Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  Sergeant Daniels stands just to the side of the entrance, looking awkward against the medical instruments and sterile environment. Too large against the doorframe. I must have called him away from far more important duties.

  I swing my feet over the edge of the makeshift bed, staring down at the pattern of my uniform on my knees. When I look up, he’s gone.

  There is paperwork, of course. I am seated in a wobbly chair with one missing wheel. The officer sits on the other side of a laughably small desk—no doubt dragged from one of the blown-up buildings. It lacks authority.

  What the desk lacks, however, the officer makes up for. Her papers are spread over the torn wood, black pen perched in long, steady fingers. I shift uncomfortably on my chair, which rocks loudly to the side. Brooks has been taken away; I have no idea where King went. The other medics cast quick, fleeting glances at me and I twist my fingers into awkward angles in my lap.

  “I’ve…had this happen before,” I say, and the doctor scribbles something far too long to be a repeat of my phrase. “I was…it’s how I deal with things.” I chew the inside of my cheek. “Before we came here, I was…” The declaration is caught behind my teeth. “…raped.” I spit the word and it writhes on the floor in the dirt. “This is just something that happens sometimes,” I quickly add, trying to brush it off, trying to scream for help.

  The officer’s blond head bobs and her hand flies across the page. “Your vital signs remained consistent from when you were standing to when you were lying down…” Medical term, medical term, I don’t understand what she’s saying but I get the gist. You’re fine.

  “I’m fine,” I affirm.

  Again that dismissive bob of the blond head.

  * * *

  Avery Langley’s memorial service is mandatory. Work is postponed. Soldiers assemble in the theater, a small auditorium with a still-functioning stage and oddly slanted floor. Andres fumes in the seat beside me, arms crossed over his stocky chest and brow furrowed. “This is such bullshit,” he complains. It’s not a full ceremony but someone has managed to scrape together music, and I listen with head bowed. Tears blur my vision.

  Andres grumbles another complaint and I shoot him with an angry glare. First Sergeant Bell climbs onto the stage, lingering to the side in his gangly height. He begins the Last Roll Call, plowing through the names with little care until he gets to L. “PFC Langley,” he calls into the darkened room.

  Silence responds.

  “Private First Class Langley,” he calls out again.

  The dark room is stifling, the heat presses at my throat.

  “Private First Class Avery C. Langley,” a third and final time. I despise the silence.

  “Let it be known that PFC Langley has been removed from the unit roster. His name will not be called again.”

  A strike through a name, a complete removal of existence, done with nothing more than an eraser. I contemplate the letter D and the precariousness of the space between C and E.

  “We shouldn’t even be here,” Andres leans into me to whisper.

  “He died,” I snap back. “Can’t you have a little respect for that?”

  Andres rears back, handsome face darkening. “I’m so sick of having to talk nice about someone just because they’re dead. Did everyone forget that all he ever did was cheat on his wife?”

  “You don’t know that,” I say, but Andres is already shaking his head at me.

  “He had a kid. He did this to his own kid.” For all his cynicism, Andres wants nothing more than to be a father. He glares up at the stage for a moment, his hands planted firmly on his knees, knuckles white as he tightens his grip. “He was a fucking coward,” he adds, softly but still bitter. “He was an asshole in life and he’s an asshole in death.”

  I step out of my seat, desperate to put space between his anger and my uncertainty. Suicide leaves everyone off-kilter. The ceremony is over and some drift up to the stage. I follow, hesitant before the display of helmet, rifle, and boots. His Kevlar, complete with name tag, sits on top an inverted M16, dog tags dangling from the pistol grip. I reach out and gently brush the softness of the well-worn boots. Not the ones he’d been wearing that night. He had been sitting. There would be brain matter and blood all over them.

  I pull my hand away. Avery had been killed in an entirely different kind of war—one with few similarities save for the bullet.

  I turn away from the memorial, one arm hugging my middle. I glance up and happen to cross gazes with Specialist Price. We know each other in passing, once friendly smiles and pleasant exchanges now tarnished by the reason we avoid each other. She steps into the aisle to meet me and we hesitate there, smiles strained and trembling as we attempt to find words of comfort. We stumble into a hug, made further clumsy by our unacknowledged commonality.

