Texas frames the narrator’s return from war and the last stretch of his military service: a place where homecoming is staged as spectacle, private damage becomes difficult to ignore, and distress feels less isolating because others around him are also coming apart.

Homecoming at Fort Hood

The narrator’s long-haul flight landed at Fort Hood on a Tuesday morning at about eleven. From the airfield, the returning soldiers were taken by bus to a parking lot on Battalion Avenue and lined up along the sidewalk. They were expected to run into a gymnasium where the families of many soldiers waited. Bass and a pounding drumbeat carried out onto the avenue, turning the arrival into a public ceremony.

At the rear of the line, the narrator saw the spectacle as grandstanding rather than an achievement that merited a theatrical entrance. When the soldiers ran through smoke into the gym, the DJ was playing the chorus of “Disco Inferno” on a loop. The contrast between the staged celebration and the narrator’s sense that he had done nothing to deserve it makes Fort Hood’s homecoming feel less like a resolution than a performance imposed on men returning from war.

The Last Months in Texas

During his final three months in the Army, the narrator drank two bottles of gin each night in Texas. He was physically unwell, passing blood when he defecated and when he passed gas. The account places bodily deterioration alongside the drinking, presenting neither as an isolated incident but as part of a sustained collapse during the closing months of his service.

After going home for Christmas, he returned to Texas and found it somewhat easier to bear. People there knew what things were like, and many were also losing control. That shared condition made the state feel comparatively hospitable: he did not seem quite so damaged so long as he remained there. Texas offered no cure or clear recovery, but it softened the isolation that had accompanied his distress.

Leaving the Army

Once his term was complete, the narrator left the Army, though departure brought no simple relief. He felt that he was abandoning his fellow soldiers and briefly considered staying, even while recognizing that they were not concerned about whether he left. The feeling mattered to him regardless of whether it was reciprocated.

Before releasing him, the Army made him sign up for the National Guard. He was nevertheless discharged and left Texas, returning to Ohio by way of a stop in Elba. There, Emily wanted a divorce, and they divorced before he went home. Texas thus marks the end of his military passage, but not a settled return to ordinary life: he left with lingering attachment to his unit and entered a period in which money and drugs seemed to promise a way through.