Replacement parts

We are seven hundred miles or so from home. Tomorrow we will complete the last leg on our thousand mile journey to my husband's aunt's house for Thanksgiving. Today I asked my husband, again, about the time he drove the Stryker over a bomb. I like to hear the story because I don't remember the details or understand anything about the incident.

Our eldest child went through a phase when they were six of asking me about it.

"Why did daddy drive over a bomb? Why didn't daddy see the bomb in the road? Why are the streets there covered in trash?"

I would answer every question as succinctly and accurately as possible, knowing they would have a follow up. Eventually they ran out of questions, but not before my heart broke just a little. I still have no idea how to explain war to a child and I am required to very often. I do not understand war myself.

I am like my child, asking question after question, trying to understand the IED, the explosion, the aftermath, the person who planted it.

Today Karl told me the seals on the engine were all busted, explaining that the engine in a Stryker is where a passenger seat is in a car. He told me the wheel below him sheared off at the hub, but the tire was fine. This made him laugh. He told me the gear shift in front of him was broken, he thinks, and he thinks the instruments were busted. He told me things are jumbled up in his head. He couldn't find his weapon next to him. Another soldier was shaking him. He doesn't know if he lost consciousness. There is rarely anything new, but I ask anyway, marveling about how lucky he is to be alive when literally everything surrounding him was destroyed.

"Well," he said, "it was all repaired."

The insinuation is everything was fixable except his brain, but nothing was fixable. The engine, the hub, the instrument panel, the shifter were all beyond repair. Instead, they were replaced.

As I read him what I've written so far, he laughingly suggests I ask where I can find new parts for him. If I were to go to a parts store, I would give him new knees, new shoulders, the parts of him which hurt and grind together. I would not order him a new brain, because who knows what I might end up with. Even if he cannot remember where he is or why, he remembers me when I was 15. He remembers the prom when I mostly ignored him and the first time we slept together. He remembers me.

Maybe it is selfish of me that I would not make his life easier, but it is more important to me that he retain who he is. When we talk about the scary future we talk about when he does not know who I am or who he is. We do not talk about when he may burn down the house. Of course, he is already at the point when he may burn down the house and it really doesn't seem to matter that much.