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“California,” Dick says bracingly from his seat on the windowsill. “You’ll have a good time.” He’s watching Nix pack, following Nix’s roving hands, eying his folded shirts and crumpled, half-finished packs of cigarettes. Nix feels like he’s under inspection, but Dick doesn’t say anything about the wrinkles Nix is probably putting into his collars and shirtsleeves. He’s wearing his jacket anyway, keeping that safe from harm, and his trousers hang in neat creases around his calves. His freshly minted lieutenant’s bars are still an unfamiliar gleam out of the corner of his eye, but Dick wears his matching set well. Dick is fingering his cap, having rescued it from the floor after Nix dumped it there while looking for a civilian tie he swore was somewhere in his pile of belongings. “Supposed to be pretty swanky out there.”
“Eh,” Nix says. “I’m sure the Army will find some way to ruin it. Best case they’ll make it boring as hell.”
Dick folds Nix’s cap, smooths the crease, then unfolds it again. It makes Nix’s fingers itch, but he knows it’s the same restlessness that has him shuffling through his socks one last time, not knowing what he hopes to find there. “I’ll write you,” Dick says. “You can tell me whether the new officer’s club is all they say. I’ll let you know if they ever fixed the mud puddle outside the mess at Croft.”
“Yeah?” Nix zips his bag shut and sits down on the mattress beside it with a thump. “Don’t be afraid to add a dab of perfume to the paper. Doll it up a little.”
“I’m not your wife.”
“Thank God. She’s a terrible correspondent.” Nix checks his watch. Any minute now, his jeep will arrive. Then the train, and then the west coast. Farewell to Georgia. Nix won’t miss being on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. It’s already over ninety degrees, and it’s not even 10 a.m. Despite his words, his new base is supposed to be top of the line. And he’s always liked California.
He looks up, and Dick quirks his mouth, not quite a smile. Nix grimaces. The army giveth, and the army taketh away. He doesn’t think Dick would take well to being stuffed in next to Nix’s underwear, even if it is freshly laundered.
“Well.” Dick offers him his cap, then sticks out his hand. It seems overly formal to Nix’s eye, like a child shaking his father’s hand because it’s what men do. Maybe he’s too freckled, or maybe Nix is just too damn fond of him, but it doesn’t fit. “See you around.”
“Maybe not,” Nix reminds him. “It’s a big war.”
He’d meant it more as black humor than anything else, but he can see it doesn’t land right. He still hasn’t taken Dick’s hand, because he can’t quite bear to—because then it would be over, wouldn’t it? Dick drops his hand, and Nix doesn’t think he’s imagining the sting of disappointment on his face.
And maybe it’s crazy, but it is a big war, an enormous yawning beast of a thing swallowing up whole nations and playing out across continents and oceans and maybe, really, they won’t ever see each other again. And he isn’t sure if the thought scares him or gives him just enough courage to do what he does next, which is to pull Dick sideways with him, out of sight from the open door, and kiss him.
He doesn’t flatter himself that it’s a particularly grand, romantic kiss, despite the backdrop of the war and his impending departure. Dick doesn’t go for that sort of thing anyway. And he doesn’t bother making it convincing, as far as that goes. Dick will clock him when he lets go or he won’t, he’ll write him after or he won’t, but Nix doesn’t think it’s the quality of the kiss that will determine which. The kiss is pressing, brief but unmistakable. It’s a statement, pure and simple. It’s a thing Nix has wanted since their first week together, and will never have a chance at again. May as well cross the river and burn the bridge behind you as you go.
He steps back, and Dick grabs him by his jacket, eyes darting across his face, shocked and suspicious and yes, Nix is pretty sure, angry. “Don’t.”
Nix licks his lips and looks back, defiant. “Don’t what?”
Dick hesitates, just for a moment, but his voice is firm. “Don’t—make fun.”
Nix’s eyes widen, because that wasn’t what he was expecting. “Jesus, Dick,” he starts. “That wasn’t—“
“I’m gonna miss you,” Dick says, like he’s arguing it, and Nix changes his mind about talking his way out of this, and this time he does put the effort in. He kisses Dick like he’s going off to war, because they are, the both of them, and of course that’s exactly when his Jeep pulls up with a flurry of beeps, and they spring apart. Dick stares at him for a moment, wide-eyed, but there’s nothing to do.
“Well,” he says, mimicking Dick’s words, two minutes and an eternity ago. “See you around.”
The letter beats him to his new posting at Fort Ord. He loses a day on the train, and another in temporary quarters until the army figures out where they really want him, and it’s a few days before he gets his first mail call. And there it is, Dick’s familiar handwriting cribbed across the envelope, and his breath stops for a second as he plucks it from the soldier’s outstretched hand.
