A BULLET IN THE KITCHEN

There it was. A bullet in my sink. That’s right, a bullet. We’d been gone all summer and we came home to find a bronze metal bullet standing straight up like a bra cup in my stainless steel sink.

I thought nothing of this. My husband had spent half of his reporting life covering wars and he’d been in and out of the house all summer. After his visits overseas, odd items showed up around our house as a result of covering stories in third world countries. We now had a collection of knives, spears, and weird guns that looked like blunderbusses or something from the colonial era.

He spent a great deal of time reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the wounded families left in their wake. He hung out with soldiers who had recently returned, had a cache of awards and honors and military coins of his own that had been given to him by various generals and commanders in all branches.

So when I walked in and saw the bullet, I shrugged. No big deal. It must have fallen out of his stuff while we’d been away, pulled out during his nightly emptying-the-pockets routine. Over the next few days, as we unpacked and settled back into the house, the subject of the bullet came up.

“Why is there a bullet in our kitchen?” my daughter asked, and I shrugged.

“It must be Dad’s,” I said. “He just got back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe he got it over there.”

“Mom, nice bullet!” my son Mack said to me the next morning, breezing into the kitchen after sleeping until noon.

“The better to keep you in line with,” I joked. He was leaving for college in five days and his absence and truculence was getting on my nerves. He was being mean to me, subconsciously on purpose, to help with the cutting of ties.

“Did you know there is a stray bullet in the kitchen? “ Bob asked me casually one day. And that was when I perked up. The use of the word stray implied that there were more, tamer ones, bullets that stayed in line.

“Yeah, isn’t it yours?”

“Mine? Nope. What would I be doing with a bullet?” he said as if I was accusing him of packing heat.

I then questioned the babysitter, who wasn’t a weapons kind of gal, but she had been keeping an eye on the house and cleaning during our absence.

“Diana,” I said casually. “Any chance you left a bullet lying around?

Her eyes widened in response. “It’s so strange,” she said. “One day that bullet was just here, in the kitchen,” she said solemnly. She couldn’t really pinpoint exactly when it had appeared.

Bob had suggested throwing it out. We probably did need to get rid of the bullet, but no one seemed to want to take responsibility.

Now I was nervous. Who, other than dictators and mobsters, finds bullets in their kitchen? Was this a symbol? A sign? A warning?

We lived in a fairly quiet, white and uptight neighborhood. It’s not exactly drive-by shooting territory, but who knows, maybe the bullet had been shot through a window. Maybe my husband had just ended an affair, my son had made an enemy on the soccer field or perhaps I had cut somebody off in the church parking lot. Goodness gracious there was a lot of talk about road rage these days. Anything was possible.

So here was the thing. There was a bullet….. standing up, in my kitchen.

We talked about the bullet on and off and back and forth, as if none of us wanted to be the one to dispose of it. Maybe, in essence, the bullet worked in reverse as a kind of protection, armor or amulet.

And so the days passed. And the bullet stayed. It moved from the counter up to the window sill. It stood, like some common household appliance, right next to the kitchen timer, as causally as people perch salt and pepper shakers next to each other.

“What if it falls into the garbage disposal and goes off with a bang?” my husband joked with me as he poured milk in his coffee one morning, But still, I felt unable to throw it out. And I didn’t want him to either.

Somehow that bullet was meant to be in our kitchen, I determined. It had become kind of comforting, protective.

“Why is a bullet in the kitchen?” asked my mother in law a week later as she visited from Detroit. She was doing the dishes after dinner and had glanced up at the window sill where it sat pointing skyward like a mini missile silo.

“It’s for good luck,” I answered simply. And she, who is hard of hearing and is becoming more garbled in thought and speech, nodded her head as she scrubbed the pots, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.

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Getting Back on the Horse

I've received so many wonderful emails and notes from folks who have read on the news that my husband Bob is back in Iraq and Afghanistan three years after his injury in Balad from a roadside bomb.  So many people have been so supportive of his desire to go back in honor of those who have served, are serving and who have returned from the wars injured or different. Many people have asked me "how could you let him go?  Or " aren't you nervous?"  When Bob stepped back out into the world after months of healing privately the first question it seemed many wanted to know was "would he go back?"  As I answered questions about whether or not I'd "let" him go back to Iraq, there was a tiny voice inside my head countering my own words. As Bob dutifully answered no, I knew that somewhere, somehow, knowing Bob, it would be important for him to do so.  The question was when and how.  It was clear he would never again be in a combat situation.  I would never be comfortable with him going back to a warzone.  The danger of even being near a blast could undo some of the amazing healing that his brain has undergone. All of the years he had spent covering conflicts or wars, putting his life on the line at times to cover a story, those days were over.  And although a part of him still yearns to do that kind of journalism.  I, for one, am very relieved that he will not. Bob got into his field the back way.  He didn't set out to be a journalist.  He was and is captivated by history, by current events,other cultures and world conflicts.  Traveling to far-flung places and telling the stories of what is happening there is simply an extension of his love of travel and backpacking into third world places or climbing high peaks. I knew well who I had married 20 years ago.  And after his injuries, I am so happy and relieved to say that very little of the Bob I married has changed.  Especially that part. It would be easy to imagine that Bob wants to return to Iraq to prove it "didn't best him" or to say that the insurgents didn't win.  The Bob I know wants to return to Iraq for many different reasons because it too, has gotten in his blood.  Certainly the fact that he almost lost his life there, that people battled and fought valiantly to save his life on that soil and that there are thousands of Americans there at this very moment putting their lives on the line, makes it an incredibly important story to tell.  No matter how weary Americans seem to have grown of hearing about the war, what your political bent is or how overshadowed the war is by the current economic events, what is happening in Iraq does matter. I understand Bob's need to return.  I understand the need to go back to a place where you almost perished and to see it with new eyes.  I understand his desire to get "back on the horse that threw him," to get the story and to update us on what is happening there from his unique position.  He is further privileged by traveling with Admiral Mullen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It's a big story and a worthy one. Each night, many spouses in America tuck in their kids, lay their head on the pillow and pray this is not going to be the night the phone rings with news of their loved one in Iraq.   I know that feeling, from the times he was embedded or placed somewhere in a danger zone.  But I didn't have to live with a year's worth of these nights-- or longer. I think that to live that way, to go to bed waiting for a phone to ring, to hope against hope that it won't, is to live a life circumscribed by fear. I won't live my life worrying that lightning will strike twice.  I've already been reminded just how precious it is.  As Bob says often to meif I worry about safety or danger, "You could step off the curb in Manhattan and get hit by a bus. " And he is right.  Life is unpredictable.  It's impossible to script.  In fact it's perfectly imperfect. In some ways Bob is most alive when he is in the field covering stories.  And this is the story that almost got the best of him.  I am sure he is feeling a mixture of many emotions while he is there.  And he will feel some very strong ones   when he touches back down on American soil. I've subconsciously waited for this trip to come for almost 2 years now, once I realized he would recover enough to go back to the work he loves. And I'm comfortable with it.  I understand it.  But I'll also be very, very glad when he is back home with us.

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