He just had to come home

My shifts were done for the afternoon and evening and I could finally park the car, climb up the steps and into the house to relax watching some soaps. When I got in there was a note on the coffee table. An old friend from high school had tracked me down and needed to talk to me. A mutual friend who disappeared after high school was in trouble over seas and things looked pretty scary for this young man. 

Now all of us graduated in 1984 and 'Logan" (real name witheld for privacy) was a rebel anyway, always looking for trouble but never really getting into it. A hedonistic bad-boy with mocha-latte skin and very curly tight-and-close to his head hair cascading into sideburns, yes Logan had sideburns. We were all in tech-crew together in high school and most of us had not seen each other for about three years. None of us had seen Logan since a few weeks after graduation.

Logan went looking for trouble by enlisting in the marines and by January 17th 1991, the Desert Storm conflict had begun. Our mutual friend said the last correspondence was a telegram  she received from Logan dated August or early September of that same year. They had kept in touch only recently and he said he would come home "as soon as this fiasco was over". I called her phone but the line was busy and it was for many hours into the night. Around 2am, while everyone else in the house was asleep, I flicked the stereo on, put my earphone jack in the amp and flipped through some stations.

I started to cry as I listened to Brett Michaels of POISON sing this ballad of love, war, tears and friendships erased by the cruelty of obedience gone wrong, but there had to be something good about what Logan was doing over there and I had to have 'something to believe in' at that moment, just to sleep and face the rest of the week till I heard something.

If Brett's singing about something to believe in could have made Logan come home that would of been great but he could not and all I did was cry for I knew as bad as it was out there, Logan was not safe. To this day, I am not sure where our friend Logan is and if Desert Storm lost him then they lost a fine soldier, a great man and a mother never heard her son say, "mom you gave me something to believe in and I died trying to save it. I am so sorry it had to end this way for all of us." He is still 'missing' today . . . and I have never heard from our mutual friend who raised stakes and moved clear across the other side of the world. If he or she ever gets to read this by chance, I hope it gave them something to believe in and brought them home together, finally, forever.