The Truck Driver at the VFW Breakfast
My husband Mark has gone to that breakfast every year since he came home. He does not march in the parade. He does not wear a cap with anything stitched on it. He just goes, eats his pancakes, puts a twenty in the honor guard jar, and goes home.
I have always thought it was the only place he could stand to be on that day. A room full of men who did not need him to say anything.
And every year, his brother came along and said something.
Todd is three years older than Mark. He sells insurance out of a little office on Main Street, between the hardware store and the place that used to be a video store and is now a vape shop. He is good at it. He knows everybody, and everybody knows him, and he has never once been quiet in his life.
The two of them grew up on a dairy farm south of town. Their father milked sixty cows twice a day and served in Korea, and he hung his discharge papers in a frame in the hallway where the boys walked past them every morning.
Mark joined the Army at nineteen. He was an 88M, a motor transport operator, which is the Army’s way of saying truck driver. In 2003 his transportation company got its orders, and early in 2004 he was in Iraq, driving supply convoys up and down the main roads out of a big base called Anaconda.
He came home in the spring of 2005. I met him that summer at a softball game. He was twenty-eight, quiet, polite, and he had scars across both palms that he told me came from grabbing a hot grill.
I believed him for about four months.
Then one night that fall I woke up and he was not in bed. I found him on the kitchen floor with his back against the dishwasher and his hands open in his lap, staring at them like they belonged to somebody else.
I sat down on the linoleum next to him. I did not say anything. I am good at that part, it turns out. You learn it in the ER, sitting with families.
After a long time, he talked. It was maybe ten minutes. A convoy. A bomb in the road. The truck in front of him on fire. A guy named Ray stuck in the cab. He said he got him out. He said his hands did that, on the door. He said Ray went out on a helicopter and then to Germany, and he heard later that Ray made it home.
Then he said, “I don’t want to talk about it again, Di.” And he never did.
We got married the next year. Emma came along not long after. He went to work for the county highway department, and now he runs the road crew, and in twenty years I have never seen him lose his temper with a single person.
He has also never once answered his brother.
I used to think Todd was cruel. I am going to be honest about that, because I am going to be honest about everything else.
Every Veterans Day it was something. “Here’s the war hero.” “Hey, Mark, did they give you a medal for parallel parking?” “My brother fought the war on terror from behind a steering wheel.” Every year, in front of whoever was sitting there.