“Girl?” his new bunkmate checks.
“Buddy,” Nix answers, and the guy puts his head back down, disinterested.
Nix thumbs the envelope open. He isn’t sure what he expects, except that he hadn’t really expected anything at all. Their mail isn’t their own, of course, with the sensors checking everything they send. It’s not as if Dick would write—well. What exactly did Nix expect him to write, even if he could?
He wants to take the letter’s very existence as a good sign. But it would be a perfectly Dick Winters move to ream him out via five pages of blistering, self-righteous pique. Nix feels a little ashamed of himself now. Has since he left. It was a rotten way to end things, he supposes. Spring something like that on a guy.
It’s lonely here, the letter starts, and Nix’s heart gives a victorious, selfish little kick. He supposes a more gracious, benevolent friend would want Dick happy. Nix is perfectly pleased to be missed.
I’m catching up on my letters at least. I’ve got a few days leave, but I never know what to do with that. You’re always the one who finds ways to pass the time.
I won’t have too long to rattle around here. Still no openings in the paratroops, but they say they’ll let me know if something comes along. In the meantime, I’m back to Camp Croft for more training, since they approve of the job I’ve done so far. It seems hard to believe I was one of those boys just a year ago, but there it is. I know they’re good men, and it’s important work, but I feel like a horse worrying at its bit. It seems ungrateful I suppose, but I’d like to try something new. Maybe I’m just restless.
He passes on greetings from their fellow officer classmates and feeds the grapevine of who has since departed for where. Nix thinks they might be putting his parting gesture behind them unspoken, which seems as respectable a move as any, until he gets to the last paragraph.
Your timing is lousy, I hope you know, Dick closes. I’ve got a lot of things to say to you, but I guess they’ll have to keep until I see you again. I keep waiting for someone to interrupt all the things I keep thinking about and not writing, but then I remember that you’re the only one who ever barged in on me, and you’re in California.
I’ll probably be gone by the time you get this, but write back anyway. It’ll catch up to me.
Nix reads it for longer than the single sheet requires, lingering over the neat date at the top, the same day he’d left, and tries to read the most flattering interpretation of that into the first, already flattering paragraph. He’s pleased to have left his mark, if distinctly unpleased, now, to be on the other side of the country.
The barracks around him are the usual clatter and din of men talking, laughing, tramping over the wood floors. It’s summer, and the doors and windows are propped wide to catch the breeze. Dinner hour is over, and Nix has time on his hands. He isn’t one for long correspondence, but Dick is right, and he’s a long way from being able to kick Dick’s bedframe until he puts down his own letters or books and comes walking with him. He resigns himself to the next best thing and gets up from his bed with a lurch before rooting through his footlocker for pen and paper.
He tackles the easier topic first.
Your problem is the curse of competency, Nix writes back. If you don’t want to train babes fresh from their mother’s arms, then stop showing the army you’re good at it. I myself strive never to be too good at anything I can’t accomplish by delegating to such lowly examples as your new trainees.
Nix is confident this describes his new posting to an almost alarming degree, and the rest can be done with meetings and paper pushing, and Nix has been training for that kind of job his whole life.
He details what he’s seen of his new home so far, laments the long train ride over, and creates a list of activities that could fill Dick’s time, but will instead simply scandalize him, in the hopes that at least it makes him laugh.
He shies away from the remaining subject. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s written flowery missives in the past, has no problem quoting poetry and leaving innuendo tucked into desk drawers, schoolbooks, or coat pockets. But the thought of writing anything to the sort to Dick doesn’t cross his mind, except as a ludicrous impossibility. The army doesn’t even enter into it. Dick’s forbidding voice echoes: Don’t make fun.
More to the point, Nix hadn’t been kidding that he isn’t any kind of correspondent. Even when he left love notes to sweethearts, to Kathy back when doing such a thing gave him a rush, it wasn’t about communicating. It was a flower left on the stair, a touch that couldn’t reach across a country. He really hadn’t expected to see Dick again. He doesn’t have a next step.
I’m sorry for the timing, he writes after he spends an entire cigarette staring at the remaining space on his paper. If we cross paths again, I’ll make it up to you.
He still thinks that maybe that will be that, but another letter arrives the following week, post-marked from South Carolina. Dick doesn’t reference Nix’s apology, but it’s hard for Nix to tell if that’s because he’s set the matter aside for now, or because Nix’s own letter simply hasn’t made it yet. Nix isn’t foolish enough to think Dick has moved past it. Dick still festers over an inaccurately delivered lecture on machine guns he’d witnessed back during his own boot camp days, and Nix has heard the rant more than once.
Dick chats about his relocation, about his new CO, about the chow, which has improved not at all since Dick’s first stay at Camp Croft. He found Nix’s tie in his own footlocker, and wants to know if Nix wants it in California, or postmarked to his house in New Jersey instead.
