Like Smoke, We Move [Amnesty 2006, Earthside Challege] by thedaytheystop
Title: Like Smoke, We Move
Author: thedaytheystop
Rating: PG-13/R
Sheppard, Gen, a take on events leading up to 1x01-02 Rising.
"You’re an only child, and you weren’t exactly planned. You were more of a surprise, when your mother discovered she was pregnant two days before her fortieth birthday. Legend has it that when your father heard he frowned and went outside to smoke."
Inspired by "The Unspoken," a poem by Edwin Morgan (included). Written but never posted for the Earthside Challenge.
--------------------------------------------------------
Like Smoke, We Move
When the troopship was pitching round the Cape
in '41, and there was a lull in the night uproar of
seas and winds, and a sudden full moon
swung huge out of the darkness like the world it is,
and we all crowded into the wet deck, leaning on
the rail, our arms on each other's shoulders,
gazing at the savage outcrop of great Africa.
and Tommy Cosh started singing 'Mandalay' and
we joined in with our raucous chorus of the
unforgettable song,
and the dawn came up like thunder like that
moon drawing the water of our yearning
though we were going to war, and left us exalted,
that was happiness,
but it is not like that.
When the television newscaster said
the second sputnik was up, not empty,
but with a small dog on board,
a half-ton treasury of life orbiting a thousand
miles above the thin television masts and mists
of November,
in clear space, heard, observed,
the faint far heartbeat sending back its message
steady and delicate,
and I was stirred by a deep confusion of feelings,
got up, stood with my back to the wall and my
palms pressed hard against it, my arms held
wide
as if I could spring from the earth ---
not loath myself to go out that very day where
Laika had shown man, felt
my cheeks burning with old Promethean warmth
rekindled --- ready ---
covered my face with my hands, seeing only an
animal
strapped in a doomed capsule, but the future
was still there, cool and whole like the moon,
waiting to be taken, smiling even
as the dog's bones and the elaborate casket of
aluminium
glow white and fuse in the arc of re-entry
and I knew what I felt was history,
its thrilling brilliance came down,
came down,
comes down on us all, bringing pride and pity,
but it is not like that.
But Glasgow days and grey weathers, when the
rain
beat on the bus shelter and you leaned slightly
against me, and the back of your hand touched
my hand in the shadows, and nothing was
said
when your hair grazed mine accidentally as we
talked in a cafe, yet not quite accidentally,
when I stole a glance at your face as we stood in a
doorway and found I was afraid
of what might happen if I should never see it again,
when we met, and met, in spite of such differences
in our lives,
and did the common things that in our feeling
became extraordinary, so that our first kiss
was like the winter morning moon, and as you
shifted in my arms
it was the sea changing the shingle that changes
it
as if for ever (but we are bound by nothing, but
like smoke
to mist or light in water we move, and mix) ---
O then it was a story as old as war or man
and although we have not said it we know it,
and although we have not claimed it we do it,
and although we have not vowed it we keep it,
without a name to the end
-- Edwin Morgan
---
You enlist because where you’re from that’s what boys do after a few years of high school. You’re one of the only twenty boys in your graduating class-you waited, finished it out, but only because you decided one day that you wanted to take calculus. You had to do it as an independent study, since no one else took it, but you finished it nonetheless.
On graduation day your dad (retired Colonel J. Sheppard) drives you the thirty miles to Goodland, where the recruiting office is. You look at the window at the never-ending stretch of golden brown and piercing blue and you decide that maybe you’ll join the Air Force.
When you get to Goodland, there’s a line of St. Francis boys stretching out of the office. You step in behind Brad Morris, who kicked you once in second grade. Brad’s an Army boy, you can tell. Your dad was Army, too, but he’s never expected you to be.
“Your shoulders aren’t wide enough,” he said once, on your sixteenth birthday. “You’d never make it through basic.”
The sun is beating down and your crisp white graduation shirt is scratching your shoulders and the line moves forward slowly, boys joining the exodus, one by one.
“Name?” one of the recruiters asks when you finally reach his desk. They keep track of the graduation dates, around these parts, and they’re prepared.
“Sheppard, John, sir,” you answer, “Air Force.”
He sizes you up and nods, slowly. He’s a Marine, himself, you can tell, but out here on the edge of nowhere the distinctions are blurred, not enough recruiters to have one for every service. He hands you the Air Force paperwork and sends you to edge of the room, where Brad and the others are scrawling down their own fates.
