My platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Pelton, offers me periodic use of his couch after he learns of my bed on Andres’s floor. “Yeah, anytime,” he says, his cherub face bright from the sun, but brighter still with the smile that rounds his cheeks and makes his blue eyes glow. He gets it. I love that he gets it.
I sleep there mostly during the day, the late afternoons after work, to nap after I’ve been worn thin by a long night on hard tile floors. He lives on base housing, in a small house of creams and beiges. His couch is soft, I sink into it, face pressed into the cushions, and it’s safe. I take up everyone’s space, having none of my own, switching from person to person in order to give each a break from me. Sergeant Pelton lets me come and go as I please, gathering myself onto the couch even when he’s not yet home, as if he’s taken in a refugee. His pregnant wife lays out the sheets and fluffs couch pillows, smoothing the makeshift bed with hands that remind me of my mother. She often offers me tea and leftover meals.
Sergeant Pelton is a good man with a quick, generous laugh, one he still offers to me in kindness. He moves quickly, in the sharp, sudden movements of someone who has too much energy. He crackles, like a bonfire on a cold night. He is handsome and kind, a Christian, which is important to me when I’m Christian and less so later, when I’m not. I like him instantly, and his initial refusal to push me aside gives me legs and helps raise me off the floor each morning.
First Sergeant Michael Bell is less accommodating than Sergeant Pelton. There is nothing lost between us after the rape, because there was nothing to begin with. I know him in the cursory manner one knows a disliked higher-up—as a peripheral, to be greeted but never sought out. What little I know of First Sergeant Bell isn’t promising. He’s a tall, gawky man who breaks forward a little when he stands, shoulders sloped downward, long neck sticking out as if he’s waiting for the sword that will inevitably drop and sever head from body. His perpetual grin is neither smart nor funny but instead planted there dumbly, uncomfortably, impossible to move. It’s said that First Sergeant Bell is a pathological liar. Once, as he boasted about the time he rescued children from a burning forest, crossing a river with child after child raised over his head to keep them dry, Specialist King whispered, “Isn’t that a scene from Rambo?” Another day Sergeant Bell pulls up a chair to sit with the Persian-Farsi linguists as they study, confiding that he had, on his own, broken open a spying operation at the US embassy in Tehran where the Iranians were attaching listening devices to live cockroaches. There is no US embassy in Tehran.
The First Sergeant is Top—usually a term of endearment referring to the top of the line, the trainer of professionals. It was a term of respect for First Sergeant Cole, who stood in front of his unit and commanded their attention, who was rumored to mix whiskey in his morning coffee and who, one morning, swayed in front of his formation so he could explain where the term to freeze the balls off a brass monkey came from. I don’t know if he actually drank or not, but we didn’t care either way, because he’s First Sergeant Cole and that meant he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. This Top who was loved, who fell off the side of a five-ton truck and broke his hand: This Top could no longer lead his troops into Iraq, so First Sergeant Michael Bell took over. But Bell will never be called Top.
Eventually First Sergeant Bell tries to lure me back into my old barracks room, standing in front of the door and demanding I go in. “We can’t give you another room,” he says. “There are none.” It’s a blatant lie. From over his shoulder I can see the open door of Rivera’s room, which is empty and cleaned out, now that he’s moved on to another assignment in another post.
“First Sergeant, I can’t stay here. I won’t. I’m just…I’m not. I’m not staying in there.” He sighs, his head hanging forward in that awkward, droopy posture of his. Had it been First Sergeant Cole, I would’ve been humiliated and properly cowed by his disappointment, but this is Bell, whom I neither know nor respect. His displeasure means nothing to me.
“What if we have the combination changed? Would that make you feel better?”
As if that’s the only reason I won’t enter that violated space. He doesn’t get it and I don’t know how to say it.
“I will not stay in there.” I’m firm.
“You’re being difficult.” He wants me to be easy, and I’m noncompliant.
