“Two answers,” Grant said as he reached for a box of cereal. “Mom went with Melissa to Leah’s doctor’s appointment, but she is aware that I’m very ill,” Grant paused to offer a half-hearted, fake cough, “and that is why I’m not at school. As for the mail I had sent to your address, I’m going to need you to hand that over because if I feel you know too much I might have to kill you.”
“Well, in that case,” Joanna rolled her eyes, “I hardly noticed the Harvard insignia.” She reached into her briefcase and handed Grant a package.
Grant stared down at the letter.
“You could get into Harvard in your sleep, so why are you looking at that letter as if you are waiting with bated breath to see if you’ve made the cut.” Joanna stopped to raise a curious eyebrow. “Is there something I need to know? What kind of mood were you in when you wrote your admissions essay?”
“It was genius if I do say so myself,” Grant snickered as he tossed the packet carelessly onto the kitchen table.
Joanna sat down at the table and began unwrapping a piece of candy she took from her pocket. “Well, genius, did you forget your address? Because I don’t intend to become your personal postal delivery service.”
Grant carried his bowl of Frosted Flakes to the table. “Well, Joey, as you know, at my primary residence, letters from any college other than the United States Military Academy are generally, no pun intended, weeded out before I ever see them because no self-respecting Cohen man would dream of bucking tradition and going civilian.”
“It’s Harvard!” Joanna exclaimed.
“I don’t think you get it, Joey,” Grant said with his mouth full.
“Again,” Joanna emphasized, “it’s Harvard!”
Grant nodded. “And that might mean something to a rational human being; perhaps you’re unaware that our father is certifiably nuts. It won’t matter that it’s Harvard. That means nothing to him. You might as well say Podunk Junior College; he hears no difference. The man is the most singularly-minded individual on the face of the planet. Hooah!”
Joanna rolled her eyes but couldn’t stifle a little giggle. “Hooah,” she smiled back as she playfully tousled Grant’s hair.
Grant sat in his senior English class, flipping through his folder as he listened to his teacher explaining the daily writing assignment. He pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his folder and stared down at an e-mail that he had printed that morning but not yet read. He carefully tucked the letter back into the pocket of his folder, and his mind drifted back to the summer and back to a girl with long, curly, brown hair and a pure southern accent that, though he had teased her about it, he couldn’t get enough of.
Basketball camp had lasted only two weeks, but Grant feared that the questions of what could have been would never leave him. He had spent his days playing basketball and his evenings alone with a girl who seemed to have entered his world for the sole purpose of reminding him that it’s never a good idea to get close to anyone because you’ll eventually have to leave them. Distance or death eventually steal the people you love, so, though he had spent the best two weeks of his life with the most amazing girl he’d probably ever meet, he was determined to distance himself from her and her memory. She was not making that easy. She had sent no fewer than a dozen e-mails, but he had not responded because he would not, could not let his guard down any more than he already had. She had been a beautiful moment in time, but, like so many others things in his life, she was gone now.
It was Grant’s senior year of high school, and, at the end of the year, he would be free, free to write his own destiny and blaze his own path, and he looked forward to the possibilities that the future held for him. Sometimes he imagined college; in some of his visions he was wearing a Tar Heels basketball jersey at the University of North Carolina. Other times he was sitting in a classroom at Harvard Law watching for some woman who was a little more Reese Witherspoon and a little less Elle Woods to walk in. Other times, despite his best efforts to curse his subconscious, he pictured himself at West Point, wearing the cadet uniform and filing into formation. Among military men, there had always been a certain amount of clout that came along with his last name. For David, his last name had meant a foot in the door. For Ike, it represented history, pride and long-standing tradition. For Grant, it was more like a birthright that he would have happily sold to the highest bidder. In the Army everything operated by pecking-order. He, because of who his father was, was treated with tremendous respect by those his father outranked. He often wondered what all of those people would think if he turned out to be nothing like his father at all. He couldn’t imagine entering West Point with a name like Grant Cohen. The name alone carried expectations! Many men entered West Point, but how many of them were forced to do so carrying the names of two of the academy’s most revered graduates? Sometimes Grant thought about taking Pops’ money and buying a house, maybe in Boston or maybe in North Carolina, and living in the same place for the rest of his life. Other times he wondered what it might be like to wander around with nothing but his money, his backpack and his passport.
Grant took a small stack of paper from his folder and, shaking off all thoughts of the summer and all the unanswered questions about his future, began working on his assignment. Grant found the process of actually conversing with most people to be a painful undertaking, but he had a passion for the written word. He not only loved to read, but he found that he enjoyed expressing himself in his daily journal entries.
“When I was a kid, I played war,” he wrote that day. “Like most other five-year-old boys I blew away the enemy with my imaginary machine gun and, trying to make my voice as deep and intimidating as I could make it, shouted coldly for them to die. I called them names… racist names. I shouted phrases at my imaginary victims that I had heard in movies. After all, they were the enemy… the target… the bad guys. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I truly came to understand that those whom I knew only by the name enemy were actually boys from other nations who had been asked to do for their country precisely what American boys were asked to do for our country. Sure, their ideals might have been different. Their beliefs, moral code, politics and motivation may have conflicted with ours. As misguided and convoluted as their world view might have been at times, I came to understand that those I simply called the enemy were really men just like my father… they had mothers, wives and children. Somewhere, thousands of miles away, I knew there was a little boy like me whose daddy had led his troops into war… a little boy with darker skin, darker hair, who practiced different customs and spoke a different language, yet asked the very same questions I was asking… primarily when and if his daddy was ever coming home.