  Rumor has it that Price recently reported that she was gang-raped, by either a small group of Iraqis or US soldiers—the details remained muddied. Her claims are met with derision; she is either a depraved slut or a flagrant liar, the vehemence of her status wholly dependent on the one reciting the rumor and the participating party that is named.

  Perhaps I partially believe the rumors, because it’s easier. Perhaps she believes the rumors about me. There is never a joining in shared experience or sisterhood between us, just averted gazes and hollow phrases of nothingness. Maybe we are afraid to get too close to each other, as if our two negatives would tear a hole in the unit. Maybe we worry about the possible rumors that could come from the two raped girls huddling close together: conspiring our next rapes, collaborating our new stories. Or maybe we are both embarrassed by our own guilt—that for no matter how short of a time, we bought into their pervasive rhetoric about rape and didn’t believe the other until it was too late.

  I can cry now, a small spattering of tears, though I never reach Brooks level of devastation and I feel something empty in that. I hadn’t been able to, at first. I recall being in that room the night it happened, moved out of the aid station to another room where there is a chaplain, though I don’t recognize him. He is young with a shock of black hair. His earnestness rings false.

  Grief counseling. He looks tired and I realize it’s nearly three in the morning. I want to sleep but I haven’t cried yet. It seems like the proper thing to do.

  I’m placed in a corner, and I spread out on the floor, arms flung out to claim my space. Then it comes—the tightening of my throat, the burning of my eyes.

  Relief: I’m still human.

  Just as the tears slide down my temples, sinking into the loose strands of my hair, I accidently sidestep. The ceiling blurs and the tears dry on my cheeks.

  “Hey, stay with me.” The chaplain snaps his fingers in front of my nose, a loud, obnoxious sound, and I jolt back.

  I waver back and forth between my safe white place and this precarious reality. I see, flashing like an endless loop before my eyes, the very last time I ever see Avery. He’s leaping into the air, fingertips straining, stretching for the low-hanging ceiling.

  Ace of Hearts and Clubs

  Exactly twenty days after Avery’s death, Sergeant Daniels storms in our room, kicking my cot with one boot. “Get up!” He’s in full battle rattle, M16 slung over his shoulder. “Get up and get your gear on!” he barks, kicking Brooks’s cot. Then he’s gone, devoured back up by the gloom of the hall.

  The four women around me are leaping up, moving automatically into their uniforms in the dark. I think of the past month and wonder who else has died. No one wakes you up in the middle of the night for good news.

  There’s no time to reflect now, though. I fumble with my woobie, throwing the poncho liner on the floor. I hear it then, the cry of AK-47 fire, the occasional slower rumble of a .50-cal. I’ve learned to sleep through the AK-47 but the .50-cal startles me. No one shoots the .50-cal unless they mean business. My hands shake as I tug on my uniform, my gear rested carefully by my cot. I slam closed my flak vest, shrugging on the familiar weight of my TA-50 gear.
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br />   Then we’re racing out of the black silence of the company building, into the warm night air. The entire city is ablaze. The sky is cut apart under the barrage of tracer bullets, like thin red fibers, crisscrossing in a quilt of fire and metal. Star Wars, I think to myself. I tense for falling bullets, my skin tight with anticipation of a hit, running with head ducked, watching my feet, moving, keep moving, a sprinting target under the burning sky.

  We hurry inside the enveloping blackness of our work building and I feel an instantaneous rush of relief. There’s no time to pause. My fellow platoon members flitter by like shadows and I heave my flak vest higher, trying to buy a breath of air, eyes widened for a scratch of light. No flashlights allowed—the quickest way to get shot in the head is to put a light on your helmet.

