Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  “Who wants to hit Pegasus?” James asks the room.

  I glance at Stuart for clarification, using the opportunity to shift my body farther away. “Pegasus?”

  “Strip club. Halfway decent place. Better than the Pink Lady, at least.”

  I blink in surprise, and instantly scan the room. I hadn’t realized I was one of only two women here. Sergeant Forst emerges from the kitchen in a slow saunter, bringing our number up to three.

  Private Woods balks at the suggestion. She’s all waves of blond hair and carefully lined eyes of kohl and Tempting Tanzanite Purple. “Uh, no thank you.” She makes a show of declining and the men smile at her appreciatively—Woods, with her feminine curves and pale cheeks fused with shimmering powder.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Rivera offers and Woods smiles sweetly, demurely collecting her pocketbook and saying her goodbyes. Rivera opens the door for her.

  James looks to me, waiting for me to decline, too. “You don’t have to come,” he says, and I feel a stab of annoyance. Like I’m being pushed out, purposefully excluded. I suddenly want to fight back. I shrug. “Sure,” I say. “It won’t be the first time I’ve been to a strip club,” I lie.

  I can’t tell if the men are annoyed or indifferent to my acceptance but Sergeant Forst smirks as she gathers up her purse, bright-blue eyes a little too knowing. She inclines her head slightly in my direction. I don’t know if it’s an invitation to come or a warning not to.

  Confused, I just smile back. When we leave, I open my own door.

  * * *

  Pegasus smells. It’s the first thing I notice in the gloom. It reeks of cigarettes, stale beer, and something sickeningly fruity. Blue lights flash, illuminating a stage where a woman writhes on the floor, legs spread at a painful angle, and all I can do is wonder how much that wax job must have hurt. “Here, you sit right here, Dostie.” James drops his hands on my shoulders and sits me down at a round table. The surface is sticky and the ashtray overflows with a heap of mismatched butts.

  A half-naked woman stalks by. Her breasts are high and tight but her stomach sags slightly over her thong, the loose skin bouncing with each step.

  The men and Sergeant Forst fill the seats around me, enclosing me in a tight circle of cigar smoke and masculine laughter. The music drums through my bones, a constant bang, bang, bang of senseless noise. Someone has put a drink in my hand, which I don’t drink, noting the chipped glass edge.

  James yells something, his whiskey-washed breath splashing over my cheek.

  “What?” I call back, squinting against the flashing lights. I’m trying really hard not to label that slightly off scent that lingers over the club.

  But he’s moved on, yelling something at Lieutenant Patron, whose face beams in reaction. They sit back and sip their whiskey and I glance at the stage. It takes a lot of upper-body strength to swing around a pole like that, especially in plastic six-inch heels. I’m impressed.

  I don’t see where she comes from. She slinks onto the table, all spray-tan legs and taut, slender torso. Instinctively I rear back, space invaded as her ass sways by my face. James holds out cash close to his chest, eyes half hooded, and she shimmies for the bills, perky breasts hovering in front of his face.

  I shift uncomfortably, glancing away, only to see Stuart and Patron admiring her assets with open-lipped leers. She makes her rounds of the men and suddenly James is shoving a twenty-dollar bill in my hand. I stare down at it, then back at him. “For you,” he mouths, and gestures gleefully at the stripper. His gaze is off-balance and I suspect he’s drunk. The money dangles in my palm—I’m afraid to hand it back.

  The girl turns toward me. Fake lashes flutter playfully, and I realize she’s younger than I am. I smile apologetically, suddenly feeling like I’ve become a part of something horrible and oppressive. I slide the money across the sticky table, trying to save her the act of earning it.

  A sharp gleam enters her eyes and she holds the bill up over her head, kneeling in front of me and swaying with the beat. She has a heart-shaped beauty mark over her left hip bone. It seems the only safe place to stare at. She leans forward, arching her back to carefully slide the bill down the front of my shirt, tucking the edge into my bra.

  “It’s okay, you don’t have to,” I say, softly because she’s close enough to hear me.

