Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  People talk about it. No one loves a good ghost story more than a soldier. Al Kut is either haunted or it’s a shared hysteria, if that’s a thing. Or maybe we’re just tired.

  * * *

  The camp is protected by the Ukrainian Ground Forces, part of the thirty-eight countries that contributed to the multinational coalition in Iraq. I continually forget who they are and call them the Norwegians for no real reason. They guard the perimeters of the camp in impossibly tall towers hastily made of wood and barbed wire. I continue to run in Al Kut, the experience far more enjoyable in the coolness of twilight. I’m obsessed with the ritual, still carefully picking through my meals to push away anything carb-related, loading on extra exercise in shame, terrified that I will once again slip back into that fat body. My worth is determined by how low the uniform pants hang on my hips, by the extra space between the fit of my brown undershirt and the frame of my body. Because I am thin, because I am fit, I think this is healthy.

  Female King and Starre often run with me. The Ukrainians press against the edges of their towers, waving hands over blond heads, howling an accented “Hello.” They say more that we can’t understand, and I wave back.

  “Don’t do that,” King huffs, swiping away beads of sweat from the crown of her forehead. “Ignore them.”

  And if I don’t ignore them, will that seem like I’m looking for attention? I’ve come so far; I have to be vigilant against any old labels that may be applied should I slip up. I press my elbows to my side, staring down at the bumpy road as I run.

  Some evenings, long after the camp has gone black and everyone is tucked away in a cot or snuggled up on a hard stone floor, the Ukrainians commence with Operation Scare the Living Shit Out of the Americans. My room suddenly rolls, rocking with a thunderous boom, dirt and bits of stone shifting down from the ceiling as I snap out of my cot.

  “Get your gear on! Move, move, move!” I can hear Sergeant Daniels’s screaming from one house over. The sky flashes phosphorous white, and the spatter of some unrecognizable gun offsets the boom of the mortars or land mines.

  I have just grabbed my M16, woken so suddenly that I’m still not really processing, simply moving, when Sergeant Daniels yells, “Stand down!” The other girls and I stand by our cots, gear half scrambled into, glancing around in the dark, swiping sleep out of our eyes, but no one really says anything.

  Sergeant Daniels, already in full gear (perhaps he sleeps in it), strides up our driveway, waving us off. “Go back to bed. It’s just the Ukrainians doing some kind of live-fire exercise.” He doesn’t say more, just turns on a heel and heads back toward the black street.

  It’s not only the night exercise, though. Sometimes it’s simply mindless rifle firing, often bored Ukrainian night guards shooting at coyotes in order to stay awake. Most times it’s loud—tremendously loud, like the sky is being cracked open and the entire field of land mines is on fire. I strain in the dark on my cot, waiting to hear Sergeant Daniels’s voice, hand wrapped around the muzzle of my M16, counting ascending numbers in the flashes of light, because if no one has responded by now, then it’s probably nothing. Then I roll over, tugging my woobie over my head, and mutter, “Fucking Norwegians,” before I slip back to sleep.

  * * *

  Locke strolls up the driveway one evening, M16 slung over her shoulder. She looks around the darkened house. “Where is everyone?”

  I’m sitting on a nylon chair, straining to read a book under one of the battery lanterns. I glance around, shocked to find the house empty. I shrug. The girls could have dispersed to any number of places—playing cards with the boys in groups of four, or huddled around a six-inch screen to watch a movie on a portable DVD player, or perhaps just strolling from house to house to visit and talk. The lack of electricity has made socialites of most of us.

  Locke shrugs back. “Okay. Want to go take a shower?”

  I lean back in my chair, thumb holding my place in the book. “I took a bath earlier.”

  “No, I mean like a real shower. With running water and everything.”

  I place the book on the ground; now she has my full attention.

  Locke points off in the distance, her slender form outlined by the last of the dying light. The sky is still a gauzy gray. “They have milvans on the other side of the camp with showers. Like hot/cold-water shower, and electricity and everything.”

  “What? Why do they get showers?” I’m not sure who they are but I’m outraged by the injustice.

  Locke grins, her teeth white against her sandblasted face. “Who cares? They’re ours now. Gaul, me, and Frenchie are going. Are you in?”

