12
Jo and Bob Burns
Laramie, Wyoming
THE SOUND OF strapping tape ripped through the living room in Laramie, Wyoming.
"Now for the hard part,”Jo Burns said after opening a cardboard box from Iraq filled with her son’s possessions. Then she corrected herself. "It’s all hard.”
It had been more than a month since Major Beck’s snowy midnight drive to the white house with the biggest numbers on the block. It had been a couple of weeks since Andrew Alonzo had set their son’s stone at Fort Logan. Major Beck wasn’t required to personally deliver the boxes to Laramie. He didn’t have to stay with the family for two hours more as they sifted through them. Actually, the major said, he had no choice.
"I know that Kyle Burns is looking at me, making sure I’m squared away-with his family and with him,” he said during the drive to Wyoming. "I know I’m going to have to answer the mail on that one day-not with God but with Kyle.”
In the living room, near a bare Christmas tree that the family couldn’t bring themselves to decorate, Bob Burns began lifting Zip-loc bags from the box, cataloging the contents in a shaky voice.
"Here’s his wallet,” he said as he looked inside. "A fishing license. A hunting license. A Subway Club card? Good grief.”
"They’re things that reminded him of home,”Jo Burns said.
A few minutes later she pulled out a list in her son’s handwriting and started to cry.
"What is it, Jo?” Bob Burns asked.
"It’s everyone he wanted to call-and write.”
"Well,” Bob said, "now we have a list, don’t we, Jo?”
They found more: a Bible with a splotchy camouflage cover, a giant clothespin, pens with their tops chewed, the government-issued sunglasses he called "military birth control glasses,” the keys to his truck, and to the house.
"Shee-sus,” Bob Burns said, shaking his head and lifting out a new set of corporal’s stripes. "He already bought them,” he said. "He only had a couple more tests to take.”
Kyle’s older brother, Kris, pulled out a book, Battlefield Okinawa, feathered the pages, and placed his finger at a wrinkle on the spine.
"Looks like he only got to about here,” he said. "He only got halfway through.”
He then pulled out one of the tins of Copenhagen his brother was known to hide everywhere. He opened up the tin, took a sniff, and scrunched up his face.
"That’s formaldehagen,” he said, knowing the crack would have made his brother smile: Kyle’s favorite joke was "Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.” When he went out drink ing, he wore a cap with rabbit fur ear flaps.
Jo Burns never wanted Kyle to be a Marine. When he invited a recruiter over to meet her, she was openly hostile.
"I have to be honest,” she said later. "I didn’t believe all that brotherhood bullshit. I thought it was just a bunch of little boys saying things that boys say. I never believed it until after he died.”
She whimpered as Major Beck rubbed her back.
"For me, having all this back is a good thing. I want to remember. I don’t ever want to forget or to stop feeling. I think Bob feels a little differently.”
"I don’t want to forget,” Kyle’s father said. "I just don’t want to hurt.”
In one of the boxes they found a little snow globe with a typical Wyoming scene: trees, an elk, a bear, and a coyote.
"He said it was so hot over there, he wanted something to remind him of home,” Jo Burns said.
She shook the snow globe and watched the flakes fall.