Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  They dismiss me. I don’t run but I walk quickly. My feet find the familiar path to my work building. The shade gives only a small relief this time and I climb the stairs numbly, until the fourth floor where I turn and climb over broken walls, cement blocks with iron rods bursting through the surface. I stumble over blasted marble, dust settling around me like a white shroud. I find a room and burrow in the rubble, spine shoved against failing drywall. I dig my feet into the floor, heels pressing down so that I am one with the wall, arms wrapped protectively around my M16.

  I cry where no one can hear me, cheek pressed against the warm metal, fighting for air between body-racking sobs, tears dropping into the dust. I bawl like a child, like a girl, until the shadows lengthen and I have nothing left to give. I’m nicely empty, and quiet, and dead, and then I can go back to work.

  Respite

  June 2003 isn’t kind to us. Two soldiers from the regiment are kidnapped and promptly murdered, their remains found thirty-two hours later. Then there’s an attack on our camp’s back wall. Rumor has it that insurgents were actually aiming an RPG at a tank but missed, blowing up one of the guard towers instead. Two soldiers are killed, eight wounded. We make CNN. There’s McCarthy’s suicide, which takes everyone by surprise but doesn’t make CNN, but the suicides never do. Rumor also has it that First Sergeant Bell was there with McCarthy, trying to talk him out of it, but, true to character, said the wrong thing and McCarthy pulled the trigger right there in front of the command. That part probably isn’t true, just wishful gossip of soldiers who long for the ultimate fuck you aimed at an ineffectual command. There’s also EOD, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal, who keep forgetting to tell the little MI unit they’re about to make a controlled detonation of an IED, so that we’re left scrambling for gear and instructions as our buildings sway with the roar of the unexpected blast.

  It all becomes normal. There’s a lot of space between these chaotic markers, and there’s a kind of desperate joy in downtime as soldiers bind together to survive the boredom. There’s the popular and traditional means: card games, chess, wrestling, movies on portable DVD players with groups of soldiers bunched around tiny screens. Everyone reads anything. Anne Rice’s erotica series the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy sweeps through the unit, much to the amusement of the women who read it first. There’s the dancing and, if you’re unlucky, the singing. Then also the less traditional, like scorpion fights, running from rats, running after rats, pranks that involve throwing camel spiders at shrieking troops. The innovative, like darts with toilet plungers, donning MOPP gear and running amok. We sit in circles and smoke apple or mint tobacco from the hookah. When the time comes, we’ll dress up for Halloween from random supplies found in care packages. We’ll dress up for Christmas with reindeer headbands and tinsel. We hate it here but we find ways to make it home.

  I spend much of my time reading, both on shift and off. When I can, I sit beside Andres on his cot, back rested against his, and devour one book after another. Eventually male McDonald will buy a TV from the locals, along with bootleg American movies, and we’ll watch bad copies of whatever we can find.

  Female King, female Brennan, Brooks, and Lovett make Friday date nights, where they’ll climb up to our work floor, take off their uniforms, and dress up in jeans, smoking the hookah and pretending to be civilians again. I’m invited but I never go. There’s something circular about the women and their bond. I can’t break in. I never know if their invitation is genuine or out of pity.

  If I’m not with Andres, I’m with Starre. I enjoy strolling across the camp with her, especially in the evenings, when the temperature drops to ninety and it feels cool, conceptualizing views on the universe and God’s place within it. She’s Christian and I’m possibly not. The farther from home I get, the larger my questions become.

  Before we left Fort Polk, Sergeant Pelton issued her an M249 light machine gun, because he laughed at the idea of such a small woman carrying such a big gun. When it’s slung over her shoulder, the buttstock nearly brushes her ankles as she walks. The joke’s on him, though; she carries it with both confidence and ease. Starre is just that kind of soldier, meaning she’s the very best kind. Back at Fort Polk, she’d drop concrete blocks into her rucksack on marches. On run days, she’d lead the pack, and the men would say she’s so fast only because she’s short, because they can’t handle that this tiny woman has outrun them all. But she’s eventually sent to the cigarette factory and I feel her absence instantly. During supply runs from one camp to the other, we pass fat envelopes filled with long letters to each other. We collaborate over a shared fantasy story, where she writes one section and I the other. She draws out a plot full of intrigue and adventure, while I add a romance between the personifications of war and death, because my writing always is a little too on the nose.

