CHAPTER 20 - WAR WOUNDS

            I'll confess that I took a lot of walks in those days, always in the direction of Michael's house on the chance that I might see him. Looking back, I believe our meetings were by design more than default. I think Michael might also have been making a point to spend his evenings on his front porch, playing one of his guitars or reading, on the not unlikely chance that I would wander by. Each encounter with Michael brought me some new insight into his character.

            Sometimes we would sing together, and I think I enjoyed those times best. Michael introduced me to all kinds of music and musicians that I would never have known or have been able to appreciate if it had not been for his guidance and influence.

            Sometimes we would talk. Unlike most of the grownups I'd known, Michael always listened to me. He asked my opinions and made me believe that he actually cared what they were. We would discuss books we'd read or movies we'd seen. Michael always had some fascinating insight to share, some point of view that I had not thought to consider.

            And, sometimes we would just sit together in profound and eloquent silence. He would play his guitar and I would lose myself in some volume from his library. Just being in his near him made me happy.

            A Jewish friend once told me that according to the teachings of the Kabbalah, when the human soul is created, it is half male and half female. When the soul is sent to earth, the two halves are separated, and we spend our lives looking for the person who completes us, who can supply that missing half of ourselves. That's why some people refer to their spouse as their better half and why we talk about finding a soul mate. In Michael, I will always believe I that I found my soul's true mate.

***

            On one particular evening that I remember, I ended up at Michael's house as usual, and we were throwing a Frisbee back and forth in the yard. I jumped to catch a wild toss, and when I landed, one foot slipped sideways in the dirt and loose gravel at the edge of the driveway. Like the walls of Jericho, I went tumbling down, effectively removing several layers of skin from my right knee. Michael was kneeling at my side almost before I hit the ground. "You okay?" His forehead was furrowed in a look of deep concern. I held my leg and resisted an urge to utter one of the assorted profanities that had sprung to mind.

            He looked at my mangled knee. "No, you're not okay, are ya? Lemme have a look," he said, softly. He began to examine my wound with surprising thoroughness. "Can you bend it?" He placed one hand behind my knee and held my ankle with the other, flexing my leg slightly to be sure that I hadn't twisted, sprained or torn anything. "I don't think it's too bad," he pronounced at last.

            "'Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve!" I declared through clenched teeth. It hurt like a son of a gun, but big girls don't cry and ladies don't swear, so I glared at him and did my best to remain stoic.

            Michael laughed at this. "Well, it's a good sign if you can still quote Shakespeare at me. Try to stand up," he directed, taking both my hands in his and helping me to my feet. "I wanna see you put your weight on it."

            I did as he instructed, showing him that the injured limb would indeed support my weight, "I feel like an eight-year-old," I muttered. "A clumsy eight-year-old. I haven't had a skinned knee since I was a kid!" In Michael's everlasting favor, he resisted the urge to point out that I was still a kid.

            Before I realized what was happening, he had picked me up as though I weighed no more than the aforementioned eight-year-old. Now I should point out that at the age of sixteen I had already developed my share of curves and some rather ample endowments. Let's just say that the ‘boob and butt fairy' had been extremely generous. Even so, Michael carried me into the house as though I weighed no more than a child.

            With my arm around his neck, our faces were only inches apart. If he wanted to, I thought, he could just turn his head and kiss me . . . The very idea made me blush furiously, and I was sure he could hear my heart hammering in my chest. I silently prayed that he would attribute my high color and shortness of breath to our game of toss in the summer heat.

            If Michael noticed anything out of the ordinary, he didn't acknowledge it. He was either truly oblivious or just being a gentleman. I hoped it was the former, but I suspected it might've been the latter because very little escaped Michael's notice.

            "Let's get you cleaned up," he said as he carried me down a short hall and into the bathroom across from his bedroom. He deposited me on the counter as he prepared to tend to my injury. The bathroom and what I could see of his bedroom looked like the rest of his house, compact and compulsively neat. The bathroom smelled faintly of Ivory soap and English Leather cologne. "This'll hurt a little," he said, as he began to clean the dirt and gravel out of the ragged gash on my knee, "but I'll try to be careful."

            I was touched by his tenderness as he took care of me. Washing away the blood and dirt, he made every effort to cause me as little pain as possible. "How does it look?" I asked in an attempt to be flippant, "Will I live?"

            "I've seen worse," he said quietly, not meeting my eyes as he worked. He seemed unusually taciturn. Maybe he had noticed the effect he was having on me. Michael reached into the medicine cabinet for antiseptic, gauze, tape and ointment. He applied the antiseptic to a cotton pad and poised it above my knee. "This is gonna hurt like the devil, but it can't be helped. Want somethin' to bite on?"