Your dad waits with the other fathers: outside, squinting at you through the dusty glass.
You’re one of the first to finish-probably because you know you’re one of the only ones who can read easily, one of the only ones who got more than the standard barely-passing grade in school.
“Hey, Shep,” Brad says, as you stand up. “Air Force, huh?”
“Yeah,” you say. “You?”
“Army, like my dad and Bill,” he replies, showing off the paperwork with a proud smile. Outside, Brad’s dad smiles too.
“See you, then,” Brad says, and you nod, hand the paperwork back to the Marine officer, and head into the back room for the cursory interview.
When you finish, you walk back out into the blazing June sun and your dad is waiting, chewing his tobacco and spitting it out into the dirt.
“Air Force,” you say, climbing back into the truck.
“Huh,” your dad says.
---
You’re an only child, and you weren’t exactly planned. You were more of a surprise, when your mother discovered she was pregnant two days before her fortieth birthday. Legend has it that when your father heard he frowned and went outside to smoke.
He was in the Army, and he was good-a Colonel, in Korea and after, mediating with the Soviets, but somewhere along the line something changed, and by the time you came along in 1975 he was pushing fifty and only interested in harvesting every last ragged ear of corn from the family farm. He married your mother, a St. Francis girl, when he retired in 1970. Everyone in town secretly thought he was a godsend, because without him Etta Lincoln would have been a spinster till she died.
When you came along, things changed, but not by much. Your mother raised you as she was raised. If your dad, who was raised somewhere out East, had any ideas about your upbringing, he didn’t share them, beyond an occasional well-deserved licking and teaching you to drive your first tractor.
---
The first couple of years in the Air Force are uneventful. You make it through basic and even write a few letters to your mother and Shannon Robart, who you took to senior prom and fucked afterwards in the sweltering dark in your father’s truck bed.
Most of the time you’re stationed in Texas, where everything is pretty much like home. There is the sky and the land and the point you dream about, where they change, where suddenly one breathes out and one’s feet no longer touch the ground.
After a while they notice that you can read and do math, as well as shoot a gun and grease up a plane, and you get promoted a few times until unexpectedly you’re a master sergeant.
After almost three years, they ask you to extend your contract and offer to put you in charge of the mechanics on the base. You think of the horizon and explain, haltingly, that you think you might like to fly. You’re just shy of twenty-one and your superior office looks you over and writes a recommendation for the Academy. You never learn why he thought you should go there rather than OCS.
That recommendation leads to a flurry of letters and frustration and finally a phone call home. Your dad’s authority gets you where your transcript and history could not, and two days after the call you’re shipped from Randolph to Colorado Springs, just in time for the beginning of the school year.
Starting at the Academy is like being eighteen again, vaguely nervous and unaware of yourself. You’d never planned to go to college, but here you are, on a full scholarship, and you end up having to study for hours for your exams even as you outrun and outshoot all of the other cadets in the athletic and military exercises. You’re probably the only one in your class who’s actually been enlisted, and that sets you apart, if only because you already know how to make a perfect bed and hold a crisp salute.
You don’t like Colorado-the mountains encroach on your peripheral vision, and you feel trapped. You don’t like the Academy too much, either, not the soaring chapel that’s nothing like the whitewashed clapboard church you grew up with or the instructors and officers that stare down their noses at you, as if your three years spent covered in grime and grease when you learned to fix every helicopter engine known to man mean nothing in their classroom or on their parade ground.
Eventually you finish, with a degree in mathematics and aerospace engineering. You didn’t choose them-your advisor chose them for you, but you’ve never found them difficult, and you’ve even gotten to fly in some planes. Your mother comes to your graduation, along with your Aunt Maureen, but your father stays home. As you graduate, he’s all you can think of, sitting on the desolate back porch, looking out at the soybean field that failed two seasons ago.
---
After the Academy, you go to pilot school, and you pass through the exams easily. Your vision is perfect, your grades are good, and you know how to appear as just another American boy in your interviews. They keep you in the ground courses for a while until finally you’re allowed in a T-37. You look at the instructor, check everything, speed down the runway, take off-and then you are in the air, and, suddenly, nothing else in the world matters.