  She turns her face toward me and her grin is lofty and a little hard—she knows something I don’t. Wiggling her ass in the air, she leisurely leans down, never breaking eye contact, lips brushing over my collarbone as she clamps her mouth down on the bill and pulls it free.

  All to the thunderous applause of the men. They throw their hands above their heads, clapping, roaring, and I swallow the dry lump in my throat and force a laugh. The stripper tucks the bill into her G-string.

  Across the table Forst arches her fine blond eyebrows at me. She salutes me with her cigar, ash cascading down onto the table. Welcome to the fold, she seems to say.

  May it shred you to pieces.

  JRTC

  I’m barely at Fort Polk a month when I learn what JRTC is.

  “You got here just in time, Dostie,” Sergeant Pelton informs me, leaning against the Humvee I’m PMCSing. “We’re going to start Joint Readiness Training Center in two weeks.”

  “Sergeant?” I toss my checklist board onto the worn seat of my Humvee, next to where Andres is relaxing, debating whether I really want to crawl under the metal beast to check for leaks, like the damn preventive maintenance checks and services list demands I do.

  “It’s this monthlong war game,” Sergeant Pelton elaborates. “Units come from all over the country to train here. It’s actually really good training. There’s two sides, us and OpFor, the bad guys, and we go to war. Think of it like…” He places his palms together as he inclines his head back, thinking of a good comparison. “Like a glorified game of laser tag.”

  I arch my eyebrows. “That kind of sounds cool.”

  “That’s what I want to hear!” Sergeant Pelton slaps me on the shoulder, grinning widely. I smile with him, because Pelton is infectious. “So go see Sergeant O’Brien when you’re done with this vehicle and he’ll get you up to speed on what gear we need packed and ready,” he says as he starts to walk off, throwing us a friendly wave as he leaves.

  “This seems like it could be fun,” I say to Andres in the passenger seat, his check board balanced on his knees and fully completed, even though I know he didn’t get under a single vehicle.

  He turns his face to me and scowls, his dark, thick brows pinned together. “Are you shitting me? Fun? You think this will be fun? This is going to suck dirty, sweaty balls.”

  “I mean, it could be exciting.” I imagine rushing through the woodline, M16 in hand, commando-rolling under laser fire of red and blue, theme music blasting in the background. “Come on, it’s laser tag. When has laser tag ever been boring?”

  He gives me that hard stare he’s so good at, as if he’s waiting for me to realize my own stupidity. He then points off into the distance, into the dense green forest that lines the edge of the motor pool. “We’re going to be out there. In the fucking wild swamps of Louisiana. With no beds. No bathrooms. No showers.”

  I forgot about that part, but I’m not averse to a little dirt. I did join the Army, after all. “Baby wipes?”

  “For a month, Dostie. That’s four weeks. Time stops in the field. No, scratch that—it goes fucking backward. Four weeks is like two years regular time.”

  I cringe. Now that I think about it, that is an awfully long time to go without a shower. He leans forward to drive in the last nail. “In August.”

  I groan and sink into the driver’s seat next to him as the thought settles in. “Oh my God, there’s going to be no AC.”

  “Dostie, we’re not even going to have electricity.”

  I stare back at him, eyes wide, trying to envision a night without my beloved AC cranked up as cold as the setting will allow. I’m a New Englander. I’m not built for
this Southern wet heat. “It’s going to be hell,” I whisper. “It’s literally going to be hell.”

  Andres snorted. “Hell is spring break compared with what we’re about to go through.”

  * * *

  He’s right, of course. It only takes a few days into JRTC for me to realize this is hell. Even in the evening, the wet Louisiana heat is oppressive. The night is clear, the moon a slim slip of light. The heat is visible in wet, fluttering particles that saturate the air and dance across the beams of the Humvee headlights. One night, I stand by the open Humvee door, rummaging through my rucksack in the dull light. We’re parked in a loose circle for protection from OpFor, the Opposing Force, who’s been promised a four-day weekend if they manage to kill any of us MI folk. The task shouldn’t be terribly difficult—OpFor is well trained in this JRTC war game. Yet miraculously, so far we’ve evaded.