  “Fuck yeah!” I hop up and rush into the house, throwing my hygiene bag into a sack with my PT uniform.

  “Get your Kevlar!” Locke calls.

  I snag the helmet out from under my cot. “Why do I need my Kevlar?” I ask as I jog over to her.

  “Do you really want to walk across the entire camp?”

  I scowl, falling into stride beside her. “They told you we can take a Humvee?”

  She flashes that smile. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

  Gaul and Frenchie lean against the stone wall beside Sergeant T’s driveway. Gaul holds one finger against his lips, and Frenchie flicks the red cherry of his cigarette into the dark. Locke points to one of the Humvees in the driveway and the boys position themselves in front of the grille. Locke slips into the driver’s seat, doesn’t turn on the lights, and throws the vehicle in neutral. Gaul and Frenchie lean down low, hands braced against the front as they push the Humvee out of the driveway and into the road.

  “Let’s go,” Locke hisses and Frenchie slips into the passenger seat as Gaul plants a foot onto the tire well and hops into the open back of the truck. I scramble over the tailgate and roll onto the metal floor. Gaul snorts and I grin back from the bottom of the Humvee, fitting my Kevlar into place.

  “Are we going to get into trouble for this?” I whisper as the Humvee flares to life with a low growl. Locke still doesn’t turn on the lights as we slowly crawl down the road.

  “Nah,” Gaul says and leans back against the wooden rails, legs leisurely spread out in front of him on the bench. He reclines his head back, one arm latched around the rail to keep him in place. He smiles up at the passing stars. Sweet Gaul, who will eventually achieve his dream of joining the Special Forces, whom I’ve seen rescue an imprisoned hedgehog from a trap and release a comfortable distance from the house into the desert, Gaul, who will call me still periodically over the next decade, sometimes at three in the morning, sometimes from places far away, and his voice will become a little lower, a little flatter, as if that quick, ready grin has been snuffed out, and I will worry for him, because even gods can die—in fact they do quite often.

  The farther we pull away from our unit, the faster Locke drives. Once we turn away from the dark row of lightless houses, she lets out a loud whoop.

  Gaul responds with one of his instantaneous, loud laughs, and Frenchie reaches one arm out the window and loudly raps the roof like a drum. Gaul and I yelp in unison as another bump sends us bobbing. “You’re going to kill us!” I scream at Locke, a surge of adrenaline curling my toes and causing my skin to burn.

  Locke throws back her head and howls and for a second I release my grip on the rails, laughing, raising both fists to the sky, glowing, pulsating, grinning.

  I gulp the wind, as if I can’t get enough and this is the moment. The moment I’m in love with. The moment where I’m alive, in some part of the world with a landscape of ancient beauty, dazzling skies, stolen Humvees, and secret getaways.

  And I like it here.

  Two Miles Out

  We are in Al Kut for three months, then shortly to Diwaniyah. I see Andres again. Our time apart has worn us thin. He wrote to me more than I did to him and he knows it. He tries to physically make up for the imbalance, and we have sex in a dark, abandoned room. He’s angry at me so I kiss him harder and that seems to work.

  When
our company leaves Diwaniyah to head for Kuwait, the regiment takes away most of our ammo. It goes to another unit, cutting our supply nearly in half.

  “So you’re telling me if we get in a firefight, we won’t have enough to defend ourselves?” asks Captain Noble, standing at the head of the convoy, his standard-issue Oakleys strapped tight over his eyes. He’s exasperated. We all are, as we divide our magazine stacks in half and hand them over.

  “Less weight to carry?” I try for optimism. My TA-50 certainly is lighter, but I’m not sure the trade-off is worth it. There is a ripple of a rumor circulating around the convoy, a sort of snarky opinion that an MI unit wouldn’t know how to defend itself in a fight anyway. Leave it to the big boys. Give them the ammo and let them do the real work, like they’ve been doing this whole time. They’re better trained, but the reminder still chafes.