They recommend you for helicopters, and you get stationed in Texas again. You don’t mind the choppers-you’ve come to love everything that flies. Texas feels like home-the stretch of flat land, extending in every direction, the welcoming openness of the sky, wider and grander than anywhere else in the world. Your world revolves around your base, your chopper, and your weekly evasive maneuvers practice.
By now, you’ve turned twenty-six, and only a few months after you receive your chopper assignment the world changes; skyscrapers fall on the other side of the country and for days the base is on edge, waiting for the declaration of war.
There is no grand gesture, no day of infamy. Your CO just calls you into his office, weeks later, and hands you an envelope-Afghanistan, it says. Combat duty.
You think that perhaps this is what you have been waiting for.
---
You get a month off, for your years of service, before you are shipped to the desert. You go home, back to the dusty county highways and the run-down high school where the boys play football and the girls dream of opening their own nail salons.
Brad Morris is there-he’s finished his stint in the Army, most of it spent shepherding new recruits into basic training at an intake station, and he’s married, with two kids and another on the way. When you run into him in Goodland at the one grocery store left after the Mercer’s in St. Francis closed, sometime while you were away, he proudly shows you a picture of his wife’s growing belly.
“And how are you?” he asks. “Heard you went to officer school or something, man,”
“Yeah,” you say. “The Academy. I guess I…wanted to fly.”
“No kidding,” Brad says, clapping you on the back. “Shep, a pilot.”
---
You mom’s nervous about your assignment, you can tell. She has the church ladies over for Sunday dinner the day before you leave and they bake and bake and bake afterwards until you have four tins of desserts for the plane ride to Ramstein.
Your father shakes your hand as you leave, and it’s all that you were expecting.
---
Afghanistan, when you finally get there, after orientation exercises in Saudi Arabia, is beyond what you’ve ever imagined. In some places it is a desert, expansive and hot and surpassing in every way your wildest conceptions of the word; in some places, the mountains burst through a landscape so barren and rocky that they appear uninhabitable. Sometimes it is violent green, splashed with red, as you fly over acres of poppy fields. Sometimes it is a city, burqa-clad women shuffling from building to building and young boys in Nike t-shirts playing soccer in the dusty street.
You fly everywhere, and do everything, and yeah, when it’s time, you get in a plane and you drop bombs, you fire on RPG launch stations, you kill. It’s not something you think about much, the killing, and you don’t dream about it at night. You dream of the sky, open and endless, and the wind whipping past your ears.
One of your men-Holland-asks you, once, why you don’t have more friends. You laugh it off, because you don’t know, and follow him and Mitch and Dex down to the C barracks to trade for illicit Afghan beer. You wake up, hung-over, to a base-wide gas mask drill.
---
When Holland and the others are shot down, you can almost picture it in your head. A camouflage helicopter, barely visible and yet achingly clear against the sand, the Taliban fighters on the other crest of the dune, their knockoff Kalashnikovs in hand.
You don’t really realize what you are doing until you are in your CO’s office with a plan for a rescue mission, because all you are seeing is the broken rotor, listing to one side and then the other in the wind.
When he says no-and you knew he would say no, because he is in every way identical to your father, practical and sun-browned and steel to the bone-you salute and return to your tent and spend an hour looking at Holland’s empty cot before you move.
From looks you get, after, you think that everyone thinks it was a great, heroic, honorable decision. Leave no man behind.
It wasn’t like that. You’re not sure what it was like. You’re only sure of your mouth, so dry it tasted of sand, as you walked out of your tent and to your chopper, alone.
---
You don’t tell your mother that you are being court-martialed. You don’t tell anybody.
They don’t handcuff you on the plane back to the States, but you have to wear your dress blues and you have an escort, two guys that met the cargo plane they shipped you to Germany in. They left you alone on the cargo plane, with strict orders not to move anywhere near the cockpit. You wandered the other way, instead, until you came into the main loading bay and saw the coffins, sixteen in all, each draped with a flag.
You turned around and went back to your seat and closed your eyes, feeling the sky hum around you, and you tried to forget that you weren’t the pilot, not anymore.
When you get to Germany your escorts hustle you onto another plane, homeward bound, and finally when you get to New York (where you’ve never been--where everything ended, and started, and where, ninety-odd years ago, your paternal grandmother was born to Italian immigrants, coming into the world with a full head of thick black hair) you walk through the airport and you can feel all of the civilians looking at you, measuring you up, taking in the dress blues and the polished shoes and the uniform cap. You can see the relief in some of their eyes and the disgust in others. You’re not sure if you deserve either.
