Anything For My Country
Failed dreams
Hey, thanks for stopping to talk. I have been feeling kinda lonely since that horrible day. Everyone seems to be in a hurry to get nowhere and pass me by like I am invisible. Ya know my twin brother and me growed up just across the river in Camden. My dad was a big muscular guy who was so proud of his service in Vietnam and came home in ’73 to marry my mom.
My mom told us the story of how she met Dad in high school at a school dance. He was in his senior year, and she was a sophomore. He wasn’t anything like the other guys in school. He was warm, funny, and not a pushy pig who thought he was wonderful. He dressed kinda cool in his own way, he never cared much how the other guys dressed.
Mom said he treated her with respect from the first minute they met, and she felt safe with a man for the first time since her dad left the family some five years earlier. She showed us pictures from their early years. Mom was always beautiful, dressed like a little princess with smooth, creamy brown skin and an eye-popping jet-black Afro.
They kept up a love affair by mail while he was in ’Nam. At first her mom was against her dating such an old man when he returned, imagine that he was only three years older than Mom when he came back from Nam at the age of twenty. Grandma finally gave in to Mom when she saw how much they loved each other and when Dad got a good job with the sanitation department. She accepted him even though he was not much interested in their church.
Mom was only a little over five feet tall and when she stood next to Dad; even with her Afro that added a few inches to her height, he towered over her like a gentle giant. We always joked about how she had so much hair while Dad was bald. They wanted to start a family as soon as they got married but at first it seemed that it would not happen to them. Mom had three miscarriages in the first ten years of marriage and then in ’83 she got pregnant again and my brother and me got born in ’84.
Grandma told us how unbelievably happy and proud Mom and Dad were when we were born. They told everyone that they had two of the most beautiful boys in the world. Of course, they had to say two since we was identical twins, so if one was beautiful it had be true for the other kid. We grew up in a very happy family.
Mom would go out from time to time to clean houses to put a few dollars in her usually empty pockets. We never had much money, so Mom had two outfits that she called her cleaning uniforms; one was always clean and presentable when she went to work. The rest of her wardrobe was very limited but colorful and always made her look so beautiful. She also had one good church outfit for each season. Mostly Mom stayed home to be with my brother and me and would sometimes take us out to give us a treat with her pocket money. She also made sure that we had nice clothes for school; she did not want no one making fun of us. Our house stood arm’s distance from our neighbors’ houses, each one looking like it might be the first one to fall over.
Our house looked like it had never been painted, and what paint remained was peeling off the dull gray boards, and the windowsill boards were so warped that they looked like waves that hugged the windows that could no longer be opened. Even though our house was old and tiny, Mom made it warm, cozy, and happy inside.
John and me shared a little room that faced the back of the house overlooking the driveway where everyone parked their car. There were a few scrubby trees back there but not a blade of grass unless you call those ugly weeds grass that no one touched since they all died anyway came winter. Our bedroom was so small that we were always bumping into each other, but we played together and laughed all the time. We used to build houses and forts together out of cardboard boxes and fought off all the enemies. We had a big American flag and a big cross on our wall. Other than our beds and a little night table with a lamp we did not have much else in our room. But Mom made us colorful blankets out of old scraps of clothing that we all grew out of, and she painted each wall a different bright color. We loved our private room.
John and me were the most popular guys in high school. The girls said there weren’t nobody better looking than us. We were just a little taller than six foot and had our dad’s slim, strong muscular body. John and me used to talk about the girls in our class and how they were always hanging around us. We decided that they were great to have lunch with and to go to the school dances with, but we did not want to get serious with no one just yet. I know that Barbara was all broken up about that, she was so in love with John, but he stuck to our little agreement.
We was the best athletes in the school and in our local sports division. I played shortstop and John played second base on our school baseball team and no one could hit a ball on the ground past us. We both had batting averages above four hundred. We also played football for our school in the fall/winter season. We caught almost every pass Jack, our quarterback buddy, threw to us. We scored more touchdowns than anyone else in our school’s history. John and me used to talk about getting into the draft right from high school and how rich we was going to be. I think that Mom and Dad shared our dream, but they never dared to mention it. Well, it never happened. No one ever paid our school no attention.
When we was seventeen Dad lost his job because one of his white bosses called him a dumb nigger and he got into a big fight. Of course, his boss said he never called Dad anything bad and no one was going to believe Dad. Dad seemed to be changing these past few years and had begun to drink too much but now it really got bad.
He used to take us to the ball games across the river in Philly when we was growing up. We used to sneak in some food under our bulky jackets and sat in the cheapest seats in the stadium but that did not matter for a second. It was great to watch our heroes play ball and dream that someday soon we too would be out there on the field with the fans screaming at us to catch the ball or to hit it out of the park. I don’t know if Dad did all those things with us cause he wanted to, or if it was cause Mom made him do it to keep us away from the bad kids in our neighborhood. We did not care much for school, except to graduate and for sports, and that was sort of OK with Mom since we could read scriptures and we went to church every week with her. She was hoping that we would get scholarships to play ball at some high-ranking Division I school and get some more appropriate schooling than we got at our local high school. Very few of the students at our school ever graduated, let alone went to college. Well, Dad just got meaner and meaner and started hitting all of us for no reason and then one night he and Mom had one hell of a fight. She threw him out of the house. We never saw him again.
