Letter To An Unknown Soldier

Anonymous, Teacher

Dear Unknown Soldier,

I only know war from the pages of dozens of books I have read and from the faces of people I’ve met, people whose faces are yours. I am a teacher, and I consider my job to be one where I show students the world through words, a world many of them will never see except through small typeface and the skewed perspective of Hollywood. Few of them have ever seen your face.

I saw the face of your sister in the face of my friend, a friend whose family has always had soldiers and always seen months without loved ones. My friend bubbles with energy and excitement and can bring a whole room to tears with her humor and good spirit. She bursts with love and passion and fire. Sometimes though, she has the face of your sister because even though her brother came back from the Middle East alive, his spirit did not.

She can’t watch war movies or read war novels, and she shies away from war poetry because every word and image drips with her brother’s blood even though he sustained no wounds. Her brother who used to share her light and laughter now lives in darkness, wracked by the pain of lost friends and the horror of causing others to lose friends. His face is your face, and his sister’s face is another mirror for your experiences. She rocks her own three little boys to sleep at night and searches for the lost face of her brother in their fluttering eyelids and dreaming expressions.

I met you this summer on vacation, bored with my own leisure by the sea. By accident, I talked with you. There were five of you. Five young men who had a weekend away and laughed with one another in the water and flirted shamelessly with young girls. First one told me he was a florist. Then that another was from Norway. Then that another was a college student. I only learned three of their stories, but they had a new one for every girl. They were fun and innocent stories because none of them wanted to say that “working together” meant jumping out of planes and doing a tour in Afghanistan and coming back with two new metal bracelets and leaving behind two friends.

And while the fireworks erupted into a shimmering cascade of colors above the beach, celebrating freedom, I watched while your face replaced the face of a young man who could only hide behind his stories for so long.

Unknown Soldier, I saw your face for the first time when I was sixteen, sitting in the living room of my grandparents’ house, hearing my grandfather’s stories for the first time. To me, he had been a travelling salesman, a man of God, the tallest man I ever knew who let me stand on his feet as a child while he danced with me. But I saw his first face for the first time when I was sixteen. A soldier fighting someone else’s war on another continent. A war he doesn’t speak of. Except I finally asked him about his stories. And he told me all about the food and the weather and sleeping in the elements and learning to swim, a country boy thrown halfway across the world in the 1950s.

But he won’t tell me why he brushes his grey hair into a particular part, covering the bald spot, still self-conscious because a bullet left its mark on his scalp. He won’t tell me why he can still hit the small head of a snapping turtle plaguing the fish in his pond from hundreds of feet away with one bullet. I have only heard the phrase “sharp shooter” whispered quietly by my grandmother when my grandfather was not in the house. Sometimes I see the darkness cloud his solemn face, and I know I’m seeing your face, Unknown Soldier.

I am a teacher, not a soldier. I fight my own battles. I want to teach my students to see your face and to feel the stories behind it. I want them to behold your face in all its pain and glory and suffering and humility and openness and pride and to realize what it costs to have that kind of face. Your face is one that I love but also one that keeps me awake at night. And I pray every day that my students will feel the weight of your expression so that they may keep their own faces and joys and pains and not have to share in yours. Your face is famous enough already.

--------------------------------------------

Feeling inspired? Write your own letter to the unknown soldier and join the 17,000+ people who have already contributed including Stephen Fry, Lee Child and Malorie Blackman.
Post your letter on your own Wattpad account with the tag #UnknownSoldier, and then upload it to our online memorial at www.1418NOW.org.uk/letter/new

SUBMISSIONS OPEN UNTIL AUGUST 4.