---
The court-martial is quick, and only afterwards do you think that you should have been more worried about yourself and your future. The lawyer they assign you (military, of course) is competent, if not friendly, and he argues the honor card, and you play along, and phrases like good intentions and no additional casualties float along until you find yourself presented with a choice.
Dishonorable discharge or Antarctica.
You think about St. Francis, about Brad Morris’s long-pregnant wife and your mother, tucking her gray hair behind her ear as she starches her Sunday dress, and you choose.
---
Antarctica is new and ancient, all at once, and you think you kind of like it, more than you liked Colorado, maybe more than you liked Texas. You’re not sure.
During the long days of the polar summer you ferry civilians from McMurdo to another base, something secret and strange that you don’t concern yourself with. You start to meet people at McMurdo, without the expectations of war, and gradually the image of camouflaged helicopters fades from your mind. You relax a little, drink some smuggled Australian beer, and play pool, which you first learned in the musty basement rec room of your very first base when you enlisted all those years ago.
You write a letter home to your mother-you don’t mention the court-martial, and she doesn’t either, and if she wonders why you’re now in Antarctica, she doesn’t question it beyond accepting your claim that you “needed a change of scenery.” You haven’t spoken to your father; he doesn’t expect you to.
After a few months, you start to feel like you might like this person, this you, this Antarctic helicopter pilot, and maybe-for the first time in your life-you know what it is to be content, to feel like you are in the right place in the world.
Then, one day, you ferry a General in your chopper and you see a strange weapon that can seek a target on its own, and then before you can exhale you’re down an elevator shaft in some kind of laboratory and then you touch a chair and feel a spark, and when you sit down and think of the universe, it feels like the very first time blood has rushed through your veins.
Suddenly, a void you never knew existed in your soul is full to the brim, the abandoned back-stretches of the Kansas prairie forgotten in the rush of exultation flying through every fiber of your body.
This.
This is what it feels like to come home.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Sheppard’s hometown: St. Francis, Kansas. Chosen randomly on Google Maps. I have no idea what it’s like, having never been there, but it is 30 miles from Goodland.
Author: thedaytheystop
Rating: PG-13/R
Sheppard, Gen, a take on events leading up to 1x01-02 Rising.
"You’re an only child, and you weren’t exactly planned. You were more of a surprise, when your mother discovered she was pregnant two days before her fortieth birthday. Legend has it that when your father heard he frowned and went outside to smoke."
Inspired by "The Unspoken," a poem by Edwin Morgan (included). Written but never posted for the Earthside Challenge.
--------------------------------------------------------
Like Smoke, We Move
When the troopship was pitching round the Cape
in '41, and there was a lull in the night uproar of
seas and winds, and a sudden full moon
swung huge out of the darkness like the world it is,
and we all crowded into the wet deck, leaning on
the rail, our arms on each other's shoulders,
gazing at the savage outcrop of great Africa.
and Tommy Cosh started singing 'Mandalay' and
we joined in with our raucous chorus of the
unforgettable song,
and the dawn came up like thunder like that
moon drawing the water of our yearning
though we were going to war, and left us exalted,
that was happiness,
but it is not like that.
When the television newscaster said
the second sputnik was up, not empty,
but with a small dog on board,
a half-ton treasury of life orbiting a thousand
miles above the thin television masts and mists
of November,
in clear space, heard, observed,
the faint far heartbeat sending back its message
steady and delicate,
and I was stirred by a deep confusion of feelings,
got up, stood with my back to the wall and my
palms pressed hard against it, my arms held
wide
as if I could spring from the earth ---
not loath myself to go out that very day where
Laika had shown man, felt
my cheeks burning with old Promethean warmth
rekindled --- ready ---
covered my face with my hands, seeing only an
animal
strapped in a doomed capsule, but the future
was still there, cool and whole like the moon,
waiting to be taken, smiling even
as the dog's bones and the elaborate casket of
aluminium
glow white and fuse in the arc of re-entry
and I knew what I felt was history,
its thrilling brilliance came down,
came down,
comes down on us all, bringing pride and pity,
but it is not like that.
