It used to be that when they got back to the barracks, he would sit and watch the sun rise. The hot, miserable sun that turned everything evil. That sun would come up and bring with it all that they were against, or at least were supposed to be against. It used to be that he would get back from patrol and watch that sun rise and then read her letters and wait for the mortar fire. Every day with that sun came the mortars.
But that was before. Before he got her last letter. She sent them only once a week now. She used to send them in twos and threes everyday. But now it was only once a week. He got back from his nightly patrol and watched the sunrise, then he read her letter.
Before, when he was home, it was easy. He woke up and she was there, he slept and she was there. He would work all day up in the quarries and at night when the sun went down he would be home and she was there waiting for him. Once a week, two weekends a year, he would volunteer himself to the country he loved and have to forget the woman he loved.
Now the weekends had turned into months, month upon endless month with nothing but letters and the nights to keep occupied. He didn’t know when he was going home, he just knew he wanted to. It wasn’t so much the guns, or the tanks, or the orders, or even the constant death that surrounded him. It was that sun, that hot, miserable sun. Every day brought more hatred at not being home with her.
But in her last letter she told him. She told him that she missed him. He missed her too and wanted so badly to come home to her. But she told him that if he ever came home she would not be there. She used the word ‘if’ like he had been subpoenaed by the grim reaper himself. She told him that she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t be a soldier’s wife. He was not a soldier, he thought. She told him that she couldn’t wait around to marry a pine box with an American flag on it. She told him it was over.
She had been with him in this hell of a life for fourteen months. Fourteen months of night raids and spider holes. Fourteen months of mortar fire, flak jackets and helicopters. He needed her on those nights when even the moon would not show its broad, pale face, and the hours would creep along so slowly that the only sanity one could cling to was the thought that this was insane.
Some had families to go back to, some had jobs, some lived for the others. He lived for her. He was careful for her. He did everything for her. He just wanted to be back in her arms. Being in her arms was his reward for everything. As long as he had her to go back to, he could do anything. Now she was not his, and he had no reward.
The sun came up and with it the heat and the despair and the mortar fire. The sun came up and it would soon go down and he would be out there in the night all alone. Alone for the first time in his life. Alone in a land that was not his. Alone among a people he did not know how to help. And when the night was over all he had was that hot, miserable sun.
