He graduated last spring.
He hugged me at the ceremony and said, “You didn’t give up on me,” and I said, “I don’t do that. It’s kind of my whole thing,” and he laughed, and I thought about a burning vehicle, and about how the going-back never really stops, it just changes what it looks like.
I teach history now.
American history, mostly, which means I teach a lot of wars, and I do not glorify them, because I have been in one, and instead I teach the kids the thing nobody taught me at their age, which is that history is not generals and dates.
It is the staff sergeant who goes back a second time.
It is the private who spends eleven years looking for a way to say thank you.
It is the ordinary person who decides, in the worst afternoon of their life, to be the one who goes back.