But Glasgow days and grey weathers, when the
rain
beat on the bus shelter and you leaned slightly
against me, and the back of your hand touched
my hand in the shadows, and nothing was
said
when your hair grazed mine accidentally as we
talked in a cafe, yet not quite accidentally,
when I stole a glance at your face as we stood in a
doorway and found I was afraid
of what might happen if I should never see it again,
when we met, and met, in spite of such differences
in our lives,
and did the common things that in our feeling
became extraordinary, so that our first kiss
was like the winter morning moon, and as you
shifted in my arms
it was the sea changing the shingle that changes
it
as if for ever (but we are bound by nothing, but
like smoke
to mist or light in water we move, and mix) ---
O then it was a story as old as war or man
and although we have not said it we know it,
and although we have not claimed it we do it,
and although we have not vowed it we keep it,
without a name to the end
-- Edwin Morgan
---
You enlist because where you’re from that’s what boys do after a few years of high school. You’re one of the only twenty boys in your graduating class-you waited, finished it out, but only because you decided one day that you wanted to take calculus. You had to do it as an independent study, since no one else took it, but you finished it nonetheless.
On graduation day your dad (retired Colonel J. Sheppard) drives you the thirty miles to Goodland, where the recruiting office is. You look at the window at the never-ending stretch of golden brown and piercing blue and you decide that maybe you’ll join the Air Force.
When you get to Goodland, there’s a line of St. Francis boys stretching out of the office. You step in behind Brad Morris, who kicked you once in second grade. Brad’s an Army boy, you can tell. Your dad was Army, too, but he’s never expected you to be.
“Your shoulders aren’t wide enough,” he said once, on your sixteenth birthday. “You’d never make it through basic.”
The sun is beating down and your crisp white graduation shirt is scratching your shoulders and the line moves forward slowly, boys joining the exodus, one by one.
“Name?” one of the recruiters asks when you finally reach his desk. They keep track of the graduation dates, around these parts, and they’re prepared.
“Sheppard, John, sir,” you answer, “Air Force.”
He sizes you up and nods, slowly. He’s a Marine, himself, you can tell, but out here on the edge of nowhere the distinctions are blurred, not enough recruiters to have one for every service. He hands you the Air Force paperwork and sends you to edge of the room, where Brad and the others are scrawling down their own fates.
Your dad waits with the other fathers: outside, squinting at you through the dusty glass.
You’re one of the first to finish-probably because you know you’re one of the only ones who can read easily, one of the only ones who got more than the standard barely-passing grade in school.
“Hey, Shep,” Brad says, as you stand up. “Air Force, huh?”
“Yeah,” you say. “You?”
“Army, like my dad and Bill,” he replies, showing off the paperwork with a proud smile. Outside, Brad’s dad smiles too.
“See you, then,” Brad says, and you nod, hand the paperwork back to the Marine officer, and head into the back room for the cursory interview.
When you finish, you walk back out into the blazing June sun and your dad is waiting, chewing his tobacco and spitting it out into the dirt.
“Air Force,” you say, climbing back into the truck.
“Huh,” your dad says.
---
You’re an only child, and you weren’t exactly planned. You were more of a surprise, when your mother discovered she was pregnant two days before her fortieth birthday. Legend has it that when your father heard he frowned and went outside to smoke.
He was in the Army, and he was good-a Colonel, in Korea and after, mediating with the Soviets, but somewhere along the line something changed, and by the time you came along in 1975 he was pushing fifty and only interested in harvesting every last ragged ear of corn from the family farm. He married your mother, a St. Francis girl, when he retired in 1970. Everyone in town secretly thought he was a godsend, because without him Etta Lincoln would have been a spinster till she died.
When you came along, things changed, but not by much. Your mother raised you as she was raised. If your dad, who was raised somewhere out East, had any ideas about your upbringing, he didn’t share them, beyond an occasional well-deserved licking and teaching you to drive your first tractor.
---
The first couple of years in the Air Force are uneventful. You make it through basic and even write a few letters to your mother and Shannon Robart, who you took to senior prom and fucked afterwards in the sweltering dark in your father’s truck bed.
Most of the time you’re stationed in Texas, where everything is pretty much like home. There is the sky and the land and the point you dream about, where they change, where suddenly one breathes out and one’s feet no longer touch the ground.
After a while they notice that you can read and do math, as well as shoot a gun and grease up a plane, and you get promoted a few times until unexpectedly you’re a master sergeant.
