Alice's Part 2

The next time they talked, it was Ray’s birthday, and his father was helping him pack his bags. Ray was leaving to join the Army as he had always wanted to, but it wasn’t supposed to have gone this way.

‘So, you’re leaving,’ he said to Ray. ‘Well, that will make life easier.’

‘I’ll send what money I can,’ Ray replied. He half expected his father to smile: to show the same pride that he had shown when Ray first mentioned the army.

‘Well, do what you can,’ his father said, as he turned to leave Ray’s room. ‘Just don’t get yourself killed, alright?’

‘Sure,’ Ray said. He shivered; the heat had been cut off again.

Ray’s family was poor, and they could seldom afford to pay all the bills at once. They got paid on a rotating basis. Sometimes the heat would be turned off for months at a time. These months were often the coldest of the year. The state power company only seemed to notice the late bills when it was well below 20˚.

The alarm went off. Still with tears in his eyes, Ray hit the snooze button. It was 4 am. He had three hours to decide. He couldn’t accept that in a few short days he would be driving the streets of Fallujah; he would be an occupier in a country that had done nothing to deserve the treatment it was receiving.

For his entire basic training, he had been a model soldier. He’d been on the verge of promotion, when everything changed. The Twin Towers fell. Within a few short months, the lame duck president was leading the nation to a quick victory. Ray had felt left out when his unit had been left behind. Shortly afterwards, though, the president was talking about going to war in Iraq. Ray had been overjoyed: finally he could be a hero.

Ray had called the G.I. help line the night he received his orders to ship out, at the end of January. ‘Hi, I don’t want to go to Iraq, and I’m wondering what my options are.’

The man on the other end of the line sounded tired. ‘There’s a couple of things you can do,’ he said. ‘You can apply for Conscientious Objector status, or you can go AWOL. I’ll warn you, though; the Army won’t like what you’re doing.’

‘’Kay, thanks. I’ll think about it.’ Ray had never run away in his life. He’d been forced away more than once, but to actually flee was beyond anything he had ever considered.

The alarm began again. Two hours forty-five minutes. Ray reached over, and hit the snooze again: he still wasn’t ready.

There had been protests around the world. Ray had watched them on T.V. He‘d been fascinated by the size of the crowds. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in every country on earth. Ray was amazed that so many people could be against what his country thought of as so right. His friend, Alice, had gone to the ones at the base.

Alice owned a little diner--built from two airstreams welded together--where Ray felt at home. He wasn’t quite sure what it was about the place. Maybe it was the food--which was the same as every other diner everywhere else--or it may have been the juke box, or the chrome and vinyl booths. In any case, she had been kind when he’d first come in, uniform and all.