Passing, a Home Front Memory

I see two scenes in my mind.

In the first scene, I stand with my back to the University of Houston’s library. In front of me, an expansive green space is covered by a modest crowd. It’s a sun-splashed and seasonal spring morning and students and other faculty are collected in an unsanctioned, impromptu teach-in. The United States has just begun bombing Baghdad. I sling the megaphone over my shoulder and read out a speech that begins: “Most of you that are here have been a part of the struggle to keep this devastating event from happening.” I speak of powerless Arabs throughout the region whose lives will be made more difficult by U.S. policy. When I come to the part about the U.S. prejudice against the Palestinians in favor of Israel’s Likud government, I am moved by an audible affirmation from the gathered students. Behind me, tenured professors in the department where I teach look on approvingly. A lonely reporter records interviews. After my speech, several listeners approach me saying they want to read the text, which they believe should be published. Another student whose confident manner clashes with his boyish looks walks up to me. He wants to argue, so we talk for twenty minutes. Our exchange lurches incoherently from point to point. Although I give him my card as we part, the gesture feels perfunctory. We are no more connected than before he approached me. We are each locked in our own mindset.

In the second scene, it’s a new morning. Eight months have passed. This time I am in North Texas, at an airport baggage claim area. Again it is sunny, even though it’s winter now, and the light bounces off the byzantine concrete ramps and tunnels outside and fills the corridor. I am surrounded by a battalion of relatives. I am still in Texas and still in a community that I claim as my own. As a family, we are surrounded by a larger crowd of strangers, typical North Texans, mostly in baggy denim skirts or Dockers, but with a few pairs of cowboy boots mixed in. This time journalists abound. The crowd is clapping, cheering, and whistling. The noise is escalating, building on itself and drowning out tinny pre-recorded patriotic music. Some are waving small American flags picked up at Wal-Mart. And in front of us as the cheers crescendo, in long interminable files that move inexorably through the crowd, all shapes, sizes and colors of American soldiers are passing, passing, passing.

The day the troops came home for Christmas, my parents, my brother, and I arrived at the airport before any one else in our family. We were there to greet my nephew, Joe, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had been in Iraq for 8 months and was coming home for a two-week Christmas break. Joe’s mother was stuck with a client and might not make it to the airport. The youngest of my three older sisters was also trapped at work all morning and would have to meet us at lunch. My middle sister would be there with her large family in full force, sons ranging from Joe’s age to a carefree five-year-old named Isaac.

I had driven north from Houston a day early so I could be there when Joe arrived. On the way to the airport, I had served as chauffeur for my parents and brother, who was visiting from England, as we sped south from our house across Lake Ray Roberts–named after a beloved former Republican congressman who was anti-immigrant yet had religiously sent my father his circular for constituents when I was a boy. Once at the Dallas–Ft. Worth airport, we unpacked ourselves. My octogenarian father was well wrapped in a sport coat made of imitation leather and a beret. He began marching through the international wing with authority in search of information about the flight that would bring home Joe and the other soldiers. Decades of training had my brother and myself falling...