Love And War

Love and War by Anne Marcotty page 

Love and War Courtney is a beguiling young woman, a petite twenty year old with honey-colored hair, flawless skin, and fabulous green eyes. She is quick and bright, sassy and willful, funny and sweet. To her family’s surprise and dismay—and her mother’s utter horror—Courtney is going to war. A little more than a year ago, Courtney’s mother, Erin, wrote to me with the news that Courtney had enlisted in the army for five years’ active duty. She said that besides the fact that her baby was leaving home, (“which sucks mightily”), she had very mixed feelings about her daughter’s decision to enlist. “She doesn’t support the war, or Bush,” Erin wrote, “but sees the Army as a way to avoid college, which she’s not really ‘feeling’ right now, and avoid having the years slip away as a customer service rep at her current job at a car dealership (no blame for that one). She wants a plan, all laid out, a career, challenges, free room and board, decent pay, free college, a sign on bonus of $4k, and travel. She’s foregoing any ethical, moral, or philosophical considerations about being part of the war machine in favor of the above.” What’s a mother to do? Erin and her mother—Courtney’s grandmother, Joan— hatched a plot to kidnap Courtney and not let her go. It was preposterous, of course, though it seemed reasonable at the time. Far more reasonable, in fact, than enlisting in the military at a time of war. Instead of a kidnapping, they arranged private military interventions, like drug interventions, with trusted friends and family taking Courtney out, pulling her aside, sitting her down, having a heart-to-heart, trying to talk some sense into her. All to no avail. Courtney would do what Courtney would do. In the end, Erin had to concede that, “...the truth is, I raised a pretty well adjusted, independent thinking young woman and this seems like a good idea to her. I figure my job as her parent is now to support her and accept the whole thing. Fuuuuuck.” On the day that Courtney was to go off to basic training, Erin woke her with a resolute “happy going into the army day.” Erin shed a few tears on the way to the recruiting office, but she allowed herself to be cheered up by Courtney’s palpable excitement. The young guys at the recruiting office were funny and nice and made Erin feel that somehow it wouldn’t be so horrible after all. She kissed Courtney goodbye, got back in her car and drove home, with her goodbye smile frozen on her face like a mask. She put away the breakfast things, let the dogs in, checked her e-mail, smoked a cigarette, and then went into Courtney’s room and lost it. Totally. She sat on the bed and howled into her daughter’s velveteen rabbit. Three months later, Courtney came home on leave. Erin described her as her old bouncy self, but with a new-found self assurance. “Plus,” she added, “she now calls all women ‘Ma’am.’” They were going to try and get through the next stage by being in

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the moment and not saying the word Iraq, but it hovered in the air between them like a blimp, and the more Erin tried not to think of Iraq, the more she thought of Iraq and how her baby, her first-born, her beautiful child did not belong there, under any circumstances. Joan counseled Erin to, “take it as it comes... let’s wait and see... we don’t know for sure yet what’ll happen.” Which only made Erin more miserable. She didn’t want to have to be so reasonable and supportive; she wanted to wail and carry on and give in to good old fashioned, self-indulgent hysteria. But she didn’t. She soldiered on, making good use of the thousands of dollars she had spent on therapy over the years, using her coping strategies and being self-actualized. And while Erin soldiered on at home, Courtney the soldier went off to learn how to be a military interrogator. According to GlobalSecurity.org, an interrogator’s job is “... to obtain usable and reliable information, in a lawful manner and in the least amount of time, which meets intelligence requirements of any echelon of command.” To that end, Courtney, and her fellow trainees had to learn about the culture, the language, the customs, the history, and the expectations of their target country, namely, Iraq. They also learned how to handle themselves with the same degree of focus and objectivity no matter whether the source be neutral and nonpartisan or hostile and antagonistic. They learned to handle classified information, and how to respond to nonverbal cues, and they received special training on Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the Enemy (SEDAE). By the time she finished her training, Courtney not only knew how to identify, mark, handle, and control sensitive material, but she had become familiar with the capabilities, limitations, and employment of standard weapons and equipment including small arms, infantry support weapons, artillery, aircraft, vehicles, communications equipment, and NBC defense. All this, for a girl who hadn’t been “feeling college.” Despite the nature of the education her child was receiving—not to mention the impending deployment to the Middle East—Erin felt a measure of pride for Courtney’s achievements. The military is nothing if not up front about its codes of behavior and standards of performance. Everyone knows, somehow, that you can’t get through that kind of training by being a ditz. “She can be such a spaceshot, though; I’m so afraid she’ll leave her grenade, or whatever, in the barracks,” Erin told me, laughingly (somewhat hysterically, I thought at the time). “She’ll remember her lip gloss, though.” “That will have to be her commanding officer’s problem,” I said. “You need to let go. Put her in the light, and keep her there.” “And where would that light be emanating from? Just to clarify,” she asked. “The light of the Universe; the light of positive energy, of good karma... you know.”

