Bruce and I had 36 anniversaries together before he died of a brain tumor in a 2005. This November 9th would have been our 47th wedding anniversary and 47 years since Bruce was in Nam.
This year it is easier than the last and easier than the year before that. Yet still I find myself slightly out of sync with the world.
It is as if my heart is in a time capsule and the dates are shifting and swirling. Fragments of the past drift around me, blurry but still able to cause a gentle ache of loss and poignancy.
Of course we thought we were mature and wise!
I am deeply glad we married that young as it gave us so many more years together. It gave us time to be together too before Bruce went overseas.
“Overseas” – that sounds like such an innocuous term as if he were going to study in Europe or travel abroad.
I thought about cruising the strip, high school football and meeting this cute college guy named Bruce. I saw the photos from Nam and heard the news stories but it seemed unreal, maybe too scary to really grasp.
I watched the news with more intensity. I saw the pictures of young soldiers and worried. It was real for me in a way that it had not been up until then.
We spent our first New Years Eve walking the streets of New Orleans. On weekends we hiked the bayous of Alabama or the beaches on the Gulf.
It sounds fun but it was done with a touch of desperation.
The army “promised” Bruce that he would never go to Nam, but we weren’t convinced.
Nixon, the bombing of Cambodia, 543,000 troops in Nam, more than 33,000 American soldiers already dead, dark military cars pulling up to the homes of widows-to-be… and Bruce, my Bruce going to Nam.
I had wanted to make a special dinner for Bruce, but the best I could do on military pay was macaroni. I was about to add tuna fish to the pot when Bruce walked in the door. He was wearing his army uniform and carrying a bag of freshly caught shrimp.
He had bought the shrimp for $6.00 from a road side vendor. We couldn’t afford it with two weeks to the next pay day. I was angry at first but said nothing. I thought Bruce was bringing it as a Valentine’s Day gift and that was sweet.
Bruce kissed me on the cheek and hugged me. Then he kissed me on the lips with an emotion and intensity I didn’t quite understand. He still said nothing about what they had told him that day at the base.
We cooked the shrimp and sat down across from each other at the little table in the kitchen. I can see him now, playing with the shrimp and macaroni, pushing the food around the plate. He looked down and then up and then away again, avoiding my eyes.
We never did eat the shrimp. Instead we stood up and clung to each other, me sobbing, Bruce crying. We went to bed and lay in each other’s arms saying little, holding tight.
At the end of our brief leave I took Bruce to the airport for his flight to Vietnam. I cried all the way home, running two stop lights through the tears.
We had been married for a little over four months. We had aged years.
I kept all of his letters and read them over and over. He doused them with his cologne so I would smell them and remember him. Even now, 40 years later I can close my eyes and smell that scent. Part cologne, part Vietnam
The photos touch an inexplicable emotion in me; something to do with realizing Bruce had a profound experience as a soldier in Nam that I will never fully understand.
That first anniversary was one that we never anticipated. It was not the story book anniversary in some stateside hotel. Instead I had flown from LA and Bruce had flown from Vietnam to a place miles and cultures away from home.
The difference was more than the smell of Nam . . . jungle rot they called. It was more than the little bits of war stories cut short because he did not want me to know.
That anniversary in 1969, though, I didn’t understand and Bruce didn’t want to share.
I felt it in him as he lay on the bed, looked in the mirror or walked around the streets of Hong Kong with me.
We bought a stereo and had it shipped back home. hmmm “home” How alien that must have felt to Bruce who would in a few days go back to Nam. He liked to plan, though, for our future. The stereo was part of that.
We did all kinds of things that week that were not a part of my world back in America or Bruce’s world in Vietnam. We spent days surrounding ourselves with an allusion of timelessness as if we could keep the rest of the world away from us.
But in the end I would go back to America and he would go back to Vietnam for another few months.
Bruce continued to write me and I wrote him. It all seemed surreal. I drove to work on the freeways of Los Angeles. Bruce walked perimiter guard on the Phu Loi base in Nam.
I cherished the letters and the photos. They connected us.
Most were fragments of sentences and memories, but I treasured them.
They reminded me of that first year when are souls, our love and our view of the world were tested and aged.
After Bruce died in 2005 I looked at the charred scraps often. The letters again connected us across time and space.
Even now, 11 years after Bruce died I treasure those small reminders of our first year being married in the shadow of the war in Vietnam.
Every anniversary, just days before Veterans Day, I pull out one letter in particular as sorrow drifts around me. I read it and hear Bruce and I smile.
Bruce wrote 40 years ago to me
“I love you honey. Sleep well tonight. Keep thinking of the good night kiss and when you fall asleep I will be right there beside you in bed. Think of me close to you, holding you in my arms and in your dreams I will pull you close and kiss away your tears.”
We are far apart still, this time from death but Bruce is close in my dreams.
Happy anniversary Bruce. Welcome home from Vietnam.
