A Reflection for Veteran’s Day

Once upon a time I was engaged to a Field Medic who served in Afghanistan.

I remember begging him not to go and him telling me

“I’m going to this meeting, I’m just going to go, don’t worry.”

That turned into

“Don’t be mad, but I enlisted.”

I couldn’t say anything and deep in my heart I knew he was going to do it but there’s that part of you that’s holding out that maybe he won’t and that was it.

We were so young. I never told him about the terrible nightmares I had leading up to him leaving.

He saved my life once.
A story for another time.

When I was growing up I didn’t live in a world where we had war. It was something we read in history books. My grandfather was a guerrilla fighter in World War II but that was something we never talked about and I would think It’s lucky that I never had to live through that.

Once in a while my former fiancé would message me in short bursts,

“I killed someone”
“Someone died on my table today”

and then he would disappear.

When he was in Afghanistan I never knew when the next message would come. The stories were always similar though, and he felt responsible for death when he was just the messenger.

When that tour was over he asked me to go to Italy with him, and from there he traveled all over the world. I was in a different space then but I always wondered what my life would have been like if I had gone with him.

One night he told me,

“If you had gone with me it wouldn’t have been the same because I would have worried about you.”

He doesn’t know that I was always worried about him.

Every Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day I think of all the people who have sacrificed so that I can live the life I have now.

When I look at the world now it looks like it’s going backwards in a lot of ways.

I think in general people don’t really like or want war, but people also don’t know how to talk to each other, discuss, or be open with what other people want. That creates emotional dissonance, which in turn causes emotional reactions and conflict.

Wars aren’t something you can repair over coffee with two people. They are entire ecosystems that are predicated on multiple factors with multiple parties, multiple histories, and multiple goals.

Sometimes I look at war, and think They broke you and I see him whole but fractured, with all his pieces.

But the cracks are deep, too deep for me to hold.

I wonder about all the other people who have lost people, and the ones who come back in pieces, pieces lost.

Wars are expensive. It’s not just dollars or defense budgets.

It’s minds and blood.

It’s the echoes that live in the people left behind, the ones who still wake to the sound of a memory that never stops beating.

I saw the aftermath of a bright light trying to turn pain into beauty.

Dangerous. Unpredictable.
But oh so beautiful in his brilliance.

I remember the way he wrote things. The way he shot portraits. The way he saw people, and memory, and the world.

His annoyance and amusement over me “wasting so much time to save a buck.”

How he loved my writing and always teased me about how one day he was going to retire off my royalties.

How he never yelled at me, not once, even when I lost the pendant he surprised me with on the first day.

“Not even 24 hours Rhea?!”
Followed up quickly with “I’m not mad.”

Which somehow made it so much worse because I could tell he was heartbroken and it was my fault.

He never yelled, not until the very end,
when everything fell apart completely.

And all the other pieces I lost of him through war.

One time, years later, I overheard him say

“She was the only thing I had left to look forward to.”

I don’t know what the answer is
but I’m still thankful.

I wish there was another way, but this is all I have.
And so this is all I can give.

For all those who served, and all those who loved them,

Thank you.

– Rhea Lynn Mascariñas
Writer and strategist exploring love, memory, and the architecture of human connection.