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“Right. I knew that,” she said, not at all convinced. Easy for me to say. My firstborn—and only—daughter is just going into high school this year. I have my private worries about this, but they can’t begin to compare. How does one be a friend with such unequal experiences? Erin is my oldest friend. In the mid ’60s, when we were six, or so, our parents had gone to the Unitarian church in search of other like-minded, arty liberals like themselves, who were few and far between where we lived in suburban Detroit at that time. They became friends and she and I became friends. Erin’s parents, Bob and Joan, had three boys and a girl; my parents, Michael and Tania, had three girls and a boy. When we got together, our parents would have wine and cheese and conversation in our respective book-lined living rooms while we kids made up stories and games and played school. My sister, Fiona, was always the teacher. Over the years, Erin’s family has been dealt more than their fair share of difficulties. During one such time, Erin came to stay at our house, going to my school during the week, and returning home on weekends. We became as close as sisters. We had a secret language; we dressed up and acted out silly plays, and danced to Beatles records. We fought, argued, and made up constantly. Erin and her family moved to Colorado in 1972. She and I wrote letters and called each other, and shared our teenage secrets. Then they moved to Tucson; Erin and I got through high school, (not without a few scars to show for it), and we kept in touch. When Erin married Bo in 1982, I flew to Tucson to help with her wedding. When I married Joe in 1990, Erin flew to Boston to help with my wedding. She had a daughter and a son, and then I had a daughter and a son. While we haven’t always been there for each other’s milestones, (we have sometimes gone several years without a word) when we do reconnect, it’s like riding a bicycle. We remember instantly how to be friends. I remember the night in January 1986, when Erin called to tell me about Courtney’s birth. She said, “Okay, I have three words: Take the drugs. I don’t care what they say about natural childbirth and how it’s a beautiful thing to be in touch with yourself and your baby and the process and the blah, blah, blah. It hurts like hell.” She laughed. “But on the brighter side,” she continued, “I have a beautiful little daughter. She’s perfect. She’s my heart.” And now her heart is being deployed to Iraq. I e-mailed Erin last week to let her know I was thinking of her with all my might as she counted down to Courtney’s departure. She wrote back that Courtney had just dropped a bomb: instead of coming home on leave, as expected, she was going to Massachusetts to marry Mike, a guy she’d been with for just five months, and whom Erin had never met. Mike is another trained interrogator, scheduled to be sent

