Rome Revisited

Dear John

Arma virumque cano.
Of arms and the man I sing.
Virgil’s The Aeneid (19 B.C.)

O White Star—so bright and strong! O, gallant defender of everything good thy sing. Out the door he jumped at night, leading the charge behind enemy lines, and afterwards under the indistinct glow of the heavens and the smell of smoldering ruins, writing home—believing in Almighty God and thinking of nothing but truth and liberty.
O White Star was a dedicated soul, not the kind to slight love but to remain attentive to his high school sweetheart who also at the tender age of just eighteen years knew fully well that life is fragile.
Rebecca loved him, unlike the way he loved her, for he was a man of quiet love, a man of discipline and courage, who merely wanted to serve his country as masterfully as those able men traced back to the French and Indian Wars, to Ethan Allen, and not to forget Francis Marion and Wild Bill Donovan. A week after they married in a little church in the little town of Painted Post, New York, he was ordered back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and promptly thrown halfway around the globe—he and eleven other men landing on the Horn of Africa in broad daylight to sort out a food fight between rival clans, which unfavorably turned ugly thanks to a sandstorm of resentment blown in from the Arabian peninsula.
Astute men, but never have they been so unlucky—or not since the debacle at Desert One. Then the hour came, both sides leaning forward after a company of Rangers arrived at the airport. It was a complicated showdown—humane and immovable, neither of them wanting to error and impeccably adept in the avoidance. White Star took to the streets in the cool of night—paid a local boy to unearth clan hideouts while his comrades did double work preparing for combat; then upon a beautiful sunrise the battle was waged and lost.
Oh, my poor White Star, Rebecca cooed, you’re home with me at last. She came to greet him at the airfield with the other wives. His arm was hung in a sling; his head hung in shame. Yet behind that sullen frown was a grin that was so tight nothing would ever stay him now.
White Star made love to Rebecca until falling asleep that night. Then nine months later they had a baby boy; but the day before junior was born the colonel told him he must deploy. He went and high above Egyptian windswept dunes free-falling to the earth he collided with another man—fortunately quickly coming to and having the wherewithal to open his parachute.
He escaped another accident six months later. Meantime Rebecca stayed at home and cared for the boy. Things were pretty good. There was plenty of time at home, and he was promoted which helped him during that period when he was dissatisfied with himself, with what he could not do.
Junior grew in size and began to show signs of solidity, toughness. White Star, however determined, could hardly overcome the deficit in love because the world was getting more and more turbulent and in certain places more and more evil. All the time he was away he wanted to get back to where they were; he wanted to help Rebecca raise his son so that he would turn out to be a fine young man. So whenever he was home he found much delight in reading books to him and showing him simple pleasures such as hide-and-seek and baseball.
A few years passed and the one thing he felt absolutely certain about did not come true. White Star was a professional now and the father of a second son. Rebecca worked as a receptionist for a dentist and was able to keep everything at home together, but now the marriage was on the verge of breaking apart. While White Star was trekking up, over and around three of the world’s mightiest mountain ranges in northern Pakistan she left him. Once in coming down from the lung-busting mountains he called her—the telephone rang and rang, and then his good friend and neighbor next door told him that she took the boys to her mother’s place in Columbus, Ohio. He didn’t find out for three months that she left him for good. He just stared at the note and cried, “Becky, no—please, no.”
For the most important things are the most difficult and that is the stumbling block of love and the lesson of life. It seemed wrong for White Star to want to see and touch Rebecca long after she had remarried. Inasmuch as it hurt he finally found a way to cope with it.
A few years later he was thrown into battle again. He was ready and it felt right—indeed he was prepared and things began to happen in exactly the way that he was trained. He was part of a veiled detachment dropped in hostile territory by a Blackhawk helicopter. They were to lead an Afghan resistance force into the town of Mazar-e Sharif. On the night they set out a band of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters ambushed them. The search-and-rescue operation was finally called off after fifteen long days of unabated exertion.
White Star was left for dead in a foreign land. The only American survivor of the ambush has repeatedly said that he was unsure where they became separated—running some distance he started back, looking for him, when the enemy came over a rise in his direction; he fired at them and ran down a trail, jumping into a deep opening in the rocks where he waited until being scooped up by a roving helicopter—and now is convinced of one thing, and that is the significance of the bright beacon in the heavens above that dark and lonesome place of battle.
And now his sons have sufficient proof to the truth of what he proclaimed—service to God and country.