  Not that death would be a release. The training ends when it ends and not a moment sooner, death be damned. I pull at the multiple integrated laser engagement system harness, tossing the glorified laser tag gear down by my feet. The humidity has done its work and my uniform is soaked through. Stepping farther into the dark and using the Humvee as a shield, I peel off my BDU top. It sags to the ground and I shed the next layer, the brown undershirt leaving my skin with a wet hiss. I groan in appreciation of the tiny breeze; even my sports bra is soaked through. I strip down, keeping my clean uniform within reach, but pause for half a moment, trying to remember what it feels like to be dry. I lean against the Humvee, my wet skin leaving imprints on the metal, and sigh, glancing around the black forest, starlight just barely visible between the dense canopy of Spanish moss trees. This was not how I had envisioned Military Intelligence life to be. I startle at movement in my peripheral, snatching a brown undershirt from my bag. A silhouette sits perched on top a Humvee hood and I narrow my eyes, straining to see through the gloom. “What the…” It takes a moment for the figure to grow limbs, one leg stretched down the hood, the other bent as he rests one arm on his knee. In his hands and pointed in my direction, I recognize the familiar shape of night-vision goggles pressed against his face.

  “Jesus Christ,” I hiss, angrily yanking on a sports bra. He casually waves to me and I flip him the bird. I can hear him chuckle, which only annoys me more. I huddle against the Humvee door as I dress. The heavy material instantly sucks up the heat and spits it back out at me.

  I contemplate telling someone, maybe Sergeant O’Brien, the track commander of our vehicle, but I bristle at the thought. I’m too new at the unit to be starting trouble. The last thing I need is people thinking I file Equal Opportunity complaints. Besides, our four-man team is leaving for our new positions in the morning and I won’t see this guy again. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.

  Still, anger simmers as I crawl across the hood of my Humvee, rolling out my poncho liner as a protection against the hard metal. I shove a BDU top under my head as a makeshift pillow and try to ignore the heat, the unforgiving metal, and the silhouette in the corner.

  * * *

  A few days later, I cough up another handful of black ash, stare at the dark smear in my palm, then wipe it against the leg of my BDUs. The sun beats down on our position but the lack of trees creates a wind tunnel of dust and ash, generating a breeze that stings when it crashes against my eyes or down my lungs.

  The Devil’s Ashtray, Sergeant Burns affectionately named the desolate stretch of land. Louisiana habitually burns acres of forest to prevent wildfires, and a smoldering patch of burnt wood and blackened grass makes for the perfect hiding spot from OpFor. “They’ll never expect us to hide in a burn zone,” he stated upon arrival.

  “Because they’d never expect anyone to be stupid enough to try,” Sergeant O’Brien mutters just under his breath. Sergeant Burns is our team leader, and open disapproval isn’t allowed.

  “Is this even safe?” Sergeant Forst stretches as she gets out of her Humvee, kicking bits of grass that explode into black dust.

  “They already burned this area,” Sergeant Burns replies with a shrug, as if that should be promise enough of its safety.

  “I don’t think we’re legally supposed to be here.” Sergeant Forst plants fists on her hips as she surveys the gray landscape. She’s short but sturdy in a way that reminds me of a German tank. Her lack of height never makes her seem petite; instead her thick legs lend her a type of earthy strength and reliability. She has the distinct honor of being the best Humvee driver in the platoon, and the entire unit knows it. I’ve seen her rock impossibly stuck beasts from wet, hungry mud pits, all while sitting back with one arm jutted casually out the window. “There have to be laws against this. I mean seriously, those trees over there are still smoking!”

  But her protests are ignored and Sergeant Burns’s ashtray epiphany ends up paying off. Aside from the burning eyes, cloying smoke, and ash in the lungs, our position has yet to be compromised, leaving us to our OpFor resistance work in relative peace.

  I stretch out against the base of a tree stump, trying to pull my fingers through the sweat-and-dirt-clogged mess that was once my hair. With four of us on a rotating schedule, we have four hours of rack time to rest between shifts on the equipment and pulling guard duty. I should be sleeping—the rule is when you can sleep, you sleep—but the sun is too high in the sky and I just can’t get used to midday naps. I twist my hair back into a bun and rub my face and arms down with baby wipes. Twenty-three days and counting with no shower. Andres was right. This sucks dirty, sweaty balls.