After almost three years, they ask you to extend your contract and offer to put you in charge of the mechanics on the base. You think of the horizon and explain, haltingly, that you think you might like to fly. You’re just shy of twenty-one and your superior office looks you over and writes a recommendation for the Academy. You never learn why he thought you should go there rather than OCS.
That recommendation leads to a flurry of letters and frustration and finally a phone call home. Your dad’s authority gets you where your transcript and history could not, and two days after the call you’re shipped from Randolph to Colorado Springs, just in time for the beginning of the school year.
Starting at the Academy is like being eighteen again, vaguely nervous and unaware of yourself. You’d never planned to go to college, but here you are, on a full scholarship, and you end up having to study for hours for your exams even as you outrun and outshoot all of the other cadets in the athletic and military exercises. You’re probably the only one in your class who’s actually been enlisted, and that sets you apart, if only because you already know how to make a perfect bed and hold a crisp salute.
You don’t like Colorado-the mountains encroach on your peripheral vision, and you feel trapped. You don’t like the Academy too much, either, not the soaring chapel that’s nothing like the whitewashed clapboard church you grew up with or the instructors and officers that stare down their noses at you, as if your three years spent covered in grime and grease when you learned to fix every helicopter engine known to man mean nothing in their classroom or on their parade ground.
Eventually you finish, with a degree in mathematics and aerospace engineering. You didn’t choose them-your advisor chose them for you, but you’ve never found them difficult, and you’ve even gotten to fly in some planes. Your mother comes to your graduation, along with your Aunt Maureen, but your father stays home. As you graduate, he’s all you can think of, sitting on the desolate back porch, looking out at the soybean field that failed two seasons ago.
---
After the Academy, you go to pilot school, and you pass through the exams easily. Your vision is perfect, your grades are good, and you know how to appear as just another American boy in your interviews. They keep you in the ground courses for a while until finally you’re allowed in a T-37. You look at the instructor, check everything, speed down the runway, take off-and then you are in the air, and, suddenly, nothing else in the world matters.
They recommend you for helicopters, and you get stationed in Texas again. You don’t mind the choppers-you’ve come to love everything that flies. Texas feels like home-the stretch of flat land, extending in every direction, the welcoming openness of the sky, wider and grander than anywhere else in the world. Your world revolves around your base, your chopper, and your weekly evasive maneuvers practice.
By now, you’ve turned twenty-six, and only a few months after you receive your chopper assignment the world changes; skyscrapers fall on the other side of the country and for days the base is on edge, waiting for the declaration of war.
There is no grand gesture, no day of infamy. Your CO just calls you into his office, weeks later, and hands you an envelope-Afghanistan, it says. Combat duty.
You think that perhaps this is what you have been waiting for.
---
You get a month off, for your years of service, before you are shipped to the desert. You go home, back to the dusty county highways and the run-down high school where the boys play football and the girls dream of opening their own nail salons.
Brad Morris is there-he’s finished his stint in the Army, most of it spent shepherding new recruits into basic training at an intake station, and he’s married, with two kids and another on the way. When you run into him in Goodland at the one grocery store left after the Mercer’s in St. Francis closed, sometime while you were away, he proudly shows you a picture of his wife’s growing belly.
“And how are you?” he asks. “Heard you went to officer school or something, man,”
“Yeah,” you say. “The Academy. I guess I…wanted to fly.”
“No kidding,” Brad says, clapping you on the back. “Shep, a pilot.”
---
You mom’s nervous about your assignment, you can tell. She has the church ladies over for Sunday dinner the day before you leave and they bake and bake and bake afterwards until you have four tins of desserts for the plane ride to Ramstein.
Your father shakes your hand as you leave, and it’s all that you were expecting.
---
Afghanistan, when you finally get there, after orientation exercises in Saudi Arabia, is beyond what you’ve ever imagined. In some places it is a desert, expansive and hot and surpassing in every way your wildest conceptions of the word; in some places, the mountains burst through a landscape so barren and rocky that they appear uninhabitable. Sometimes it is violent green, splashed with red, as you fly over acres of poppy fields. Sometimes it is a city, burqa-clad women shuffling from building to building and young boys in Nike t-shirts playing soccer in the dusty street.
