A Man in Uniform

      The dark blue, button-down shirt tucked neatly into his belted navy pants was merely the backdrop to the many patches sewn across his pressed sleeve. Robbie, my first love in the second grade, sported that yellow handkerchief better than any Cub Scout I’d ever seen. He would only ever be out-shined by my own son many years later.

        If I’m being honest, that was when my affection for men in uniforms began. But as with all puppy love, Robbie the Cub Scout would diminish in my heart, only to be replaced by Brett, the Boy Scout, in 5th grade.

       By high school it was, Trevor, the leader of the marching band in his red polyester jacket lined with gold tassels and a white, feathery plume shooting out the red and white shacko atop his head. The design on his jacket formed a V that pointed down to his pleated white pants. It was enough to drive a hormonal teenage girl insane.

      And don’t forget the superhero cape. In my opinion, all uniforms should have a superhero cape. After all, some men in uniform are akin to real-life superheros, at least in my mind.

      Over the years, I’ve had many uniform-clad lovers. There was Peter, the policeman; Frank, the fireman; Sam, the sailor; Mark, the Marine, and I can’t ever forget Bickram, the handsome Buckingham Palace guard I had a fling with while on holiday. (That’s how they say vacation in England -- holiday.)

       The list could go on. Over the years, I’ve broken many a uniformed man’s heart. But there would be one uniformed man that would completely, through no fault of his own, annihilate mine.

      When I met him, he was sitting on a bench outside the courthouse, disheveled, reeking of body odor and dried urine, mumbling to himself. He held a sign, “Veteran, will work for food.” I brought him home, let him shower, fed him, and offered him the guest bed. He disappeared by morning.

       I met him again one day as I slowed to a stop at the off-ramp of 417 and Aloma Boulevard. He was standing on the corner in the August sun, his lips parched, his wrinkled skin burning, holding a sign with the single word, “Hungry.” I rolled down my window and handed him a twenty and my bottled water. It was all I had on me. He took it, said the obligatory God Bless, and moved on to the next car. He did not recognize me.

       He got thrown out of homeless shelters because he couldn’t control his impulse to lash out at the ghosts who haunted his dreams. He spent the 4th of July in jail, picked up for disturbing the peace. He had only wanted the mortars to stop.

       His uniform was once new, pressed, barely worn. But just like the unworldly young man beneath, that uniform would be soiled and ripped apart beyond repair in the rice paddy fields and jungles of a foreign country. It would later be spat on by ungrateful citizens of the very country from which the young man had been drafted and forced to give up a life that could have been. Baby killer they had called him as they threw red paint on his underutilized dress uniform, worn only for his bittersweet homecoming.

      He’d had to leave many brothers behind but he had made it home alive, or at least this screwed-up version of alive. But he would never truly find home again. Home was gone. He was not welcome.

      By the time I found him many years later, he didn’t know who I was. I had been an unknown consequence of high school love before he’d shipped out, and by the time he’d made it back, Mom had married my dad, at least the man I would grow up knowing as my dad.

       I did my best to get him help. I wasn’t concerned that the VA’s version of help would eventually drive him further into himself. My intentions were selfish. I wanted him to know me. I wanted him to remember my mom. I wanted him to acknowledge the love he had shared with her that had resulted in my birth.

     He couldn’t.

     I tried to give him a safe place to come home to.

     He wouldn’t stay.

     It took me years to come to terms with the fact that the young man who had fathered me no longer existed. That boy had died many years ago with his comrades in that faraway, crimson jungle.

     Mom had given me a picture of him in his Army dress greens taken days before he had deployed. I put it in a box and shoved it in the back of my closet. I had to finally let go of the superhero image I had been fervently grasping. Only a shell of that pictured man remained.

      Last week, he was struck by a hit-and-run driver as he walked along Colonial Drive. He bled out on the side of the road, anonymous and alone.

      Today, tears stream down my cheeks as I lay a single yellow rose at the foot of his headstone and I say goodbye once again, my heart breaking over the love of the one uniformed man I had wanted and needed the most that I would never, ever have.

      I was wrong. In my heart, he will always be a true, real-life hero. His sacrifice was far more than even he could comprehend.

By GRClarke