Major Conflict

by Jeffrey McGowan, Maj USA (ret. )

  Paul was late, forty-five minutes late, in fact, so I had the chance, sitting at the bar, nursing a Weizen beer, to go through this whole process a few more times: up and down, hope then doubt, terror then relief and joy—again and again. What a mess in love I was!

  And finally around eight forty-five, just when I was about to give up, not just on seeing him that night but on him completely, his absence the final proof, I was sure, of his straight indifference, there he was, bursting through the door, rushing briskly toward me, looking contrite, eager to explain. His face was flush with exertion, and he was bright-eyed and smiling big, all perfect white teeth ear to ear, as he pushed past my clammy extended hand, to hug me hard, like a long-lost brother.

  “Heeeey, buddy, what’s up!” he enthused. “Sorry I’m late, but my unit was doing some last-minute stuff before we fly, and we had to work late. I’m so sorry, really, bud,” he went on, pulling out of the hug and backing slightly away and looking into my face intently.

  “I’m great,” I said, too loudly I thought. “What about you?”

  “Good, good,” he said, still breathing a little hard. He pointed to one of the unoccupied private nooks. “Let’s sit down and get a beer.”

  We didn’t miss a beat. It felt as if we’d seen each other only yesterday. He told me he’d moved up in his unit, having been given an executive officer position, and that a few times, in the absence of his bosses, he’d briefly commanded. Commanding is always an honor and is especially good for your promotion prospects when you’re a lieutenant. I was truly happy for him. The conversation came so easily and seemed just so right that I felt completely relaxed and open.

  After a few beers it started to feel as if we’d left the army far behind. There was a moment, when he got up to get us the third round and I was left alone at the table, when I felt the whole unwieldy burden of the military just lift from my shoulders, as easily as an overcoat, and suddenly, but only briefly, it was just the two of us, Paul and me, having beers in a bar in Europe, two young Americans far away from home, on a date, I thought to myself. How simple it all was when you removed the army from the equation, removed its antiquated bias and all the wasteful and unnecessary hand-wringing and drama that came along with it.

  But as Paul loped back toward me, through the smoke and red light of Kyalami’s, bearing two fresh Weizen beers, all I could think of was the war. And suddenly, that’s all there was. There was only the war. Only the military. And I think in the few seconds it took for him to reach me, as I watched what I couldn’t have move closer to me while at the same time receding from possibility, I understood, for the first time in my life, what it might be like to have a broken heart. I think I aged a decade in those few seconds, and I grew up right then and there. I understood that I was, after all, just like everyone else, a man who can be hurt, who can be vulnerable; I understood that I, too, was a man who bleeds.

  I almost spoke up at that point. I almost shouted, “Wait, I have to tell you something!” thinking I could save us. I almost told him everything. I almost said it all. But as he put down the two beers and settled himself into the booth, he started talking about his girlfriend for some reason, and the moment was gone. He might as well have slapped me across the face.

  All hope wasn’t lost, however, because it became plain to me right away that he was talking about the stateside girlfriend out of some sense of obligation, the excitement that had lit up his eyes just a few minutes before disappeared, and his easygoing manner became clipped and a bit curt, as if she was an unwanted, though necessary, intrusion at this point.

  For my part, as much to cover my own ass, I think, as to put him at ease, to let him know we were playing the same game, I told him about a girl I’d met through a friend at Speckmaus. Her name was Annette, and she had a huge crush on me. I liked her well enough that I’d decided to date her somewhat casually. Paul reacted to this coolly. He was smooth and noncommittal, though he did seem distant for a moment, and the reaction seemed just a little bit off, as if he’d slightly miscalculated his response and had, as a result, underplayed the role. He was too cool, too indifferent. And I could see this. And to complicate matters even more, I think he saw that I saw.

  Suddenly we broke into laughter, sharing the unspoken inside joke, and I think within that laughter and that split second of self-conscious acknowledgment, we inadvertently managed to look at each other with unguarded honesty for the very first time. But neither of us had the courage to make a move, neither of us had the balls to say what needed to be said, so the laughter petered out and the moment vanished.

