A Better Man
The drill sergeant takes notice of his name.
"John Winchester." He grunts with appreciative appropriate aggression. "I like the sound of that. An all-American classic."
That name says good things are in store for him. It says that when he comes home after a job well done, he'll have a good car and a good wife that'll obey him well into old age.
But just a few years later he finds himself saddled with a hippy girl like any other with her peasant shirts and long natural curls and biting disproval for the macho jingo attitude that the new vets wear as a sad and desperate badge against the hate of the public and the disappointment of the WWII vets.
"Machoism, masochism." She theorizes at him with her snotty liberal college feminism. "Same word. That's why girls used to like the tough guys. Well buddy, that was a sickness and we're getting clean!"
He can't stand her at first. He meets her when he's coming out of the airport, trudging with his friends: soldiers and losers just like him. She has the brightest head of golden hair amid the unwashed uncolored brown of the rest of the girls, and she sings the goodwill songs of the Beatles through a loudspeaker. And he thinks sourly that the girl must have parents who love her like a jewel in a box and she's never seen a fight in her life.
It's not clear whether she still thinks he's a surly caveman by the time she has a softer word or two for him when she sees him around in the town soda shops. But he knows he isn't. As proof, when they're married and have two boys, a tough little bruiser named Dean and a strong-lunged little man named Sam, when he looks at them he doesn't think: my own quarterback and linebacker in twenty years.
He thinks: I should have had girls. Dean charges through the living room and knocks over the TV he doesn't have money to replace and Sammy spits spinach in his eye with pro-pitcher accuracy and screams. Ten, and twenty years later, he'll think the same thing looking backwards at his scrubby bear-like sons passed out stupid in the backseat. He knows he would've never done this, never even started it if he'd had two pretty little girls to take up the comfort and roots and he once offered to Mary.
But even then, when he had her, he walked out on Mary even though Sam'd just been born and Mary hadn't worked a paying job her entire young life. She could have, though. That was clear to him the way she took him back, the hem of her long white nightgown ghosting her toes as she held the screen door wide open for him while Sam chewed on his fist in her other arm in one of his spells of midnight wakefulness that helped drive his father out of the house.
"You done with your bit of post-partum depression there, daddy?" she zings, eyes bright. As he walks back into his life by taking Sam, it occurs to him that his wife and kids deserve a better man, the best man. But he's all they got.