“Really,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

I nodded, and for a long moment we simply stared at each other.

“Will you remember to watch for the full moon?” she asked.

“Every single time,” I promised.

We shared one last kiss. I held her tight and whispered that I loved her, then I forced myself to release her. I slung my gear over my shoulder and headed up the ramp. Peeking over my shoulder, I realized that Savannah was already gone, hidden somewhere in the crowd.

On the plane, I leaned back in the seat, praying that Savannah had been telling the truth. Though I knew she loved and cared for me, I suddenly understood that even love and caring weren’t always enough. They were the concrete bricks of our relationship, but unstable without the mortar of time spent together, time without the threat of imminent separation hanging over us. Although I didn’t want to admit it, there was much about her I didn’t know. I hadn’t realized how my leaving last year had affected her, and despite anxious hours thinking about it, I wasn’t sure how it would affect her now. Our relationship, I felt with a heaviness in my chest, was beginning to feel like the spinning movement of a child’s top. When we were together, we had the power to keep it spinning, and the result was beauty and magic and an almost childlike sense of wonder; when we separated, the spinning began inevitably to slow. We became wobbly and unstable, and I knew I had to find a way to keep us from toppling over.

I’d learned my lesson from the year before. Not only did I write more letters from Germany during July and August, but I called Savannah more frequently as well. I listened carefully during the calls, trying to pick up any signs of depression and longing to hear any words of affection or desire. In the beginning, I was nervous before making those calls; by the end of the summer, I was waiting for them. Her classes went well. She spent a couple of weeks with her parents, then began the fall semester. In the first week of September, we began the countdown of days I had left until my discharge. There were one hundred to go. It was easier to talk of days rather than weeks or months; somehow it made the distance between us shrink to something far more intimate, something that both of us knew we could handle. The hard part was behind us, we reminded each other, and I found that as I flipped the days on the calendar, the worries I’d had about our relationship began to diminish. I was certain there was nothing in the world that could stop us from being together.

Then came September 11.

Fifteen

This I am sure of: The images of September 11 will be with me forever. I watched the smoke billowing from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and saw the grim faces of the men around me as they watched people jump to their deaths. I witnessed the buildings’ collapse and the massive cloud of dust and debris that rose in their place. I felt fury as the White House was evacuated.

Within hours, I knew that the United States would respond to the attack and that the armed services would lead the way. The base was put on high alert, and I doubted there was ever a time that I was prouder of my men. In the days that followed, it was as if all personal differences and political affiliations of any kind melted away. For a short period of time, we were all simply Americans.

Recruiting offices began to fill around the country with men wanting to enlist. Among those of us already enlisted, the desire to serve was stronger than ever. Tony was the first of the men in my squad to reup for an additional two years, and one by one, every other man followed his lead. Even I, who was expecting my honorable discharge in December and had been counting the days until I could go home to Savannah, caught the fever and found myself reenlisting.

It would be easy to say that I was influenced by what was going on around me and that was the reason I made the decision I did. But that’s just an excuse. Granted, I was caught up in the same patriotic wave, but more than that, I was bound by the twin ties of friendship and responsibility. I knew my men, I cared about my men, and the thought of abandoning them at a time like this struck me as impossibly cowardly. We’d been through too much together for me to even contemplate leaving the service in those waning days of 2001.

I called Savannah with the news. Initially, she was supportive. Like everyone else, she’d been horrified by what had happened, and she understood the sense of duty that weighed on me, even before I tried to explain it. She said she was proud of me.

But reality soon set in. In choosing to serve my country, I’d made a sacrifice. Though the investigation into the perpetrators was completed quickly, 2001 drifted to an uneventful close for us. Our infantry division played no role in the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, a disappointment to everyone in my squad. Instead, we spent most of winter and spring drilling and preparing for what everyone knew was the future invasion of Iraq.

It was, I suppose, around this time that the letters from Savannah began to change. Where once they came weekly, they started arriving every ten days, and then, as the days began to lengthen, they came only every other week. I tried to console myself with the fact that the tone of the letters hadn’t changed, but in time even that did. Gone were long passages in which she described the way she envisioned our life together, passages that in the past had always filled me with anticipation. We both knew that dream was now two years distant. Writing about a future so far off reminded her of how long we had to go, something painful for both of us to contemplate.

As May swept in, I consoled myself that at least we would be able to see each other on my next leave. Fate, however, conspired against us again just a few days before I was to return home. My commanding officer requested a meeting, and when I presented myself in the office, he instructed me to take a seat. My dad, he told me, had just suffered a major heart attack, and he’d already gone ahead and granted the additional emergency leave. Instead of heading to Chapel Hill and two glorious weeks with Savannah, I traveled to Wilmington and spent my days by my dad’s bedside, breathing in the antiseptic odor that always made me think less of healing than of death itself. When I arrived, my dad was in the intensive care unit; he stayed there most of my leave. His skin had a grayish pallor, and his breathing was rapid and weak. For the first week, he drifted in and out of consciousness, but when he was awake, I saw emotions in my father that I’d seen only rarely and never in combination: desperate fear, momentary confusion, and a heartbreaking gratitude that I was beside him. More than once, I reached for his hand, another first in my life. Because of a tube inserted into his throat, he couldn’t speak, so I did all the talking for us. Though I told him a little of what was going on back on base, I spoke to him mainly about coins. I read him the Greysheet; when that was done, I went to his house and retrieved the old copies he kept filed in his drawer and read those to him as well. I researched coins on the Internet—at sites like David Hall Rare Coins and Legend Numismatics—and recited what was being offered as well as the latest prices. The prices amazed me and I suspected that my father’s collection, despite the fall in coin prices since gold was in its heyday, was probably ten times as valuable as the house he’d owned outright for years. My father, unable to master the art of even simple conversation, had become richer than anyone I knew.

My dad was uninterested in their value. His eyes would dart away whenever I mentioned it, and I soon remembered what I’d somehow forgotten: that to my dad, the pursuit of the coins was far more interesting than the coins themselves, and to him each coin was representative of a story with a happy ending. With that in mind, I racked my brain, doing my best to remember those coins that we had found together. Because my dad kept exceptional records, I would scan those before going to sleep, and little by little, those memories came back. The following day, I would recall for him stories of our trips to Raleigh or Charlotte or Savannah. Despite the fact that even the doctors weren’t sure whether he was going to make it, my dad smiled more in those weeks than I ever remember him doing. He made it back home the day before I was set to leave, and the hospital made arrangements for someone to look in on him while he continued to recover.

But if my stay in the hospital strengthened my relationship with my dad, it did nothing for my relationship with Savannah. Don’t get me wrong—she joined me as often as she could, and she was both supportive and sympathetic. But because I spent so much time in the hospital, it did little to heal the fissures that had begun to form in our relationship. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I even wanted from her: When she was there, I felt as if I wanted to be alone with my dad, but when she wasn’t, I wanted her by my side. Somehow, Savannah navigated this minefield without reacting to any stress I redirected her way. She seemed to know what I was thinking and anticipate what I wanted, even better than I did.

Still, what we needed was time together. Time alone. If our relationship was a battery, my time overseas was continually draining it, and we both needed time to recharge. Once, while sitting with my dad and listening to the steady beep of the heart monitor, I realized that Savannah and I had spent only 4 of the last 104 weeks together. Less than 5 percent. Even with letters and phone calls, I would sometimes find myself staring into space, wondering how we’d survived as long as we had.