I have nothing to say in response to that. The standoff continues and I sleep on the cold, hard tiles of Andres’s floor.
* * *
At the start and end of the workday, my rapist and I stand in formation together. This is a certainty but at least in formation I know where he is. I see him; I mark his space and its distance from mine, a mental measuring tape that I try to stretch as far as allowed. It’s the times in between those forced encounters that terrorize me, though, when I’m not sure of his whereabouts and when I see him everywhere, especially where he’s not.
I’m not allowed any time off work, so the days keep clicking by, moving forward like some unstoppable iron freight train, and I learn to adapt, to clock out when my body remains present. I eat, a lot, finding comfort and oblivion in cakes and chocolate. I sleep wherever I find a place to rest. Reality becomes simple snippets between long hours of black. Getting out of bed takes hours. It physically hurts, this act of being awake. When awake I dream of sleeping, when asleep I dream of nothing. There is this quiet, white place inside my skull I flee to, my own personal winter wonderland where there are wide, rolling expanses of nothing. My favorite place to be.
The oblivion is addicting. I simply slip away—in the chow line, while in formation, standing in the motor pool where I’m supposed to be working, in the car, like the time I forget I’m driving and the Subaru bounces off the road, rolls down a ditch, and crunches to a halt on the gravel and dead grass at the bottom of the slope. The sudden stop causes my head to snap forward. My forehead bounces off the steering wheel. I don’t feel the pain. My hands drop from the wheel, falling languidly into my lap, fingers curled upward. I stay there, head resting against the leather, staring at nothing, hearing only the click, click, click of an errant blinker light. I know I’ve crashed my car but I can’t dredge up the energy to care.
I probably should’ve hit the ditch harder. If I wanted to do anything, I should have hit the gas just a tiny bit harder. But I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to live, either.
What They Want
The investigator from the criminal investigation department waits a week to call for an official statement. I don’t know what takes them so long, but I’m still surprised when I get the phone call. It’s the middle of the workday and our platoon has been ordered to decorate the hall for the upcoming officers’ Christmas party.
“Specialist Dostie, can you come down to the office for your interview now?” the lead investigator asks without preamble.
It’s too abrupt, a sudden, disorienting turn from Christmas music, paper snowflakes, and dangling lights. “What? Right now?” I swing around in a circle, looking for Sergeant Pelton. He stands on a chair, hanging green paper leaves over a doorway. “Hold on,” I say to the investigator. I shuffle up close to Sergeant Pelton. By now the reality of the investigation has begun penetrating the ranks, and I feel an uneasiness between Sergeant Pelton and me that has never been there before. There’s a stiffness around his eyes now. “The CID wants me to come down for an interview,” I whisper. Other soldiers are around, close enough to hear, close enough to peer my way, eager to add a new piece of rumor to the mill.
“Right now?” Sergeant Pelton asks, annoyance heavy in his voice. He’s stressed; Captain Wells shoved this assignment on him suddenly and expectations are high. He’s pressed for time and can’t spare another soldier. “I really need you here, Dostie,” he says and turns back to his paper leaves.
I can push him. I can say that he has to let me go, that he has no right to hold me here, but it’s not something I’m willing to do. I don’t want to burn bridges, not realizing they’ve already sunk. I
step away and place the phone back to my ear. “Is there a way I can reschedule?”
There is a pause that haunts me. I hear a thousand words in that hesitation. “That’s fine. I’ll call back to reschedule.” He doesn’t bother with anything more and the line goes dead.
I feel it instantly; a cold knot fills my stomach. I replay all the unsaid words that saturate the short conversation. I hear him say I’m not taking this seriously, so it must not be serious. I hear him say that clearly I’m fine, not consumed, not broken, and I realize I’m doing this all wrong. The phone is a hot iron in my hand and I’m sweating, standing outside in the December air, compelled to dial back. “I changed my mind.” The words tumble from my mouth the moment he answers, breathlessly. “I want to come in now.”
