Veterans of a Foreign War

It’s close to midnight when I cross the Mississippi River at Saint Louis. The soaring stainless-steel Gateway Arch gleams in the skyline light.

I’m driving west across the country from Pennsylvania to visit a couple of old veteran friends of mine, to see what their lives are like now that they’re home, and to try to understand what the country makes of the continuing wars. After a dozen hours on the road, I pull over to sleep in my car at a rest area on the side of the freeway. In the morning, I drive south-west towards Fort Leonard Wood, where I attended US Army basic training and combat engineer school a decade ago. Rain hammers my windshield as I drive past dozens of billboards advertising tours of the caves where the James Gang hid from the law in the days when Missouri was still the Wild West, before it became part of the emblematically milquetoast Midwest.

Around lunchtime, I roll up to the same gatehouse where I arrived on a bus late one evening in October 2001, destined for fourteen weeks of trainee hell. Fort Leonard Wood seemed like a maximum-security prison back then – within hours I had my head shaved, civilian clothes confiscated and individual identity dismantled – but today I’m just another visitor. The guard looks at my ID and waves me through without a word.