When the war came for me

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On March 20, 2003, I was stationed in Alaska, about as far away from the desert heat of Iraq as you could get. I was a staff sergeant in the Army, assigned to the public affairs office at Fort Richardson just north of Anchorage. I spent nearly every working hour under the bland gaze of fluorescent lights with thoughts of war — actual combat in the “real” Army — far, far from my mind. Maybe someday I’d earn a Purple Heart for carpal tunnel syndrome, but I knew I would never come close to the graze of a bullet.

From the distant land called Washington, D.C., we’d heard the rumble of war-mongering getting louder every day. And now, the inevitable was upon us. For weeks, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had engaged in a stare-down contest. Neither one had blinked and now their eyeballs were all dried out, thanks to their resolve, hubris and, in at least one case, outright insanity. Bush had given Iraq a 48-hour warning, clicking a political stopwatch to life.

As the hour neared, there was something approaching a party atmosphere in the U.S. Army Alaska headquarters building where I worked. Voices rose in pitch. Tight laughter punctuated conversations. Senior officers swaggered down the hallways. At last, at last, all their military training would be put to good use.

Fiction: Numb by David Abrams

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Three weeks before Christmas, my sister-in-law left her husband for another man. When Robin made her grand exit -- slamming the door so hard the Sears family portrait trembled, then seemed to leap off the wall -- my wife’s heart went out to Jerome. She homed in on his pain like it was an emergency distress signal blinking from a glacier’s crevasse. Jerome has always been Elizabeth’s favorite brother because, she says, he reminds her of me -- or vice versa, I guess.

My other brothers-in-law, Zeke and Sam, were always cruel to her, playing tricks, never telling the truth about anything, always keeping an emotional distance. Typical males. Elizabeth told me: “They never talked about anything but sex -- you know, what they were going to do to all the girls we went to school with. When I was in the bathroom, I’d catch them looking under the door with those little mirrors dentists use to examine your teeth -- except they were trying to see me pee. I’d scream and holler for Mom, but they’d keep right on sticking those mirrors under the door.”

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When the war came for me

Fiction: Numb by David Abrams