“Silenced” was the way she described it to me, the listener, the one with whom she was never silent. “Silenced,” she added, “because there is one place I will never be able to go with him, something elemental and essential about him that I will never have any real access to.”I often wondered if everything she said to me might not better have been said to him, that she could have given him at least a chance to know the one part of her he had no access to: the anguish, the grief. Impossible, she said, when I mentioned this once. His life was cluttered and complicated. He was already concerned about the military’s rules about intimate relationships. Added to this were war strategies, the movement of troops, staking out the enemy, statements to the press. All of his mental and much of his physical energy went into this. What was left over he hoarded for his extended family, who, though most often far away, brought their own troubles and triumphs to his table.He had once told her that she was his oasis, an apt metaphor for a desert warrior, this man whom I came to think of as Mister Military.
