Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  It’s just a body, just meat and bones and skin. I feel it here for the first time, that savage epiphany, that brilliant flood of power as I crack open my eyes, watch his abandon, watch him lose himself in me, and wonder why I never noticed this before. I no longer care about this body, and there is something savagely powerful in that.

  Classical Conditioning

  Someone let the cat out of the bag and told my father I was raped. That’s not something I want him to know. Daddy’s little girl doesn’t get raped—that’s not something my princess books prepared me for while growing up. In my mind there was no reason he should know. If anything the Army gives me physical space from home so that I can firmly live in two separate worlds, and they needn’t intersect unless I allow it. There’s something to be said for having an entire sustainable existence that operates separate from one’s family. When my mother found out, it didn’t occur to me that she’d tell my father. He just calls one day and knows.

  There isn’t a big conversation about it. It’s succinct and brutal.

  “Just say the word, and your uncle and I will be on the next plane,” he says. I’m pacing the room, barefoot, anxiously twisting the fingers of one hand around my loose hair. I don’t want to be having this discussion.

  “I’ll break both his legs,” my father swears.

  I envision him stomping down the metal steps of a puddle jumper on Leesville’s tarmac, my tall uncle just behind him, a wooden bat slung over each of their shoulders. I don’t doubt him. It’s an honest and earnest offer and for that very reason, I decline. I don’t think he’d get away with it. But he volunteered, I refused, and never is the subject broached again, not for over a decade, for so long that I think he forgets.

  * * *

  It’s not the only offer I receive. A semi-friend, more of an old party acquaintance from another unit, a medic with a less-than-pristine reputation, makes a far more gruesome proposal. “Do you want me to kill him?” he asks.

  “Kill him?” I awkwardly laugh. I haven’t told him but that’s how rumors work around here. Everyone knows about the MI girl who was raped, even if they don’t know her by name or face.

  “Yeah, kill him,” says the medic. “I’ll get rid of him for you.” He says it with a casual flick of his shoulder. He’s leaning over a table, rolling what, at the time, I thought was tobacco into a thin, white paper.

  “And going to jail doesn’t make you want to rethink that?”

  He snorts, bringing the unlit, makeshift cigarette up to his mouth. “I know how to do it without getting caught,” he reassures me.

  It’s a bizarre conversation and feels wholly rhetorical. “Yeah? How?”

  He leans back in his couch and rests one ankle over his knee. “There’s the draining of the body, you know, the whole upside-down thing in the shower thing, and the sawing off of the limbs and putting them in different plastic bags, the basic shit everyone knows. That’s nothing new. The real issue is hiding the parts without them ever being found. For that, you need a deer.”

  “A deer.”

  “A dead deer. You dig a hole on the far side of the post, put the body in there, fill it partway, throw a dead deer on top of that, and, boom, when the search dogs find the spot, police will only dig until they find the deer and assume that’s what’s got the dogs all riled up.”

  “That’s a terribly specific plan.” I laugh it off. I think he’s not serious. I hold my hand out and he hands me the quarters slip I came for, pre-signed by some doctor at the aid station. It’ll get me out of work for the day, at least.

  “Want any prescriptions?” he asks, thumbing through a different booklet.

  “Nah, I’m good.” Taking a forged quarters slip seems a lot less illegal than drugs, but it’s semantics, really.

  “Let me know if you want anything,” he says pointedly, sounding a lot like one of Andres’s cartel movies, and it’s funny, until a few days before we roll out for Iraq when he and his roommate get busted for large-scale drug dealing, supposedly holding several kilos of cocaine in their barracks room, as well as a few illegal firearms, and pads and pads of doctor’s prescription booklets. So who knows?

  * * *

  My mother is far less violent than the men, and far more efficient. She wants something done and done now. If that means calling her congresswoman, then so be it. If that means threatening to descend on Fort Polk and kick in doors, she’ll do it. My mom would’ve rattled the bars of this post until someone or something fell out, but the problem for her is that I won’t let her do it.

