Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  “We were told it needs to be inventoried.”

  “It’s already been inventoried. Put it all back.” He stalks away and Holt holds both hands up over his head in outrage.

  “Does anyone know what’s going on? Doesn’t anyone have any fucking clue what’s going on right now?”

  No one does.

  Rinse and repeat.

  * * *

  I spend most of my time in the motor pool, moving gear from one pile to the next, and sometimes back again. The entire regiment is up in a storm. Now that our deployment country is announced, things are moving rapidly. Units are smashed together, sharing mechanic bays, connex boxes, storage units. Some units sneak up to our vehicles to steal brackets, doors, or mirrors, some of us sneak over to theirs to steal them back. Everyone wants their inventory perfect but there’s not enough gear to go around.

  “I don’t care how you get it as long as you have it,” Sergeant Daniels repeats as he collects inventory sheets. As the saying goes, there’s only one thief in the Army. Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back.

  The intermingling fills the motor pool with unfamiliar men. Everything feels just a little bit unsafe to me. I look from side to side, to indistinguishable faces in uniform, and think I don’t know you. I don’t know any of you. I notice Starre jumping off the back of a deuce and a half, helping unload the vehicle with four other guys from some other unit. They crowd around the edge of the vehicle, handing down stuffed duffel bags. I’ve never seen them before. I gesture her over, standing a bit away from the vehicle. She trots up to me, all petite and beautiful and happy.

  “Do you know those guys?” I ask, glancing over her shoulder at them.

  She looks back and shrugs. “No.”

  “You have to be careful,” I hiss, leaning forward, heart pounding. My palms itch. I’m cold despite the early-spring heat. “You can’t just get in vehicles with random guys.”

  She looks up at me, brilliant hazel eyes fringed with long, dark lashes. She’s confused. She tilts her head slightly. “What are you talking about? It’s fine,” she says with ease. Never suspicious, not uncomfortable. I realize with a sudden start that she’s not scared of them. I realize, in the same moment, that I am. But of course her behavior is normal. How many times had I been surrounded by men before, and never given it a second thought? With the male-to-female ratio in the Army so drastically skewed, and made even worse in Fort Polk, there was no avoiding it. How often had I mingled and mixed and been perfectly fine with it all? I rub the heel of my palm against my chest, trying to physically ease the anxiety. The men watch us from the back of the deuce and a half, probably innocently, probably curiously, certainly more interested in her than me, who has grown too fat in comparison, but all I see is dark eyes, mouths slashed into downturned lines, large hands resting on bent knees. I see height and strength and numbers and I don’t want to. I blink hard, trying to fight tears, suddenly embarrassed. I flush hot red.

  “Never mind,” I mumble. “It’s nothing.” I want to reiterate that she needs to be careful. That she’s the kind of beauty men pause to look at. That she has smooth, pale skin with just a splash of freckles, enough to make her look sweet and harmless. I want her to know that she looks very pretty and very small but she somehow doesn’t see that and I don’t know if I should ruin that bliss for her. I don’t know if I should contaminate her, too.

  I leave her, my stomach tight with dread, trying not to make a mountain out of a molehill. I have my own molehill to deal with.

  * * *

  In this new mashup of platoons and units, everything is topsy-turvy, everyone is thrown together. Even still, I didn’t expect to see him. First Sergeant Bell had told me not to worry. They already moved him, Bell assured me, somewhere else, somewhere not here, and that was fine with me. So I don’t look for him anymore. I don’t scan the backs of heads or faces. And because of that, he sees me first.

  I don’t know how long he’s been watching before I turn my head and realize he’s there, staring. I had believed them; I had learned to breathe again. My rib cage had unhinged, my shoulders risen, and I had thought I can do this. So while I sit in the regiment motor pool during deployment prep, cross-legged on a five-ton spare tire, waiting for my vehicle to be cleared by the mechanics, I don’t expect to turn and see him standing there, frowning in my direction. I freeze. He breaks away first, gaze sliding to the side, feigning indifference. I’m hunched forward on the tire, realizing he never left, he has been here the whole time, and my mind races, collecting slips of memories when I hadn’t checked to see if he was around, hadn’t searched for engraved white scars at the backs of heads, hadn’t scanned the street or the company or my barracks building for his silhouette, and I wonder how many times he’d been there. How many times had he seen me first?

