The Long Shadow of War

A young man sits in a wooden boat. In the faded photo, he wears an unzipped, well-worn life vest. There is no smile behind his neatly trimmed beard. His dark eyes have no spark.

This somber-looking man was my husband for three decades. The picture was taken forty years ago, when I was already falling in love with him. He was a man of very few words. “I wonder what you think of it,” people would ask. I’m sure I know what he would say, if asked about today’s events. It would be nothing good. Alas, I’d have to agree about that.

But over our many years, he rarely thought anything good about anything. And so, eventually, I dismissed his dire predictions. You say that tree is about to fall on our house? Nice! That proves we’re safe, and that it won’t, not for years to come… The world is going to hell? Of course not…

Whenever we planned to join up with friends or family, he said ‘let’s get this over with’ – as if it were all a chore. He hated so many things, most things really; it became exhausting to hear. But he loved birds; he was a hermit who felt most comfortable in the wild places.

Can this be true, did I really fall for a man who had beautiful things to say about birds, but not about much else? Or is that only how it looks now, through the sour lens of what came after? I admit it is true; that is exactly what I did. I fell deeply in love with a sad man; his eyes really were that sad, even then. His sadness pulled me in, he seemed so wise. I saw a gentle wounded soul, and I would heal him. I became drunk on my own healing powers… What a sad cliché I was. How obvious it is from here, forty years later.

I was not alone in assuming or imagining wisdom at the core of his darkness. Other women had, before me. He had warned me, in the very beginning, but I chose not to believe him. I chose to trust in love. It took me a long time to learn that he could not sustain love at close range. He needed to be far away, so he could yearn for our love. Up close, he recoiled, even with me; even though I was the woman he loved, or so he believed. I was his wife. He had promised we would knit together a new and better future…

I wrote him a love poem once, pouring my heart out in praise of his ability to say NO. I am terrible at saying no myself, so I assumed it takes more strength than I can muster, more depth, more wisdom. I loved him the more for it.

He kept that poem, it turns out. He gave it back to me the very last time I saw him. He also gave me back his wedding ring that day. It made me feel sick suddenly: what was he telling me? He pointed out that I had taken my own ring off too. . . But that was not true, I had not.

For years, he had receded so far into himself that I could no longer reach him. I moved my wedding ring to the other hand, and I added a star sapphire to it. It was the color of dark denim, and I called it my kindness stone. It stood for the promise I made to myself. I will remain kind and loyal, even if our love has been lost in darkness. I had learned to keep enough distance from his echoing silences, so I could survive, I learned not to drown in his cavernous absence. But I would be kind. He was not well, and I would care for him.

He shot himself soon after returning the poem. That was five years ago.

In this faded picture of a sad young man, the eyes are so downcast, so dark, that they have no color. But I know his eyes could be a luminous blue. Was he too sensitive for this world? Or too empty? Will I ever understand it? Can I forgive him, or forgive myself?

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How black-and-white that question turns out to be… Nothing is ever that simple, is it?

I met my husband, still young then, a mere ten years after the Vietnam War ended. His story of the war created an image in my mind of a hero, a war resister. And such a story, of course, was all about saying NO. Saying no cost him dearly then. And he never stopped saying no afterward.

He had majored in philosophy in college, where he bristled at what felt like academic hypocrisy. He despised a system in which it was so easy to succeed, by making a game of saying what was expected, rather than what he held to be true. He dropped out, knowing full well that he would now be drafted, and get sent to Vietnam. His father did not speak to him for two years after. And rather than waiting for the draft, he enlisted as a Navy Coreman. At least he would be caring for the wounded, instead of learning to kill.

While tending to returning soldiers, he listened to their stories. These men came back broken. They were disillusioned, bitter. Or strung out on drugs to dull the horror of what they had seen. He decided he wanted no part of this hell. He refused to go overseas, and he was sent to prison. He spent a year there, much of it in solitary confinement. He was mistreated by guards and wardens – though he never shared those details with me. Eventually, when he was released, he worked to support draft resistors.

The men who were in Vietnam, we were to learn over the years, would struggle to re-enter society. Their PTSD would devastate them, and their loved ones. How heroic, that my husband had knowlingly chosen imprisonment over Vietnam, that he refused a role in the war that consumed our generation. And also, how wise that he avoided getting his mind wrecked in Vietnam.

How wrong I was; he was not spared. He, too, was broken by that war, by what his resistance had done to him. His trust in people was broken, and his belief in love, and in life itself.

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