Chapter Text
Alabama, 1946
“Eugene Sledge. S-L-E-D-G-E.”
“Thank you, sir. Would you mind filling this out, as well? Feel free to take a seat.”
“As I have been,” Eugene muttered.
He was handed a clipboard, a pen, and the latest of the endless number of forms he’d filled out since he came to terms with the fact that he could no longer avoid being a person.
Eugene gripped his pen a little too tight when he wrote his name onto the first line; he was beginning to get antsy, and he hadn’t brought his pipe as he’d presumed that smoking would be frowned upon at the VA benefits office.
The building felt, like many he’d entered since coming back to Alabama, unsettlingly sterile, though the expressions the people wore in here were more like his, and less like that of the ever smiling receptionist at the front desk who refused to let him finish his paperwork all at once.
She was, however, the only one she had spoken to all day, and one of the few people he had spoken to in general for the last few weeks save for his family. Even then he hadn’t said much.
He’d taken to journaling, but as the days stretched into each other his writings had started to loop back to the same thoughts and frustrations, out of his brain and onto the paper and back into his dreams.
They’d all been trying to get him to talk--his father, his mother, Edward, and Sid, but the truth was the only people to whom he would have anything to say were scattered across the country or rotting on an island an ocean away.
He thought about this as he printed his address on his form, and then paused.
When he approached the front desk again, the administrator, with her oppressive smile, notified him that he was free to go, but not before asking if he had any questions.
“Yes, actually. I’m looking for someone, an address. K company, 5th Marines.”
--
The receptionist hadn’t had the answers he’d been looking for, but somehow the idea had driven Sledge as far as he could go up the bureaucratic chain until he had, written on the back of his hand, a mailing address for a home in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Dear Shelton,
How are you?
(Dear God, Eugene thought.)
Actually, maybe I’ll skip the formalities. I’m guessing you aren’t the type for them, but then maybe you’re not the type for letter reading and writing, either. I hope you are, at least in this case. I do want to know how you are, though.
Alabama is the same. It’s the same, but I hate it. Everyone’s acting like everything’s normal, and fine. I keep seeing articles in the paper about the war, or what people think it was like, or what they’d like to think it was like, and I can’t ever finish them.
I tried to sign up for classes at the university the other day. The clerk asked if I had learned anything worthwhile in the Marines; funny how people can use you for so long and then turn around and call you useless.
Anyways, hope everything’s good as they can be where you are. Write back if you can.
Best,
Eugene Sledge
Eugene read his draft a few times. He hadn’t mentioned that they had never said goodbye; there was no use dwelling on it, or disclosing that he was.
The next day the letter was sealed away, the envelope addressed, stamped, and tossed into the mail before he could convince himself to tear it up and bury the pieces. There was no use in overthinking a message that might never get a response, or even seen. If Shelton didn’t want anything to do with him, that was… fine. But if there was a chance that he did, Eugene would take it.
--
So much time had passed between his letter and Shelton’s response that Eugene had almost forgotten about it, but when he saw the envelope laid squarely on the desk in his room, he felt nervous, surprised--maybe excited. They were anxious but bubbling and solid feelings, different from the ones that had been leaving him exhausted.
He gnawed on the end of his pipe as he read.
Sledge--
Are you some kind of stalker, Sledgehammer? I’m wondering how you got my address. It’s impressive, actually.
As for how I’m doing, I’m better than I was. Water, food, people--well the people aren’t better, but at least they’re not shooting at me. I get to shit indoors, now, too. I just started a job at the mill. Wasn’t planning on going to school, but wasn’t planning to come back and keep living, either. So we’ll see. I guess.
I appreciate you writing. Thought youd’a forgotten about old Snafu a while ago now. Glad to know you’re still literate.
(Eugene laughed genuinely at that. The gall of that in a letter riddled with spelling errors. There were also some lines that had been started and struck through, and some that had been written out completely but had been so aggressively scrawled out they were no longer legible, aside from words that may have been dreams , or bullets , or alone . Eugene tried, but failed, to focus on what he could read and not linger on what he couldn’t.)
Let me know how your classes go, college boy. Maybe some of your brains might get to me through the post. And don’t worry--I can vouch for you, if anyone else tries to call you useless.
--Merriell Shelton
It was short and sloppily written, like an afterthought, or like Shelton had been drunk. Eugene had questions; how had Shelton felt when he got word from him? Why had he taken so long to write back? What had he been thinking while he was writing this? Where was he living, what was he doing? Was he miserable, or angry, or empty?
Eugene could allow none of those questions to go into his next letter, he realized, when he found himself already setting a pen to a new piece of paper. But he could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears; the relief of not being ignored was overwhelming enough to spill onto the page.
Dear Shelton,
Took you long enough to get back to me. I was worried my dramatics might have ended up at the bottom of a bayou.
I only recently started school. We’ve both had our fair share of suffering in our lifetimes but classes are really something else. I’ve taken up business administration--and that’s all I really have to say about that subject.
I’ve been reading some other things to pass the rest of my time. Books about nature and birds and things like that. Maybe you think a twig is a twig and a rock is a rock, or that I’d want to be done spending time in the dirt. But it’s interesting to me, for some reason. I was so stuck on death for a long time, I guess it’s time to start thinking about life.
(Eugene hesitated to press a period to the end of that sentence. Maybe he, too, could cross out the thoughts that probably belonged in his head and nowhere else. But he had been thinking too much and saying too little for so long; he had to reveal at least these small pieces of himself before he forgot how.)
I don’t know if this is at all entertaining to you--if anything it’ll give you something else to make fun of me for. I’ve started birdwatching, if you can believe it, and I know you’ll never let me live it down.
Anyway, no, I haven’t forgotten you.
(Another contender for an omitted line.)
Been hard to forget anything, as much as I’d like to, for some of it.
I was kidding, before, when I said you’d taken too long to write back. It was good to hear from you. Maybe regale me with some tales from the city--not much going on in Mobile.
Best,
Eugene Sledge
--
The next morning Eugene’s second letter went in the mail. He tucked Merriell’s first in the back of his journal and spent the day reading under the tree in his front yard. He smiled at his mother when she came out to bring him lunch.