Book Review: The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship

Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski

A globetrotting Army veteran and teacher reflects on the dynamic people, places, and moments that challenged his conceptions of community and belonging.

Former Army veteran Bronson Lemer reflects on his early years of wanderlust and the reasons for his rootlessness in The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship, a collection of lyrical and thoughtful essays. 

In a loosely organized compilation of pieces—many of which previously published in journals—Lemer lays out the foundational experiences that impacted his sense of identity from an early age. Beginning with “Gumshoe,” Lemer pieces together the tragedy of an older sister he never knew, who was born and died on the same day in 1979. His parents’ refusal to talk about her except in one-ended statements leads his precocious eleven-year-old’s mind to dig for more information, aided by his love of solving the popular Carmen Sandiego novels. The stories were also a doorway into his future of traveling:

“Reading those books, I learned to luxuriate in the pleasures of an active life. We were meant to move around this world, to explore, to attain knowledge, to live with meaning and purpose.”

Moving from childhood, Lemer’s next essay jumps right into Army basic training, where in “Battle Buddy” he reveals the first painful pangs of trying to fit in among “grunting, gun-loving, gung-ho men.” The burgeoning awareness of his sexual orientation and the awkward exchanges with fellow soldiers are artfully depicted and will surely resonate with men and women who serve or have served in the U.S. military. It is an education he looks back on with wistfulness:

“All my military training had conditioned me to want to adapt, to blend in … Years later, I would wonder how my life would have been different if the military hadn’t forced me to tamp down what made me different, if I had embraced it earlier … instead of running from it.”

After the Army, Lemer led a peripatetic life far from his North Dakota farm roots: first as a civilian teacher aboard a U.S. Navy ship and then as an expatriate living and teaching in China. His ruminations on China and the feelings of alienation that alternate with his passion for travel leap off the page in melodious prose. A boat ride through the Benxi Water Caves crystallizes his understanding of himself as “aimless, drifting, waiting for something to snag my collar and hold me in place.”

Lemer delves into his complicated journey as a gay man living abroad, explaining how the expat life often sounded more romantic than the reality. He invokes his literary heroes (like Ernest Hemingway) to make sense of the tension between his desire to wander and his need to belong to someone, somewhere.

In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Lemer relates to the great author’s expansive appetite for Paris, but recognizes that even Hemingway’s sojourn abroad was not endless, and neither was his: “I remember Hemingway left Paris vowing never again to live in a city … He never stayed in one place for very long. He kept looking and looking, trying to fill that emptiness … the way so many of us do.”

Along the way, Lemer chronicles his evolving acceptance of being gay and the relationships that taught him something about himself, holding up a mirror that is not always complimentary. It is this honesty that reveals the nature of the change in Lemer as he slowly shifts from a footloose and lonely vet to a man who finds a “new state of being” with a house and a husband, in that order:

“I felt that I was building a new version of myself that had never before been constructed. A version that had until now existed only in my dreams.”

The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship is an absorbing journey through one man’s shoes as he wrestles to find meaningful community in the world and all the way back home again. 

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