You fly everywhere, and do everything, and yeah, when it’s time, you get in a plane and you drop bombs, you fire on RPG launch stations, you kill. It’s not something you think about much, the killing, and you don’t dream about it at night. You dream of the sky, open and endless, and the wind whipping past your ears.
One of your men-Holland-asks you, once, why you don’t have more friends. You laugh it off, because you don’t know, and follow him and Mitch and Dex down to the C barracks to trade for illicit Afghan beer. You wake up, hung-over, to a base-wide gas mask drill.
---
When Holland and the others are shot down, you can almost picture it in your head. A camouflage helicopter, barely visible and yet achingly clear against the sand, the Taliban fighters on the other crest of the dune, their knockoff Kalashnikovs in hand.
You don’t really realize what you are doing until you are in your CO’s office with a plan for a rescue mission, because all you are seeing is the broken rotor, listing to one side and then the other in the wind.
When he says no-and you knew he would say no, because he is in every way identical to your father, practical and sun-browned and steel to the bone-you salute and return to your tent and spend an hour looking at Holland’s empty cot before you move.
From looks you get, after, you think that everyone thinks it was a great, heroic, honorable decision. Leave no man behind.
It wasn’t like that. You’re not sure what it was like. You’re only sure of your mouth, so dry it tasted of sand, as you walked out of your tent and to your chopper, alone.
---
You don’t tell your mother that you are being court-martialed. You don’t tell anybody.
They don’t handcuff you on the plane back to the States, but you have to wear your dress blues and you have an escort, two guys that met the cargo plane they shipped you to Germany in. They left you alone on the cargo plane, with strict orders not to move anywhere near the cockpit. You wandered the other way, instead, until you came into the main loading bay and saw the coffins, sixteen in all, each draped with a flag.
You turned around and went back to your seat and closed your eyes, feeling the sky hum around you, and you tried to forget that you weren’t the pilot, not anymore.
When you get to Germany your escorts hustle you onto another plane, homeward bound, and finally when you get to New York (where you’ve never been--where everything ended, and started, and where, ninety-odd years ago, your paternal grandmother was born to Italian immigrants, coming into the world with a full head of thick black hair) you walk through the airport and you can feel all of the civilians looking at you, measuring you up, taking in the dress blues and the polished shoes and the uniform cap. You can see the relief in some of their eyes and the disgust in others. You’re not sure if you deserve either.
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The court-martial is quick, and only afterwards do you think that you should have been more worried about yourself and your future. The lawyer they assign you (military, of course) is competent, if not friendly, and he argues the honor card, and you play along, and phrases like good intentions and no additional casualties float along until you find yourself presented with a choice.
Dishonorable discharge or Antarctica.
You think about St. Francis, about Brad Morris’s long-pregnant wife and your mother, tucking her gray hair behind her ear as she starches her Sunday dress, and you choose.
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Antarctica is new and ancient, all at once, and you think you kind of like it, more than you liked Colorado, maybe more than you liked Texas. You’re not sure.
During the long days of the polar summer you ferry civilians from McMurdo to another base, something secret and strange that you don’t concern yourself with. You start to meet people at McMurdo, without the expectations of war, and gradually the image of camouflaged helicopters fades from your mind. You relax a little, drink some smuggled Australian beer, and play pool, which you first learned in the musty basement rec room of your very first base when you enlisted all those years ago.
You write a letter home to your mother-you don’t mention the court-martial, and she doesn’t either, and if she wonders why you’re now in Antarctica, she doesn’t question it beyond accepting your claim that you “needed a change of scenery.” You haven’t spoken to your father; he doesn’t expect you to.
After a few months, you start to feel like you might like this person, this you, this Antarctic helicopter pilot, and maybe-for the first time in your life-you know what it is to be content, to feel like you are in the right place in the world.
Then, one day, you ferry a General in your chopper and you see a strange weapon that can seek a target on its own, and then before you can exhale you’re down an elevator shaft in some kind of laboratory and then you touch a chair and feel a spark, and when you sit down and think of the universe, it feels like the very first time blood has rushed through your veins.
Suddenly, a void you never knew existed in your soul is full to the brim, the abandoned back-stretches of the Kansas prairie forgotten in the rush of exultation flying through every fiber of your body.
This.
This is what it feels like to come home.
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Note: Sheppard’s hometown: St. Francis, Kansas. Chosen randomly on Google Maps. I have no idea what it’s like, having never been there, but it is 30 miles from Goodland.