  “What is your commander saying?” “Have you gone to JAG?” “What are the MPs doing?” She has a question for every time she calls me. “I can get Channel 8 News,” she says. “Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro called me back, she wants to talk with you,” she adds.

  The more she pushes, the more I back away. These lives aren’t supposed to overlap; my family isn’t supposed to be within my Army sphere. And it’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want to talk about it to them, my mother and father. That my Fort Polk life has now infiltrated the other half of my world feels egregious. I want it done with.

  “Stop asking, Mom,” I tell her shortly, using the excuse of formation to hang up.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say the next time and the time after that, except she’s not listening because she’s a mother and she just wants to uphold her maternal right to protect her baby, but I’m too young and angry to understand that then.

  “If you keep talking about it every time you call, I’m not going to answer anymore,” I promise her.

  She accidentally calls my bluff, more of a slipup really, when she asks, too intently, how I’m feeling, and that’s enough for me. When she calls next, I glance at the cell phone and drop it in my cargo pocket. She calls, and calls, and then calls again, and so when I finally answer, two weeks later, she’s trained like Pavlov’s dog, no longer breathing a word about the subject.

  Spoliation of Evidence

  I don’t know what unsubstantiated means. I’ve never heard the word before; it isn’t part of my vocabulary. So when Captain Wells says it in front of the entire company, heads swiveling in my direction, I don’t know what he means or why it’s so significant.

  The investigation has been going on for months, long weeks where I hear nothing from the case, almost like everyone has forgotten all about it. Now we’re sitting in an Equal Opportunity briefing; the company sprawled out across the small theater, seated in heavily worn blue thread seats. Andres reclines his head back in boredom, staring up at the ceiling, and I glance at his dark profile. “This is so fucking pointless,” he groans, not quietly enough. I know it’s pointless, but for entirely different reasons. Andres’s squad leader hisses at him and Andres grumbles as he shifts in the seat, sitting up. Captain Wells is in front of the company, standing on the wooden stage, halfheartedly preaching about the necessity to speak out if one feels threatened or sexually offended.

  Captain Wells scans the crowd and his eyes linger on me slightly as he nears the end of his speech. He hesitates, showing me the tiniest lift of his lip in a sneer, then turns away. “Now, everyone knows about the sexual assault case going on in the company right now.”

  I go cold, my heart sputtering in shock. Captain Wells stares back at the upturned faces of his company and says, “And that case has been found unsubstantiated. So guys, if a girl accuses you of something you didn’t do, don’t worry. You won’t get in trouble unless you actually did something wrong.”

  “Is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?” Andres’s face is dark with anger, his mouth open, aghast.

  I sit rooted in place, incredulous, thinking he can’t be talking about my case, he’s not talking about me. I can feel the eyes of the company turn toward me, drinking in my reaction, and I wonder how many minds are made up in this moment.

  “What does unsubstantiated mean?” I ask no one.

  The briefing is over and I jump up from
my seat, pushing through bodies, forcing my way to Sergeant Pelton. Everything has slowed; a buzzing in my ears dulls the noise of the crowd. “Was he talking about me?” I blurt out to him and grasp his elbow, forcing him to face me. It’s aggressive and inappropriate but I do it anyway, as if having him pinned in my hand will force him to take me seriously. Sergeant Pelton freezes, his normally bright eyes jumping to the side, looking for an exit plan. “He couldn’t have been talking about me, right?” I persist.

  Sergeant Pelton sighs. He doesn’t want to be here. “Captain Wells just told me today. The case was found unsubstantiated.”

  “I don’t know what that means.” I rest my palm against the wall to hold myself up.

  Sergeant Pelton’s eyes flutter shut, as if asking for strength. He doesn’t want to be the one to do this. He shouldn’t have to. Captain Wells should have—his absence, as usual, is telling. “It means that they can’t rule one way or the other. It’s your word against his.”