  But this is well-known terrain. Sergeant Daniels has drilled this route into our skulls, so that tonight we can move quickly, we know each step and stone, and there is a brilliance in that efficiency. Sergeant Daniels, ever the Ranger, has set up the six-story building into a complex maze, a crisscrossing of floors with blocked exits and dead ends, a course we know well even in the dark, easily defendable, filled with nooks and crannies to take out invaders. We dash across the floors, up flights of stairs, past our work floor, out onto the roof, back out under that fiery sky, to the world roaring with gunfire.

  “Here, here.” Daniels directs us each to our own dark nook and I hunker down in position, M16 braced, and glance over the roof wall. I can see below, out across the expanse of the city, to the streets lit up, car horns blaring just under the sound of all those AK-47s. Tonight I am the sniper, the shooter in the dark, and I press against the stone structure, eyes focused on the camp walls, ready should shadowy forms flitter up and over.

  The firing goes on and on, tearing the night apart, shrills and screams of heavier fire, of more dangerous things, and the terrifying thunk, thunk, thunk of a .50-cal. Sergeant Daniels strides across the roof, stalking like a lion, fearless of the bullets overhead. Unwavering, he is the vision of a warrior, epitome of everything I should be, but am not. He commands, we follow, and I draw strength from his calm. I stare up at him, this steadfast man, and realize this is how you get soldiers to love you—lead with fire and fervor, burn everything before you, not because you’re interested in victory but simply to get your troops home. This is how you get soldiers to die for you.

  Adrenaline burns like a drug, sweet at the back of my throat, and suddenly I’m alive, so alive, like the world is burning in high definition, aware of every part of me, every aspect of life narrowed down into this chilling moment, this glorious moment, beautiful and horrifying and wondrous. Suddenly I am giddy, almost laughing, burning up with a rage to live, an itch to destroy, and this is how the soldier becomes who he is.

  Sergeant Daniels abruptly gets new information filtered in to him from his radio and the tension in his wide shoulders eases. “They’re celebrating,” he calls out in a slightly baffled voice.

  “Celebrating? Celebrating what?” someone asks.

  “Uday and Qusay have been killed.”

  Saddam Hussein’s two sons: the Ace of Hearts and Clubs. I know their faces well from our military-issued personality identification playing cards. Each card contains the name and photo of one of the fifty-two most-wanted members of Saddam’s government. I also know the stories. Iraq celebrates for a reason. Uday can no longer “discover” women on the street to rape and murder. Qusay can no longer order the execution of thousands. It’s a good win.

  We blink in surprise, glance at each other, startled by the suddenness of the news. It’s our first real victory, the most demonstrative sign that we are winning, and we need this.

  There is a sharp laugh, a bark of delight, I see my fellow soldiers’ faces break into grins. “Fuck yeah,” someone hollers. We unfurl, unroll our tense bodies, uncurl legs, straighten crooked fingers. Then we roar, rifles overhead. Adrenaline thundering through my veins. This moment I’ll remember, so clear and vibrant, effervescent and intense. This feeling I’ll chase forever.

  “All right, calm down,” Daniels yells over our cheers. He knows better than we do that just one gun turned the wrong way can morph celebration into a full-force attack. He knows the swinging of an RPG in the midst of rejoice can demolish our walls. He leads us down one floor to our work site, where we are to guard our top-secret materials and equipment.

  “Get away from the windows,” he orders, and I pull farther back into the hall, legs sprawled out in front of me. I continue to stare out the window, though, watching the tracers flash by, casting red flares of light against all the broken shards of glass on the floor.

  And so we wait. Giddy, awed, yet anticipating. Because even when it’s good, you always, always wait for it to go bad.

  What Isn’t Mine

  Uday and Qusay are killed. Saddam eludes capture. Life in Iraq rolls on. I’m trying to keep a relationship alive in this shithole camp, and I’m failing. Andres doesn’t seem to notice.

  Sex between soldiers is strictly forbidden in Iraq. It doesn’t surprise anyone. Had we been ordered not to breathe we would have nodded and said “sure, sure,” then taken to the task of breathing when no one was looking. The difficulty isn’t in the order but in not getting caught while breaking it.

