“Truth is not simply what happened, but how we felt about it when it was happening, and how we feel about it now.”
— Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By
The Lost Identity
When Randy returned home from Ethiopia, he came back to a world that looked eerily the same as it did when he left. The streets looked the same. The houses sat in the same places they always had. His parents still moved the same, talked the same, asked the same predictable questions. But Randy was not the same.
After many nights imagining what it would be like to drive down his street again, when the moment came, it was as if the comfort of nostalgia had been erased out of him. The relief he was reaching for remained just beyond his grasp, and he wondered if he would ever feel like his old self again.
At first, he convinced himself that adjustment was simply a matter of effort. It seemed reasonable enough to assume that if he could be changed so much in three years, he could easily go back to what he always knew.
He tried to step back into ordinary life, pushing himself to become useful and engaged. He made attempts at conversations, and drifted through the motions of family life, feeling trapped inside the heavy, dark cloud that felt attached to his entire body.
Every normal thing seemed to ask too much of him. The everyday world felt oddly staged, full of people discussing errands, bills, jobs, church, dinner, and plans for the future, while none of that seemed important to Randy anymore. The mundane tasks of everyday life felt unbearable, and the fear that he was too broken to function inside normalcy stirred up his deepest wounds, which felt very unsettling.
He had come home with too much inside of him. His body was there, but some essential part remained elsewhere, trapped in an experience no one around him seemed capable of entering. Even if he had the words to explain what he had lived through, he knew his family wouldn’t really want to understand. Randy knew it would be easier for everyone if he could find a way to suppress and move on.
But that did little except bulk up his shame. Not simply because of what had happened, but because he was afraid he couldn’t master himself afterward. Randy had always seen himself as the one who could step into the spotlight as the vivacious one; the one who could soften the sharp edges of life and add color to the dreariness. With that part of him dulled, who was he supposed to be now?
The emptiness on the other end of that question scared him, so he withdrew. And while it felt like the safest thing for Randy to do, he became trapped in his loneliness. The more his parents pushed him to go back to school or find a job, the more misunderstood he felt. The more misunderstood he felt, the more he retreated from the world around him. If his pain was too dark for the world to handle, then he’d figure out a way to live so he didn’t need the world at all.
But he did need it. That was the tragedy. Behind the withdrawal was not emptiness, but an overflow of ignored truth. Behind the man performing indifference was still a boy aching to be understood without having to explain the memories that haunted him the most.
At 23 years old, he was tasting the bitter truth that he wasn’t as invincible as he hoped he was. It was as if his innocence had evaporated into a strange funk, and it was easy to listen to the nagging inner voice that reminded him that he could never be more than trouble.
It was a painful realization that home had become another place where he could not quite belong.
Then Christmas came, and the only person Randy could think about was Susan.
Susan
Randy never knew how much Susan had also been changed by his deployment. Once it was confirmed that he would be leaving, something inside her cracked. She tried to keep going to school in Knoxville, but everything felt lifeless and empty. Some days, she could barely get out of bed. She stopped applying herself in her classes and eventually decided to leave Knoxville behind, returning instead to the comfort of her childhood home, where life still seemed to make sense.
Her parents tried to remind her that she still had her whole life ahead of her and that the future remained unwritten. But their words felt less like encouragement and more like a dismissal of her pain. A life that might never include Randy did not seem like anything worth looking forward to.
The last time they saw each other had been heartbreaking. Randy’s face was draped in an expression Susan had never seen on him before, and as he told her the latest about his departure, she barely knew what to say. It was as though everything inside her had frozen in disbelief.
Perhaps, in his desperation, Randy hoped there might be some way to soften the blow of such a cruel turn of events. Right then and there, as they were about to say goodbye, he asked Susan to marry him. Maybe he tried to frame it as an adventure they would always remember, or maybe he hoped it would give him a reason to be excused from leaving.
But Susan knew better, and she said no.
She felt terrible watching him drive away, knowing there was a chance she might never see him again.
When his letters arrived, her hands would shake as she opened them. The sight of Randy’s handwriting carried her back to a simpler time, when she would see that same familiar script on notes he passed her in class. Her heart pounded as she read every word, and when she finished, she curled into a ball and cried. At times, she became so distraught that her mother grew concerned.
When the emotional wave finally settled, Susan would think about writing back, but the words would not come. She knew anything she said to him would carry weight, and she had no idea how to say something that might actually help. So she froze, and she said nothing.
…
By 1976, Susan had begun finding her way back to herself. She enrolled in the first nursing program at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and when classes resumed that fall, a friend mentioned seeing Randy.
Susan’s heart seemed to jump, stop, and sink all at once.
Should she call him? No, she had been taught not to call boys.
But would he call her, after she had never answered his letters? Would he be hurt? Angry? Had he moved on and forgotten her entirely?
Suddenly, she felt as though she were back on the same emotional roller coaster, caught once more in that familiar, frozen feeling.
Then, on the day after Christmas, just as her family was loading up the car to head to Florida, there was a knock on the front door.
It was Randy.
December 26, 1976
The surprise visit…
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