By the time April rolled around, Norm had more or less resigned himself to having a son in the war. He had even begun to feel some pride in Alex’s determination to serve his country. It was a tough, thankless choice, but it was Alex’s to make. When Alex signed the 11X/Airborne Ranger contract the day after his eighteenth birthday, it didn’t come as a surprise.
The other big development that April did: Alex fell in love.
When I first left a voicemail for Anna Dudow, now a nurse at Children’s Hospital Colorado, she texted back a week and a half later to apologize for the delay, explaining that it had taken her some time to get her feelings under control.
She didn’t strike me as someone who often struggled with her feelings when we met at a coffee shop a few days later. Brisk, blond, and very small in stature, Anna struck me instead as a woman who had become wearily expert in convincing professors, coaches, salesmen, doctors, clients, patients, and students not to dismiss her as “cute.” At Littleton High School she had been just as much a jock as Alex, an accomplished gymnast with perfect side and straddle splits who could pull a layout backflip when they tossed her in the air on the varsity cheer squad.
Alex used to love telling the tale of their meeting. One dreary morning in April, he crawled beneath a table in the school library to catch up on all the sleep he had been missing between hockey practices every night and road marches every morning, then woke up to a sandaled foot six inches from his nose. It had been simple interest, a motion requiring no decision at all, to reach out and circle the ankle with his fingers. The foot jerked in his hand. Whoa: it was alive! He bent up each painted toe in sequence. After a few seconds a head peeked down—blond, pretty, shy, quizzical. A flash of a smile and then the head went back up, embarrassed. He began playing with the knob above the heel.
When I asked her about it, Anna remembered it well. “First of all,” she said, laughing, “to catch Alex in the library was, I feel, something very rare. And of course he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing in a library setting. He was sitting underneath my table being just a total … being Alex. I don’t know why I even bothered to acknowledge him. I mean, who sits underneath the table at the library? He was just a total … he was funny.”
At the time, Alex had already asked someone to the prom, just as friends: a deaf classmate named Kathleen who had been assigned as his volleyball and badminton partner in gym class. This was the latest in a series of efforts at teenage good citizenship. The previous summer he had knocked on the front door of a younger kid whom a large group had bullied at a party to apologize to him and his startled parents. In the fall, after discovering an old friend passed out on a toxic blend of alcohol and antianxiety medication in a back bedroom at a hot tub party, he had sucked the vomit from the friend’s throat and saved his life, and he continued to pay him visits and check up on him long after other friends fell away. He considered this the gentlemanly conduct demanded of a soon-to-be Army Ranger—“Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained soldier,” reads the Ranger Creed. When Kathleen told him that he should just take his new girlfriend, he wouldn’t hear of it. One of his buddies would take Anna. They would all go together. It would be fun.
“I was like, look, we were just going as friends, I honestly don’t mind if you take Anna instead. I can save my dress for my junior prom,” Kathleen wrote to me a few weeks later over Gmail chat from Dayton, Ohio, where she recently married and works in accounting. “But he insisted. Wanted to show me a good time.”
“Was the night fun at all or just hopelessly awkward?”
“Haha oh gosh. Very awkward. Especially in the limo. I sat next to Alex, and he’s chatting away, casually puts his arm around me, and Anna (of course, in the same prom group!) is just shooting death stares at me. They were this popular senior group of kids that I just saw from afar. They were definitely the cool kids that had a good time and here I was just a goody two-shoes tagging along awkwardly. I thought the dancing might be awkward, but Alex spent a lot of time in the bathroom, so I just danced alone.”
Anna too looks back on that night with humor, but in the moment her feelings were desperate. She and Alex had so little time.
“Our relationship went from zero to a thousand miles an hour in point two seconds,” she told me. “We were psycho for each other. We spent every minute we could together. I don’t think it was him going into the army. I think it would still have gone that fast even if he’d been going away to college at CU.”
Alex’s enlistment was already a fait accompli when they met. After graduation in June, they had only a month until he had to report to basic training. They went for a lot of long drives together in Norm’s black Jeep Cherokee, watched a few movies, but mostly they hung out with Andrew and Jenny and Alex’s guy friends around fire pits in one or another of their backyards. The group had known each other for years and fed perfectly off each other’s energy. Alex was both the most fun and the most responsible, staying sober—he was on a strict no-alcohol, no-sugar diet for basic—and driving everyone home safely from parties. His loyalty to his friends was incredible. Everyone relied on Alex. Anna had dated guys before, but Alex made it obvious she had only ever been playing around. He made her laugh harder than any guy ever had, but he also treated her with more respect than any guy ever had. He was handsome and popular. Up to thirty people from school attended his hockey games; his team was neck-and-neck for top ranking in the state. He had a touchingly close relationship with his family too, especially his father and his little brother and sister.
“It was strange how much my parents trusted him,” Anna said. “I’m still not allowed to have boys sleep over when I’m at my parents’ house, but for some reason he was allowed to stay, and I was allowed to go over there. I think they fell in love with him as fast as I did. They were totally okay with us not being seen for days, because they knew I was in good hands. It was really nice how well he meshed into my life and my family and how well I meshed into his.”
The only hitch was the army. No one in Anna’s world knew anything about it. Alex tried to prepare her for what life would be like once he left: weeks at a time without phone calls, months without visits. To show her the kind of work he would be doing, he screened his favorite movie for her, Black Hawk Down, about a 1993 operation conducted in Mogadishu by Rangers and Delta Force operators. It was obvious how inspired he was by this display of military expertise, the fast-roping and room clearing and hand signals and jargon, all of which he eagerly explained to her as it arose, but when the bodies started to mount, Anna couldn’t help expressing some misgivings. Alex hugged her to him on the couch and told her not to worry. He loved her; he would always come back to her. Though he tried to play it casually, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, it was the first time either of them had said it. Thrilled, Anna told him she loved him too.
“Everything was so fast and so perfect between us that I just completely ignored everything bad,” she said. “I literally ignored it right up until the moment when they came and picked him up.”
Years passed. Anna graduated from LHS, made the cheer squad at the University of Colorado, pledged at a sorority, and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She coached cheer at a Denver gym for a while, then went to nursing school and landed the job at Children’s. Through it all, she continued to think about Alex. Her parents did not want her talking to me. She wasn’t so sure it was a good idea either.
“It’s hard not wanting to go back to him,” she explained. “All of my relationships now, I’m always comparing everybody to him. He was amazing. He made me feel … he made me feel. If he’d stayed in the army, I don’t know if we would have made it, because