  The words fall like physical blows. I’m still holding his elbow, my grip tightening. “And this is how he tells me? This is how I find out?” Sergeant Pelton says nothing. “But what about the photos?” I shake him, trying to knock loose all the answers I need to hear. I remember the MPs calling me back into a small side office, asking me to strip, standing half naked in a stark, cold room while a female officer held a camera up to my skin, capturing the bruises that lined my arms and rib cage, her nose inches from my flesh, the bare lightbulb swinging on its cord overhead as she examined me. “Don’t those prove anything?”

  “I’m sorry,” is all he says, and I drop his elbow. How sorry can he be? It’s not like he believes me anyway.

  * * *

  They give me a blank manila folder with the report in it. Someone at the company places it in my hands and I walk out of the building with it tucked under my arm, smashed against the side of my chest. It’s nondescript but it still feels like everyone knows what I’m carrying. I soldier out into the sunlight, into the warm spring air, and find an empty picnic table. I sit on the tabletop, boots resting on the bench, folder resting on my knees. I eye it warily, unsure I want to know. I already know the case was found unsubstantiated; I already know Sergeant Pelton read it and hesitated. That it made him look at me differently.

  The report is thinner than I expect it to be. I expected it to be heavier somehow. I unpeel it from the folder, flipping through the pages, reading but not. There are witness statements, short little paragraphs and each a punch, a swift, steady jab to the gut. In the clear, bright sunlight I feel myself splinter.

  “He said he was going to ‘that Dostie-chick’s room because she’s crazy drunk,’” says a friend of Kevin Hale, about how Hale crowed and swaggered before his conquest, and how he later returned, gleefully victorious.

  The pictures are surprisingly absent but allude to photos that once were, like the descriptions of angry, red scratches across Kevin Hale’s body, but I don’t remember scratching him. There are descriptions of the bruises on my upper arms and back, but I don’t remember exactly how I got them. It’s like there was an entire hidden scene performed, an act played out for an audience of none, and the void where the memory should be terrifies me. Had I fought back? Had there been some epic struggle and did it even matter if I can’t remember it?

  They reason it away. “A wrestling match” with his friends caused the scratches. My bruises are evidence of a drunken night. They have an explanation for it all, carefully sectioned-out words that set out to prove the very opposite of what really happened. They’re trying too hard.

  I jerk my chin away, flipping the pages. “Dostie never would sleep with the likes of Kevin Hale,” says Sergeant Rivera’s girlfriend, the MP who had been there that night. “She wouldn’t want anyone to know if she slept with him,” she continues. I had already heard this from her, when she explained her interview to me in person, but the report makes different connections and the insinuation burns. In the unsaid details it suggests I worried about my reputation, that I would do horrible things to protect a reputation I didn’t even know I had. I squint at the pages, blinking rapidly to see through tears, trying to understand why she would say such a thing, why would she even suggest such a horrid thing, and it doesn’t occur to me until years later, when it’s too late to ever ask, that the investigator might have poked her, too, prodded her the same way he did me, twisted and turned her words into an artful statement that suited them just fine.

  My testimony is there, too. A small, tiny space, it’s short—dreadfully, deceptively short. Black, round letters stare back at me: I don’t know, but I know what he did was wrong.

  I stand suddenly, gripping the report, crumpling stark pages, and it’s only a few steps to a wire trash bin. I drop the report into the pail, letting it fall on top of spent coffee cups, a box of half-eaten pizza, and bottles filled with tobacco dip. I never finish reading it and I never look back, leaving it to rot out there in the open.

  Shock and Awe

  Around this time, in March 2003, they tell us we’re deploying but no one believes them. There is a perpetual sense of denial, maybe because we’re going, then we’re not going, then we’re going again, back and forth, military-orders badminton, until it doesn’t make sense to stress over anything because nothing is permanent or certain. Rumor has it that our squadron commander, Colonel Fox, wants to go, to drag our unit into the desert because he needs that combat patch to make rank, to join his family connections in the Pentagon. We don’t need to be there, the rumors say, but he’s pushing hard to make it happen.

