The Uniform My Father Tried To Destroy

Every button polished the last time I wore them, because a Marine does not let his blues go dull, not ever, not even hanging in a closet in his childhood bedroom in a town that never understood what they meant. The high collar. The scarlet trouser stripe that marks blood shed in battles most people have forgotten the names of. The medals I had earned one terrible day and one ordinary day at a time, none of them given, all of them paid for. My white cover sat on the closet shelf where it always sat, exactly level, because some habits do not leave you even when everything else in a house has gone sideways.

I drove out to the armory at Camp Colton, forty minutes from Bramble, at three in the morning, because I needed somewhere quiet to think and there is no place on this earth quieter to me than a base gate before sunrise. The young lance corporal on gate duty straightened up so fast when my headlights caught my rank sticker that he nearly dropped his flashlight.

“Gunny, everything all right?” he asked.

“Working through something,” I told him, and he had the good sense not to ask twice.

I found my old First Sergeant in the duty hut, because some men never really leave the Corps even after they retire from it, and he had been coming by that armory at odd hours for longer than I had been stationed there. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting me once, which is a rarer gift in a man than people realize. When I finished, he did not tell me my father was wrong, even though we both knew he was. He just looked at me for a long moment and said, “Fabric tears easy, Bellamy. Fourteen years doesn’t tear at all.” Then he told me to go get married.