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Snafu hated this stupid history class. He only took it for the cute boy he saw on induction week, who ended up agreeing to a date with him during said induction week, making his whole decision worthless. Snafu took this class for Sledge, who ended up dropping the class after he had the audacity to make him fall a little bit in love with him. So here he was. Stuck in this brain-numbing class, with his cute boyfriend taking a far more interesting class, leaving Snafu bored. At least he only had two weeks left of this semester.
Sighing loudly, he drops his textbooks on the table of their shared dorm room and successfully gets the attention of Sledge.
“Was your class really that bad?” Sledge asks, hiding a grin as Snafu sits next to him.
“You don’t understand, our final assignment is so gonna be soooo difficult,” he replies, dragging out the word, “We have to research the the trauma of war and the lifelong effects it has on soldiers who return home, with focus on the first and second war.”
“That’s doesn’t sound too bad,” he says, thinking aloud.
“Yeah but it’s also a 5000 word essay. I don’t think I could write 5000 words about anything,” Snafu complains.
Sledge playfully rolls his eyes, “Remind me again why you took this class?”
“You already know why, I can’t believe you dropped this class and left me all alone!” Snafu playfully throws his shoulder into Sledge’s.
Sledge laughs, “You should’ve stuck with that Literature class.”
Five days later and the assignment is almost forgotten. It isn’t until Snafu gets a text from a fellow course mate asking how his essay is coming along that he remembers he actually has an essay to write.
Frantically opening his laptop, he starts googling everything he can relating to the second world war and trauma. He makes notes on something called the thousand yard stare, shell shock and flashbacks. He ends up knee deep in research surrounding soldiers who served in the Pacific with over 50 tabs open on one browser.
Sledge comes home from his late class and finds Snafu hunched over his laptop, notes in piles around him and a sandwich half eaten on the bedside table. He calls his name to get his attention, which promptly pulls him from his screen.
“What’s all this?” He asks, indicating to the mini fort Snafu has constructed out of his own notes and textbooks.
“Work for my paper, look, c’mere,” Snafu replies, pushing aside some of the books to make room for Sledge to sit. “I’ve got this so far, have a read and lemme know what you think,” he says, passing his laptop off to his boyfriend.
While he does that, Snafu pulls up the last article he was reading on his phone to carry on his research. He clicks on a link to read something else and starts scrolling, when an image pops up attached to the article. In less than a second, his heart is in his mouth.
“What the fuck Sledge. Look!” He exclaims, shoving his phone into his face.
“Wait, I’m trying to read your essay,” Sledge gently pushes the phone out of his face.
Snafu tries again, “No really, look.”
Sledge moves his eyes from one screen to another and can’t believe what he’s seeing. “Holy shit! That looks like us!”
“I know!”
Both of them stare wordlessly at the image. It was a photo of two soldiers, Marines more specifically, in the Pacific. Their uniforms are run down and stained and they’re looking directly into the camera. There’s something haunting hidden behind their eyes that neither men can place.
“What does the caption say?” Sledge mumbles, almost not sure if he wanted to know more.
Snafu scrolls down a little to read the caption, “It just says they were two Marines from the second world war, this was taken sometime after the Battle of Okinawa.” He scrolls further down and finds another image, “Wait, here they are again! This is during training apparently.”
He shows Sledge the image, it’s obviously the same two soldiers but there’s something different about the two images. In the one from training camp they’re smiling, laughing with each other. There isn’t that same emptiness behind their eyes.
“Shit, you gotta find out more about them. See if you can find their names or something, you could mention them specifically in your essay,” Sledge says, still staring at the photo.
It takes the two of them an entire night in the library, combined with fifteen textbooks and an email to the granddaughter of a soldier who survived the Battle of Okinawa to find out the names of the two men in the photos.
“They both went home after the war, although the rest of the company never heard from them again. Grandad said they had a special connection, they understood each other in a way no one else did. He heard once that they were living together out in Alabama, but he never chased that lead. They’re buried next to each other at a local church, no one knows how they died or what they did post war.” Snafu is reading the email out loud to Sledge, almost not believing what he was reading.
“We did a bit of digging and all we could find was some local legend about two lovers and a lake, there’s rumours that every now and again someone finds dog tags in the lake but they somehow always end up losing them in the water again. It sounds like it might be them, but then again we don’t know for certain. It sounds like they lived an uneventful life after the war. Maybe that was their happy ending, a life without anymore trauma.”
The rest of the email is pleasantries, the granddaughter wishing Snafu good luck on his paper and hoping she could help in some way. Snafu gets a B- on his paper. It’s the best grade he’s gotten in any class so far.
He’s never able to shake the two images from his mind, the difference in the soldiers in as little as a few years. He hopes that the rumours and legends are true about the two soldiers, the two lovers. A small part of him wonders if this was him and Sledge in a past lifetime, a historical version of themselves. Maybe one day they’ll drive out to the lake, the one mentioned in the email. See if they can find dog tags drowning in the water, or if the stars really are brighter in the summer.