But Friday night in Williamsburg has seen much odder sights than a young couple going to a dinner and dance. Gangly and self-conscious, I’d feared this walk to the subway in my dress blues. I put my on my big blue Stetson last, back to front like I’d been taught some years before at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, and we’re out the front door and into the spring evening. As a former cavalry officer, if I’m going to do this I’m going to do this right. I grin and then groan as I bend down to put on my spurs.
She’s ready-dress and makeup and hair complete. I think about how her gray eyes quivered when she said that, two clouds rushing across a wide, flat prairie of a face. I think about the Iraqi mother whose house my scout platoon raided going after an insurgent, who told us that if we really wanted to help, we needed to leave her house immediately, for fear of her neighbors believing she was one of our sources. Then I think about the Iraqis in the town we were stationed in, if the schools we helped build are still open, if the sectarian fault line remains as prominent today as it was in 2008. I think about the young men I knew that aren’t earnest or angry about Iraq right now. Sometimes it’s with myself.Īs I put on my bow tie, I think about how lucky I am to be any of those things. Sometimes it’s with the yellow-ribbon patriots who won’t hire my former soldiers looking for work, or with the straw men who think we’re all victims, or all heroes, or all monsters. Sometimes it’s with anyone who didn’t go with us. Angrier with whom, and what, has proven a shifting target. I’ve grown more earnest about my service with time. I realize that I’m proud of these ribbons and badges and of being able to wear them, modest in significance though they may be, even though my feelings about the war I earned them in remain complicated. I’ve forgotten how much the military revels in dog-and-pony shows. It takes me a long time to get ready, ensuring all my ribbons and badges are straight and in the correct order. Until we decided to go to this year’s ball, my blues had been boxed up in my mom’s garage, untouched since I’d left the Army. Our friends, both vet and civilian, promise we’ll have a good time.
This is the school’s third annual Military Ball and is being held at Gotham Hall in midtown Manhattan. Even though my particular graduate program doesn’t have a lot of Iraq and Afghanistan vets in it, the school as a whole does-more than 450 last year according to an article on, by far the highest number in the Ivy League. Tonight, in 2013, we’re going to Columbia University’s Military Ball, my wife and I. The World War II–era America she referenced has been dead far longer than that. My grandmother was a practical woman and a career Navy wife, so nostalgia didn’t soak her words when she said this.
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