This was in crow, oregon, a high desert town in the foothills of the cascade mountains. in crow we have fifteen hundred people, a dairy queen, a bp gas station, a food4less, a meatpacking plant, a bright green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. nothing distinguishes us from bend or redmond or la pine or any of the other nowhere towns off route 97, except for this: we are home to the second battalion, thirty-fourth marines. the marines live on a fifty-acre base in the hills just outside of town, a collection of one-story cinder-block buildings interrupted by cheatgrass and sagebrush. throughout my childhood i could hear, if i cupped a hand to my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, and the report of assault rifles shouting from the hilltops. our fathers – gordon’s and mine – were like the other fathers in crow. all of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more for a sergeant. beer pay, they called it, and for two weeks every year plus one weekend a month, they trained. our fathers would vanish into the pine-studded hills, returning to us sunday night with their faces reddened from weather, their biceps trembling from fatigue, and their hands smelling of rifle grease. then a few days would pass, and they would go back to the way they were, to the men we knew: coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, aqua velva – smelling fathers. no longer. in january the battalion was activated, and in march they shipped off for iraq. our fathers – our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas station attendants and ups deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics – our fathers, so many of them, climbed onto the olive green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine and vanished. just like that.