  I scramble off the tire. I run out of the bay, a mechanic shouting after me because I’m not supposed to leave my vehicle unattended and I don’t care. I race up the hill, over the grassy slope, boots sliding on loose gravel, and I don’t check the double-lane street for traffic before I dash out into the road. I run with one goal in mind, faster than I’ve ever run for PT, lungs burning, calves aching, and burst into the company building. I look for Sergeant Pelton. I shouldn’t. He’s not my platoon sergeant anymore. He’s handed me off to Sergeant Daniels ever since that first, awful day when I was stranded between the two of them. But Sergeant Daniels and I never had this conversation, I don’t even know what he knows, if he read the report, or if either Captain Wells or maybe even Sergeant Pelton had leaned forward and whispered evil in his ear. I can’t come to him blubbering in uniform, in the middle of the workday, so I run back to Sergeant Pelton instead. He might not believe me but at least he knows. I swing the thin door open into his office, sobbing, red-faced, and he stares up from his long desk, pen frozen in his hand.

  “Dostie?”

  “Hell no,” I say, and realize I’ve been saying it over and over, a type of chant, and I can’t break its rhythm. “Hell no, hell no,” as I drop down and crawl under the edge of his desk. I’m unprofessional and unreasonable. I press my back into the wall, curled under the wood, and I cry, harshly, loudly, into my knees, tightening myself into a ball, as if I can fuse all my skin and limbs together, never to be unrolled.

  Sergeant Baum comes to the door to watch; he saw my flight from the motor pool. They stand awkwardly by the doorway, shuffling boots against the concrete floor, unsure what to do with me. Then they look away and begin to talk over and around me, as if I’m not there, balled under a desk like a schoolkid waiting for the hydrogen bomb. It’s near the end of the workday and they leave me, not abandoning me exactly, simply turning a blind eye, which I’m grateful for. I’d rather be invisible, than this stain on the uniform. Formation is eventually called and I peel myself away from my corner, drained and humiliated, and too tired to be afraid.

  * * *

  I wish Kevin Hale had beaten me that night. I wish he had broken all the bones in my face and smashed the back of my skull harder against the brick walls. I wish it had left a red smear on the cement blocks because maybe then they would believe me. Maybe then I could believe myself. Because violent rape is the only thing they understand, the only thing that releases me from my blame and my part in it. I reimagine it always, re-create it in my head, and in my fantasies there’s an epic struggle, a battle of fists that he wins—he always wins eventually, as if even in my own re-creations I can’t escape that reality—but at least I would have fought, would have raged and screamed and stood defiant and at least they could have seen my broken parts and believed me. But he didn’t, I didn’t, and I wonder even if it went down that way, if the barracks room had been an empty battlefield of smashed furniture, shattered glass, and blood, would it have been any different?

  I’m learning to survive on rage alone. I want to make it into a weapon, a stone-ball club with a wood and rawhide handle, the kind that slams into a skull and leaves a sunken, round indent into the har
d bone. I want to scream, not the cry of a girl terrified, but of a creature enraged.

  Since I was deemed “unsubstantiated,” I’ve begun to hate Wells. We were never close, and rape has spoiled any ground between us. The emotional depth is perhaps unfairly projected, but anytime I encounter Kevin Hale I feel only an inconsolable terror, no room for anything else, and so I move my crosshairs a little to the left, to something safer. It’s that self-righteous kind of hatred, directed toward someone who was supposed to protect me but failed. It fills in all the holes, plugs up any places that should hold fear or worry, and it is now I realize rage is my strongest ally. She gives me feet. She holds me steady. She burns with an intensity that promises to take the whole world down with us. I should be frightened by her, by the way she pours into my hands and jaw and shoulders, slowly cinching each muscle tight, whispering lullabies of release through sweet violence, but she doesn’t scare me. I embrace her. I’d rather rage than cry.

