We can all hear it coming, yet when the small plane roars over our ashtray, it’s still a shock. Sergeant Burns howls, leading the plane for a moment before he fires, the MILES gear sending a ping from weapon to plane as it tears by.
We stand frozen, breath held, straining, and faintly we think we hear the high-pitched ring of the MILES gear overhead signaling a hit.
“You hit it! Holy fucking shit, you hit it!” Sergeant O’Brien screams, clapping his hands in delighted shock.
Forst thrusts her hands overhead in victory. I roar, and we imagine a fiery explosion, wings snapping off and the plane diving down in a ball of chaos.
Even after it’s gone, we stand frozen, Sergeant Burns still perched atop the Humvee, AT4 rested casually on one shoulder. Then Sergeant O’Brien: “He could’ve called in our position.”
An electric shock of adrenaline jolts through us. We explode into motion. “Move, move, move!” Scrambling, we tackle the equipment, ripping down the antennas. Even on our best runs, it usually takes at least fifteen to pack up our gear. But if the pilot called in our position, they could rain down artillery fire in minutes.
We get it done in five. We are a symphony of twist, pull, bag, perfect unity as all four of us squat in the dust and cinders, black smeared along the edges of our uniforms. Sergeant Forst swipes sweat off her brow, leaving lines of war paint across her checks. Her eyes are stark blue in comparison.
“Get in, in, in!” Sergeant O’Brien is screaming and I throw my rucksack into the back of Sergeant Forst’s Humvee before I leap into the passenger seat of Sergeant O’Brien’s truck, heart racing. The tires tear up the dirt and black soot, the Humvee shooting forward and ripping a trail through the woods.
“Yes! Yes! That is how it’s done!” Sergeant O’Brien slams the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “That is how we get shit done!”
A laugh simmers in my stomach then bubbles up, surging outward, and I’m high on adrenaline. Suddenly nothing seems that bad.
Sergeant Forst pulls her Humvee to the side of us, clearing some rocks and catching air. She thrusts one arm out the window to point to us in a show of solidarity and triumph. Next to her, Sergeant Burns clings to the frame for dear life.
I point back, lost in a laugh, the other hand braced against the dashboard as we blaze our own trail between half-dead trees.
And I’m so in love with the Army then. I’m in love all over again.
Consumption
Death isn’t supposed to stop the JRTC training, but apparently a mysterious, lethal disease can. I’m pulled from the field when I’m found shivering under a woobie blanket, cocooned beneath the green fabric, teeth chattering despite the hundred-degree weather and dense humidity. A red rash covers my skin, including my palms and the bottoms of my feet. My joints ache; my bones hurt. I can’t support my own weight.
“That doesn’t look good,” Sergeant O’Brien observes, pulling back the edge of the woobie to expose my neck. The rash has crept up from my neck to the side of my jaw and along my cheeks. I’m in full uniform, hands tucked into my armpits, chin to knees, to stay warm. He rests a hand across my forehead. “Jesus Christ, she’s burning up.”
Sergeant Burns leans over my cot and I crack open my eyes to see him chewing on the edge of his glasses. My eyelids feel hot. “I think we should radio the medics.”
“I don’t think you can fake that,” Sergeant O’Brien agrees. I’m glad for the rash, because at least it’s a visible symptom.
They load me up into the Humvee, busing me over to the regiment HQ site, where I’m led to a tent, dragging my boots, kicking up dense clouds of yellow dust. I hurt, from the center of my skull to the smallest toe. I want someone to carry me, but I can’t ask for that.
“Well, this is different,” says the doctor, an officer, an older woman with a thick, gray stripe of hair that runs the line of her skull. She holds my hand, flipping it over, staring at the red, raised bumps, then back at the soles of my feet. “I’ve never seen this before,” she says with delight, eyes bright, rushing over to her bag to pull out a camera. “It’s very odd for the rash to be on your palms and soles of your feet,” she clarifies, speaking quickly, thoroughly engrossed in this little medical wonder. She holds the lens close to my body, click, click, click, each done with an appreciative hum. She then flips through a heavy book, tugging at the collar of her uniform in between pages, sweat coating the sides of her face.
