Solider

Chance encounters have ways of taking what I know to be true, turning it sideways and dumping it all over the frozen winter earth. After encounters such as these, I often feel sick, disoriented and strangely fulfilled. Yesterday, I happened upon a soldier standing alone amongst the rocks and rubble of an ancient barracks on my way home from work. Dusk was fast fading into a slimy cold night, and the soldier never once took his eyes off of the horizon. I slowed my car to a stop in the soft gravel beside the road and approached him.

Before I could reach him, he spoke out to me in a voice unlike anything I had ever heard. Every word rang fully and dark, not unlike a trained singer swimming through a verse; however, he was not singing. His natural tone was unimaginably focused, as if he had rehearsed the exact lines for hours.

“This used to be a barracks during the war. We’re standing in what was the mess, and in front of us was the tower where watch was kept.”

He never once looked back, but his voice wavered slightly as he continued.

“You never really realize how beautiful a single tower can be until you look at it in the fading light of a winter day. The way the shadows fall over the cold stone can illuminate it so perfectly. You might not understand it, but one day you will look at a tower like this old thing and realize just how strong and faithful it was, and, still is. It never once failed its men.”

With that, he walked across the empty field, got in a car, and drove off.

While he was talking, I couldn’t help but fathom the levels of crazy this old colonel had reached, going on and on about a tower that plainly wasn’t there. Writing about the encounter now, I realize that the fact that there was no tower is exactly what he saw and still believed in. There is no tower now, but there used to be, and that makes the field so much more beautiful, so much richer, and it was what drew the man to the ruin.

Thinking back on the encounter, it most likely didn’t happen, the setting, the characters and the plot completely falsehoods. Despite this, I heard from a co-worker today that plans were in place to reconstruct the north watchtower of the old barracks on base.