I was hiding under my father’s desk when I heard a young man, merely a few years older than I am now, in tears as he recalled looking into the dying eyes of the man he’d killed. I had been around military men all my life. I had heard my father’s stories of war, but, as I came to realize that day, there were aspects of my father’s job, of his life, that I knew nothing about.
My dad was the toughest man I knew… the sort of guy who could cut his arm half off with a chain saw and not flinch… pull splinters the size of a two-by-four from his foot without so much as a wince… doctor his own wound with a pocket knife because he didn’t want to bother with the hospital.
I remember crawling out from under my dad’s desk that night and stupidly asking him how many men he had killed. The way he looked at me that day made me believe that he might be about to add one more to his sum total. He told me that no one had ever dared ask him that question…not his father, not my mother, not my older siblings. He pointed a stern finger in my direction, that, at that point in my life, I would have sworn could have snapped me in half, and he told me with utmost sincerity that he never talked about war. I was confused; of course he talked about war… that was all he talked about… history, politics, national security, rank, strategy, tactics, guns, planes, bombs… simply put… war.
He told me that if I wanted to understand war, I needed to talk to veterans with no legs, no arms, faces burned beyond recognition. He told me about the men who lay traumatized and comatose because they couldn’t forget what they’d seen.
‘Then why do you fight; why do you train other men to fight?’ I shrugged, not because I couldn’t come up with an answer on my own, but because I wanted to hear his.
He stared me in the eyes, and, with tight-lipped conviction, he quoted former president Ronald Reagan: ‘Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.’
I had seen the men who believed so wholeheartedly in the foundation our great nation was built on that they were willing to lay their lives down in order to preserve it. I admired those men, willing to die for me and millions of kids like me, so that we would never know a world where we didn’t have the right to say, do and believe as we so desired.
I have since grown up and learned to appreciate those men even more. I’ve heard all the stories of war vets turned abusive alcoholics, grown men afraid of their own shadows. I’ve read all the books: Mailer, Heller, Tim O’Brien. War is hell. I’ve come to understand that the men who come home and are able to lead productive, healthy lives, the only true survivors of war, leave what they saw on the battlefield buried in a place they never revisit.
Obviously, I have never joined the military; I’ve never been to war, but I’ve spent nearly eighteen years around men who have. I understand war as much as someone who has never fought one possibly can; I understand why heroes like my father fight. I hate war, but I know enough to know it’s necessary, and I love the warriors who are willing to fight for me. Anyone who knows anything about the military knows that there is a clear distinction in the Army between enlisted men and officers. The thing I admire most about my father is that, though his rank is important to him, he proudly calls himself a soldier. Throughout my life I’ve asked lots of questions, trying to understand the psyche of a soldier… why they fought… how they fought. If I have learned one life-lesson in the lifetime I have spent as the son of a four-star general, it is that despite the differences among us, we are all men, family, and, when it comes down to it, survival in the most literal sense depends on knowing that you can count on the man standing on your left and on your right: ‘war is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead’ (O’Brien). In war, as in life, all we have is each other and ‘from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ (Shakespeare).
This brief reflection of war and the heroes who fight them begs the question, what happens when you can’t count on your hero anymore? What happens when the very person you trusted to lead the way turns out to be fraternizing behind enemy lines? What happens when that hero breaks the very code he taught you? Is it possible that, in an instant, you can lose all respect for the person you respected most in the world? Is that fair, and does it matter if it’s not?”
Grant stared out the window for a moment before turning back to his notebook. “What happens when you’re hiding a secret that is eating you alive inside?”
David was helping his father load the back of the family van as the Cohen family prepared for a rare weekend outing together, though he was doing little more now than handing luggage to the general after being chided for not effectively maximizing space.
Melissa slid her cell phone into her pocket, as she watched from the sidewalk. “Mom says that Leah’s fine. She’s napping now, so I couldn’t talk to her.” She paused. “Well, you know what I mean; I thought maybe Mom could hold the phone up to her ear just so she could hear my voice.”
David nodded at his wife. “She’ll be fine. It’s just a weekend.”
“Did you remember to put her purple sippy cup in her bag like I asked you?” Melissa exclaimed.
“Mel,” David smiled as he wrapped his wife in his arms and kissed the top of her head, “she has her princess cup; she has her blankie, and, truth be known, she is probably happy to have a break from our constant cooing.”
“I doubt she gets a break from that with grandma,” Melissa replied seriously.
“You should have brought Princess Leah with us,” Randy said gruffly.
“Melissa needs a break every now and then,” David said as he handed his dad the last of the luggage. “You should see this woman in action. She is like Super-Mom twenty-four hours a day, and she won’t take any time for herself unless I absolutely make her. She is over due for a weekend of adult conversation.”
Randy was six-foot-six, solidly built, with a stern brow and a harsh tone that faded in moments when he spoke to the people he loved. He possessed a dominating presence that was, at times, intimidating. “I appreciate you guys taking the time to do this,” he said as he put his hand on David’s shoulder. He smiled at his daughter-in-law, and she could see a kindness in his dark eyes. “It’s very important to Nora that all you kids get together every once in a while. It’s been a while since she’s seen everyone at the same time, and she needs that.” He nodded thoughtfully. “I guess I can’t say that I mind it myself.”
Nora walked out of the front door, looking a bit disheveled as she held her cell phone to her ear.