  * * *

  One Friday Captain Wells addresses his unit, his dull eyes scanning the formation. He gives the weekend safety briefing, the basics of don’t be stupid. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t do drugs. His gaze settles on me. We stare at each other for a year or two, or maybe just a few seconds, and his fleshy lips pull into a slanted smirk. He lingers to let me know what’s coming. Then he turns back to his formation and adds, “And don’t drink and have sex, then regret it in the morning and call it rape.”

  He gets his desired effect—I suck in a short, hard breath, and for one blind second I want to scream, to stand on the brick wall behind me as a red-hot brand in front of the entire unit formation, and to point one finger at his white, fleshy face, shouting that he knows that isn’t what happened. That “in the morning” I had already spent long hours curled up on a wooden bench in a military police station, torn figuratively, torn literally. I had been waiting for Captain Wells to storm in and tell me everything would be okay, that he had my six, but he never even bothered to show up at all.

  It’s clear to me he likes playing this card; he likes the half-hidden chuckles and the sideways glances thrust in my direction. But in the end I can only stand in my squad, fists clenched behind my back, lips pressed together, because I have already learned the consequences having a voice. If you’re sexually offended, never show it. If you’re sexually harassed, never say it. If you’re sexually assaulted, never, ever report it. The truth burns in my chest and I wish I had learned this lesson before. I wish someone had leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “When you get raped, don’t tell anyone. Never tell anyone.”

  Captain Wells releases us and I break from formation, smoldering. My fury tastes like copper and fire. It stops me from crumbling onto the asphalt; instead it lifts me up, lengthens my spine, and I believe I can be remade in its image.

  “I hate him,” I hiss to Sergeant Forst, blinking hard through hot tears. “I hate him, I hate him,” I repeat, wound so tight that should I release, I’d be napalm.

  “I know,” she says and pats my hand, but she doesn’t share my anger. There is a calm acceptance in her voice; she is sympathetic but nothing more. I want others to hate him the way I do, but no one else is fucking upset enough.

  That isn’t to say that Captain Wells isn’t spectacularly disliked, however. When a random US soldier in Kuwait purposefully throws a grenade into his commander’s tent in early 2003, the report gets back to those of us in pre-deployment and First Sergeant pounds one closed fist on Captain Wells’s back; with a loud laugh, he suggests our commander always wear a flak vest. Wells’s greatest enemy is us, who watch him with dark, glittering eyes and waiting for any sign of weakness.

  There are reasons he’s hated. Rumor has it that Captain Wells hates his wife. So the whole time we’re in Fort Polk he keeps his company late daily, just so he doesn’t have to go home. He schedules extra weekend field exercises, even in the blistering cold, the wet frost covering bare branches and sticking to uniforms. Locke and I huddle in the back of a covered Humvee, snuggled against each other for body warmth, her breath a white fog.

  “We’re MI,” she grumbles against the cold. “We’re not supposed to be doing this shit.” And we’re not. I didn’t spend two years in training just to babysit some 1980s-era equipment in some frozen swamp in Louisiana. Captain Wells has a cot by his Humvee and a Gore-Tex sleeping bag, so he doesn’t mind.

  No one likes this Captain who cares only about himself. Soldiers have a way of knowing these things—of sniffing out the frauds who are only in it for the brass and pay grade and who have no fidelity to their troops.

  But no one hates him like me.

  I prefer not to salute Captain Wells. Outside, in our company space, I try to see how often I can walk by without rendering him a salute. Sometimes he catches me.

  “Do I get a salute?” he asks. He has his own rage, a self-righteousness I don’t understand. I dramatically snap to attention.

  My salute is perfect—my back straight, my hand flawlessly raised to brow. But there’s nothing respectful in the way I drawl, “Sir,” drawing out the title sardonically. I mock him with flair and if he knows it, there’s little he can do; I’ve completed the task to the letter. He stands with several subordinates—undoubtedly trying to show off. I am the kink in his otherwise decent unit. He leaves me there for a moment, stuck at the position of attention, before decorum demands he release me—with nothing more than a halfhearted flash of his hand no higher than his cheek. A pathetic attempt at a salute for a pathetic officer. I stalk away. His presence clings to me for hours, making it impossible to process words or details. Sergeants shout orders at me but I stand and hear nothing. Rage makes me both dumb and blind, a sort of numbness except it burns all the way through.

