Wyatt's Guns
David Thornbrugh
He'd be my cousin if he married her, but for now he's just a man telling me how he knows who stole his guns, thirteen of them, including a handgun his father gave him in high school. I nod and grunt, non-committal and polite, but really I just want to watch the marines being blown up on TV so I can figure out if this episode of the series depicts Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Joan wants to know what's the point of another movie about the war, any war, and I say it's what people do, tell stories, about what they do, and each of us has a story. For example, how Wyatt, who's living with my cousin, feels about the pictures of her husband and her two sons posing happily "before the accident," in her words, about not being the hunter who bagged the two antelopes mounted over his head, staring back at the bison on the opposite wall. Later, I learn the marines were dying on Peleliu, one of the lesser known stories of a well-known war.