The reporters stand between all fourteen of us and our transport; they put their microphones and cameras in our faces and say, “You’re going home for Christmas. What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”

We ask, “What are our choices?”

“The usual two,” the reporters say. “Are you going to hold your babies and sweet babies real tight? Or, are you going to lay your fallen comrade to rest while the chaplain conveys the gratitude of the president and the entire nation and then prays to God for the state of your comrade’s immortal soul?” Then they consult their notes and ask, “You do have a fallen comrade, don’t you?”

“Yes,” we say. “Saunders.”

“Well,” they say. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? Are you going to bury him? Or, are your going to hold your babies and sweet babies real tight?”

“Neither,” we tell them. “The first thing we’re going to do when we get home is put on our pointy boots and parade around the Public Square.”

Before we graduated from high school, before we met and married our sweet babies, before we had babies with our sweet babies, before we got the jobs that we didn’t want to work at for the rest of our lives, before we realized that we probably would work at them for the rest of our lives if we didn’t do something about it, before we did something about it and joined up, before we went to Iraq, before what happened to Saunders, before any of this happened, we were sitting around on a Friday just before graduation, skipping school, which, as graduating seniors, we were of course expected to do, feeling bored, feeling like we were missing something in our lives. And so we decided to go to the Public Square, to the Bon Ton, which had a little of everything, to see if they had what we were missing.

They were terrified of us at the Bon Ton because we were young and noisy, and we seemed even noisier than we were because we were the only customers in the store, because the store was the only store left on the Public Square that hadn’t pulled out and moved to the mall, and they were terrified of us because we couldn’t, at first, find what we were missing, and this disappointed us and so we let them know about it. They tried to sell us fedoras in the Men’s department, and we put our fists through their tops and then wore them around our wrists like bracelets. They tried to sell us stirrup pants in the Ladies’ department and those of us who are Ladies said stirrup pants were an abomination and so we all liberated the stirrups with our hands and feet and teeth and then reshelved what remained with the other, normal pants, thus diminishing their retail value. We wondered what the people at Bon Ton had to say about that. The people at Bon Ton didn’t have anything to say; they scattered, hiding in dressing rooms and locking the slatted doors behind them; or crouching behind checkout counters, armed only with their bar code guns. And so there was no one to help us when we entered Footwear and saw the rows and rows of boots, their pointy toes pointing at us, as if to say they wanted us as much as we, we realized, wanted them.

Once we’ve finished talking to the reporters, we get on the transport that takes us to Germany and then another one that takes us home. We get off the transport and there, standing on the base’s tarmac, are our sweet babies, waving at us. We can see that our sweet babies don’t have our babies with them, for which we are grateful. Because that means there’s one fewer person between us and our pointy boots. The tarmac has been cleared, but the snowbanks surrounding it are ten, fifteen feet high, high enough that you can’t see the electric fences somewhere on the other side of them. It’s sunny out, the sky is crystal blue, but it’s so, so cold that our eyes start to water, immediately, the way they did when we first got to the desert and sand got into our eyes and they started to water, immediately. This is one of the things we’ve learned: not that people are the same wherever you go, but that we don’t change, no matter where we are. We shoulder our duffel bags and walk toward our sweet babies. As we get closer, our sweet babies stop waving, run toward us, arms out in front of them, preparing to hold us. Their faces look hopeful, but nervous. Because they know that Saunders is dead, and they also know about the usual choices, know that we could choose him instead of them. When they get close enough, they put their arms around us and hold us real tight. But we don’t hold them back. We keep one arm to our sides; the other keeps shouldering our duffels. When our sweet babies realize this they push themselves away, like they’re the ships and we’re the shore.

“You bastard,” our sweet babies say to those of us who are men. “You bitch,” our sweet babies say to those of us who are women. “You chose Saunders, didn’t you? You chose burying Saunders over holding us real tight.”

“We didn’t choose Saunders,” we say.

“Well, you obviously didn’t choose us,” they say.

“That’s true,” we say.

They look at us, confusion displacing anger on their faces for a second, before they figure out what’s going on, before they figure out what we’ve chosen. “Oh no,” they say.

“Oh yes,” we say. And then we ask them to please take us home, where our pointy boots are in our closets, waiting for us to put them on and parade around the Public Square.

We have seen and done some things: When we first killed an enemy, we were glad, because for the first time ever we found that we could actually do what we were trained to do; when we first killed someone who we weren’t sure was an enemy, we were happy that the word enemy existed so that we could call him one anyway; when we first saw one of our own comrades killed, we were ecstatic that it wasn’t us; and when we were done being ecstatic, then we were so so ashamed. We’ve seen and done all of that. Plus, there’s Saunders. But we’re truly ashamed of only one thing: that once we first saw the pointy boots in the Bon Ton, we had a fight over what kind we should get.

Those of us who grew up on a farm refused to buy Luccheses for fear of being mistaken for wops. Those of us who were Italians refused to buy Fryes for fear of being mistaken for rednecks. Some of us didn’t want to get Acmes because they sounded like joke boots. Some of us didn’t want to get Bearpaws because the name was too close to the name of the pastry. Some of us had no trouble getting Durangos except for those of us who had trucks that went by the same name. We all, finally, agreed on Saunders, except for Saunders, who said it was a stupid name for a boot. It was like giving a dog a human name, he said. “I would never name my dog ‘Saunders,’ ” one of us said, and then Saunders wanted to know what the hell that was supposed to mean. And how does life turn out this way? How does the thing that promises to be different, the thing that promises to make you feel good, end up making you feel as bad as everything else? And when that happens, do you take it out on the thing that has promised so much, or do you take it out on yourself for believing the promise?

