Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day enters the narrative not as a shared celebration but as a private act of courtship carried out from a military radio room. The narrator spends $110 on an orchid for Emily, choosing it because nothing else would do; when he later reports that she gave it to her grandmother, the gift’s elaborate intention meets an unexpectedly different destination.

A Holiday Approaching on Duty

The holiday is close while the narrator is serving radio duty at a police station in a Shiite city during Ashura. The unit expects attacks amid the arrival of at least one hundred thousand worshippers, and soldiers are stationed at the police post for the week. In the middle of that tense assignment, the narrator notices a laptop with internet access in the radio room and turns his attention to sending Emily a Valentine's Day flower.

Castro, the sergeant major, lets him use the computer. The purchase is not casual: the narrator searches until he finds an orchid he can afford, at $110, and insists that an orchid is the only suitable choice. The scene places the language of romantic attention inside the routines of deployment—radio watch, a borrowed computer, and an online order made at night.

The Orchid and Its Card

The flower is accompanied by a message the narrator struggles to compose. Tired, he settles on a parenthetical literary passage whose reference he expects Emily to recognize, then adds a declaration of love and his initials. The card thus carries more than a conventional greeting: it is an attempt to make the gift personal through a shared cultural reference, even as the distance and circumstances of military service shape how he can express affection.

Castro asks whether the narrator is a rich kid. The narrator says he is not particularly, though his family had never gone hungry or lacked necessities. The exchange gives the expensive orchid a material context without changing the narrator's stated reason for choosing it: he wants this particular flower for Emily, and accepts its $110 price.

The Gift's Later Destination

Later, the narrator tells Rodgers that he paid $110 for an orchid on Valentine's Day and Emily gave it to her grandmother. Rodgers responds with a brief expression of disbelief. The account does not explain Emily's reason, so it does not establish whether she misunderstood, rejected, or simply passed along the gesture; what it does establish is the gap between the narrator's deliberate choice and the flower's eventual recipient.

That return to the purchase gives Valentine's Day a second meaning in the narrative. First it is an improvised moment of tenderness during a week of anticipated violence; later it is remembered through the orchid's price and its transfer to someone else. The holiday's emotional weight rests in that contrast, not in any account of a celebration shared by the couple.