Photo by Brett Sayles

Living Madly: The Summer of ‘92

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

The excessive heat this season reminds of the summer after my junior year of college. I don’t know if it was as hot back then, in 1992, but it certainly felt like it. The house in which I grew up was built in the late 19th century. There was no air conditioning.

My younger sister and I didn’t even have window AC units in our bedrooms. (Our mother did, of course.) Nat and I had to cope with cheap oscillating fans set up on our night tables. Mine squeaked and rattled every time it turned.

One of our neighbors, a guy named Leo who was a few years older than I, had recently gotten out of the Marines. He had graduated from high school when I was a sophomore, so I didn’t know him well. I had older friends who knew him, though. I’d run into him at a party at the beginning of the summer. We’d talked for a few minutes, mostly about our neighborhood and the friends we had in common.

Leo didn’t mention anything to me about his experience in the Marines at that party, but just about everyone knew he’d been one of the first troops on the ground during the Invasion of Panama in December 1989, Operation Just Cause, during which the U.S. removed that country’s de facto dictator, notorious drug lord, General Manuel Noriega. Leo was also a veteran of the Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, a short-lived armed conflict that lasted from August 1990 through February 1991 that almost no one remembers or cares about now.

Desert Storm was launched after Iraq’s then-dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied the neighboring country of Kuwait on the premise that Kuwait was drilling in an Iraqi oil field. After Hussein ignored the United Nations Security Council’s demands that Iraq withdraw, the U.S. and U.K. deployed troops to the region.

Even at the time, many Americans viewed the Gulf War as a waste of resources. Some protested it, saying it was nothing but blood for oil, which, among other things, it was.

“It wasn’t a real war,” you’d hear older veterans of other wars say about Desert Storm. But Leo still got to march in our town’s Flag Day parade alongside them wearing his dress blues, a sight that brought me to tears. I’m still not sure why.

The other thing about Desert Storm that most people have forgotten, or maybe never wanted to know, is that people died. A college friend of mine named Heather, who was also a Desert Storm vet, lost her fiancé in the war. He was killed when the truck he was driving was hit by an Iraqi missile. She kept his memorial flag in a glass case in her dorm room beside a framed picture of the two of them dressed in their desert fatigues.

Like 250,000 other Desert Storm veterans, Heather suffered from Gulf War Syndrome, a chronic, multi-symptomatic disease that no one, not even the government, recognized as being real at the time, or for many years afterward. These days, you can look Gulf War Syndrome up online. Some sources say it might have been caused by exposure to chemical weapons, namely the lethal nerve agent sarin, but no one is really sure.

I don’t know whether Leo had Gulf War Syndrome, but he did have post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the early 1990s, there was an economic recession in the United States. Jobs were hard to get, especially if you were young and didn’t have a lot of work experience. After he got out of the Marines, Leo found a job driving an armored truck, delivering cash to banks. Once in a while, I’d see him driving the hulking vehicle around town.

One steamy morning in July 1992, my mother came upstairs to my bedroom to tell me someone was at the front door, asking for me. It was Leo. He’d parked the armored truck in our driveway—something no one could get away with now considering just about every commercial vehicle on the road is tracked by GPS.

“I saw your car, so I figured you were home,” he said, as we sat down on the porch steps. “I hope you don’t mind me coming over. You seem nice, someone who’s easy to talk to.”

He told me a story about the Invasion of Panama: He and a few other Marines were hiding out in a barn. The Panama Defense Forces sent a cow into the building with a bomb strapped around its middle. The bomb, and the cow, exploded within feet of Leo and the other Marines. Leo was lucky. The soldier crouched down beside him was killed.

“I can’t handle loud noises anymore,” Leo told me. “Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about that day. I can’t even really describe it to you; it was so bad. You’re the only person I’ve talked to about it besides my mom.”

After that, Leo began stopping by on a regular basis. My mother complained about the armored truck being in the driveway, so he started parking it out front.

Sometimes Leo would talk about other harrowing events that had taken place while he was in the Marines, but not often. He mostly told me about the places he’d gotten to travel and the people he’d met. He talked about his family—his stepfather was a cop; his younger brother played the drums—and the things he wanted to do now that he was home. We’d talk about music, the bands we liked, and whether we had seen them live. Leo was softspoken, thoughtful, polite—traits that would have seemed out of character for a Marine if I hadn’t gotten to know him.

Leo and I always sat on the porch. We never went anywhere else. He never asked me out on a date, and he never called to talk to me on the phone. I don’t even think he had my number. I know I never had his.

None of that was the point. Looking back, our relationship was perhaps of the purest kind: Our hearts were friends. Thinking about it now, I’m reminded of something the 1970s Boston storyteller, Brother Blue, used to say: “From the middle of me, to the middle of you.”

The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” didn’t mean much to me back then. At twenty-one, I had no frame of reference for it. But it was obvious that Leo had issues with which he needed help. I don’t know if treatment was available to him or, if it was, whether he ever sought it out. I never asked, mostly because I got the feeling that he liked talking to me because I listened to what he had to say without judgement, without offering half-assed advice about things I would never fully understand.

I didn’t see Leo again after I returned to college that fall. I moved to Boston right after I graduated. A year later, my mother sold our house and moved to another town forty minutes away. About fifteen years ago, I heard that Leo had gotten married and was working as a firefighter, news that made me hopeful that he was OK.

I still think about Leo sometimes, especially over the past few years, since Russia invaded Ukraine. Leo shaped the way I view war. It’s sometimes a necessary evil. But for most of history, war has been a product of governments, often fortified by private capital, flexing their muscles to get what they want—schoolyard bullies beating up little kids to get their lunch money.

All wars, justified or not, are fought by everyday human beings, people with families and friends who love them, most of them heartbreakingly young. The luckiest go home afterward and do their best to put their lives back together. In order to make it possible to go on, most manage to attach some kind of meaning to the violence and suffering. But the toll is always huge, sometimes more than any one person can afford.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost is the author of The River Is Everywhere, which was released on March 14, 2023, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Learn more about Emilie and her work at  emilienoelleprovost.com.