  After another round of beers I was sporting a pretty good buzz and beginning to feel increasingly less guarded about my feelings. I was edging gradually closer to an all-out confession as I became filled with a deep, deep yearning just to stop the bullshit and talk straight. It was the whole, long process at the café and during my walk to Kyalami’s to meet him, but speeded up so that it moved through me in miniature waves.

  I’d look at his face, hear his voice, sense his body across the table from me, and all the desire would just well up in me; with each successive wave, I felt the barriers in my mind straining hard to hold on, yet beginning to loosen under the pressure. My carefully crafted life plan, my false ideal of what it was to be a soldier, seemed so utterly trivial in the wake of this desire. I kept trying to figure out something to ask, some coded way of inquiry, that would help me determine if there was even the slightest possibility my suspicions and instincts were correct. But then something would pull me back from the brink, fear mostly, I suppose, but common sense as well, since I knew I wasn’t prepared to be booted out of the army and forced to build a whole new life in the civilian world.

  But then, damn, another wave would come crashing down on me, and I’d think, Maybe, just maybe. His signals were so subtle and guarded that it was hard to tell, but there was something there, I just knew it. How could I figure it out for sure? I couldn’t. The risk was too great. And in addition to the big risk of exposure and professional ruin in the army, there was, too, the added normal risk of basic vulnerability, of admitting that you were attracted to someone only to discover he didn’t share your feelings. What if Paul was gay but simply not attracted to me? That seemed impossible. I knew it didn’t make any sense. But that possibility made it feel as if the cliff I was standing on had suddenly doubled in size: the drop would be twice as long, the impact twice as hard. All at once the risk of admitting my attraction to Paul had been magnified twofold.

  But then another wave hit me, a bigger wave, fueled by a slightly higher buzz from the Weizen beer, and I was pushing all that aside again, feeling bold, my heart screaming: This is it! Take a chance! Trust your heart!

  “Paul,” I said abruptly, interrupting his story about a dog he’d had when he was in grade school, “I need to ask you something.” His face turned a little pale, and there was something close to terror in his eyes, though a terror laced with hope, I’d think later on. He’d seen something in my face. I’d scared him. The look in his eyes was too much for me, and I couldn’t bring myself to continue. I hated myself for being so cowardly, but it didn’t seem as if I had a choice. It just wasn’t in me yet.

  “Nothing, nothing,” I said, trying to laugh. “I was just thinking that I should probably get going.” I’d had enough. It was close to one now, and I still had the drive back home to my apartment in Cleeberg.

  “What? You gotta be kiddin’ me; crash at my place, it’s much closer.”

  “That’s really nice, Paul, but it’s, what, almost one now, and I have to work in the morning, so . . .”

  Paul looked visibly disappointed, as if his perception of me had suddenly proved unworkable and he’d have to start all over again. I wanted so much to go back to his apartment, to spend the night with him, but I was feeling so frustrated and a little sorry for myself. The thought of being alone with him in his apartment was almost too much to bear. And the idea of being in the apartment and being unable to to
uch him, to have to sleep on the couch, or on the floor, when he’d be only a few feet away from me, seemed impossible. I decided just to slink home.

  “All right, man,” Paul said, a little too casually, I thought, considering the expression that had just been on his face. “Maybe I’ll have one more and then head home.” He was again trying too hard to appear indifferent. But then he said, kind of abruptly, “So, when do I see you again? We’re going to fly pretty soon. Could be any day now.” This didn’t seem indifferent at all, and I started to feel a little bit hopeful and a little less sorry for myself.

  “Give me a call later this week,” I said, starting to smile, “and we’ll set something up.” I moved to shake his hand, but just like when he arrived he moved right past my outstretched hand and gave me a big hug, even harder and longer this time, now that both of us had had a few beers.

