Meditation

Memorial Day 2006

His crutches caught my attention first. The young man in his early twenties with short-cropped hair wearing a fleece jacket and military style pants was standing at the top of the stairs in the Berkeley BART station with a companion at his side. It was a bit after six in the morning, and as is usual at that time of day, there was a chill in the air. The young man was using those aluminum crutches because of the brace on his left knee, and his inability to put any weight on the leg. His companion took the bags - an army duffel bag and a backpack - down to the platform, and waited for the young man to come down the stairs.

He was in obvious pain as he tried to negotiate the first step. Unable to manage the crutches and get down the steps without wincing, he leaned over the metal railing and slid on his belly down to the platform below. It was on his way down when I noticed that he was barefoot.

Historians, even those focused on recent history, often speak in terms of eras. When one is well entrenched into a sixth decade of life as I am, those overlapping eras become personal markers, long, slow waves ebbing and flowing. In my case I can mark the passage of time with any number of such markers. There was the Post-war Era, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam Era, the Era of Peace and Prosperity, which name notwithstanding was peppered with a relentless barrage of military engagements, police actions, covert operations, and so forth. Now I find myself enduring the Iraq War Era. It was on that early Saturday morning sitting in a train station in Berkeley, California that all these eras became crystallized in the person of that barefoot young veteran trying to negotiate the stairs down to the platform.

Once the young man had arrived at the platform his companion left him standing there alone. At first this stunned me. How could he just leave his friend like that?, I thought. Then it occurred to me that he was neither a companion nor a friend. He was a stranger who helped him get to this point on his journey. As the train was pulling into the station, I asked the young man if I could help him manage his bags. I guess in that moment I became his new companion. He said, Yes, I’d appreciate that.

Bags loaded on the nearly empty train, we sat down across from each other. The young man closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep immediately. He reminded me of those soldiers who speak of the learned ability to sleep in almost any position under almost any conditions. A skill learned on the battlefield more than anywhere else.

While the young veteran slept I was able to study him in some detail. His buzz-cut showed some old scars. Probably from childhood, I thought. He had the look of a boy, now grown, who had fallen out of his share of trees, a boy who pushed an edge or two. Sitting there with his eyes closed, his head listing a bit to the side, he looked younger, as if some of the boy had managed to survive the ordeal that was his passage into manhood. He still had his dog tags around his neck, along with a utility knife. I imagined that he had that same knife on that chain when he was in combat. By now he had taken off his fleece jacket and under it he wore a tee shirt with a vague camouflage pattern to it. He had a small tattoo in the form of a spider web on his elbow, and his forearm showed more recent scars. His pants looked like standard issue military with a more striking camouflage pattern than the one on his shirt. I could see the outline of the metal brace on his knee more clearly now, and he had wrapped it in a kind of makeshift support bandage – white cloth with a red cross on it. His feet were cut and scraped with dark calluses on his soles.

We had to change trains in Oakland to get to the city, so I had to gently wake him. Once awake, the lines in his forehead and around his eyes magically reappeared. The boy had disappeared before my eyes. The connecting train was there waiting for us, and we had plenty of time to cross the platform even with all that baggage in tow. Once resituated, I asked him how he got injured. In a voice remarkably devoid of self-pity, he said, The war. By the way he responded I thought better of asking for more detail than that. Then I asked him where he was headed.
He said, The VA hospital.
Do you know where it is?, I asked.
Not really. Somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.
Since I knew exactly where the VA hospital is, and how difficult it would be to get to by bus, I asked him if he could use some cash for a cab.
No, I’m OK.
By the way he answered I was not at all sure this was true, but I decided not to press the point.

A little while later we arrived at the station in downtown San Francisco. I had a tight schedule to catch a flight at the airport, so I found myself mirroring the young man’s other companion. I put his bags on the platform and wished him good luck and got back on the train.

As the train was pulling away from the station, I saw him standing quite still on the cold stone platform in the exact same posture that I found him in Berkeley. I offered a silent prayer that his next companion would arrive soon, and would take better care of him than I was able to.

And then I thought, Here we are again. Here I am again. Like my father’s war in Europe, like my uncle’s war in the Pacific, like my friends’ war in Southeast Asia, this war, like all the other wars in all those other eras, will not end when it ends. It will end when the last veteran dies, when the last living link to all the pain and suffering, to all the tortured lives and scorching memories, is broken.

That’s when this latest era will end… many years from now. Years after I join the ancestors. Many years after the last young veteran from this era finally comes home.