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to Afghanistan just before Courtney goes to Iraq. Erin told me she wouldn’t be able to go to the wedding on account of travel-related panic. “It’s too soon,” she said. “I need at least three weeks to work through the usual cycle of panic and remorse. I mean, obsession’s a complex thing...” I knew what she was talking about, having had bank-related panic, which for years had prevented me from the utterly normal act of going into a bank and conducting business. I thought about my bank panic and how debilitating it had been, and I remembered my friend Cynthia’s joke, when she described the kind of person who always has to have it worse than everyone else: “Multiply that by a hundred, add projectile vomiting, and you’ll know one tenth of what I’ve been going through.” Which is what Erin’s travel panic—compounded by the prospect of missing her daughter’s wedding before she goes off to war—must have felt like to her. I live in Connecticut, not far from most places in Massachusetts, and even though I didn’t know exactly where and when the wedding was going to be, it was suddenly obvious to me what I wanted to do. I was only ashamed that it had taken me two days to figure it our. I was just about to e-mail Erin to tell her that I would like to go to Courtney’s wedding, when she called me to ask me if I would like to go to Courtney’s wedding. Please. That was on Friday. Today is Monday, wedding day, and I left work early to make the two-and-a-half hour trip to Fairhaven in time for the 6:30 wedding. When Erin found out that it would take that long, she said, “I so owe you. If one of your kids ever gets married at the drop of a hat in Tucson, I’m your man.” Erin doesn’t owe me; I’m lucky to have the kind of life that allows me to do this. Fairhaven is a suburb of New Bedford, on the raggedy shoreline of Buzzard’s Bay. Mike’s family’s neighborhood is actually in Buzzard’s Bay, on a little spit of land that juts out at an angle. In the long yellow rays of late afternoon sunshine, the water sparkled brilliantly and the sea grass was an incandescent green as I crossed the causeway. I wondered whether Courtney was struck, as I was, by how different it all looked from her home in the desert. I tried to memorize everything I was seeing so I could recount it all in faithful detail. Erin had charged me with the mission of learning what I could about the kind of family that Courtney was marrying into, and along with my digital camera, I had brought with me (or so I thought) an open-minded curiosity. I found myself in a little neighborhood of modest bungalows, with neat, pocketsized front lawns and carefully tended flower beds. I thought, “Oh how pretty! I wish Erin and Joan could see this.” Then I saw the abundant American flags and the muscle cars—Mustangs and GTOs—being worked on in many of the driveways. I saw camouflage patterned tarps and bumper stickers with the Marine’s slogan, Semper Fi.

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When I saw the Blessed Virgin Mary in the buried bathtub half shell, surrounded by little flags and red, white, and blue petunias, all my years of carefully cultivated political correctness disappeared. I thought, “Hmm... these are not Our Kind of People.” I would soon come to regret my elitist preconceptions. I went first to Mike’s mother’s house and rang the doorbell. I heard laughter and the kind of peculiar, wordless exclamations of excited young men. The guy who opened the door was of medium height, with a slim build and a chiseled face. He wore a blue shirt with a tie and black pants. His hair was very short. I told him that I was Courtney’s mother’s friend and that I had come for the wedding. “Oh, hi, I’m Mike,” he said, smiling for the first time and extending his hand. “The wedding’s going to be at my grandparents’ house, down the street. Courtney’s there now, getting ready.” I thanked him, congratulated him, and then turned to go. Then I turned back. “May I take your picture, please? Like, a “before” shot?” Mike agreed, still smiling. But when I turned the camera on and aimed, he stopped smiling and became serious. The bridegroom turned soldier. Ten minutes later, I was at Mike’s grandmother’s house. It appeared that I was the first guest to arrive, and I followed the signs—flowers tied with ribbons—around to the back yard, where I introduced myself to a small group of people standing on the patio. They were Mike’s mother and stepfather, grandmother and grandfather, and they received me warmly and with apparent pleasure at my arrival. Grandmother, a stout, cheerful woman in pink summer casuals, asked if I would like to see Courtney, who was getting ready in the guest bedroom. I hadn’t seen Courtney since she was two. I didn’t really know her, but, being her mother’s friend, I had wondered about her and tried to imagine what she was like. Certainly, she didn’t know me, nor had she wondered about me to the same degree. Yet none of that seemed to matter as we came face to face. She was a bride getting ready for her wedding, probably with all the nervous excitement of any other bride; she was away from home with no other family or friends except for Mike. And I carried with me a full awareness of the significance—the weight—of the moment. We hugged and kissed as though we were old friends and I started crying immediately. She flicked her hand in an oh-pshaw kind of way. “Everyone better not start crying on me,” she said good-naturedly. She is a pretty young woman in love. She doesn’t know yet that life is not a series of events, strung together like pearls in a necklace, but the sum total of everything that’s gone before. I wasn’t crying because she, Courtney, was getting married. I cried because I felt the extraordinary force of a fortyyear friendship that had led me to this speck of land in Buzzard’s Bay, into the midst of strangers who were preparing to receive a daughter-in-law... and then send their son off to war.

