“Military?” she asked.
“Used to be,” I said.
She poured more coffee without charging me.
“Honey,” she said, “once it gets in your blood, it never really leaves.”
I slept in my car behind the diner until dawn.
By the next afternoon, I found a small apartment in Norfolk near the naval pier. The landlord was a Vietnam veteran with a limp and a handshake like old rope. When he heard I had served, he knocked two hundred dollars off the deposit and said, “Don’t make me regret liking sailors.”
The place was nothing. Thin walls. Loud pipes. A refrigerator that sounded like it was fighting for its life.
But it was mine.
On the third day, I got temporary work at a veteran outreach center downtown. They needed someone to coordinate rides for injured vets, help with benefits paperwork, and call families who had stopped answering. The pay was terrible. The purpose was not.
The first veteran I helped was a Marine named Travis, missing two fingers and most of his hope.
