My stepfather rode in the rodeo when he was a teenager. He had a basketball scholarship to a local college when he finished high school at seventeen, but he joined the Marines instead. My grandmother says that if she didn’t sign for him to join, he had sworn to join anyway a couple of months later when he turned eighteen. My aunt says, he was so wild that grandma thought this might be his only chance to avoid ending up in jail, or, ironically, dead. So he went to Paris Island, and then to Vietnam. He was decorated for bravery, and for the injuries he sustained in combat.

He and my mother moved to a farm a few years ago. He raises horses now. Miniature horses. Useless, silly little horses. Not particularly macho.

I only asked my stepfather about the war once, when I was ten or so. Mom had always told me that he didn’t like to talk about it (she also told me to stand across the room and shout at him if I ever needed to wake him up, rather than stand within his reach). It’s no wonder he didn’t like to talk about it. He was basically a kid when he was shipped overseas

I don’t know that I’ll ever feel comfortable repeating what he told me, somehow it just doesn’t seem like it’s mine to tell. But it was a horrific and disturbing story, even with some of the details that he must have omitted. He only hesitated for a minute before telling me, and it was difficult for even an imaginative child to imagine. I don’t know why he told me. I like to think that it was so I wouldn’t have a glorified image of war — and so I’d never want to go myself.

Those nightmarish circumstances left this man one of the most gentle and generous people I’ve known. I think he’s happy on the peaceful little farm now, tending his silly little horses.