“I’m sorry,” he says shortly, but he doesn’t sound sorry. “After I talked to you, I let everyone go home early for the day.”
It isn’t more than five minutes since he called. Less, only enough time for me to walk outside onto the porch of the building we are decorating. I press my lips together. “So there’s no way I can come down now?”
“Well, no. You said you didn’t want to do the interview now so I let everyone go.” He reiterates the situation, stressing my role, my lack of desire. “We can reschedule for next week.”
Tears burn my eyes and frustration closes my throat. “Fine, okay.” My voice is strained.
“Next week.”
I have to live with the dread over the weekend. I can’t shake it off; I can’t bury it. Those things left unsaid worm their way through my brain, burrowing holes, leaving me in a panic. I choke on fear, huddled on Andres’s floor under a sleeping bag, cold but not numb.
It’s another week with my rapist standing smugly in formation. Another week of whispers, sideways glances. “Fucking bitch,” one of his friends hisses in my direction, narrowing her eyes at me. She passes on the rumor that I’m a lying whore.
It’s another week on edge, seeing him here, there, and cracking just a little more with each encounter.
* * *
I’m still waiting for that call that doesn’t come in a week’s time, and I stand rigid by the cement block wall of the barracks, spine fused to the bricks, neck craned as I peer around the foyer corner, examining the gaggle of soldiers just outside my barracks building. Sweat trickles down my back but I’m not hot. December in Louisiana is mild compared with New England’s wintry bluster, but I still shiver in my Gore-Tex coat. Morning formation is in ten minutes but there are soldiers blocking the path and I have to know who is in that group.
I dissect the men, trying to piece together features in the sea of camo green. Their faces are split open in grins, milling around in the dead, prickly grass. One of them has a familiar slump in his shoulders, a nearly identical overgrown buzz cut, that short, stout silhouette, and I’m sure it’s him. My brain fills in the missing pieces until I’m certain it is him there blocking my path, barricading me inside my building, and I shrink down, wondering how I’m going to make it to formation on time. My rib cage aches and I realize Captain Wells is going to narrow his watery, round eyes at me in further disgust when I am late. Another strike against my character. Dostie, the shitbag soldier who cried rape.
The soldier turns slightly to the side, exposing his profile and the back of his neck. His nose is sharp and strong and he boasts a cut chin. His head is clean—no v-shaped scar engraved into the skull—and I unfurrow like a banner released. My knees still shake, though, as I dart down the barracks path, past the group, feeling the weight of stares and sudden silence, either because I’m a woman who was raped, or a woman who reported rape, or simply because I’m a woman.
I trot over the brown grass, up the hill, over the broken and cracked pavement of the basketball court. I check over my shoulder once, twice, expecting someone or anyone to materialize. There’s no respite when the path is empty.
When I arrive the platoon is relaxed, idly talking in the bright sunlight. I halt at the edge, inspecting the bodies until I’m sure he’s not one of them. It’s both a relief and a fear.
I seek shelter again, slipping into the company building, thankful for the shadows. It’s stuffy, filled with the familiar scent of metal, oil, dirt, and wet concrete. I find my corner, the one I have begun to know so well because it allows me to see both the front and back doors. If anything, rape has made me a far more observant soldier.
A loud, masculine voice shouts inaudibly and a vague formation starts outside the open double doors but I stretch the minutes, waiting until the very last moment so that everyone will be in position, boots rooted to their spots where I can mentally mark each of their places.
“Dostie, get outside,” Captain Wells snaps, appearing in the doorway. He doesn’t smile at me, because he doesn’t like me. I represent all the problems that come with a woman in the military. He glares, jaw working over a wad of chew, his eyes somewhat hooded by a low-hanging forehead, the wide expanse of white skin that scrolls upward into an equally pale dome head. Captain Wells started his officer career in a tanking unit and would have stayed there, among his companies of men, but, as rumor would have it, one day during a training exercise, he popped his head out of his tank and a tree branch smacked him upside the back of his skull. It was decided that he was too stupid to be a tank commander, or so the rumor continues, and he was sent to where he could do less harm, a Military Intelligence unit, which is how we ended up with a commander who wanted nothing to do with the women under his command, or their feminine issues. If he could have swiped me off the map, he would have.