Dick has a few good things to say about his new fellow officers, and many more disparaging comments.
Nix smiles as he reads it, Dick’s familiar scowl clear in his mind’s eye. He’d rather muse on that than dig for more paper to write a reply. The next day is long, and the next he finds himself playing cards with some other lieutenants after dinner. The game is at least distracting, but the officers themselves are less interesting than the painted faces on the cards they all hold.
On Monday there’s another letter, and this one references Nix's list of potential activities, though all Dick says is that he’s busier now, that he’ll save the letter for reference if his situation changes. His new batch of draftees has arrived, and he’s busy sorting them out, whipping them into shape with his own quiet sense of order. He has his favorites already, because Dick always does. You’d never know from watching him with them, and Nix wonders if the men themselves ever guess.
Nix feels as if he should respond, but he’s not sure what to say. His own days aren’t worth writing about, and what he’d be happy to grouse about while sprawled over the foot of Dick’s bed he feels exhausted just imagining putting into written form.
Still, the double letter seems to demand some kind of reply, so he stops by the commissary over lunch and, from their meager offerings, selects a postcard with scenes from around base tucked inside the letters “A salute from Fort Ord.” It’s tasteless, but he has the sneaking suspicion that Dick will love it.
Glad the kids are coming along. Still planning to leave them for a plane ride at the first opportunity? The water’s beautiful, by the way. Wish you were here.
It has the benefit of being true.
Nix tries not to think of all the places he’d take Dick if he were here. The spacious new rec center, still smelling like varnish, or the stables Nix stumbled across while looking for the laundry. The beach, of course—there are actually a few on the base itself, not even counting the surrounding area. The cool woods around the fort’s perimeter, which don’t leave Nix slapping at mosquitos with every step. Their long, rambling walks around camp would have been pleasant enough here that Nix thinks he might have been able to forget about the army entirely, pretend it was any other job occupying his time. He only explores Ford Ord minimally, figures it out piecemeal while going about his work. He doesn’t have buddies here, and he is laughably not an outdoor person by himself. He and Dick had just wanted space to talk outside the cramped barracks.
Here there is space galore, acres of paths and beach and gleaming Pacific swells beyond. Georgia’s muggy swamp of a summer has been replaced by the clean sweep of ocean air, the red Georgia mud by a thin layer of sandy dirt, and grass dares to sprout, even between the heaviest footpaths. There was new construction at Benning, but it was all bare wood, hastily assembled. Here, the new buildings gleam a clean white. He supposes the corners of supply tents and shade of trees are nominally the same, but here they’re haunted by a man who’s never stepped in them. Nix finds his eye tracking every redhead with a certain build on instinct, but it leaves him disappointed every time. He finds an ice cream shop just off base, when he gets his first pass, but he’s got no one to show it to. Once upon a time he would have been happy drinking alone—or never quite alone, because alcohol loves company. But it’s different now. Nix looks around the mess, around the busy office where he spends his days, and there’s no one to share his eyerolls, no one who matches his dry comments when the major in charge of his assignment gets too full of himself.
Nix doesn’t know how to write those things to Dick, not with the sensors reading over his shoulder, but probably not without them either, if he’s honest. And what had it been worth, after all? A trickle of letters, which will surely peter out before long. He holds the thin sheaf in his hands, fingering his lighter, but in the end he just lights another cigarette and tucks the whole correspondence back into his footlocker, under his dress greens, where he won’t have to stare at it anymore.
He gets a new letter the next morning, Dick regaling him with the idiocy of army planning, which has him scheduling training out of any order that makes sense thanks to when supplies are coming in.
They may as well get used to it, Nix writes on the back of another postcard, this one with an otter holding a seashell. Are you training them for life in the army or not?
It would be easier to put the whole affair behind him if he weren’t bored out of his damned mind.
Which doesn’t particularly make sense to Nix. There’s a much livelier town here to spend his weekend passes on than was on offer in Georgia. If his fellow officers are lackluster, they’re at least good for a drink, a smoke, a card game. The weather is perfect, and Nix takes only two weeks to beat his NCO staff into understanding that he will manage his own affairs before 11 a.m., army time be damned, and they can bother him after that. He gets his work done, and he makes eyes at the women around base—of which there are a few—who seem receptive to such things and will politely avert their eyes from his ring.
He goes out when the other guys go out. He even leads an excursion once or twice, when his quarters start to feel too small, when he’s restless and can’t find anything to fill his time. Sometimes they go to the officers club, sometimes into town. It’s only been a few weeks, but Nix is getting acclimated to the social scene here, finding his way among the other junior officers.
