The Truck Driver at the VFW Breakfast
And every year Mark took it. He would just keep eating. Sometimes he would say, “Okay, Todd.” Mostly he said nothing at all.
I asked him once, in the truck on the way home, why he let his brother talk to him like that.
He kept his eyes on the road for almost a full mile. Then he said, “Because if I correct him, I have to tell it. And I’m not telling it.”
That is why I never told it either. People have asked me since why I did not just stand up one of those years and say it myself. The answer is simple. It was not my story to tell. It was his, and he had told me once on a kitchen floor, and that was a trust.
So I did the only thing I could think of that was not telling it. I went looking for the one other person in the world who had the right.
It took me six months.
I started in May, after Mark had a bad stretch of nights. He gets them every spring, around the time it happened. He does not wake up yelling, the way they show it on TV. He just goes very still, and then he gets up and goes outside and sits on the tailgate of his truck until it gets light.
I knew a first name. I knew Ray was from somewhere up north in Wisconsin, because Mark had once said something about the Packers that made me think it. I knew the name of Mark’s company, because his discharge papers are in the gun safe, and I am the one who keeps track of the paperwork in our house.
I found a Facebook group for the company. It had about three hundred members. Old photos of trucks and tents and young men squinting into the sun. I scrolled back years. I did not post anything, because Mark is in a lot of the same circles as some of those men, and I did not want it to get back to him.
There were two Rays. One was in Texas and had been in a different platoon. The other one had not posted since 2016, and his profile picture was a walleye.
I found a reunion list in a newsletter somebody had scanned. It had a phone number in Appleton. I called it on my lunch break, standing out by the ambulance bay, and a very nice old woman told me she had owned that number for eleven years and had never heard of anybody named Kowalski.
I almost quit that day. I sat in my car with my scrubs on and cried a little, which I do not do very often, and then I went back in and finished my shift.
In August I tried the walleye man again. This time I sent a message. I wrote it nine times before I sent it.
“My name is Diane Krueger. My husband is Mark Krueger. I think you knew him in 2004. If I have the wrong person, I am so sorry to bother you.”
Three days went by. Then a woman named Kim wrote back. She said she was Ray’s wife, and that Ray did not really go on Facebook, and she wanted to know what this was about before she showed him.