I am missing eleven months, nine days, fourteen minutes from my life. A good portion of 1990 is lost, and a large piece of 1991 has disappeared. People talk to me about Brokaw's War Time America as if I were there, as if these pieces of someone else’s life could exist. I missed the yellow-ribbon orgy, the flags flying for “the boys over there,” the night when everyone closed together around their radios and televisions ready to mourn the fallen, or exult for their heroes. The robbery was complete, it was crimson, it was ancient, it was cleansing, it was achy. I’m sure that the beaches in North Carolina were quiet that year; the water was warm, the sand on the beach yielding, and the girls too—worried for strangers like only beautiful, uninvolved people can be. Here is what I want: I want that night, that night when I am twenty-one, when I can buy a bottle of wine legally, when I can sit in the dark night of the park with the girl I am in love with. I know her well—she lived with me in the desert, at night rising with the cold umber moon. She is fair skinned, almost olive, her hair a light brown, and she is thin and muscular as a fawn. Oddly, her face is much like the woman from my only pornography in the gulf: the Victoria’s Secret Fall 1990 issue. And she understands me like only I understand me, and we are leaving the party on campus, we are holding hands like people hold hands when holding hands is new to them—anxiously, moistly, tightly. We are leaving the party because we cannot bear to watch this war that is on television. Maybe we are too sensitive to violence, or maybe we just don’t want to be reminded that there are people just like us in a desert that has turned cold and hungry and loose, like it is trying to swallow up everything above it, and we don’t want that on our conscience, we don’t want to think of men walking into white flashes of light, into red tracer rounds, into the blackest fortress of sound imaginable, into faces streaked with tears, into faces streaked with blood and tears, into faces streaking in front of their vision, their fingers tightening around triggers uncertainly even though those fingers, those hands, have been trained to obey, and these boys, who are as handsome as they will ever be, wondering if the bullets hitting their chests will feel like paper cuts or like explosions, if it will be clean or if it will be messy. We walk out of that party, in love, our eyes linking like bodies copulating, and the bottle of wine is in my hand. We are both feeling high—we are six beers and a half bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill into it, drinking while we watch faceless soldiers push up on an invisible border that was already in flames above the skyline. We had to leave, our feelings for those soldiers impelling us to rise and escape with our wondrous love intact. We walk to the park. It is cool out, the grass is cold where the dew has touched, but the earth still harbors the heat of the day underneath. We are barefoot and the streets are empty. The static sound of gunfire is far off, pouring from the blue flickering lights of the houses, and we are walking away, letting the sound fade until only her breath can be heard, and mine as well, swallowed up in the sound of our blood moving through muscle and bone. We sit on a park bench, I wipe the wet night off before she sits, and we move close—the heat of our bodies swirls with the cool night as we move, and we drink wine from the bottle and she has a glistening shade of purple wine above her lip for a split second before she licks it off. And the look in her eyes right then—like there is a metaphor for that. The darkness is swallowing us, it is closing around us, pulling the light from the stars away, the moon, and there is only reflected light to see by, and her face is pale and sharp, like the dark has outlined her face in pastels, and all I can think about is how lucky I am to be this guy, here with her, and the night agrees; the night takes us and lets the alcohol do its work. We embrace, and I can feel the soft ripple of her ribcage against mine, and I can feel the side of her breast with my arm, and her breath is moist against my ear as she whispers things about love past our hair, which is entwined like the dark grass of the park. She tells me she will never leave me alone, that we will be together forever, and I know she is lying, but it feels so good to hear it that I will believe it forever. Tomorrow will be the same. We will come to this park again. I will feel like the world is collapsing into itself, that I could reach out through my bedroom walls and touch Mr. Earnest next door, that I am a part of it all, and I will feel how it feels to be a part of Blitzer's America At War from the outside, I will wake up with the dreams of a civilian, I will hold a candle out on an all-night vigil, I will stand in protest I will hang ribbons I will support our boys over there I will pray even though there is no god I will remember things that never happened I will fill the space between the boy on the bench and the boy in the desert and I will always, always make sure he is with someone, I will maintain that the desert is a fiction, a fiction of lights and noise, and I will assert to the boy on the park bench that he will never get to feel like he was a part of something missing, and unlike the boy in the desert, when he looks up, the white sun will shine upon his face without passing through.

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S. BRADY TUCKER writes: "I received my MA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University in 1998, where I founded and worked as poetry editor for Thin Air magazine. Currently, I am pursuing a doctoral degree in Literature at Florida State University. I am originally from Wyoming and served as an Army paratrooper during the Gulf War (is it time enough to begin calling it Gulf War I?). I have taught Shakespeare in London and was at one time a collegiate basketball player. My most recent publications have appeared in the Lullwater Review, the North American Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry Motel, Southern Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, the Spoon River Poetry Review, and in a number of award-winning anthologies. I currently live in sin with my love, Olivia, in Flagstaff, AZ, where I am simultaneously working on a novel and my doctoral dissertation. In college I was known as The Beer Can, and I have a great black lab named 'Moby,' but who I sometimes call, 'Dick.'" "Fallng in Love During Wartime" originally appeared in the North American Review's summer fiction issue, May-August, 2003.