The first line of the letter, written on Army letterhead in the spring of 1974 and addressed to my husband at our little apartment on Main Street, said: Sergeant Gilley, we regret that the report you filed in November of 1969 was in error. Private First Class Lamar Jessup has been recovered alive. I read it out loud, in the waiting room of the clinic, with my voice getting smaller as I went. When I looked up, the old man in the wheelchair was already nodding, and tears ran down his lined face and into the collar of his shirt.
Roscoe, it turned out, had been the one who saw Lamar fall. On a hillside in the fall of 1969, with the rain coming sideways, he had watched his friend go down under the fire of a machine gun, and he had crawled to him, and found no pulse he could feel with his own shaking fingers. He had been forced back by the order of his lieutenant. In his report, he wrote that Lamar was dead. Then he carried the Silver Star of his friend to the mother of his friend, in Enterprise, with his own two hands, and watched her fold it into her apron.
Lamar took the story from there, in a voice so soft that I leaned in to hear it. He said he had not died. A patrol had pulled him out of the grass and sent him north, and he had spent four years in a bamboo cage, one of nine men, singing hymns to stay alive. When he came home in the spring of 1973, thin as a coat hanger, his mother was gone and her house had been sold. Nobody knew where the medal had gone. He had gone looking for Roscoe at once, he said, and found that the sergeant had moved away without leaving an address.
Two old soldiers can spend fifty years searching for each other and never once guess that they live twelve miles apart.
I said that Roscoe had found the Star at an estate sale in 1978, in a box of buttons, with the ribbon dirty and the name on the back. He had driven all over Georgia and Alabama for a year with it on the seat of his truck. He had written to the Army four times. He had read the phone book of every town in three counties. At last, he had put it away in the cigar box, because he could not bear to see it, and could not bear to give it up, and every Veterans Day he sat on the edge of the bed with the door shut and said a name.
I opened the cigar box, with a hand that was not entirely mine, and I laid it on the knees of Lamar. He did not open it at once. He stroked the lid with his one good hand, the way you stroke a cat. Then he lifted the Silver Star by its ribbon, and turned it over, and read his own name on the back, and let out a breath he seemed to have held for fifty five years. “There you are,” he whispered. “I thought I had lost you for good.”
Tammy told the rest then, with her voice breaking. She had read the date on the back of my receipt, the day the pawn man had written, and she had been so ashamed of herself that she could not sleep. Three weeks ago, she had gone back to the pawn shop with the first pay from a job at the Waffle House and asked the old Marine about the man who had come in asking. He gave her a name and a number. She found Lamar in an assisted living home in Enterprise, and she drove down the next day, sober for nineteen days, and sat in his room until he talked.
“I thought,” Tammy said to me, “that if I could bring Daddy a friend, maybe I could bring him something else too.” She wiped her eyes with her fist like a child. “Mama, I am so sorry about the medals. I took the one thing he loved and sold it for sixty dollars. And it turned out to be the thing that found him.” I took the face of my daughter in both hands, in that crowded waiting room, in front of all the veterans, and I kissed her forehead. I told her that the Lord has a way of using even our worst days as a map.
The next Saturday we drove out to Resthaven Cemetery, the four of us and the Marine, in my Buick, with the wheelchair folded in the trunk. The grass was wet and the sky was a clean October blue. Lamar sat in front of the stone of Roscoe for a long while with the Silver Star in his lap and said nothing. Then he reached out and laid his palm flat on the granite, as a man pats the shoulder of an old friend. “Sergeant,” he said, “you got my name to my mother, and my medal into her hands, and you never stopped looking. I am here to say thank you.”
What happened next surprised even the Marine. Lamar held the Silver Star out toward me by its ribbon. “Mrs. Gilley,” he said, “I want you to keep it for one more year. For him.” I tried to refuse. He closed my fingers around it with his hand and said, “You told me he sat on the edge of the bed every Veterans Day and looked at it. I think it kept him company. Let it keep you company. And then I would like it to go to the museum at Fort Rucker, in a case, with both our names.”
In November, the Army sent a colonel and a photographer to Dothan, and we held a small ceremony in the fellowship hall of the church. Lamar wore his best brown suit. The colonel pinned a corrected citation on the chest of Lamar and read the name of Roscoe aloud as the soldier who had never stopped searching. There was not a dry eye in the room. Tammy stood at the back in a plain blue dress, with eleven weeks sober on a chip in her pocket, and when the colonel asked the family of Roscoe to stand, she stood first.
I still drive my Buick with the magnetic sign on the door. On Thursdays I carry Lamar to the VA clinic on Westgate Parkway, and Tammy rides in the front seat, because she has a job in the billing office there now. We stop for milkshakes on the way home, all three of us, and Lamar tells the same war story every time with a different joke at the end. I keep the empty cigar box on the dresser. In it, where the medals used to lie, I put the pawn ticket, so I will never forget how a bad day can lead somewhere good.