stories

As I was driving to get frozen yogurt with a friend today I remembered what I forgot yesterday.

Yesterday my daughter was playing Angry Birds and somehow we started talking about standing on piggies. We are nothing around here if not silly.

"You're standing on piggies!" I said to Karl.

"Twenty of them!"

Twenty? My husband is not a mutant. He has ten piggies like the rest of us.

Tonight he was pouring a slush from Sonic and he complained because he accidentally poured Frosty on his hand. Slushes and frosties are vastly different.

Documenting these little skips reminds me of the summer I kept a log of everything my husband forgot. I believe if I did the same exercise today my log would be a lot longer. Maybe I should... but it was depressing. It is depressing to reduce my husband to his lapses. That is not what I'm doing here, because this is a love story, not a clinical log. This is not for the VA. These words are not to prove how impaired my husband is for the sake of compensation. These words are to chronicle the love story between a 14 year old girl from a dysfunctional family and a boy she had a crush on. I make many jokes about how my husband had gorgeous thick long hair when we met and now he is bald. I also joke about how we met the only year he attended my high school. Then he switched to a Catholic high school. He looked so cute in those little skirts. He is tired of this joke, because he has heard me tell it so many times.

That's the point.

The point of our story is not my husband's brain damage or his joint pain. The point is that we have a story.

We have a story because of a chance meeting between a boy and a girl 16 years ago. We have a story because we had friends in common, most notably a flaky girl who brought us together time and again. We have a story because technology in military vehicles has gotten good enough that a man can drive over a bomb and live and because when Karl was driving that vehicle over a bomb, he had the hatch open because that vehicle's thermal camera was broken. We have a story today because a piece of equipment was broken. This is what I believe. I believe that having the hatch open provided somewhere for the explosive force to go. I am making this up. It is what I believe and I made it up. Having the hatch open let flames come in. This is true. I am not making it up. This is what my husband envisions when he is driving down the road and sees debris. Sometimes it is unconscious and he shivers. Sometimes he purposely draws up images of flames engulfing him.

This is part of our story. His twenty piggies are part of our story, but they are not a major plot line. Our story is populated by bit characters: the woman whom I met today in line registering my daughter for kindergarten, who said "aww" when I told her my husband was a disabled veteran (I said, "don't do that," laughing to take the edge off my words); a man in line to register his child for school had scars on one side of his face and the posture of a service member; two women in line were in uniform, one of whom had the same deployment patch as my husband; another woman was eavesdropping on my casual recitation of my husband's status as a disabled veteran. None of these people are central to our lives but they are there on the periphery, as are all the other men and women who have served our country. Not only do their lives contribute to statistics that correlate to our lives, but they are part of the seven percent of veterans in this country.

I am, obviously, not a veteran. When I was 18, I wasn't filled with enough conviction (or honor) to make a long term commitment to my country. In fact, I spent a lot of time feeling vaguely disgruntled with people who signed up to fight war. I was anti-war and I thought that being anti-soldier was the same thing as being anti-war. I still feel guilty over this mistake. My love of my husband, my compassion for him and my understanding of his motives were the keys in my being able to separate the soldier from the war. I went from thinking that soldiers joined the Army because they believed in war to believing that a variety of people join the military for a variety of reasons. Some of them come from generations of service members and honor their family and their legacy by enlisting. Some of them don't know what to do with their lives and think that earning some scholarship money will help them figure it out. Some of them want to earn their citizenship. Some of them are poor and see the military as their only lifeline. Some of them believe in war.

I wish that I had been able to separate the soldier from the war much much sooner. I wish someone had humanized the faceless men and women in uniforms for me when I was a seven year old parroting "peace in the middle east!" I am very sure that the reason I want to thank veterans and view them as kin is not just because I love my husband, but because I wish I had shown more compassion sooner. I want the veterans I encounter to know that I know they are people who deserve respect and compassion. They are not heroes to be held apart, separated into us and them. They are us. It is possible to recognize someone's honor and sacrifice in a way that does not express a mixture of pity and admiration. It is possible to recognize someone's humanity in their honor and sacrifice.

Karl is the most honorable person I know. If you ask him who the most honorable person he knows is, he'll name another man he served with. I bet if you ask that man, which I have not done yet, who the most honorable person he knows is, I'm sure he would name a third. Karl and his friend do not want to be treated as if they are heroes, not least because they know individuals more honorable than themselves. Karl and his friend want to be treated like people. This is the story of everything Karl forgets and everything I remember for him because I love him. This is also the story of Karl being sick of my jokes that are old to him and new to everyone we meet. This is the story of Karl and I being people.