The last type of motivation is for the idealistic folk. The Henry David Thoreau’s of the world. The Jude motive. Soldiers like Jude joined up because they wanted to join in the battle against evil. They envisioned an America that’s always under attack and always being plotted against, and they saw it as their duty to protect it. These guys love America like I wish I could love anything. For them, any country that wasn’t America sure as hell wanted to be, and it was their duty to help those countries along on their democratic path. Heroes of these soldiers include: Babe Ruth, Toby Keith, Ronald Reagan, Jesus Christ, and Superman. These soldiers don’t just believe in things, they believe in America. I envied these men and I tried to be infected by their idealism, but it’s not something that is easily transferable. Maybe more time with Jude would have touched me with his attitude, maybe not.
And as if my mind wasn’t fragile enough following 9/11, it did me no favor to suddenly realize that even these guys—the Teddy Roosevelt’s of the unit—had their doubts. Maybe not in regard to the war, but at least in their responsibility to it. For Jude, it was his wife. It seemed to me to almost be a slip of thought when he first mentioned his marriage. He wore no ring and when I surprisedly mentioned that I didn’t know he was married, he tried to pretend like he hadn’t heard me and then attempted to change the conversation. I didn’t catch on to this in the moment, and so I daftly pressed on about his apparent secret. Jude tried to play it cool, but I had no trouble recognizing that all too familiar “what the fuck did I get myself into?” look that came onto his face. The only thing that he would concede to me is how she fought tooth and nail to keep him from enlisting. And why wouldn’t she? It must be an uncomfortable sensation to have your husband choose his love for country over his love for you. He left behind love and life to go to war, which must be impossible for just about anyone to understand. I thought that she obviously didn’t understand the man that she loved and married—at least not like I did. Of course Jude was going to enlist after 9/11—America was under attack and it needed its Jude’s to protect it. (In Jude’s own words) How could he live with himself if he sat by idly as terrorists attacked freedom, God, and his family’s peace of mind? He said that he thought he was doing it for her but then shook his head absently and just muttered the words “I don’t know” to himself. He must have carried a lot on his shoulders. More than I can imagine. I know that it tore him up to have to leave his wife, but he believed in America—and I’ve already covered what’s at stake when real believing is involved.
So we trained. We kept in shape and honed our skills and when we got the occasional leave from base, we all looked the same. When people thanked me, they should have been thanking the likes of Jude, but I guess that in the eyes of most civilians we were all the same. Just a bunch of buzz cuts. I wanted to tell them that I’m not the kind of soldier that they were thinking of. I wasn’t for king or for country. I wasn’t for God or for family. I was confused and I was recruited for the world’s greatest military power at a fucking job fair held in the gymnasium of my old high school. I’m a soldier, but I don’t got soul. I just needed to visit five different tables to get a pass from my guidance counselor. Five different tables. If I didn’t visit the table of the United States Army I probably would have opted for the information technologies table. Maybe technical school. I got soul, but I’m not a soldier. Except I am a soldier. I’m a soldier and I’m getting deployed and I’m in trouble.
Silvio Submission Two:
WATER CYCLE
I recall the diagrams
shown by the grade-school teacher—
the sun with the sunglasses,
the wide-eyed rain in frozen freefall,
clouds puffed with the exertion of blowing.
The mountains were like toll booths,
the burdened clouds emptying
their pockets of rain to advance
thinly to the empty deserts beyond.
But after all the personification
and the directional arrows cut
from construction paper, I only
wonder now if the light nimbus cloud
overhead could once have been part
of the Jordan River, or if the ocean I
step out of may one day rain upon the
heads of my unborn children.
Expectations, Silence
The only building in the entire town that stood higher than two stories was the county’s lone hospital, which was every bit of three stories. Silvio routinely walked through its parking lot because it lay between his house and a large field next to the town’s largest trailer park, where he had recently adopted an abandoned shed that he used to feed the area’s stray cats. It was common for bedbound patients of the hospital to look idly out their windows and ask nurses about the young man lugging large bags of cat food. Nurses often responded to these patients with the enduring advice that the patient should get more rest. During his mornings at the shed, Silvio spotted what he counted to be a dozen unique cats, though, given his inability to decipher some of them that looked alike, he figured it to be anywhere upwards of seventeen. They went through a sixteen-pound bag of dry food every two days and he had already cleared an area within the decrepit space to place a space heater for the fall and winter chill.
The small buildings downtown were home to small business owners, with the exception of banks and insurance companies, which all carried national brands. At the turn of the century there were a total of four gas stations, but only one of them remained after a national chain moved into town, opened a truck stop, and started selling gas at ninety-nine cents a gallon as a grand opening promotion. The promotion went on for fifty-four days, which is exactly how long its corporate strategists calculated they needed to monopolize gas sales and do irrevocable damage to the outdated and inferior stations. It worked. What was left was a 24/7 monstrosity of a truck stop that churned out fuel, fried food, and sixty-four ounce soft drinks in equal measure. When it rained, all the excess water grabbed the oils on the ground, which sat atop the flowing water like diluted water colors, and washed them away into the truck stop’s large grated gutter that it placed on the property border to its neighboring business—a small diner that looked to blow over at the mere shudder of passing semi-trucks.
The diner’s interior matched its dated exterior. Inside, Silvio ran his hand over the decades old wallpaper appreciatively as he exited the bathroom and headed back to his booth where the old man was waiting for him. In front of Silvio was a full breakfast plate of bacon and eggs and pancakes, and in front of the old man was a cup of coffee. The old man stirred his drink absently while looking at the rain running down the large glass panes while Silvio ate. When he paused from eating long enough to notice the old man’s gaze, he too glanced out at the falling rain.
I applied to have a foreign exchange student live with me for a semester.
You did?