Even in the face of Captain Wells’s impatience, I sigh and linger at the door for just a moment more, buying myself those extra few seconds because I’m never quite ready to be in that formation again, where I can see that white, distinct scar just a few ranks over to the left. But then there’s the order, “Fall in!” and I’m out of time.
I go to my squad, spine so rigid it could snap.
Sergeant Pelton narrows his eyes at me. “Dostie, what are you doing? You’re not in this platoon anymore.” He points to the platoon on the right. “You’re in EW2.”
I blink dumbly. “What? Since when?”
“Just go.” He flashes his hand in a quick, impatient gesture of dismissal.
Baffled, I step out of formation and start toward EW2 but I don’t know which squad to fall in with so I slip into the last rank.
At the front of that squad fearsome Staff Sergeant Daniels holds up both his hands in dramatic frustration. “What the hell are you doing? You’re not in my platoon. You’re EW1.”
“Sergeant Pelton just told me I’m in your platoon now,” I reply, trying not to let the intimidation seep into my tone. Sergeant Daniels is alpha badass of this unit.
“Well, you’re not. Get back over there.”
The First Sergeant is getting into place and time is running out as I rush back toward EW1, thoroughly flustered.
“What the fu—Dostie! What did I just tell you?” Sergeant Pelton hisses. Captain Wells strides up to the front of the formation and Sergeant Pelton can’t finish his sentence, instead gesturing for me to get out of his platoon formation as he spins on his heel, falling to attention.
I have nowhere to go. I flutter between the two platoons, a soldier without a home, a literal Army of One. Sergeant Pelton is trying to pawn off the trouble girl on Sergeant Daniels and Sergeant Daniels is having none of it. This is my punishment and penance for reporting rape, I realize. I wish someone had let me in on the secret sooner—never report, never tell, swallow it whole and let it fester at the bottom of your stomach, because rotten insides are better than public ostracism.
I fall in at attention in my one-woman platoon at the back of the unit formation, next to platoon leader Lieutenant Davis, who regards me with curiosity but doesn’t offer any guidance. I don’t cry but I want to. I want to scream but it’ll just be another black tally mark against me. Look at that psycho girl. Crazy, crazy Dostie. So crazy, you jus
t know she must have made it all up.
I try to push out the dull drone of Captain Wells’s voice—that slow, insipid drawl, just like the man, and my lip starts to curl in anger, as it always does around Captain Wells, at the commander who has said nothing, done nothing, who steadfastly ignores the girl who reported rape, perhaps hoping that in doing so she would simply disappear. Just as I start to feel a slow, building burn of rage, I catch a sight at the corner of my eye.
Kevin Hale is there. And just like I always look for him, he looks for me, too. He finds my new ousting oh-so-amusing. I can’t look at him directly, I never will be able to, but I can see his grin. He elbows his friend, jerking his chin in my direction. The other soldier lets out a sharp bark of laughter and passes on the information, jab, point, stare, laugh, rolling down the line until an informed group stares back at me with narrowed, slit eyes, snickering hard enough that their shoulders shake with the effort of silence.
I dig my nails into my palms, breaking the skin, but the pain does little to relieve the weight against my chest. I labor for air, leaning slightly to the side, as if the minute inches will somehow save me. I don’t move my feet, won’t leave formation, can’t leave; I raise my chin to breathe, shaking with the effort not to let out a loud, wet sob, a sound that would roll over the formation, snake round and round all those male heads, settle between male ears, and sound so very feminine, so terribly weak. I fight not to scream. Not to run. I am trapped in a formation of me, myself, and I.
Formation Page 3