The Name He Left Off the Wall

Harold Pike slid the form across the folding table without looking up from his ledger. He had a ballpoint pen clipped to the pocket of a gray cardigan, and his reading glasses sat low on his nose.

“There you go,” he said. “Fill that out whenever you get a minute. No hurry.”

I looked down at it. The word Auxiliary ran across the top in blue letters, with the little cross emblem beside it.

“The ladies meet second Thursdays,” Harold said. “June runs it. That’s my wife. They do the bake sales, the hospital visits, the poppies in May. Good bunch of gals.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “But I’m not here as anybody’s wife.”

He finally looked up. He had kind eyes, pale blue, with the whites gone a little yellow at the edges. He was 79 years old, and he had been commander of that post for nine years.

“Well, sure,” he said, as if I had told him I preferred coffee to tea. “But the Auxiliary’s where the women are. You’ll like it.”

He was not being cruel. I want to say that plainly, because the rest of this story depends on it. Harold Pike was just certain, the way a man gets certain when nobody has asked him to look at the world again for fifty years.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in April. The hall smelled like fryer oil from the weekend and the Pine-Sol somebody had run over the tile that morning. Four men sat on stools at the long bar, and every one of them had gone quiet.

My DD-214 was folded in thirds inside my purse. I had brought it because I knew I would need it. I had not known I would need it for this.

The Paper in My Purse

Here is what that paper said. Rachel Ann Dunn, twelve years in the United States Army, job 88M, motor transport operator, which is a truck driver. Separated in 2012 as a Staff Sergeant.

It said I had deployed to Iraq twice, in 2005 and 2008. Both tours I ran convoys out of the big supply base at Balad, hauling fuel and water up and down roads that did not want us on them.

I could have laid it on the table right then. I could have unfolded it in front of those four men on their stools and tapped my finger on the line that said Iraq and waited for Harold to turn red.

I could also have gone home and called the district office. Women who served in a war overseas have been able to join the VFW for decades. One phone call and somebody in a nicer office than Harold’s would have set him straight.

But I did not come down to that hall to win an argument. I came down there because I had been out of the Army for a long time and I was tired of being the only person in every room who knew what a convoy briefing sounded like at three in the morning.

You cannot be ordered into belonging somewhere. If somebody makes them take you, you are a member, but you are not one of them. I wanted to be one of them.

So I smiled at Harold, folded his Auxiliary form neatly in half, and set it back on the corner of his table.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll get out of your way.”