Robert B. Parker by Love, Glory

but she wouldn’t tell me anymore. Her letters made no further mention of dating.
    After a few months of eight on and eight off I could take and receive Morse code at twenty words a minute while carrying on another conversation. The pink-cheeked platoon leader came to understand that he knew nothing about operating a radio and nothing about running wire and calmed down and got out of the way. The truce came in early summer and my regiment settled in along the Imjin River. The war ended with me alive. All I had to do was sweat out the tour and go home. Jennifer had worked the summer in a resort hotel as a waitress.Her parents were a little embarrassed, she said, they thought it was quite blue collar, but it got her away from home for the summer and gave her freedom. Sometimes when I wrote her I sent her short stories I’d composed about us, or thinly disguised versions of us. I was always her hero; she was always feminine and yielding, needing me. When I got out I’d be different; I’d learned a lot about what was important and what wasn’t. We could live in vets apartments and I could finish school on the G.I. Bill, then I’d write and we could have kids. I thought Michael and Meredith would be good names.
    In the middle of her senior year, a month and a half into the Korean winter, Jennifer wrote to say that she and the guy from Cornell had gotten pinned. She knew it would hurt me, and she’d always feel special about me, but she could never quite deal with my intensity, with my totality. She was a little afraid of it. She felt, finally, overpowered, possessed, and she couldn’t live like that.
    The valves of my life closed like a stone. The beginnings of stillness settled in me. I was inert, limp, without strength; more, it seemed as if I were without structure, as if all tangibility had drained away. I could no longer be upright.
    I wrote her a letter back. I begged her. I would always love her, no one could ever cherish her as I would. Wait till I got back, don’t do this. It took two weeks for her reply. Meanwhile, I kept writing. All that I was went into the desperate flood of mail. As I wrote the letters my eyes teared, but no one saw me. Her first letter back was balanced and firm. We couldn’t change what time had brought about. They were getting engaged at graduation. I was alone in the bunker when I read it; behind me andbelow, the wide brown river moved slowly. The rest of the landscape was snow-covered and almost treeless. I sank to my knees with the letter in my hand and pressed my face against the sandbag walls of the bunker and never moved when my call letters rattled on the radio. The next day my letters began to come back unopened and the stillness in me spread slowly and numbly over my whole being.
    I told no one and each night I sat and wrote her a letter and after they came back unopened for a month, I stopped mailing them. But I wrote them. When they were done I put them in my footlocker with the ones she’d returned. She sent me no more mail.
    My unmailed letters to her became a chronicle of my life, and a memorial to her, a manifestation of a truth I’d half-understood in the rainstorm before I left her when we weren’t getting engaged. I was trapped. I was simply love’s captive and from that time when I’d danced with her at eighteen I would never be free again. No effort of will could ever change that. No one could replace her. No other meaning existed in life. I knew that, as I wrote my unread letters, with a clarity and sureness that time has not modified. Not yet twenty-two, I had loved and lost and my life was without further purpose. And there was so much of it left, a paralyzing long time of it still to go.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    The messages came in over the radio in encrypted five-letter groups. They were just sound patterns that translated into nothing. When the message finished I’d send it over to S-2 and never hear of it again. Tony dePietro and I were the best operators in