  We all figure it’ll be Afghanistan. We prepare for Afghanistan. “I hear it’s really quite beautiful there,” I say to female King, a fellow Farsi linguist from my platoon, trying to make a silver lining of the possibility of war and Taliban. “The mountains, I mean. I hear the mountains are really pretty. Like Iran.” Iraq is shiny and newly invaded, an abstract idea, not yet a reality. No real Army soldiers have been there yet, just Marines. And so I’m not nervous yet. It’s not really happening, we all say. They’ll pull the orders, we all agree.

  But a few days later there’s Captain Wells in front of the company formation saying “Iraq” and we all sort of stand there, stunned. The Farsi linguists look at the French linguists, the French linguists stare back at the Farsi linguists, and we all say “What?” in our respective languages.

  Captain Wells pulls Sergeant Pelton aside after the formation, gripping him by the elbow and leaning in. “If I give you guys all the books, can you learn Arabic over the weekend?”

  Sergeant Pelton blinks in stunned horror. “No, sir. No, we cannot,” he just manages to get out. Captain Wells grits his teeth. He’s displeased.

  “He does know Farsi and Arabic are two totally different languages, right?” male King, female King’s husband, mumbles to the group of us linguists, who stand huddled to the side. “He’s not that stupid, right?”

  “I think he’s that stupid,” I say.

  “But, I mean, he’s had Farsi linguists in his company forever now. He has to know what language it is,” fellow Farsi linguist Sergeant Baum objects, but I’m not that surprised. Captain Wells has never shown a particular interest in the linguists, he never visits us at the language center when we’re studying or questions us on our DLPT scores. He doesn’t care until he has to care because now we’re going to Iraq in four weeks and no one speaks the language.

  * * *

  And so there is the prep for war. There’s a surprising amount of paperwork. Inventory becomes a four-letter word. Connex boxes have to be packed and we stand in the motor pool, stocking the dark metal storage vans with gear. Sweat drips down my spine and off my chin. It’s not exactly hot, just muggy. The wet air gets trapped inside the connex and catches in my lungs. Ever since I got a tick-borne fever during a field training exercise and almost died, I have to use an asthma inhaler to breathe. I heave a green duffel bag onto a pile of plastic bins, shoving it against the metal walls. I don’t think any of
us thinks deeply enough, in the moment, to register a fear of war. I move, I lift, I shove, I fill checklists and do it all again, functioning on a setting of disbelief. There is an undercurrent of anxiety in the motor pool, but it’s covered by gallows humor and a pure, uncomplicated frustration at the bureaucratic dysfunction.

  One of the supply sergeants stalks up to the connex, clipboard in hand, white-knuckling the papers. “Take it out,” he yells as he nears, gesturing wildly with one arm over his head. “Take it all out.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Sergeant Holt spins around, flushed and huffing from the heat. He’s new to the unit and my TC, the navigator for my driving. He seems like a decent TC so far, even sticking thick black letters onto our Humvee window shield, labeling it A HORSE WITH NO NAME, but he’s not yet accustomed to the fuckery that is Fort Polk. He faces off against the supply sergeant.

  “It needs to be inventoried.”

  “We already inventoried it all!”

  “It needs to be inventoried again.”

  Sergeant Holt abruptly kicks a semi-empty bag, sending it skidding across the cement. “The fuck!” He turns back to us, the Specialists, the Privates, the lower rungs, and angrily points to the full connex. “Take it out.”

  “We literally just finished,” a Specialist complains.

  Sergeant Holt’s face is blood red. He grabs a bag closest to him, drags it from the storage van, and dumps the entire thing out onto the pavement. “Move it all out!”

  Grumbles, swears, the connex unpacked, only for another Staff Sergeant to replace the last, swearing at the sprawled-out gear. “Why is this unpacked? Put it all back!”