  As I walked out into the cold night air, my head began to clear from all the smoke and beer, and I figured I’d be okay for the drive home. I wasn’t feeling too bad, all things considered, and when I reached the car I thought about going back and taking Paul up on his offer. I flashed on his face, tried to imagine his fit young body naked beneath the T-shirt and jeans, tried to imagine a kiss, how we’d wrestle and fumble to pull off clothes, frantic to get at each other, but then all the questions and doubts returned, clouding over my fantasy, and I reminded myself that I did have to get up early for work after all, so it really wasn’t possible tonight.

  But would it ever be? Would it ever be possible? I liked Paul even more now that I was getting to know him better. He was a very good-looking man, beautiful, in fact, one of those people you wonder about, about how someone that beautiful gets to move through the world. But he was also smart and funny and modest and easy to talk to, and it just felt so damn good to be around him. On one level I was absolutely certain that what had just happened was a kind of date, that I’d just walked away from a four-hour flirtation. On another level, that notion certainly collapsed in light of the tremendous risk and all my other doubts. And it was this dilemma that nearly drove me crazy with Paul.

  Driving home to my apartment in Cleeberg, I tried to imagine a perfect world where I could express myself however I liked without fear of losing my job and destroying my professional reputation and being humiliated in the process. A world in which I could say, “Paul, I like you. I’m attracted to you,” and he’d be able to say, “Thanks, I like you too, Jeff,” or “Thanks, Jeff, I’m flattered, but I see you more as a good friend,” the world in which my straight peers lived. Later on, I would realize that that world did, in fact, exist, with some limitations. It was the civilian gay world in which Greg lived, the world that I was unable to find credible for a very long time. If either one of us could have spoken the truth that night in Kyalami’s like Greg had spoken to me on that first night we went out drinking way back in 1985—the ease with which he came forward and said so simply and so forthrightly, I like you so much, Je f. I’m really attracted to you—it would have made things so easy, so simple, we would’ve avoided so much unnecessary pain. But Paul and I had given up that freedom; we’d given up access to the burgeoning gay civilian world to be soldiers and now found ourselves trapped in a kind of lunacy in which all desire had to fit neatly into a prescribed formula, a formula that excluded us lock, stock, and barrel.

  And why couldn’t I find the gay civilian world that Greg inhabited credible? To put it simply, I’d been taught that it could never be credible, that it was deviant (yes, deviant was the word that still ran through my head at that time), that it stood in direct opposition to and was mutually exclusive of the set of values I’d inherited from my aging, old-world grandparents, and from the aging and increasingly out-of-touch and sexually conflicted Catholic Church. In addition, I could never be a “real man” and give in to these impulses. It was all pretty typical stuff, though stuff with tremendous power, stuff that, once ingrained, is still, even in this relatively liberal age, very hard to undo.

  Because of all this I was blind to the increasing visibility of the civilian gay culture, and as a result I failed to find gay role models or any kind of guidelines that could have helped me along. It might as well have been 1950 (and in the military it often felt like 1950) as far as gay culture was concerned. The gay movement could have screamed at me through a dozen megaphones, and I still would’ve been deaf to the idea of freedom they were offering.

  Still, despite my stubborn belief that the military and the church had it right on the issue of homosexuality, I could not deny the positive feelings that Paul brought up in me—I couldn’t deny the positive nature of love itself.

  Over the next week I tried to keep my mind off Paul by throwing myself back into work as the preparations for our unit’s departure became a little more hectic. The workload was increasing daily, and the vehicle departure date was fast approaching. Our equipment would be shipped down to the theater in the Gulf, and we would link up with it at a later date. The holidays made the whole thing seem only more dramatic. The closer we got to Christmas, the harder it seemed to become for the families with whom I’d occasionally have dinner. Many of the wives were already emotionally brittle, and now they had the added pressure of dealing with all the trappings of the holiday and putting on the good face of Christmas cheer. I often felt awkward because it seemed obvious to me that the wives would have preferred spending every available second with their husbands alone, rather than entertaining bachelor lieutenants like myself. But they knew that officers like me had no real family in Germany, so they opened their homes and hearts to us all the same.

