as female. Good as us.
“No. Better put a marker by the claim, so’s the docs at the base can check it—him—out later. Might be able to analyze the s’rod, and the bulbs.”
Norma—puffed up with importance over finding the first male ’Gol ’ner in the history of at least this war—waddled out of the bunker, into the drifting snow outside, in search of a red flag marker. Alone in the empty-walled bunker, I started to roll up the ’Gol’s bedroll—until something fell out at my booted feet. A book, filled with carefully printed lines, in phrase-book English, no doubt penned in hope that if he was taken prisoner the ’Gol could prove to us American ’ners that he was ready and willing to learn the American way, to side with us if necessary. I’d seen this sort of thing before: copybooks filled with stilted English phrases, some written over and over, schoolgirl-fashion.
But this ’Gol—this guy—had something different on his mind, aside from learning English:
Morning of each day I sit, wait, as day become noon, noon become night, as I wonder “Why I fight? Why my mother? Why her mother? Must I fight harder, because I man in woman world?” I one of few men, but we grow in number. Women, they try hard next to me, more hard than with other woman. And always, I hide manness, other soldier tell me, “They know you man, they kill you harder.” But they woman too—so, then, my women, they do same to their man, if any? If that so, who is enemy?
I slowly paged through the thin diary, looking for a name, an age, something to identify this man lying behind me. I didn’t want to touch him again, couldn’t violate his War Bag. All I found was “I” and “me.” Perhaps that’s all I needed to find.
For my mother, in her diary, never mentioned who she was, never needed to use her own name. She knew herself, or tried to, considering that she belonged to a generation born to alien roles, and to an alien situation which reversed the roles of the sexes.
Yet my mother knew of this lost past, and took the time to discover pasts lost well before that of her own mother was devoured by an invasive virus:
I remember reading a sociology textbook, how back in the early 1900s, baby boys wore pink, because it was such a healthy, robust color, while girls were dressed in blue, a delicate, gentle hue. It wasn’t until after one of the world wars—I forget which one, they were spaced so far apart then—that the norm switched around, and blue became the “masculine” color. Considering the mess we “pinks” are in, perhaps that older assignment of colors for babies of different genders wasn’t so wrong after all.
Outside the cave, I heard Norma swearing, “Where the fruck is that damn flag?” as I reached the last page in the ’Gol’s diary, where he’d had the time to write one final line:
“Snow today—cover land. Soon cover me.”
Closing the book, the pages falling together with a soft chuff, I rocked back and forth on my heels, eyes shut, but still seeing what my mother had written in her diary, not long before the MOAW missile fragmented her like so much shrapnel:
Lull in the fighting—I don’t like it. Don’t know what will happen next. Better to either be in a battle or be coming out of it. This way—too much uncertainty. Get too relaxed. My mind is racing, racing. Remember a war movie I saw in basics, really an after-war film from the 1940s. No color, like old TV. The Best Years of Our Lives. Three men-grunts, coming home from one of the world wars. Second one, I think. Yes; no movies during first world war.
Anyway. The three—one was maimed, navy one—couldn’t adjust to life without war; war had given them all purpose, justification, glory. Came home to uncertainty, rejection, degradation. Seemed to me that the war years weren’t the best years of their lives, but had instead sucked away the best lives of their years. Oh, the movie had a sort-of-happy ending, but the maimed one was still maimed, and the poor one was doing work on junked war materials. The one who was rich before got to be rich again, but his daughter was in love with the low-life one. Strange to see a war actually end. And the women had stayed at home. Must’ve been why it finally ended.
Watching, I kept thinking it was all a dream-life, with women razzed about having to stay home and take care of the home front. Thought maybe EVP must’ve gotten into us women, made us hard, tough, mean—everything the men have lost. But seeing the play-soldiers of old, I think: They have lost something we women can never have—the ability not to be manly under certain circumstances. We women are so wrapped up in being wo-men, both in one, that we are neither.
And later, during history class in my last year of school, while learning of Desert Storm, I read a microfiche of an old pre-EVP newspaper, and an article about the first instances of bunkering (high-tech scavenging) in the Kuwaiti desert. This reporter who wrote the article came across one fallen soldier, named Mardy. Mardy had a diary, like mine, like all of ours. He hoped the war of his people and ours would be over soon, He asked God to make it so. He felt betrayed by his life. He had a girlfriend, Diee, whom he never saw again. And when the American reporter found him, Mardy was dead, mouth open, hand over his heart. And the reporter read of Mardy’s words: “I open my eyes and cry, sitting, thinking, ‘O God, will you accept me?’ I close my eyes and remember. Then I cry again. There is sand on my face. It is about to cover me. It is my destiny. I want to shout in my loudest voice but life doesn’t follow me.”
And before he left Mardy, the reporter buried him in those same sands. Reading that, I realized, in war there are no real enemies. Only victims—of our countries, of our races, and of ourselves. We need no other adversaries.
War, politics, EVP and AIDS before that—all shadow boxing partners. Only we do the actual moving.
My mother died a couple of days after writing those words. Oh, she did write a letter to her mother, but it only skirted the questions gnawing at her, perhaps in deference to her mother’s rank, more probably in deference to her own un-faceable fear. Yet hers was a war of equals, of women hurting other women. No fear of being killed faster and dying slower. My mother fought a war, not others not quite like herself.
“...who is enemy?”
Sitting by the earless ’Gol, his soul resting cloth-bound in my hands, I wish I knew the answer to his—and my—question. Just as I wish I knew who was doing the real moving—me, or my image on a snow-flecked earthen wall.
Author’s Note: The newspaper article mentioned in this work appeared in the Tuesday, July 30, 1991 edition of USA Today, and was written by Jack Kelley. The diary passages quoted were written by Hussam Malek Mohammad Mardy, to whom this work is dedicated.
Afterword for “The Best Lives of Our Years”
Looking back on the genesis of this story, I suppose it amounts to my overwhelming disgust over the events which made up the end of the Gulf War (senior), including the treatment of those enemy soldiers who tried to surrender, only to be literally buried alive by their own military vehicles, driven by our soldiers...somewhere along the line, even the barbaric rules of war had been hideously breached, and the horrors of the second Bush (“Dubyah”) Presidency’s Gulf War were yet to come, even as they had been anticipated by the events of the 1990s war. That war marked one of the first instances of women being used on the battlefront in a supporting role, a situation which blossomed into the current Middle East war(s) creating female vets coming home sans limbs, or worse. Now, I’ve read that women will probably be in combat soon. Never have I hated to see something I once wrote about in a fictional sense coming to fruition more than I hate this current military turn of events.
Getting back to the actual writing of this story, I had the first two sections outlined in my head long before I finally wrote it in 1991; I knew