  Someone starts a prayer circle, no one knows where the chaplain is, but the ring expands one by one, and I trot over, clasping the hands of two other soldiers and adding myself in, head bowed. I don’t know who I’m praying to anymore, what name to use, but we are all feeling a hunger for protection, a desperate desire to place our lives in the hands of something bigger and higher. “Please place a hedge of protection around us,” I murmur, words too familiar to cast aside. There is a calm here, in this ring, a little bit of peace, before we break, re-sling weapons over our shoulders, and disperse into the dusty line for our own vehicles.

  I’m Starre’s driver now and she strings CD player speakers up on the ceiling of our Humvee, the dust-covered boxes dangling between us. Music isn’t allowed but since we don’t have a radio, it’s not like we’ll miss hearing anything important. I’ll need the music as we head out, rolling out of the camp gates, passing the concertina wires into the flat, long plains of Al Kut. This trip isn’t quartered into miles and hours. The mandate that we stop for the night after eight hours of driving is tossed away. We just need to get to Kuwait. We plow onward, following a sun that never seems to set, stopping rarely for quick latrine breaks, which consist of stepping out of your vehicle and pissing beside a smoldering tire.

  “Kevlar!” a sergeant screams down the line on one break, annoyed at all of us who have peeled off some part of our gear, tossing our helmets in the hope of a break from the heat. I strip open my flak vest, holding open the heavy flaps, praying for wind to brush up against my wet uniform. The land is flat, a single line of shimmering gray at the horizon, an entire world comprising one singular line. It’s neither beautiful nor ugly. It’s overpowering in its simplicity.

  We drive for nineteen hours straight. The music keeps me awake, even as my forehead occasionally dips and taps the steering wheel. The heat makes me tired, dulls my fear, my reaction time; the windshield is shrouded in a fine layer of dust. And then, just two miles out of Kuwait, we come up on another unit’s convoy, one that was a little ahead of us, their entire line sitting on the side of the dirt road, engines cut. One of the five-tons had been pulling a trailer, a trailer that caught at the edge of the road and flipped suddenly, dragging the truck down the ditch, twisting the metal ties until the five-ton also rolled, like some felled beast going belly-up, oily tires pointed to the sky, crushing the two soldiers inside. Just two miles out of Kuwait.

  It seems unjust somehow. We can see the Kuwait line, the space that divides war and peace. They’re not the first or last soldiers to die in this war, but somehow the nearness makes it feel even more unfair, that they would never leave this place, even when they could see the end. Just two miles out.

  Desecration

  Homecoming

  Locals from around Bangor, Maine, meet us at the airport gates, holding WELCOME HOME TO AMERICA signs above their heads, passing out cans of soda and bags filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies, shaking our hands as we pass. American Legion and VFW veterans wear their hats, their unit pins, grasp our hands hard, make eye contact hard, looking but not saying, The hardest is yet to come. They lead us into a closed-off room with a table full of donated cell phones, letting us call home in a time when day minutes were a thing and it must have cost a fortune. I cry a little, head tucked to the side, because it’s kind and unexpected. A woman in a BANGOR sweatshirt wraps an arm around my shoulder and hugs me in a strong, sturdy way. I laugh. She laughs.

  I call my dad and tell him I’m here in Maine, of all places. I had called him from our stop in Germany, telling him we might land in Bangor, but also maybe not. Command keeps it vague. Loose lips sink ships, and all that. They only tell us once the plane is up in the air, and they pronounce it wrong so that the men snicker for hours, yelling “Bang her!” back and forth to each other. My dad scrambles, trying to make it to the airport on time, but Maine is a big state and we’re back on the plane before he even has a chance.

  So I don’t really stop to touch American soil until we land in Fort Polk. I clomp down the metal stairs onto the tarmac and pause in the shadow of the plane as the rest of the platoon flashes by. I crouch and press my palm against the hot asphalt.

  “What are you doing?” Andres asks, half turned back toward me.

  “I don’t know, it seems apropos or whatever. First time touching American soil and whatnot.”

  “You know that’s not soil, right?”

  Stones and tiny bits of asphalt stick to my palm, and I have to brush it against my leg. The image of kissing homeland is a bit marred but I stand, lean back on my heels, and breathe in the wet Louisiana summer air. “It’s good to be home,” I say.