            I rolled my eyes. "Ha. Ha . . . AH!" I hissed through clenched teeth as the astringent made contact with the open wound. I clutched the edge of the counter to keep from slapping him out of sheer reflex.

            "Sorry," he said, looking genuinely contrite as he fanned my stinging knee with the envelope containing the sterile gauze pad. "That was the worst of it," he assured me as he applied the antibiotic ointment and covered the wound with a square of gauze, taping it securely with practiced efficiency.

            "Good job." I examined his handiwork. "You've done this before."

            "Once or twice," he admitted reluctantly as he put away his supplies, his expression was strangely grim. "In the army I was trained as a medic," a silent pause as he looked past me into vacant space, "among other things," he finished bleakly. He seemed uncomfortable with the memory.

            "Wow." I said simply. It was the most eloquent response I could think of. "I guess you have seen worse. Wanna talk about it?"

            From my perch on the counter, we were eye-to-eye and nearly nose-to-nose. He put one hand on either side of me and leaned even closer. His gaze was level and his tone was deadly serious. "No. I don't wanna talk about it. And you don't wanna hear about it, either. Trust me, Maggie, there are some things you're better off not knowin'."

            "Yessir," I said, wide-eyed and shrinking back just a little. I had obviously probed an extremely raw nerve.

            His manner softened, and he rubbed his forehead with one hand, looking shamefaced. "It's okay." He patted my arm to let me know that he regretted his brusqueness.

            I couldn't let it go at that. We Shannons have always had difficulty exercising our constitutional right to remain silent. "But if you ever wanted to talk about anything," I ventured, "I just wanted you to know that I'd listen."

            "Yeah, I do know that, Magnolia," he replied. "But there's no point in both of us having nightmares."

            I decided that it was probably time to move on to a different subject so I tried a different course. "Y'know, I have a hard time imaginin' you as a soldier," I said lightly as I folded my arms and regarded him as though trying to conjure the image.

            "Well, they say one picture's worth a thousand words." He helped me off the counter and led me, limping, into his bedroom where he opened a dresser drawer and withdrew a flat box. With me in tow, he carried the box into the living room and sat down on the couch. Gentlemen do not entertain young ladies in their bedrooms, and Michael was ever the gentleman. I sat down beside him as he withdrew a black and white photograph from among several items in the box. He passed it to me to examine.

            It was a photo of Michael, but, at the same time, it wasn't the Michael that I knew, and it was difficult to reconcile the hard, cold face of image with that sweet vulnerability in the features of the man beside me. Looking at Michael now, I found it surprising that whatever horrors he'd seen and whatever deeds he'd been forced to commit seemed to have left no scar or telltale stamp on his boyish features. Judging from his reaction to my inquiry about his war experiences, though, the scars were definitely there. Michael carried them all on the inside, and they remained painful in spite of how deeply they might be buried.

            The man in the picture was a stranger to me. Even though I knew that this was a picture of Michael's younger self, the person in the photograph actually looked older than the man I knew. The most obvious difference was that close-cropped GI haircut. Michael's hair was long now, down to his shoulders. But, the most unsettling difference was the eyes. The soldier wasn't looking at the camera as much as he was glaring at it, iron jawed, tight-lipped and as grim as death with an expression that would have made Charles Manson flinch.

            He was sitting on an ammunition crate in front of a tent surrounded by sandbags. The man in the photograph was shirtless, wearing camouflage fatigue pants with that odd stripe pattern favored by Special Forces, not at all like the regular patterned camouflage that adorned the fathers and brothers of the neighborhood at the start of every hunting season. His fatigues were tucked into cracked and worn leather combat boots, and he had a CAR-15 rifle lying across his lap. There wasn't a spare ounce of flesh anywhere on his wiry frame, and what was there looked as though it had been hewn from a block of granite. I had to admit that he was attractive in an extremely frightening sort of way.

            "Whoa!" I exclaimed. "That's not quite the way I pictured a medic."

            "That's not a picture of a medic," he explained. "That's a picture of a LuRP. I was trained as a medic, but I became a LuRP."

            "What in the world is a lurp?"

            "Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. They call 'em Rangers, now, but back in my day, we were LuRPs."

            "Oh!" I suddenly made the connection. "L-R-R-P. The letters on your tattoo!"

            He looked down at his arm as though he'd forgotten it was there. "Yeah. My tattoo."