“Rocky Mountain spotted fever,” she says at last, looking up from the page with a wide grin. “You get it from a dog tick.”
I groan, hunched on the makeshift medic’s table, trembling from the effort of having to sit up. Not another tick-borne disease. I already had Lyme disease when I was a kid, back in the 1980s, when they didn’t know much about the disease, which made for the perfect storm of needles, MRIs, and exploratory surgeries.
“I don’t think anyone has ever had Rocky Mountain spotted fever here in Louisiana.” She stares down at the book. “You might be the first. You could be in medical books.” Her voice holds a level of reverence. I find out later this isn’t true, that Rocky Mountain spotted fever has been all over the States, but each doctor murmurs the same thing, wondering how I got it here, caught up in the name of the disease instead of the history of it.
“It has a small fatality rate,” the doctor adds, as an afterthought.
“Wait, what?” I jerk my head up, which sends a charge of pain down my spine and settles into my hip bones.
“Minor, minor.” She waves it off, although I will later learn it’s actually not all that minor. The fever is more lovingly nicknamed “tick typhus” and is the most lethal rickettsial illness in the United States.
And then she leaves, taking her medical book with her, and I’m left on the table, wondering how long I have to wait before I can lie down. I just start to lean toward the table, one elbow planted on the tough green material, when the medics come for me. I’m slightly alarmed when they say they’re taking me to a hospital, but the promise of a shower and painkillers is enough to make me move my feet. They load me up in the back of a Humvee and I huddle around myself on the hard wooden bench.
“Dostie! Hey, Dostie!”
I lift my head to see Avery Langley rushing over to the side of the Humvee, lacking his BDU jacket, his brown shirt white with salt stains.
He grins at me, a boy who is more charming than traditionally handsome, though he has the loveliest pair of green-hazel eyes. He’s cheery and laughing, despite the heat, because Avery is always cheery and laughing, a wild ball of chaos, who shrugs off disciplinary action with a chuckle because he takes nothing too seriously. He’s young and married to an equally young local stripper, a pretty, quiet girl with long, dark hair and generous curves, who supposedly comes from a strict, Christian family. She is a soft, subservient wife and mother, a good Christian, save for the whole stripper thing.
“Here, take this,” he says, and shoves a portable CD player with headphones into my hands.
“Oh,” I say, staring down at the gift. “I can’t take this from you.”
He shrugs, his smile a little tilted. “Take it. You’re going to need it more than me.”
“Thank you,” I mumble, genuinely warmed by the gift. He doesn’t know me. I’m new to the unit. He doesn’t have to go out of his way to be kind to me, but he does and that little gesture stays with me permanently.
“I hope you like Eminem,” he shouts as the Humvee pulls away, shrouding his face in clouds of dust.
I don’t, but I’ll learn to. I clutch the CD player to my chest, teeth clenched as we bump and jar over holes in the road.
I expect to be taken to an actual hospital, to a tall, bustling building humming with technology and efficiency. But they never take me out of the field, and instead to a field hospital, a small, two-story building that is permanently stuck in the year it was built, with aged linoleum tiles and old metal-framed windows. It’s underwhelming. I crawl out of the Humvee, hunched forward, st
ill bipedal so I’m forced to walk, even though my knees scream and grind and my spine bends into a hard C.
They lead me to a lobby, a twisted sort of waiting room with hard, faux-leather blue chairs that creak as the soldiers sitting in them turn in my direction. There’s no AC, but large fans are planted around the room, some pulled close to the chairs and those soldiers who sit in them.
“Why, hello there,” says one of them. They’re all older, significantly older, blatantly upper brass, dressed in a mix of PT gear and hospital paper gowns, clustered around an old television that flickers with light but no sound. There are no women.
“It’s going to be a while,” says another. “Place is a fucking mess after the helicopter crash.” No one offers me a chair.
I lean against the wall. “What crash?”
“They rushed one of the pilots through earlier. Blackhawk came up next to a Kiowa.” He gestures with one thick hand, twisting his wrist to then flop the palm up toward the ceiling. “Flipped the Kiowa right over.” I imagine the smaller Kiowa going bottom-up, a perfect 180, complete with a cartoonish dust cloud on explosion.