  If I have any anticipation for our deployment at all, it’s for simply this: a stray bullet, a single mortar, an IED just beneath his wheel well, all the possibilities of war that end in his death.

  The Last Push Before the End

  As the days click closer to April, onward to our deployment, I sit in my barracks room, legs crossed, elbows planted on my knees, the light of the television blinding in the dark room. I watch the 2003 Air Force Academy sex scandal break. The television camera pans over the academy, showing women in uniform shuffling down stone steps, as numbers are forcefully declared: 70 percent allege they are victims of sexual harassment, 22 percent experienced pressure for “sexual favors,” and 19 percent claim to be victims of sexual assault.

  “Nineteen percent,” I breathe, feeling a sudden affinity, a commonality with a number.

  And suddenly everyone’s talking about it. The media buzzes, crackles, hisses, the leadership knew and did nothing about it. There is outrage, a blast of moral righteousness from the public, and I hope.

  “Maybe now they’ll actually do something,” Andres says, watching beside me, leaning back against the white brick wall. He gestures vaguely at the screen. “Some of them went to civilian lawyers,” he adds, repeating the news. He shrugs one shoulder. “It can’t hurt to try.”

  And so I look up a local lawyer, because if these girls did, why can’t I? Except when someone actually answers, despite the late hour, I stumble over my words, coming out in a breathless rush: “Hi, I’m in the Army, I’m here on base, but…so I don’t know if you can help me or not, because you’re a civilian, but I heard in that Air Force Academy case, some girls used civilians, but I’m sorry, I’m calling to see if you can take my case. I think I was…raped.”

  His response is instantaneous. “You think you were raped?” A brutal scoff. “You would know if you were raped, honey. I can’t take a case where you think you were raped. Call your Judge Advocate General’s office.” And then he hangs up, before I can counter, before I can explain that I can’t just come out and say the word outright, without some kind of antecedent, that I need to dip my toe in. But he’s gone and I’m not calling back.

  But I do take his advice. I call JAG. “We’ll call you back,” they say, and then
they don’t.

  So I stand in the JAG building, staring down at the polished floors, shuffling boots from side to side, and then corner a JAG lawyer.

  He steps out of an office and I recognize the name on his uniform, the name the office keeps telling me would eventually call me back. “Sir!” I bark, a little too loudly, and dart after him. He glances once at me, over his shoulder, assessing me with one singular glare. He stands before the elevators, jabbing the button with one blunt finger. “I’m on my way to a briefing,” he says, deflecting.

  I parry and lunge. “I’m going upstairs, too.”

  The elevator dings loudly, and he steps in, not checking if I’m following. I rush in behind him, gathering my courage, my pre-prepared speech, but then the elevator doors slide shut and I’m inexplicably struck with a sudden jab of panic. He stands across from me and I back up. He’s much taller, very broad, and older in a sense that is not just physical years. I suddenly feel small and young.

  The elevator is small too, the space tight, but I’ve never been scared of elevators before. I stare at the doors, the skin on the back of my neck crawling. I say little to the officer, squandering my chance, pissing it away because I’m terrified of a pair of elevator doors and four constricting walls and I don’t even know why. I mumble something about my case, so bare bones that no one would want it from my description.

  The elevator doors slide open, and the officer steps out, along with all my breath. “Leave your information with the office and I’ll call you so we can set up a meeting.”

  He never does.

  Elevators have unnerved me ever since.

  So I return to the criminal investigation department to push a little more, to ask a few more questions, and am met with a wall. An officer I’m not familiar with, who has never interviewed me, bars my path. He stands, arms crossed over his chest, his belly protruding and straining against his uniform top. “If it were true, why did you wait a week to report it,” he asks, glaring at me like I’m a liar, the worst kind of woman, lips pursed disapprovingly.