  Sergeant Forst does a halfhearted circle around our position, but we haven’t seen another person in days and guard duty has become a half-assed joke. She splashes water from her canteen over the back of her neck and rakes her fingers through the short blond curls. She handles the dirt and exhaustion with experience and ease—as if the uniform is tattooed onto her skin. I’m envious in a wistful kind of way. I don’t fault her for it. I want to be her.

  “So is this everything you expected it to be,” she asks suddenly, a white-toothed grin consuming her face.

  “Thought what would be?”

  She stands and her wet hair curls at the base of her neck, dribbling water onto her undershirt. She doesn’t seem to notice. “This. The Army. The whole thing.”

  I glance around the Devil’s Ashtray. “I didn’t think it would be so smoky.”

  Sergeant Forst laughs and drops down across from me. She watches me expectantly, like I’m supposed to say more, so I shrug. “I don’t know.” I think back to a few days ago when we were hopping from spot to spot and Sergeant O’Brien was directing one of our Humvees. He stood in the waist-high green meadow, the grass bending under the thudding propellers of a Kiowa overhead. M16 rested on his hip, he had reclined his head to stare up at the low-flying helicopter, Kevlar helmet slung low over his forehead, obscuring his eyes in shadow but leaving the lower half of his face stark in the sunlight. It was as if he had stepped directly out of a film reel. It was a surreal intermixing of expectations and reality.

  “It feels like the real Army,” I say.

  “This is the real Army,” Sergeant O’Brien yells from the inside of our equipment box, his voice tiny through the thick metal walls.

  “Are you working or listening to our conversation,” Sergeant Forst yells back.

  “If you weren’t being so fucking loud, I wouldn’t have to do both.”

  She grins, that large, genuine grin that is so easy and infectious. “Why’d you join the Army, anyway?”

  I open my mouth to give the normal response. That I hadn’t gotten into the college I wanted, that I hadn’t prepared a safety school, or that I hadn’t had the money for any college regardless. Each of these is true enough that people nod and move on. It’s the simple kind of answer people expect. The real truth is that I’d never had to leave. Maybe I could’ve gotten a scholarship and gone to the local college, or taken on a lifetime of student loan debt. I could’ve gotten a degree and a husband and a small house
with a few kids and probably a dog. But the very possibility of that kind of future strangled the life from me. I saw the years stretched out before me like a roll of pestilence-ridden sod—rooted, even, and every blade cut the same as the one beside it. It was never that I had to go, but that it had been impossible for me to stay.

  And somewhere along the way, between basic training and drill sergeants and grenades, or marching and spit boot shining and brutally bloody cadences, without noticing it had happened, I realize I’d fallen in love with the time-old tradition that is my uniform.

  But I can’t say that to Forst; I can’t even begin to articulate it. So I grin and say instead, “My recruiter was really hot.”

  Forst throws her head back and lets out a full-bellied laugh. “A girl after my own heart.”

  I laugh with her.

  Suddenly Sergeant Burns is flinging open the door of his Humvee from where he had been snoring, ripping free from the vehicle, arms flapping overhead in a comical gait that strikes me as particularly apish.

  “What in the world is he doing?” I start to ask but Sergeant Forst has already risen, face immediately serious.

  “A Colt! It’s a fucking Colt!” He’s screaming as he nears us.

  “A what?” But I could hear it now—the steady drone of a single-engine aircraft. I twirl around, head thrown back and scanning the sky.

  “What’s going on?” Sergeant O’Brien sticks his head out from the work box. “What’s happening?”

  “Get the AT4!” Sergeant Burns is flinging open the box door and grabs a three-foot-long cylinder.

  “What the fuck are you going to do with an anti-tank rocket launcher!” Sergeant O’Brien scrambles out of the way as Sergeant Burns twists the tube toward him, nearly knocking over a fair share of sensitive equipment in the process.

  Sergeant Burns is already out the door and scuttling up the front of the Humvee hood. He stands, legs braced apart, resting the AT4 on his shoulder, barrel pointed to the sky.