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It’s an old story, something that people have been doing since the beginning, getting married and then going to war. Mike and Courtney will join together until death parts them, and then they will be apart for the first year of their togetherness. The urge to merge, an old sociology professor of mine called it. Erin understands it as a need to have someone that belongs only to them, for real; a commitment deeper than a promise that will comfort them, be their touchstone, in a hostile land. I took a few pictures, admired her dress, and then left Courtney to finish her preparations, and went back outside to wait with the others, who had begun to arrive. An odd assortment of chairs had been arranged into two rows, which faced the patio. There was a white tent set up over several little tables and chairs, with champagne glasses at the ready. Flowers, both in flower beds and vases, surrounded the patio, and a single-tiered cake decorated with a blue hydrangea blossom was displayed on a tiny table in the corner. Everything was neat, carefully maintained, and unpretentious. I sat down on one of the chairs in the back row and waited. Mike arrived, along with his brother Ryan, the best man, and about fifteen other young men, all looking remarkably similar, with very short hair, goatees, and tattooed forearms. Mike’s mother, Kelli, a good-looking woman with an open expression and a quick smile, perched briefly on the chair next to me. She seemed nervous, but wanting to extend the hospitality that she knew she ought to—and given a less stressful time—would have done more fully. I liked her. I wanted to ask her how she felt, really. It occurred to me that she might be taking the fact of her firstborn’s going off to Afghanistan in stride. It’s what soldiers do, she might be feeling: they go off to defend our freedom and the American way of life. But of course, I couldn’t ask her. We chatted instead about where I was from, how far I’d come, and wasn’t it nice that I could be here. Then she darted away to fuss with another detail. Other guests arrived, people who looked like extended family, aunts and uncles and cousins, and a few more of Mike’s friends. Eventually, it was made known that the minister hadn’t shown up yet. He was on his way, should have been there by now, maybe only fifteen minutes more. It took nearly an hour for him to arrive. I didn’t mind the wait. It was a perfect summer evening and the waiting offered me an opportunity to be still and think my own thoughts. I thought about Erin’s wedding almost 25 years earlier. It had been at the Temple of Art and Music in Tucson. I had made Erin’s wedding dress and the whole affair was beautiful in a natural way, artful and poetic. The marriage didn’t last, but I thought about Bo, Courtney’s father. I could see so much of him in Courtney—she had been blessed with the best of both her parents—and I wondered what he was thinking right then. Was he watching the clock, wherever he was in Tucson, trying to feel the moment when his daughter said “I do”?

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I thought of some of the other people who couldn’t be there, for one reason or another. Erin’s stepfather, Bob, had been a vivid, articulate man with a crackling intelligence. After many stops and starts and second-guessings, Bob had been able to make a good life for Joan and himself, filled with interesting work, good friends, and a measure of security. He died of lung cancer at the age of 57. Erin’s brother, Brian, had had his troubled life cut short in a street fight in 1983. I have a picture of Brian and me, taken at Erin’s wedding, which was the last time I saw him. In the photograph, we’re standing in the brilliant desert sunshine, our arms around each other like brother and sister. When I look at that picture now, I imagine that I can see in the photo the shadows of Brian’s future, as though we had somehow known that he would not win the war that was his life. I’m not seeing prescience, of course; just trying to make sense of the loss. I can’t imagine how Joan gets through her days without him. I think, too, of my parents, and how they would be here if things had turned out differently. There had been a falling out some time in the past twenty years. There were no angry confrontations between our parents, no bitter recriminations, just a cooling, and then silence. My mother has asked longingly of Joan every time I’ve told her of my conversations with Erin. I had asked Erin long ago what she thought the reason was, but we were too young then and didn’t have the words to talk about it. Perhaps the disparity between their experiences and the fact that Bob and Joan had had to struggle harder for longer, had made it difficult for them to continue to find common ground. Right then, in a back yard in Buzzard’s Bay, I composed a letter to Joan in my mind. I wanted to offer a helping hand across the chasm, to tell her that the connection would still be there, as ever, if she were to reach out. To tell her that she is still loved. I shook my head, trying to shake off the melancholia I had drawn about me like a shawl, and I decided that pulling up the past was a natural thing to do at a wedding, and that the fact that I had thought so hard about Erin and Joan, Bob and Brian, Bo and my parents, and everyone else, had made it possible for them to be there, in a way. The minister arrived and the ceremony began. Grandmother, who was sitting in front of me, whispered, “I wish we had music. Music woulda been good.” Courtney was escorted out to edge of the patio by Mike’s father. She wore a trim white strapless gown that laced up the back, and a dazzling smile. Mike took her hands and they stood, gazing into each other’s eyes, while the minister talked of God and marriage, honor and obedience, love and responsibility. They had written their own vows; Mike went first. He pulled out a sheaf of paper, shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, and began. Then he delivered, flawlessly, a poetic and passionate tribute to his bride. He told about the first time he had seen her, about how she had taught him about letting go of pain and anger, and how to

