing at all. He had the