We did both: We took it out on ourselves and on the boots. We hurled them at each other, at close range; we gouged each other’s eyes with the pointy toes; we clubbed each other with the hard heels; we put the boots over our hands, like gloves, and then boxed each other with them; we fell on the floor and wept at how pathetic and ridiculous we had become, how pathetic and ridiculous we always had been and always would be. And then, after we had wept but before we could figure out what else to do that we might later weep over, we were quiet, just for a moment, just long enough to hear one of the salesladies say meekly from inside her locked, slatted dressing room door: “What I’m hearing is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of boots you’re wearing, just as long as they’re pointy.”

It was like hearing the voice of God: not a vengeful God, but a practical, reasonable God, a God who didn’t keep tabs on all the bad things you did, but who listened, really listened to you while you did those bad things, so as to help you get what you wanted so you’d stop doing them. When you hear that voice, you don’t stop and ask how it got so wise, or question its wisdom. You just do what it tells you to do. We did what the saleslady told us to do. We gathered up the boots, found their partners. We located our size and our preferred brand and put them on, no matter how damaged they were, how damaged we had made them. Then we lined up and proceeded past the locked dressing room door; as we went past the door, we put our mouths to the slats and thanked the saleslady for her help. “I guess you’re welcome,” was her blessing. And then we left the Bon Ton and went out onto the Public Square.

Once our sweet babies figure out what we’ve chosen, they say, to themselves, “Poor Saunders. Poor us.” And then, to us: “You fuckers can just go ahead and walk home,” and then they run to their cars and lay rubber out of the parking lot. So, we re-shoulder our duffels and start walking.

Just outside the base, on the other side of the street from the entrance gate, are two protestors, both dressed head to toe in insulated camo, layers and layers of it, with only their faces uncovered. One, a woman, her cheeks round and fiery red, her gray hair peeking out from under a camo ski hat, is holding a cardboard sign with the words no more war written on it in red marker, with a green peace symbol drawn underneath. The other protestor is a man. Ice hangs from his gray beard, and snot from his red nose, like Christmas tree ornaments. He chants “no more war” into a bullhorn, drowning out whatever it is the woman is chanting, which is also probably “no more war .” They are exactly like us: There should be more of them, and they should have better ideas, and they should have better ways to tell people about their ideas. When they see us walk out of the gate, they stop chanting and come over to talk with us.

“Welcome home,” the guy with the bullhorn says, although not through the bullhorn, which he holsters in what looks like an enormous, weird-looking widemouthed wine sack.

“We’re proud of you,” says the woman, who is probably his wife. “We feel it’s important you know that.”

“Okay,” we say.

“This”—and here she taps her sign with the hand that’s not holding it—“this doesn’t mean we’re not proud of you.”

“Thank you,” we say.

“We know you don’t want to be there any more than we do,” she says.

“But we volunteered,” we say.

“You didn’t think you were volunteering for this,” she says. She looks at her sign and points to the word war, so we know exactly what’s she’s talking about.

“What did we think we were volunteering for, then?” we ask. We know the answer, and she doesn’t, but even if she did, she’d look at us the way she looks at us now—in huge disappointment, as though we’re not the people she thought we were, not the people she needs us to be. Still, she’s not quite ready to give up on us. We know this, because we know her. She really is the kind of person who wants to give peace a chance, and since she’s giving peace a chance, she figures she might as well give us one, too. “We,” she says. “You keep talking about yourselves as ‘We,’ and not ‘I.’ You poor people. I bet the army taught you to talk like that, to think like that.”

“Actually,” we tell her, “we’ve talked and thought this way ever since the day we first put on our pointy boots and paraded around the Public Square.”

“What?” she says, but she doesn’t wait for any answer. She slowly backs away from us, and across the street, where she stands holding her sign over her chest with both hands, as though out of modesty. “Are you coming, Harold?” she shouts. But Harold is not coming, not quite yet.

“Tell us something about what it’s like over there,” he says, eagerly. We know him, too. He’s the kind of guy—with his camo, his questions, his bullhorn, his homemade holsters, his gear—who spends every minute he’s not protesting the war fantasizing about what it’s like to be in one. “Tell us something we might not have heard from someone else.”

“Well,” we say, “one of the things you might not have heard is that when we’re interrogating someone we say that if they don’t tell us what we want to know, we’ll cut off their heads and then fuck their skulls.”

“Always?” Harold asks.

“Every time,” we say.

“You say it in English?”

“No, we don’t say it in English,” we say, even though we do say it in English. Because we trust that if we say it the right way, whomever we’re saying it to will get the point, more or less.

“Has anyone ever told you what you wanted to know?”

“No,” we say.

“I wouldn’t think so,” he says, then glances at those of us who are women, then looks away from them before they see him looking. It’s too late; they see.

“What?” those of us who are women say. “You got some kind of problem?”

“No, no problem,” the guy says, his hand moving instinctively to the bullhorn in his holster. “I just have a hard time imagining it, that’s all. Can, you know, a gal actually do that, physically? I mean, it’s not much of a threat, is it?”

“That’s it,” those of us who are women say. They drop their duffel bags and charge Harold. Those of us who are men have to restrain them while he retreats across the street. He stands next to his wife and shouts through his bullhorn, “It’s kind of funny, if you think about it,” and then his wife snatches the bullhorn out of his hands and tucks it into her parka.

“Saunders wouldn’t have thought it was funny,” we say.

“Who is Saunders?” Harold’s wife wants to know.

“Saunders is dead,” we say. “We’re going to lay him to rest tomorrow.”

“I bet Saunders didn’t think he was volunteering for that,” the woman says.

“No, he didn’t,” we say as we start walking home. Because we know what Saunders thought he was volunteering for. He thought he was volunteering for the same thing we did: for the chance to feel the way we felt when we first put on our pointy boots and paraded around the Public Square.

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