  He scrunches up his nose. “It fucking reeks.” He turns back toward the platoon, shifting his pack higher on his back. And it sort of does, of diesel fuel and smoldering tar, but that’s Fort Polk for you.

  I’m not the only one touching the ground, though. A few guys copy me, fingertips against the pavement. Several wait until they reach the edge of the tarmac, stooping down to touch the tangled green weeds and blooming dandelions.

  * * *

  There is an otherworldly feeling to walking up the stone steps of the barracks. They take our M16s, pack them away, and now my left shoulder feels too light. They collect our gear and there’s nothing on my back. My entire body feels off. There’s no guard duty, no walls. The open and unprotected spaces between barracks buildings are startling. I’m home, but not. Something has shifted. I never cared for this place, not after what happened, and now it has changed again, even though the cement blocks are still the same. The floors are still linoleum, the walls are still whitewashed to cover the black mold creeping along the upper corners of the ceiling. It all looks the same but everything feels different.

  The 2nd ACR is deactivated, Tenth Mountain takes over, and the entire brigade is moved to Washington State. They have no use for the linguists and are ready to ship us off to Fort Gordon. Except Andres isn’t a linguist, which means he stays, I go, and we’re handed an expiration date. We break up slowly, bit by bit, in the three months before I leave. I yell a lot now. I don’t know why, except that it feels good. Words bubble up behind my teeth and spill out with a sneer, with a hiss, and it burns as it exits, feeling like power. Andres yells back. We create our own little war.

  We try to vacation for a weekend in Lake Charles. In a few days I’m going to Fort Gordon, which is where I always wanted to be posted. I’m happy, Andres is not. We haven’t decided what we’ll do with this new, physical distance between us. We yell about it. The hotel room shakes with our anger.

  “God, see? This is why we can never be together,” I scream, gesturing sharply between us. “All we do is fight.”

  Andres stands in the bathroom threshold, stunned into silence, as if his entire body has been struck immobile. He stares at me blankly for a moment, then rounds on his heel. He slams the bathroom door in my face.

  I didn’t mean to say it like that. I didn’t mean to tell him that way, so definitively, that I already know there isn’t anything left for us. I don’t know how to tell him I’m not feeling much of anything but rage, that only in these brilli
ant moments of anger do I vibrate with excitement. Here, in this emotion, I feel invincible.

  He cries in the bathroom, on his side of the door, privately, because Andres hates naked emotion, hates revealing anything besides anger and general disgruntlement.

  You’re destroying a good man, I realize. Dismantling him piece by piece, because despite his flaws Andres is a good, kind man, attentive and faithful. I watch myself breaking him. I’m an effective poison. I hate myself on the other side of the door, forehead rested against the wood, and yet I don’t tell him to come out. I don’t take back the words because I don’t know how.

  And even still, when I leave Fort Polk, he stands by my car door, holds me tightly against his body, face buried into my hair. We linger there. I etch the span of his shoulders into my memory, the feel of his arms around my back, how mine tuck under his and press around his waist. I carefully fold up the memory of that last kiss, soft and sad, one of his thumbs brushing along my jawline, and I tuck that memory away, somewhere safe where I can’t taint it. This, at least, is real.

  * * *

  I love Fort Gordon. I love its green, rolling hills, its massive oak trees, the fact that the base sits fatly in the middle of Augusta, Georgia, a bustling city. I love my platoon, filled with almost all linguists; my command, who have been in the military intelligence field for years; my female commander, who has a way of stopping what she’s doing when you talk to her, of making eye contact while you talk, like she’s actually listening. I love the smartness, the casual enjoyment people have for intelligence, the appreciation of academic discourse.

  I reconnect with Josephine, my Air Force friend from DLI. We friend so hard that the men are baffled by our bond and call us lesbians. She encourages me to continue writing, because I had stopped shortly after I came back from Iraq, when I sat at my desktop and tried to read back my novel in progress. I quickly deleted the thing. I dug through drawers and bags to find any paper copies, gathered them up, and took them outside to the dumpster, disposing of the book without a backward glance. The naïveté of that writer infuriated me. Her staunch view of black and white, as if there were either, was childlike. Josephine encourages me to start from scratch and I write a world of gray.