Give him enough time, and Nix thinks he could get over this Dick Winters obsession, like a bad cold he caught that’s finally easing. He can go hours now without thinking about the freckles that erupted all over when Dick was exposed to the southern sun. He can go drinking with the other lieutenants after all, and they’re not such bad guys, some of them. He doesn’t compare every one of their braying laughs to Dick’s quiet smiles. And there are women too, who are all kinds of alright with him when they see his officers bars shining. He dances, which is ok, and he buys a few of them drinks, which is better.
He takes one of them out, a girl named Dottie who seems charmed enough by him for it to be flattering, but not so enthralled that Nix thinks he’ll have to worry. She doesn’t bother to ask about his family. She’s pretty enough, with a good instinct for a story, which the fellow girls in her boarding house provide fodder for in spades, and Nix is entertained, half-charmed in turn. They walk around the storefronts near the beach, and it’s all going well until she ducks into one of the shops to look at a pair of sunglasses. She leaves Nix near the register, and without thinking about it he’s flipping through the postcards.
There’s one with dunes stretching long and strangely wild, feathered in dunegrass, running right down to the blue ocean. He’s studying it, thinking less about what he’ll write, and more about the little pond that was all Dick said he’d had for swimming in his youth, when Dottie finds him again. “Who’s that for?” she asks.
“Buddy of mine back east,” Nix tells her, and scrounges in his pocket for the change to buy it.
But after that the letter’s burning a hole in his pocket, and he lets Dottie go with less argument than she might have been hoping for. He thanks her for the day, and darts into a corner store to borrow a pen and buy a stamp. He drops it in the mailbox on his way back to base that night.
Tell me again about the planes and the nonsense. If you were gonna convince a guy.
The letter comes back before the week is out.
It’s an experimental unit, totally new. They’re going to take only the best men, then give them extra training. They’ll be an elite force. And there’s no long marches looking for action. They’ll drop us from the air right into the heat. If I’m going to go, I want to do something. And I want to be with the best.
Nix takes a sip from his flask and chews on his lower lip.
He thinks that nothing is as good as it sounds. He thinks that “experimental” has a good shot of being a clusterfuck. He thinks that the spike of adrenaline he gets during live fire drills isn’t actually a high he enjoys very much.
He thinks about riding a desk in California, wrangling housing assignments and administering the tides of men setting sail and returning across the ocean, while Dick Winters is parachuting out of the sky in the thick of fighting. He thinks about sending his postcards to the front, and not getting an answer back someday. He thinks about not knowing whether Dick’s bought it somewhere in France or on the far side of the Pacific, or if Nix the desk jockey simply won’t be worth the postage once the fighting starts.
He takes another swig of the Vat. He came to fight a damn war—no, he didn’t. He came to fight an inevitable war on his own terms. He didn’t wait for his number to be called up, and they may have pacified him with a sweet posting for now, but he’s still at the whim of the army.
That much might be true regardless, but it’s the principle of the thing. He was going to end up in the army regardless, but he chose to enlist. He might end up in the fighting either way, but he can carry a gun like any chump, the silver bars on his shoulders good for absolutely nothing when it counts, or he can do something—something extraordinary.
He’s smart enough, dammit, to learn whatever they can throw at him. Dick’s got one thing right. If the army pours enough training into them, they won’t be cannon fodder. Dulce et decorum est and all, but better to go in with the best the army can give him. And Nix knows exactly who that is, though he guesses the army doesn’t know the half of it, not yet.
It’s not for love. Nix may relish a dramatic gesture, but it’s not that—not exactly, anyway. Sure, Nix is a little moony over him, that much is obvious. Otherwise he wouldn’t find himself replaying, before he drifts off to sleep sometimes, the time his hands were shaking after long hours at the firing range, the rattle of the machine guns still echoing in his tired nerves. He wouldn’t linger over Dick’s little frown of concentration as he bent in, fingers brushing Nix’s own as he took the lighter from him, struck it and cupped his hands inches from Nix’s lips, pursed around his cigarette.
But it isn’t about Dick’s steady hands, or the straight line of his shoulders. It’s about something much bigger, a chance to do something Nix will never have the opportunity for again, should he let it slip away.
And perhaps it’s about something much smaller. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, his mother’s voice swims up out of memory, would—
Not all of them. Just the one. But yes. Without question.
Maybe it’s for love after all.
But that leaves him with just one question.
He slips his letter into the mail drop, and waits for an answer.
Two days later, too soon to be a reply, he gets a telegram.
I got word today there’s an opening. I’m heading down tomorrow. They want more officers. If you wanted to make up for your timing, here’s your chance.
Two days after that, Nix’s train is accelerating slowly out of the station, the Pacific a shrinking pool behind him. He has his answer.