  About a week after my night with Paul I got back to my apartment and found a plate of food from my landlady, Marlies, on my doorstep. She was a sweet lady who often left cookies and other things for me whenever she could. Like the wives who had me over for dinner, Marlies apparently felt some sort of obligation to take care of me, and I appreciated it mightily. As I started to take off my boots I listened to the one message I had on my answering machine. It was from Paul.

  “Hey, bud,” he started in that light, bouncy voice he always used, as if nothing could upset him, “I was hoping to talk with you before I left, but since you’re not around I’ll have to leave a message and maybe try again a little later, too.” He paused, cleared his throat. “We’re leaving tonight from Rhein-Main, and it looks like it’s going to be a nightmare. The plane schedule is all fucked up again; it’s like the Keystone Kops are running the base, I swear, but that doesn’t matter. I wanted you to know that—ever since I met you—I just knew we would—ahhhh—that we would always be friends. We’re going to war now, and I don’t want to—get too mushy, but I—just wanted you to know that I would miss you and all—so—stay safe, bud, stay safe, Jeff, and maybe, hopefully, we’ll see each other over there. If not, we’ll definitely have to get together when it’s all over. Okay then, so—bye for now.”

  I lay there on the bed, one boot on, one boot off, playing the message over again, three or four times, staring at the ceiling. Yes, I thought, we were going off to war, and yes, the only thing we were sure of was that we’d do our duty as we’d been trained to do.

  But none of that mattered too much in light of the message. All I could hear was his voice. This was the last piece of evidence I needed. Add this to every conversation we’d ever had, all the signals he’d sent, the lingering glances after some double entendre, the times I’d caught him secretly staring at me, the heat that so often seemed to rise off his body when we were together (his body was one that seemed to have been specifically designed for sex, as if his beauty was his evolutionary trump card)—take all this into account, and you could arrive at only one conclusion: Paul liked me, was attracted to me. And I was thrilled. The girlfriend was just a front, I thought, and suddenly the sheer ardor with which he’d pursued our friendship became crystal clear to me; it was so telling, it was all the evidence one needed, really.

  Still, damn it, still, I thought, pulling myself up and finally
taking off my other boot and throwing it against the wall, how can I be sure? I played the message over one more time and found myself hearing the voice of a friend, not the voice of a lover, and everything was up in the air again. This wasn’t fair! I quickly changed my clothes and went to the fridge to grab a beer. Here we were, I thought, on the eve of war, facing the great abyss of uncertainty that comes with every war, in which the possibility of death, of mutilation, of unspeakable horror, is very real, and we are denying ourselves the comfort of shared affection, the knowledge that the other waits for us, no matter where we are, and is thinking of us, hoping for us, praying for us. Damn it, if there could be something between Paul and me I wanted to know, I wanted to be able to have hope for the future, to know that there might be something wonderful to live for after the war. And this knowledge would be a refuge when the going got tough, a private place of comfort. I wanted to be able to pull out a picture of someone I loved, or to send him a letter—to be connected to another individual in a way that might make the war, and my whole life, more meaningful and valuable. What is it that we defend in war, after all, but the tranquillity of our domesticity? We fight for the right to live in peace and to love. We fight war to defend love.

  Yes, there was my grandmother back in Jackson Heights, hoping for me, praying for me, sending me letters; she was a great comfort, but it was the potentially intimate connection with Paul that would have given me even greater comfort. I wanted to be able to share my whole being with another person, and I was pretty sure that’s what Paul wanted as well. I thought of all those soldiers’ wives who had been so generous to me, taking me in and feeding me, and how thoroughly they took for granted their right to love and hope and pray for the safe return of their soldier husbands. My God, so often I felt as if I were standing behind a piece of glass, watching other people who were in every way just like me go about their lives, and all I could do was look, never touch. How long could I live like this without going completely insane?