  At Camp Dragoon, we get one phone call home a week on a large satellite phone. This usually entails a four-hour wait in line for a timed five-minute call. My mom misses my call once and then never again. She straps her cell phone to her body and always has the volume set on high. My father is harder to reach. There is no cell phone service in his part of Maine.

  Eventually an internet café will be set up, a small room with old desktops maintained by Iraqi workers. We pay for internet access in fifteen-minute intervals, which is just enough time to send a few emails home and browse Amazon, which is mostly just books at this time. There’s a careful algorithm to maintain between ordering books, when books will arrive, and how much is read in between. I grow a small library in my room. Even random soldiers I don’t know come in and ask to borrow this or that. My dad sends the newly released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which also makes its rounds, but I make sure to get it back, because he’s written inside the cover, and I keep every little card and letter he sends in a box under my cot. I would keep my mother’s letters, but then I would have no room for anything else.

  We make a life at war. We don’t think to ask for more but instead make do with what we have. We find hilarity and comfort between the rumbles of mortars and the rounds of AK-47s, because that’s what soldiers have always done. We’re no one new, just the next iteration of the same old story.

  The Way We’re Trained

  Before Iraq there was Kuwait, a holding ground for troops ready to head into war. We sit here for weeks, temporarily inhabiting long tents built upon plywood floors with no electricity, tucked between red sand dunes, our tent city stretching behind walls and walls of stacked metal connex boxes. We’re waiting to be sent to Iraq, stuck at this holding base that is, quite literally, in the middle of a desert.

  Kuwait has a way of depositing itself in odd places—gritty sand up the nose, pressed against the back of the neck, dark lines embedded between the legs or under the arms. It inhabits from the inside out, sandstorms crawling down our throats and back up again in inky spit or long tendrils of black snot.

  We’re left mostly to our own devices. We’re woken up at 0530 every morning in order to do nothing. Occasionally, there are the random training sessions, like sitting hours in full Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) as we test our chemical and biological gear, wearing thick green overgarments, black rubber gloves and boots, and trying to read books through the round lenses of our gas masks as we wait for the session to end. There’s also the frisk training, how to pat down locals, which is particularly invasive as well as useful, especially for us women, because eventually there will be times in Iraq that they’ll need females to frisk local women workers as they come in through the gates, which could have been humiliating for all parties involved had some of the Iraqi women not made a charming game out of it, trying to hide non-contraband in odd places to test if we’ll find it, not done in malice but to make us better.

  Most of our time, however, is spent enduring the long trek from our tents to the DFAC hall. The deep sand hampers any movement. Sometimes along the way, Andres and I will slip between the connex boxes, fitting our bodies between the metal
walls, hiding from everyone else because if we want to touch, this is the only way to do it. I find these short sessions chilling, staring up at the tall containers, wondering if one will slip and crush us, and then how long it will take for them to find our bodies.

  The only eventful thing to happen in Kuwait is the tent fire. Somewhere down the line, a tent catches ablaze. No one considered this possibility when the tents were placed, because they’re too close, and in the dry weather the fire leaps from one tent to the next with ease. We stand in our tent doorway, watching the growing flames in general amazement, clicking photos with our disposable cameras because this is the most action we’ve seen in weeks.

  Then there’s Lieutenant Patron racing the fire down the line at a dead sprint, kicking up a cloud of sand behind him. “Get out, get the fuck out,” he’s screaming, waving one arm over his head to get our attention. We all snap to, realizing the fire is rapidly coming our way, jumping from tent to tent and swiftly devouring everything inside. NCOs start barking, “Grab your gear, grab your gear,” and shoving us out the back door. There isn’t enough time to get everything so I pick the mandatories but swing back for my rucksack, which has my hygiene bag and a few personal items. All the gear is heavy and I lean forward, practically to my knees, trying to fight the shifting sand as we move a safe distance from our tent. Avery and a few other soldiers dash back into our tent, scrambling to grab the grenades and what ammo they can find, but it’s not our tent that matters.

