Free The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau Page B

The left side of the bar is awash with people milling about, talking, a series of animated heads and dark clothes, laughing, carrying drinks. On the right side of the barroom is a low table at which Hakma sits alone, lit from above as if by a gentle spotlight, his half-finished beer on the table in front of him, his arms resting on his knees, fingers together, interlaced, his head bowed as if in prayer.
52
    Tuesday, September 25 (AP)—Johnstown, Pennsylvania, resident Rose Henderson has only questions, and she wants only answers.
    “At first, when they told me he was lost, I thought they just meant lost as in misplaced, like maybe he caught the wrong plane somewhere and he would turn up eventually,” she says, referring to her son Christopher, who went missing in action while serving with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment. She speaks with the practiced weariness of someone who has repeated a story many times. “Then, a few weeks later, I got this very official-looking letter that said he had been formally declared missing in action. But they wouldn’t say where he was, or how it happened, or why.
    “Eventually, we learned a few more things about it,” she said recently over a cup of tea in her living room, which has been turned into something of a shrine to her eldest son. A large portrait of him hangs over the mantelpiece, and commendation letters, school trophies, and snapshots are displayed on shelves in a bookcase.
    Years later, she says the worst part is not knowing for sure, not having closure. “We were going to hold a memorial service a few years ago, but it just seemed wrong. If there’s even a chance he’s still alive, however small…” At this, Rose’s voice trails off, before she is able to take in a breath and continue. “At the same time, I wish there were some kind of end to this.”
    A spokesman from the Department of Defense, Richard Dominick, refused to discuss the specifics of the case.
    In an effort to get more information, she repeatedly contacted her congressional representatives. When she still didn’t hear anything, she formed a support group of other military families, many of whom have suffered lost, injured, or killed family members.
    “At first it was small, just local. We have a lot of families in the service around here. But pretty soon we were being contacted by people from all over.”
    The support group, which numbers over one hundred families, calls itself Military Families for Truth. And while they haven’t been able to get all the information they believe is available about the loss of Christopher, they have been able to help the families of other soldiers.
    “Many of them were misclassified,” says Henderson. “Or there was some kind of other clerical error. We’re pretty good at getting them to go back and make sure they have told us everything they can, and often, when they look at it again, they realize they can tell us more than they have.”
    She says that helping other families deal with the loss of their loved ones has helped her deal with her own loss. “He was my firstborn son,” says Henderson, who is divorced from Christopher’s father, and has two younger children who are now grown and live away from home. “The group has brought me up a little,” she says. “I was depressed for such a long time, and it helps to know that there are others in similar situations, and that I can help them.”
    In the meantime, Rose Henderson is still looking for answers. “I don’t know if I’ll ever learn the whole truth,” she says. “But I’ve got to keep looking.”
53
    It gets in there, this thought, this way of thinking. They try to plant it, for sure, tend to it so that it grows, foster it, but it is in there to begin with. You’re born with it, I suppose, and eventually life takes it out of you. The notion that you’re invincible. No fear, they said. They don’t want you to have any fear. Those other things, that invincibility, that aggression. They bring it