February 2007, Syracuse, New York

As told to Benjamin T. Altman

It’s early in the morning. The sun’s up, just barely, flooding in over my shoulder and into his eyes. Coffee arrives not moments after we sit; it’s that kind of place, and he’s that kind of regular.

I give up on my menu, since he hasn’t even glanced at his; I’ll take whatever the house recommends. The waitress comes and goes, we both address our mugs, and he begins.

We never really talked about it, I guess. It didn’t seem quite right to really ask “why,” even though it crossed my mind often enough. But when, really, does a father ever know for sure why their kid does anything?

So he joined the Army. There were certainly worse choices a boy could make, so I was fine with it. At first, anyway.

September 11 sure changes a father’s opinion - a parent’s, really: No amount of patriotic pride’ll make you glad your son’s joining what’s surely about to be a hot war. But he’d decided to join back before everything’d changed, and you don’t go back on that kind of thing. Or at least you shouldn’t.

So yeah, I was proud. Proud in the first place, then proud that he’d be doing his part, and proud that he hadn’t turned tail when the probable future of “the Army” suddenly changed from the Boy Scouts-like commercials to an impending war. Scared, but proud.

I don’t know how real it was to me, even then. Intellectually, you had to know where it was heading, but when he left for basic training, there was still this sense that afterward, he’d just be off to a stateside base like everyone else for the last 20 years. Assumptions, right?

Anyway, it wasn’t till after all the stories from basic, the occasional letters and phone calls, the excitement and the struggles, that we got the news. Afghanistan, you know?

I can still remember the tales out of that place from decades ago, when we were fighting the other side of things. It was bad enough back then, before the world’d gone completely crazy. Before my son was involved. Hell of a thing, that is.

We didn’t really talk all that much, in a lot of ways. Mostly ’cause, of course, contact was necessarily limited. One phone call a week, since everybody on the base had to share satellite access.

One week, his mother’d get a call, then his brother, then me, then his girlfriend. Hearing from your son once a month is bad enough for a father, let alone when your son’s off in some war zone hellhole.

The only break in that was the decency of the communications staff: technically, the boys were allotted 15 minutes, but if the next scheduled person hadn’t shown up, they would let you keep talking. Twenty or 30 minutes still wasn’t much, but at least it was something.

Talking until it was time for the next family to hear from their son made the whole thing more tolerable, softened the blow of regulations and distance.

But even when we were on the phone, we didn’t really talk, as it were. Not about serious stuff, most of the time, and then occasionally, about nothing except the serious stuff.

I’d tell him if one of his cousins was sick. He’d tell me if one of his squadmates had died. No matter who’d been talking, it was always the same. The other would pause, “Jesus. Look, give everybody my best. I’m sorry.” What else is there to say at that distance, in that situation? Life’s still just life, even when it’s life and death.

The worst call, hands down, was the time he hung up. We’re in the midst of talking about his eldest cousin and the fact that I cannot bear the boy she’s been bringing around - just the minutiae of the people he’s missing - when he cuts me off. “Shit. SHIT! I love you, Dad. Bye!” And then the line’s dead.

It took a week, of course, till I found out if my son was still alive. Till he had another turn at the phone to call back home. Turns out that while we’re sitting there chatting, both of us with feet up on desks, both looking out a window and watching the world go by, he’s staring off into the mountains around his base, watching the trees. He sees a puff of smoke, then another, and has to take off running as he realizes that some bastards have just launched rockets at the base.

So on opposite ends of the world, we handle our individual panics. He’s yelling, “Incoming,” and pushing people toward a bunker, before I’m even sure that the phone’s been hung up. He ducks and covers in some sandbag pile while rockets pass over his head. I chew my lip and wonder, idly, if Star-69 works on a military satellite phone.

He’s guarding the wall, watching the gates for an invasion attack. I’m talking to subordinates about some dirtbag who, of course, swears that the weed wasn’t his, trying to convince everyone (including myself) that I’m paying the slightest bit of attention.

So yeah, that’s about what it’s like to have your son off at war. It’s just life, except crazy. Just day to day, except that no matter how hard you try to make it “routine,” you’ve always got that thought in the back of your head - that it’s not.

But yeah, I’m proud of him. He did what needed to be done.

Benjamin T. Altman is a world-renowned organizer of charities for children and the elderly, and a professional embezzler. If he had wheels and pedals, he would be a bicycle. He is also working on a memoir with Todd Torrance.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, November 19th, 2007 | Email This Post

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