The final chapters of Company K hit hard. It’s a bunch of short stories about coming home. And in the last, one of Company K’s soldiers visits his old camp a few years after the war has ended.
The nostalgia of old places.
He visits the commanding officer, takes a look at the current roster, and sees a familiar name – one of the soldiers he served with in WWI was still in the unit. These two old soldiers meet up and tour the facilities. The troop bay where they had stayed had been converted into a kind of monument to the men who “went over,” the soldiers’ names etched into the wall to mark their bunks.
The two stood and talked about was and when, and had a hard time remembering who was who and who did what. They were both searching for a kind of nostalgic happy memory that was supposed to be there, but as they stood, trying to remember, something didn’t feel right. They couldn’t find it. And stranger still, there was nothing between them.
Then one of the last lines of the book: “We didn’t have anything to talk about, after all.”
So much of war experience – the pain, the excitement, the fear, the absurdity, the eternal bonding through shared hardship – seems like it is supposed to transcend everything else. And in a way, it does. But it’s not something that can ever be recaptured. It’s there and then it’s gone. Worse still, it’s only really there in memory. It wasn’t even really there to begin with.
It’s a very difficult thing to explain, but that scene captured a fragment of it.
CTG 