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feel like a worthy person. He said things I wish I had thought to say myself. By the eighth page, Mike was having a little difficulty getting through, he was so choked with emotion. Kelli and I looked at each other—we were sobbing. Grandmother had tears streaming down her face. A woman next to me said, “I’m glad I didn’t wear mascara.” I nodded, my throat tight and full. Then it was Courtney’s turn. Her speech was shorter, but no less articulate. In the end, she thanked God for having brought Mike into her life. Then she flung down her speech, and with a cute little shrug, she threw her arms around Mike and kissed him, before the minister had said anything about a kiss. It was Courtney, having things her way. In the receiving line, I stood next to the woman who had been glad about not wearing mascara. She introduced herself as Bridget, Kelli’s best friend. We stood there, the friend of the mother of the bride and the friend of the mother of the groom, and marveled together about how beautiful, how moving and inspiring the ceremony had been. She said, “Mike’s a nice guy. And this is a good family that she’s marrying into, with good people. They’ll love her to pieces.” When everyone had made it through the line and had their champagne glasses in hand, Ryan, the best man, delivered a brief and funny toast, as though he had done it all his life. After I had helped myself to caviar and canapés, I sat down near the mosquito fogger, and was soon joined by Grandmother. I thanked her again for her hospitality, and congratulated her on a beautiful wedding. She told me that they had had just a few days to pull it together. Mike and Courtney had been ready to elope, she said. They were going to get married in Texas in a civil ceremony. “First, Kelli asked him to wait. I wanted him to wait. But then, we thought, what if—God forbid—something happens, and one of them doesn’t come back. We’d never be able to live with ourselves if we’d talked them out of it. We begged him to please either come home or go to Arizona, just so they could have their wedding with their family present. When they decided to come here, we had just a coupla days to, you know, make it happen. But I think it came together nice, don’t you?” I agreed, then got up my nerve to ask about the other big thing. “So... Mike’s going to Afghanistan?” She nodded and cast her eyes down. “It took Mike a long time to finish high school. Not because he’s not smart”—she added quickly—“he’s very smart. He just... was interested in other things. When he joined the military, we could see how he wanted to get his life together. We thought it would be a good idea. Even if we hadn’t, though, he still would have joined.” She shrugged. “What can you do? But Afghanistan...” She trailed off, letting the name hang there, saying it all. I couldn’t think of a response beyond a sympathetic pout. I said again that it had been a lovely wedding. Then the mosquitoes won the war they had been waging all

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evening, and I moved to take my leave. I made the rounds and thanked everyone again, gave Courtney and Mike another hug, and then started for home. As I drove, I relived the day. I remembered my initial judgment, and squirmed with embarrassment. This family, the people I had been prepared to think were “not our kind,” had come together to give their son and his bride—whom they’d never met—a beautiful little wedding, knowing even as they did that the marriage would start with the newlyweds being sent off to war in different countries. There were no drunken scenes, no cold shoulders, hurt feelings, jealous rages, or any of the other family nasties that can come out at a wedding. They rose to the occasion, with grace and class. Could I have done the same? I’d like to think so but I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the spectre of war can be, ironically, a force of good. War is one of the worst things that humans can do, yet it can also bring out the best in us, and make us remember whom we love, and why.

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