In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

89 A Soldier Gets Home Ending my bluebird days of boyhood, war seduced me, war I could romanticize— a belly dance of rippling sand and fire— until the hot dust gusted in my eyes, and stars, glimmers of God, became the sky’s bullet holes. Home for seven months, I’ve wondered if home’s a fiction only a fool buys. The other morning, a turtle crossed my front yard. His hut, battered and scuffed, said he could be a hundred, and right away the image activated a memory . . . Blizzard of butterflies, late April. A gem-eyed boy stripping a twelve-pound flathead, I had pulled his mudsuit bright side out to the tail and laid him open when a dome-shaped turtle moved in the belly. “Look, Dad! Can I have it for a pet? Jonah the Miracle!” My father told me Jonahs can’t survive outside the hungry swamps that swallow them alive . . . But suddenly, in my ravaged mind, the picture morphed and the dark-green shell became a helmet. Crawling with nightmares, it came to claim a soldier, some head to haunt. I tried so hard to gut my memory. Better that its joys be cut away than grief-diseased, harrowed and hollowed, or so I told myself. Today at sunset, my windows going blind, I hit the remote and a war film was on. I cursed, but when it showed 90 a GI chin deep in a smoky ditch, the TV’s rounded screen bagging his helmet like the see-through stomach lining of a fish, a cruel metaphor went bright side out. Imagery that had stolen Jonah brought him back to me. Closing my eyes, the turtle in my hands again, I knew I had to set him free and trust him to be swallowed whole— trust him to nest inside the darkness like a soul. ...

Share