  “Oh fuck,” says Sergeant Daniels, mostly to himself. He turns around and bellows, “Move! Move! Move!” gesturing for us to go farther back.

  “The ammo tent,” says someone else, and sure enough the flames are licking around the edges of the tent. Everyone forgot about the ammo. We hasten farther back, slipping in our rush. Sergeant Baum, the young star sergeant of the platoon, leans down and plucks a tumbling soldier up by her rucksack and flings her back up to her feet.

  “Get down!” one of the higher-ups orders, and we bury ourselves into the sand, in the prone position, like we’re going to fight the fire with bullets.

  The ammo tent goes up in a blaze, sounding like popcorn in a microwave. Heart pounding, I get my first real taste of adrenaline. I shift farther down into the hot sand and watch as the flames reach out and surround the fuel tanker that sits behind the ammo tent.

  “It’s going to blow,” I whisper over and over, hands clamped over my ears, wondering if we’re far back enough for this. But it doesn’t. The fire dies out over the sand and, surprisingly, the fuel tanker is no worse for the wear.

  The fire stops one tent from ours. The firefighters make it just in time to save our stuff. We trudge back into our tent and wonder what will happen to everyone else who lost their everything. “Lucky them,” someone hypothesizes. “They’ll probably get to go home now.” But they don’t. They roll out with the rest of us, with significantly less gear, and wait for replacements in Iraq. Sucks to be them.

  Beyond that, the days are dull. Get up, find nothing to do, go to sleep. Rinse repeat. The living conditions don’t make our stay any kinder. The engineers have electricity (that’s what started the fire, or so we hear), but not the Military Intelligence units. So instead the heavy flaps of the tents, meant to keep out the burning sand, simply lock in the heat. There’s nowhere to escape the insufferable temperatures. Sergeant Lee pours water into a ramen noodle cup and sticks it outside the tent wall, a rock holding the paper top in place, and in fifteen minutes it is cooked.

  The camp hadn’t anticipated women, so while there are some men’s shower vans, we women have nowhere to bathe. So we hold up our woobies for each other in the tent bay, creating a makeshift curtain as we use wet wipes to scrub the dark sand off our skin. They leave a pungent, floral-scented layer of grime under the uniform.

  One tent holds an entire company, a hundred or so of us crammed side by side, the women scattered among the men. I often toss and turn on the plywood floor, my bed made up of a woobie blanket and a deflated rucksack for a pillow.

  I’m propped up against my duffel bag, trying to read a book in the gloom, when someone from Supply flips open the tent door, splashing the dark bay with stark sunlight. I blink my eyes angrily at the intrusion, but his hand is wet around the slick canteen he’s holding and I lift my nose like an animal, water-starved. “Where did you get that?” I ask.

  He jerks one thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a water buffalo out there.”

  Female King’s head snaps up. “There’s a water buffalo?”

  “Wait, when did we get a water buffalo?” Starre looks up from her book.

  Locke swivels in her seat, several beds down. “Water buffalo?”

  “Is it cold?” I start to ask but the guy has slunk away, and I don’t really care if it’s cold anyway. We have access to bottled water, but a water buffalo means disposable water that can be used for more than drinking.

  King is already rummaging through her pack, collecting her hygiene bag. Locke, Brooks, and Starre are following suit. I dig out my travel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hurry after them.

  The water buffalo is only a few tents down, a very short walk even if the shifting sand sucks at our boots and the temperature screams at 120 degrees. We huddle around the four-hundred-gallon green-and-black portable tank like zebras at a watering hole. The water pours from a spout, creating a dark puddle in the sand, and King leans down, dunking her head under the flow. We take turns submerging our heads, releasing hair from tight buns so that the sweaty, sticky tendrils gather around our shoulders until we can hang our heads upside down under the spout.