  It might not surprise anyone, but it does make life difficult, especially if sex is the only way you know how to keep a bond from dying. Most soldiers explore dark corners among broken-down walls and nest between concrete and shattered drywall. Andres and I have been there, done that, but a couple of weeks ago I got startled by a very large rat in a very dark room and so I demanded we find less infested places. The most convenient place is the outside shower (the only shower), the makeshift room we had created when we arrived, walls built not with drywall but with broken wooden doors. At the request of the women, the cracks were eventually sealed with duct tape and bits of rags. It offers a small piece of solitude, if you can catch the room in between shower times, which are typically early morning or late night, before or after the crux of the heat, when the five-gallon jug of water doesn’t instantly turn to sweat the moment it hits the body.

  My uniform top is unbuttoned and my brown undershirt raised so that the air can cool the sweat at the base of my spine. Andres slips a hand farther up my shirt, thwarted by the sports bra, but there isn’t time to take any of it off. He playfully nibbles my neck, trying to make it romantic, he’s always trying to make it romantic, but my palms are pressed against one of the doors, uniform pants wrapped around my ankles, boots still tied, and there’s nothing sweet about this. My head lolls forward, eyes open; I try to find the pleasure in the jarring thrust, the slap of skin on skin bouncing across the door-walls, but this feels like rutting to me.

  I resent the rules that reduce me to bending over in a dark, dank room somewhere in Baghdad, with dirty water splashing around my feet, in order to get some human relief—but even this doesn’t make me question them. American law is foreign to us, we belong to the Uniform Code of Military Justice now and the UCMJ isn’t all that keen on individual freedoms. Sign on the dotted line and suddenly nothing is mine. You’re government property now, and none of it is sacred.

  Our bodies aren’t ours. When Andres complains, “We’re all fucking Commies,” I can’t actually argue and at the time it didn’t really matter. We had simply moved from one parental institution to another, so that years later, when my enlistment is up and my rights are finally placed back into my hands, I won’t quite know what to do with them anyway.

  Andres murmurs something against my cheek, my hair escaping from its bun and tickling my ear. I want to snap, Just finish already, but it’s not his fault he started dating me when it was just a few weeks too late and there was already something hard and dead growing in my chest. More than this emotionless sex, I want to instead grab his arm, to press my palm against his bare forearm, as if I can draw comfort from that touch, but even I know that’s weird.

  Andres hears it before
I do, his hand snaking out and clamping his sweaty palm over my mouth even though I haven’t made a sound.

  There it is again, the hard rap, rap, tap against one of the wooden doors. My eyes widen and my breath freezes behind Andres’s palm. I turn, Andres falling out of me. “Someone’s in here,” I stutter and Andres is jerking up his pants, fastening his belt.

  Again the knocking and my hands shake as I fumble for my pants, my fingers tangling in the buttons.

  “Who’s in there?”

  Fuck, fuckidy fuck, I know that voice. Involuntarily my teeth clench together. Captain Wells. Jesus Christ, couldn’t it have been anyone but him?

  “I’ll be right out,” I respond as Andres is doing wild little circles, frantically looking for a way out, but thanks to us women the doors are securely taped and there’s no other exit.

  Captain Wells is knocking at the door again, as if I’ve kept him waiting for hours, and my heart is hammering. I quickly sling my M16 over my shoulder as I look up, as if Andres could scale the sleek doors and escape over the walls.

  “Open this door now.”

  Fuck you. “I’m changing.”

  Andres gestures at the door, for me to open it and he’ll slip out the side, he even whispers it, as if his voice can’t carry through wood. It’s as good a plan as any, and I grasp the one loose door that serves as an opening into the shower. I lift it, tilting it outward to block Captain Wells’s view, and Andres darts outs and around the corner. In another world, it would’ve been the perfect getaway.

  Captain Wells steps toward the corner, short, stubby neck craning, making his prominent forehead all the more noticeable as he snaps, “Who was that?”

  “Who was who?”

  Captain Wells follows the dark shadow that was Andres, calling after him as Andres darts into the company building. With his other prey lost, Captain Wells turns back to me, his dark eyes glittering in the low light. He enjoys this. “Who was just with you?”