“Killed both pilots.”
“Oh,” I say, stunned. My mental image is reworked. This seems out of place for the field, for the safety of American soil. This isn’t Afghanistan. Pilots shouldn’t be dying here. “That’s horrible.”
The men nod, agree, henpecking the stupidity of all pilots involved. “It’s not like they’re the first two to die in this exercise,” snorts one of the men.
This is gruesome gossip, macabre grumblings from the upper echelons.
“Two got run over by a tank while they were sleeping,” says one to me, an aside so that I’m caught up with the group.
“They got run over by a tank?” I ask, aghast. “How do you get run over by a tank? How did they not hear it coming?” I learn later that this is a real problem in the military, that ground guides need to be deployed to walk in front of tread vehicles, to kick awake bodies from the tanks’ path. I learn that smart soldiers sleep near the base of trees, or pressed up against the side of wheeled vehicles, anything to protect the body from being crushed in the dark.
And then there was the soldier who fell off the obstacle course before JRTC started, who tumbled from the top of the rope climb and broke his neck. That makes five in a month. I do the math, glance around the old, quiet field hospital, and realize I’m going to die here.
I’m eventually called into a long room with multiple beds. It looks vaguely technical, as if the machines and equipment had been new once, a few decades ago, now clunky but present. The room is awash in garish fluorescent lights, one of the bulbs flickering erratically in the corner.
A middle-aged, stocky Captain greets me. He’s an affable doctor, with round, boyish cheeks and a blunt, square hairline. “We’ll figure this out,” he says warmly as he jabs a needle into the nook of my arm. He fills vial after vial, handing them off, and I grow dizzy. He lets me lie down on the hard green bed as he exits left to do something with all that blood.
I must smell, I realize. I can’t remember the last time I showered. I lie on my side, racked with pain, feverish head pressed against the vinyl.
“I can’t give you any pain meds,” the doctor informs me much later, when he returns. He drops two small Tylenol pills into my hand. “Your liver is bleeding. We can’t give you anything harsh.”
My eyes grow a little wide. “Is that bad?”
“Well, it’s certainly not good,” he laughs.
Fear is slinking its way through the pain and filling in the holes of my thoughts. I ask his thoughts about the fatality rate.
“As long as you respond to the antibiotics, you’ll be fine,” he says. They pump me full of tetracycline. I find none of it reassuring as I down dry pills of Tylenol, my knees, hips, spine unable to even make short distances from hospital bed to bathroom. Though I could now, I choose to not take a shower, not for days even, because I can’t stand in the stall, and instead I lie in bed, the film of filth transferring from my skin to the white sheets.
They set me up in my own bay because I’m the only female in the hospital. I have the long room all to myself. There’s no AC in this wing because it doesn’t make sense to cool an entire area for one occupant. They give me a fan, though, which sits in front of my bed. The windows hang open, white long curtains shifting in the breeze, in the sunlight, which illuminates the entire bay; it’s almost romantic, in a quiet, Love in the Time of Cholera kind of way.
For the first time in what feels like years, I have no schedule, nowhere to be, left to lie on the bed in solitude. I listen to Avery’s The Eminem Show album on repeat, “Soldier,” “White America,” round and round again, reading The Firm, a fat book one of the medics gave me to fill the hours.
I’m not allowed to leave the hospital until my unit leaves the field, and the exercise is delayed for days when someone loses a detonation cord. Packs and vehicles are stripped the field over, soldiers left to linger in the heat, and by the time we finally can go home, I can stand without support for short periods of time. The antibiotics do their job and the fever breaks, the rash recedes, the liver stops bleeding. I’m allowed back to my barracks room along with everyone else, where I finally climb into the shower, sit on the bottom of the tub, and wash my hair, the water turning black around my feet as it circles the drain.
The disease does its number, though. My lungs still struggle. I suck on air, mouth hung wide, at the smallest provocation. They put me on profile—no working in temperatures over eighty degrees, which rules out all of late-summer Louisiana. I sit awkwardly in the offices, shifting papers from one pile to another, while my platoon labors in the motor pool and comes to formations with reddened cheeks and sweat-slicked hair. I’m a princess in fatigues. I’m humiliated by my own ineptitude.