  The water is warm from the sun, almost hot, and my hair is so long that I have to hold the tips to keep the mass from dragging in the mud. I don’t care. Flipping up my head so that water dribbles down my temples and neck, I gather my hair and scrub with shampoo, breathing in the fresh scent with a sense of wonder. My fingers dig into my scalp, as if I can remove the top layer of flesh, and I point my face to the sky, savoring the stunted lather.

  But then I happen to glance to the side, outside our small huddle. A row of male soldiers has taken up residence outside their tent, nylon chairs planted into the sand, reclining back to watch the show. They’re from some other unit, one without females. Hands laced behind their heads, they are grinning, watching.

  Locke pauses, her fingers sunk into the suds on her scalp. “They do realize we’re just washing our hair, right?”

  King’s wet hair hangs around her face and soaks the shoulders of her brown undershirt. “Fuck them.”

  I shy away to the side, acutely aware of the fat around my stomach, the extra bit that hangs over the top of my uniform belt and is so obvious under the stretch of my undershirt. I try to hide behind Locke to block their line of vision. Suddenly the act of washing hair seems very private, and I nervously wring the moisture from my curls. I feel on display, shockingly exposed for some reason. I think that if I were thin, perhaps the scope of their gaze wouldn’t bother me. I assume that Locke and King, with their svelte forms, must not really mind, but Locke’s brow is pinned together, back purposefully turned away from them, and King already has her sleek blond hair wrapped up into a bun.

  A few of the men in the row clap as we walk away, and the skin at the back of my neck tightens. It’s not even a quick getaway, my feet sliding in the uneven sand so that we skid and stumble in a slow retreat. We were just washing our hair. The ordinariness of the act somehow infuriates me more.

  But in a camp comprising so little entertainment, even the mundane becomes exotic, so it’s not long before some unnamed officer from one of the other units complains to Captain Wells that his women are distracting, that they shouldn’t be walking around in their government-issued brown undershirts, that surely he must see how the fatty tissue on our chests, visible beneath our T-shirts, is highly inappropriate. Of course Captain Wells immediately informs us females that should we venture outside the tent, we now must don our DCU tops, buttoned ful
ly up the front, even if we’re just going to the latrine and back.

  “This is so unfair,” I protest as the men come and go in their brown shirts.

  “They’re fucking breasts,” Locke snarls, roughly grabbing her tight, small breasts in both hands and shaking them up and down. “It’s not like we can fucking take them off.”

  “That’s not the point,” King adds. “It’s a T-shirt. A fucking T-shirt! How can someone be distracted by a T-shirt? It’s like they’ve never seen a woman before.”

  “We haven’t been here that long that they can’t handle a T-shirt,” I agree. And we haven’t, maybe two weeks max. The other units couldn’t have been here that much longer. Had we all lost sense of ourselves already? “And on top of that, maybe I’m distracted by them in their brown shirts. Have they ever considered that?” But of course they haven’t.

  Then Chief Warrant Officer Steele arrives, cornering Captain Wells in the middle of a bay, her sinewy arms exposed under the rolled-up sleeves of her undershirt. Her gray hair is brushed back from her sharp face and clasped in a bun, which somehow makes her features more pronounced. She does not wear her DCU top. She stands inches from Captain Wells, chin raised. She’s smaller, but not really, only in physical size. She lays into him. I can hear the general rise and fall of her intonations and there is no wavering, nothing quick or slow, just an even stream that she will not allow to be interrupted.

  Although Steele is in Captain Wells’s unit, she is not under his command, and is protected by her title of chief warrant officer. Captain Wells is struck dumb by her even-keeled aggression, his chin tucked. His furrowed brow makes him look like a primate trying to understand human language.

  “If I have to wear a DCU top, then you have to wear a DCU top,” she finishes loudly as she is walking out, turning to point one long, skinny finger at him. I want to stand and applaud.