Chapter 11
“Dear Mom,” he wrote.
But then, looking at the words on the page, he decided that the penmanship was too shaky and the letters were poorly formed. His writing betrayed his nervousness and his fear. He pulled the page from his notebook, crumpled it into a ball, and then tossed it in the direction of the wastebasket. He did not notice if it landed in or near.
Now he was looking at a fresh white page. He willed his hand to move slowly, carefully, confidently, stoically.
“Dear Mom,” he wrote again.
He paused and reviewed this new handwriting. This time, he judged his writing was steady, so, he continued.
Private First Class Holden Eckwood had promised his mother that he would write a letter to her every day. He knew his mother was a great aficionado of the written word, and that she prized hand written letters above all other forms of communication. She loved to read old style books and would avidly read whenever she could find novels or stories written and published in the old style. The old style, before writing evolved into pulp and content experiential features on the WetWeb.
Eckwood doubted that his mother even owned a Synapse suit. If she had ever experienced a pulp feature, it was years ago and she did not speak of it. Instead, she was hanging onto the old fashioned concept of written language, and the now defunct enterprise of publishers, authors, writers, and readers. She was a book enthusiast in a world where books were forgotten. She exchanged old paperbacks or novels with her friends and fellow book lovers, stubbornly holding onto to a simpler time. Claudia and her friends would spend their days digging through bins in second hand stores or at antique dealers. They would go to rummage sales or estate auctions. They were always on the lookout for books, hoping to find perhaps a romantic novel, or a work of science fiction that they had never seen before. Something published long ago, written by an author now long gone and printed by a publishing house that no longer existed. They would ferret them out from basements boxes, or the backrooms or buildings that used to be libraries. Once found, they passed the books from one reader to the next, like something precious but illicit. They whispered the names of long gone authors, or favorite quotes from forgotten books like they were sharing incantations. It was as if they had gained access to the secrets of a forgotten mysticism.
So, while his compatriots used their free time to connect into virtual meeting environments for simulated reunions with their families who were half a world away, Holden Eckwood calmly and privately sat in his barrack, on his bunk, and wrote his daily letter to his mother and read her daily response. Writing was their connection.
The daily letters had started as a promise to his mother, but after a few weeks of daily writing, these letters became a chronicle of his life. The letters described all aspects of his life as a soldier. He described the excitement of enlistment and the physical exhaustion from the first day of boot camp.
He described his training with the complex equipment he was expected to use, and his interactions with the other guys in his unit. He described the different personalities from the officers and fellow soldiers he encountered. He wrote about the first time he wore an Exo-Suit. The stiff servos in his leg made him feel like he was stepping through deep mud, but if he pulled too hard the servos would overcompensate and send him sprawling onto his well armored backside. In writing the letters to his Mother, he downplayed the difficulties, and emphasized how this new armored technology would protect him from the rudimentary weapons employed by the insurgents and terrorists.
As the biography of hand written letters grew, day after day, and week after week, the habit of writing slowly evolved into a therapeutic exercise. Eckwood ordered his thoughts, and then retold the experiences of the day, into a version that his mother would read. In doing so, he reinforced an improved version of the day’s events upon his mind.
As the excitement of enlistment led to the exhaustion of boot camp the ritual of writing focused and calmed his mind. This ritual continued when his unit deployed, and he was sent into the desert, where small battles, to full scale wars, had continued to wage on and off since before he was born. He would write about the drudgery, the training, and the travel. He described the heat of the day and the cold at night. He wrote about his first patrol outside of the green zone. Writing his mother became the event that purged the fear from his day. “Dear Mom,” was a refrain that also said, “I survived another day.”
In this way, Private First Class Holden Eckwood maintained a mental balance. His exhausted survival instinct became revitalized each day through the act of writing. When he described the events of his day, his writing refracted the memories of his day through the prism of a braver soldier, a more confident soldier.
In his letters, he was the hero of a story told in the first person, and in a first person tale, the reader must assume that the hero would survive. The hero must survive so he could write the end of the tale - so he could tell the completed story. This balance sustained him.