            "Well what does a LuRP do?"

            He inclined his head slightly and looked up, remembering. "Oh, we'd locate the enemy and gather intelligence. We also acted as forward air controllers and artillery spotters - that's locating the targets for aircraft and heavy artillery and then there was always bomb damage assessment."

            "BDA!" I exclaimed.

            He nodded. "BDA. After an Arc-Light. You remembered." He continued. "We'd go out on six man patrols, usually four or five days at a time. We had to maintain total silence. Nobody would say a word from the time we were inserted until we were extracted again. Everything was done with hand signals."

            "So that's how you were able to sneak up on Bobby the other day."

            "Yeah," he nodded. "Being able to get right next to the enemy without him knowing it was something my life depended on."

            I looked at the picture again. "Well, I sure don't think I'd have wanted that guy getting' next to me. He looks mean. He didn't need to shoot the enemy; he could've just scared ‘em to death!"

            Michael shook his head. "I wasn't as mean as I thought I was or as mean as I tried to be, but it took Father Frank to teach me that."

            "Father Frank? You mean like a chaplain?" I asked.

            Michael shook his head. "He wasn't a chaplain, but he was a good listener and he cared. All the guys in the unit used to tell him their troubles. They called it ‘going to confession'. He was a little older than the rest of us and his name was Francis Murray, so somebody nicknamed him ‘Father Frank'."

            "Did you have a nickname?"

            "Just Doc," he replied with a shrug, "because of my medical training. Medics always get called ‘Doc'."

            He seemed to remember something. "Now that I think of it, though, Frank always called me by my name. He called all of us by our names." Michael closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. Then he continued, "Frank had a knack for rescuing lost souls, and I was about a lost as they come. I wouldn't have made it back alive if it hadn't been for him."

            He looked at me and his reverential tone bespoke a lingering awe at the impact this man had had on his life. "He was different from a lot of people that claim to be Christians. He didn't preach at me, or at any of us, really. But his life was an example, and he showed us that it was possible to keep our humanity even in the middle of hell. When he said that the power of love couldn't be overpowered by hate, we knew he really believed it. He made us wanna believe it, too. Through it all he kept believin' that all men were his brothers. Even when those brothers insisted on killing each other."

            His use of the past tense had not escaped me. "What happened?"

            Michael fixed his gaze on something far away and visible only to himself, the proverbial thousand-yard stare again. "No greater love," he whispered, "like the Bible says, he laid down his life for a friend."

            "And you were the friend." It wasn't a question. I knew it just as certainly as if Michael had said it.

            "I was the friend," he confirmed with a barely perceptible nod.

            After our previous exchange, I knew better than to press for more specifics. Whatever Michael decided to share with me about those particular experiences, he would reveal in his own time and in his own way.

            As Michael put the photograph back into the box, it tilted in his lap and something silvery slipped out with a faint clatter against the worn hardwood floor. He picked it up, and held out his hand for me to see his dog tags on a chain, the same tags I'd seen on the dour stranger in the photograph. I picked them up and examined them more closely. "Donovan, Michael J," I read. "What's the ‘J' stand for?"

            "James."

            "Oh."

            Also embossed the tag was his service number, his blood type - A Positive, and his religion - Protestant, which in his case I'd learned meant Methodist. There were two tags, exactly alike on a short loop attached to the longer chain, and I handed them back to him.

            I may never know what prompted Michael to do what he did next, and I suspect that Michael didn't precisely know himself, but he removed one of the tags from the loop and threaded it on the chain. He tossed the short loop and one tag back into the box. Then, he slipped the chain with the remaining tag around my neck.

            I held my breath as I looked down at the dull silver pendant where it lay against the fabric of my dark blue, Jonathan Livingston Seagull T-shirt and then back up at Michael, giving him an uncertain smile. He didn't say anything, and his expression was enigmatic. He just inclined his head toward me slightly and gave a faint smile in return.

            He never said anything directly about the gift or its significance, and I somehow knew better than to question him or mention it myself. No, this was a fragile moment, and to speak of it would have shattered it. To question him might have forced him into a place that he wasn't yet ready to go. So, I picked up the tag and dropped it down the neck of my shirt where it lay over my heart, the cool metal warming against my skin.

            I could only speculate about the meaning of the token. Perhaps that was the moment Michael first admitted to himself that his feelings for me had gone beyond the fondness of an adult for an amusing child. But in the end, it would simply be speculation. Only Michael could say what he was thinking when he slipped that chain over my head. Now, decades later, he was unavailable for comment.