My lungs don’t improve.
I have an allergic reaction to the tetracycline, my hands bloating red, my fingers unable to bend, my throat growing tight. “Don’t take those meds anymore,” says the Captain from the field hospital, whom I still visit, this time in a real hospital on the other side of the post. “You’re allergic to it now. If you have it again, you could go into anaphylactic shock.”
“Oh,” I say with a desperate little hiccup for air, and I have to add a red tag to my dog tags so that no one injects me without my knowing.
My lungs still don’t improve.
“Maybe it’s asthma,” says the doctor, and fills my cargo pants pockets with albuterol. I suck on the ends of plastic cartridges, even as I’m finally off profile, finally back to work in the motor pool but gagging on the hot, wet air.
“Maybe it’s tuberculosis,” says the doctor, when even after months the albuterol does nothing to alleviate the symptoms. He gives me a PPD test, a little bubble placed under the skin of the forearm. The skin turns ruddy and swollen.
“Positive PPD,” he muses. “You have tuberculosis.” He says it triumphantly, like he’s solved a puzzle.
“Like consumption? Like where you hack up blood?” I’m alarmed and loud and nervous.
He waves one large hand at me. “No, no. It’s sleeping inside you. It’s not active. You just need to have chest X-rays every few years to make sure it doesn’t wake up.”
I shiver in the chair, thinking of the sleeping creature inside me, shifting and turning and waiting to wake and eat all my organs.
“Take these for nine months.” He hands me a large bottle filled with fat orange-and-red pills. “That’s for the tuberculosis. And these”—he hands me a smaller bottle with smaller pills—“are vitamin B for your liver.” He waggles a blunt finger at the first bottle. “Those things will do a number on your liver. You’ll have to take blood tests every month to make sure your liver isn’t failing.”
“What?” I stare at the bottles sitting in each hand. “That seems really dangerous.”
He shrugs. “Better than tuberculosis.” Then he adds, in passing, “And no drinking while on these. Ever.�
�� He turns to stare hard at me, as if trying to drill the words into my head, like he can see that I’m young and stupid and only half listening. “Your liver can’t handle the meds and alcohol. I’m being serious here.”
No drinking for nine months? For the entire time it takes for a human to grow in the womb? No drinking in a town that has nothing to do but drink? Where the only non-alcoholic entertainment, the movie theater, bursts into flames every few weeks due to a faulty popcorn machine? It’s too high a demand for a twenty-one-year-old, for a girl who has just started to drink, who rarely did it before she turned of legal age, because there was the Christian thing, and then the not-wanting-to-be-demoted-to-truck-driver thing, scared straight right up to twenty-one and now she just wants to do what everyone else is doing, and in excess.
Locke thinks it’s ridiculous, too. “Come on,” she taunts, straightening a dark tank top against her long frame. She twists in the mirror, examining her silhouette. She slips on one of my coats, then peels it off, back on again, trying to decide if the warmth is worth hiding the lines of her body. “You don’t have to drink,” she reassures, holding the coat open, hands planted on hips, trying for a compromise. “But at least come out.”
I slump on my bed. “I don’t know. You guys are all going to be drinking and then there’s going to be me sitting in the corner like an idiot, sucking down water.”
She turns to me with that wild grin she owns so well. “But we’ll be daaaancing!” She throws out her arms and spins for effect. She’s lissome and tall and powerful. The coat hides nothing. She promises fun and excitement with the curve of her arms overhead, the turn of her hips below.
I groan, lean against the wall, tap the back of my head against the brick, deliberate, deliberate. I’m terrified of being left out, of everyone moving forward without me. I say, “Sure. Why not.”
I laugh and dig through my drawers, tossing unwanted articles onto the floor, finally finding a short black skirt and matching mesh top. Locke excitedly dances from one bare foot to the other as I hastily apply makeup, tossing bottles to the side, cluttering up my desk with brushes and tissues. But it’s the weekend; I don’t have to worry about room inspection until Monday so I leave the room chaotic. I slip on a black leather coat, tall black heels, and totter out the door.
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