by Benjamin Sledge
“What’s the last thing you remember telling him before he died?”
The reporter’s question makes me stiffen. Was it goodbye? Stay frosty? Watch your six? Even though she can’t see the gesture on the other end of the phone, I shake my head back and forth and reply hesitantly, my mind gnawing at where the conversation is about to head.
“It wasn’t a general sentiment. It was an answer to a question he asked.”
The reporter presses further. “What did Kyle ask you?”
I pause and breathe deeply, then exhale and repeat Kyle’s question. “How did you survive? How did you manage not to go crazy from fear?”
I hear scribbling as I wade through the silence, lost in thought before she speaks again.
“What did you tell him?”
There’s an ugly fresco painting sitting in a room at my parent’s house. I see it every year when I visit, and it always makes me smile. It’s the last thing Kyle gave my mom before he died. Technically, he mooned her first and then presented the atrocious depiction of the Panama coast. When my mom asked what the hell she should do with the monstrosity, he informed her she must keep it forever and display the fresco with pride. Now it’s a ghost that haunts our
memories.
Sometimes we stare at it together. Neither of us can talk about Kyle for more than a few heartbeats before one of us feels the old wound tear anew. Years later, my mom’s friends will ask what the loss was like. “Like losing one of my own children,” she’ll say. Like me, she has never recovered from Kyle’s death. I think most veterans who lose a friend in combat carry a memory that rummages around in their mind like a raccoon digging through a dumpster. Sometimes you catch
glimpses of it, but when you shine a light on the memory too long, it’s paralyzing.
“Sergeant Sledge? Are you still there?” the voice on the other end of the phone asks.
I remember the first time I saw a scene from The Walking Dead that left me speechless. It’s as if the writers had listened in on my conversation with this reporter. In the scene, the lead character, Rick, is sitting in a barn and sharing a story about his grandfather. As a young boy, Rick wanted to know about his grandfather’s service fighting the Nazis in World War II. Curious, he
asked his granddad if he’d killed anyone — a question his grandfather refused to answer, telling him that was “grown-up stuff.” So Rick tried another angle and asked if anyone had ever tried to kill him. Rick said his granddad got real quiet, then recounted the following...READ MORE
