He looked like a soldier. I was almost scared to talk to him. Because I could tell he was a changed person, and I knew that whatever he’d gone through in basic training had made him stronger and harder, more ready for war. It made me feel like a little kid just to stand beside him. I figured that’s what I was compared to him, a kid, and I figured that when he got back from Vietnam it would be like there were twenty years between us instead of just five, and we might not have anything to say, we’d be so different from each other. When he got back, he would have been in a real war. Probably the closest TJ and I had ever been was when he was twelve and I was seven. I was old enough and smart enough by then to do stuff with him, and he was still enough of a kid that he could include a seven-year-old in his plans. Those were our best war days, when we kept notebooks of make-believe battles and ran home from General MacArthur Elementary School, where TJ was in sixth grade and I was in second, so we could set up our Army guys and test out our strategies against the enemy, which was commanded by Bobby Kerner and his little brother Charles.