John and me got jobs at Burger King down the road after Dad disappeared. We went to work almost every day after we left the school ball field. It was tough and John and me talked about what to do. We did not make much money but added our money to the money Mom could make cleaning houses in Cherry Hill; we all just scraped by. Mom aged terribly, her hair was full of gray streaks, her face was set in a permanent frown, and she no longer stood straight up like she used to, but she was a proud lady and no way was she going to take charity from the government.
Then 9/11 happened and Bush pretty much said that we needed to get those fuckers before they hurt more of us. So, John and me decided we should join up and protect our momma from those lousy Arabs in Iraq who spit on Christ and were proven to be building nukes to wipe us out. Besides, we knew how to build fortresses to protect ourselves and we was the most powerful peoples on the Earth.
It is sorta funny that we were the same age as Dad was when he went to ’Nam. He never talked much about what he did over there, but he done good and got promoted to sergeant before he came back to marry his girl, like things were supposed to happen. Another important thing was that the army would feed us, so Mom would not have to, and they would pay us to protect America so that we could send Mom money to live and to help her pay the mortgage. She was always behind in paying that damned mortgage and being threatened by the bank that they would take that dingy ole house from her. It weren’t even worth the money she gave the bank every month, but it was her house and she wasn’t ever going to leave it.
Ya know, it wasn’t much longer before John and me were moving into Baghdad with the infantry. We was saving those bastard pagans from Saddam. I have never been in such a hot, miserable place in my life, and we had to move around with backpacks that felt like they were two hundred pounds. Soon after we got there, they had us doing more training maneuvers in the desert, running and crawling through those hot sands.
For a moment the feeling of those sands against our bodies took us back to the good ole days when Mom and Dad would pack us up in our little rusted Chevy wagon and take us for an outing to the Jersey seashore. John and me would run as fast as we could through the hot sands, digging our toes deep into the sand and then kicking it up at each other. When we tired of playing in the sand, we would cool off, jumping over the waves that came rushing to play with us, knocking us down and dragging us up to the shore. I don’t remember ever getting tired of fighting with those noisy waves.
John and me quickly forgot the joy of those summer romps at the shore when the sweat of the maneuvers and the aching muscles told us where we were.
We wasn’t there more than a week before we got into a big fight in some lousy, meaningless courtyard. At first the whole place seemed totally deserted ’cept for the few unbelievably skinny chickens running around. Then, like an unexpected bolt of lightning from nowhere, bullets were coming at us from every corner. We was being backed up by our big guns from behind when John was shot in the back of his head and in his back. He never saw it coming. He dropped dead at my feet with his face blowed off.
I couldn’t think of nothing. I just dropped down to hold him close to me. I don’t know how I got to the hospital, I just know I woke up in that bed like from a horrible dream. Fuck, it weren’t no dream and I lost my John. I wasn’t hurt none on the outside, but I just didn’t want to do nothin’ on the inside. I mean, the Army taught us to shoot and kill the enemy, but they never told us how we would feel watching someone we just shot die, let alone how we would handle someone next to us getting killed, especially when that someone was your brother.
Mom made the Army send me home ’cause I was her only son left and she was sick and needed me home. I wasn’t going to do any more fighting in Iraq anyway, no matter what my commander would have told me. When I got home, she showed me the wonderful letter Secretary Rumsfeld sent her about how valiantly John protected America and how sorry they was that he paid the ultimate price. The letter wasn’t even really signed by the Secretary and John was shot from behind by our own men and no one said anything about that. Then Mom showed me the letter from our pastor praising John and saying that he died for a good cause and that now he was at peace with God.
What a crock of shit. The only person I really loved was killed by American troops in a war that turns out was never really necessary to start. Saddam was never really a threat to us, and I will bet it was all about fucken oil. And God, who was supposed to watch over us, never did. I could not tell Mom anything about the truth; it would have killed her. Every day when she would start in again about how great John did and how everyone called him a hero, I moved further and further away from Mom.
I knew I had to leave and come out here to live by myself. The only thing I wear from the Army is my boots. They are strong, well worn, and keep my feet so warm. No way in hell would I wear any of the other shit they gave us to wear. I don’t want anyone near me when John visits me and we make our plans for our future. We talk for a long, long time and I don’t need nobody to interrupt us.
I know my not talking to Mom hurts her, but I just could not live in her lie. Maybe someday I will go back and spend some time with Mom, I really miss her. I know that Mom had to go live with her sister ’cause our checks never got to her in time to pay the mortgage on the house. It wasn’t long after I left that the sheriff threw her out of our house on the anniversary of John’s death. I know I have told you this story a hundred times before, but I ain’t got much else to do while I sit here. I must say that I am so tired, I can’t keep my eyes open. It is colder than I can ever remember…
Officer, officer, please come quickly. I was just about to pass this guy on the grate over there. When I first saw him from a block away, he was waving his arms like he was talking to someone. It is so cold I cannot believe he was sitting out here, but as I was about to pass him, he keeled over and doesn’t seem to be alive.
