Chapter Text
The first time I saw you, it was raining.
Not the gentle kind of rain poets lie about—the kind that makes windows beautiful and streets glitter beneath yellow lamps. This was November rain. Cold enough to creep beneath the collar of a uniform. Hard enough to turn the earth beneath our boots into mud.
It fell steadily over the camp, turning the parade ground into a sheet of brown water and the roofs of the barracks black with the wet.
I had been in the Army for six weeks.
Six weeks was long enough to learn how to make a bed tightly enough that a sergeant could bounce a coin from it. Long enough to learn the weight of a Garand in my hands, the ache it left in my shoulder after a day on the range, the sound of a company being awakened before dawn by a whistle sharp enough to cut through sleep.
Long enough to learn that the Army could make a man exhausted without ever allowing him to forget that he was being watched.
It was November of 1943, and I was nineteen years old.
So were you.
There were boys everywhere then.
That is the part history sometimes forgets.
It remembers divisions and regiments. It remembers beaches and artillery and names printed on maps. It remembers generals leaning over tables, moving little wooden markers across Europe.
But before we became numbers on those maps, we were boys.
Boys who had mothers.
Boys who had sisters.
Boys who had never shaved properly.
Boys who wrote letters home every Sunday and lied about how well they were sleeping.
Boys who were afraid of the dark.
Boys who had never been farther from home than the neighboring county.
Boys who polished rifles until they could see their own frightened faces reflected in the metal.
I was one of them.
And then I saw you.
You were standing outside the barracks beneath the overhang, smoking a cigarette you weren't supposed to have.
You had your back against the brick wall.
Your field jacket was buttoned incorrectly.
Your cap sat too low over your forehead.
And you were smiling.
I remember thinking that you looked terribly young.
We both did.
The cigarette was burning between your fingers, the smoke disappearing almost immediately into the rain.
You looked at me.
I looked at you.
Neither of us spoke.
Then you smiled.
It wasn't a particularly remarkable smile.
I have spent half a century trying to describe it, and every description fails.
It was simply there.
Sudden.
Warm.
A little crooked.
It broke over your face like the dawn.
I didn't know, then, that a smile could compare to the sunrise.
I didn't know I would spend the rest of my life trying to go home to it.
Your name was Thomas.
Mine was Edward.
But that first day, I didn't know your name.
I only knew that you were the soldier smoking a contraband cigarette in the rain.
And I knew, somehow, that I would remember you.
The whistle blew.
You dropped the cigarette immediately.
You crushed it beneath your boot.
"You're supposed to be inside," I said.
You glanced at me.
"So are you."
"I was going."
"So was I."
Neither of us moved.
You looked toward the barracks.
Then back at me.
"Well?"
"What?"
"You going to tell on me?"
I stared at you.
"Should I?"
You considered this.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because then I'd have to explain why I was smoking."
"You were smoking?"
You looked down at the cigarette beneath your boot.
"Apparently."
I laughed.
It surprised me.
I hadn't laughed much since arriving at camp.
You smiled again.
Then the sergeant's voice came from inside the building.
"HALE!"
Your expression changed instantly.
You straightened.
"That's me."
"You're Hale?"
"Thomas Hale."
The sergeant shouted again.
"Hale!"
You sighed.
"That's definitely me."
You pushed away from the wall.
Before you went inside, you looked back.
"What's your name?"
"Whitmore."
"First name."
"Edward."
You nodded.
"Edward."
The way you said it was unimportant.
It should have been.
But I remembered it.