Our Highways Are an Ever-Expanding Museum of America’s Wars
South of downtown Columbus, Ohio, lost on the way to a tailgate, I saw the road sign bearing his name. The brown aluminum placard flashed between passing cars. I’d been holding my phone, listening to directions, and I dropped it. I could hardly make out the words on the sign, and then it disappeared behind semis, but I knew what they said: Army Specialist Nicholaus E. Zimmer Memorial Highway. Fifteen years earlier, when he’d been killed by a rocket-propelled grenade near Kufa, Iraq, I was on a base four hours north, staring at dark hills and crooked coils of concertina wire during a quiet 12–4 a.m. guard-duty shift.
I thought about merging into the right lane to pull over. A guy from our basic-training platoon, now a truck driver, had stopped on this freeway years back and taken a selfie with the sign. A bunch of us “liked” it on Facebook. Guys typed things like “RIP Nick” and “Miss you brother.” I always told myself I’d go see the sign. I never had.
As I moved with the hundreds of other vehicles, I was angry to be among the anonymous mass passing his name. No one here fucking knows Zimmer, I thought. I also sensed a self-deprecating awareness: Yes, how sad, I’d seen the name of a dead friend on a road sign and now felt a numb indifference to the rest of the day—to the first football game of the season for the nationally ranked Ohio State Buckeyes.
If I pulled over, what would I do anyway? Was I really going to loop around, park on the side of the highway, take a photo? Touch the metal sign? Run my hand over it?
I wanted to call someone from basic. Carter, in Missouri. Hernandez, in Texas. Just to tell them that I’d
