The Valley

by John Renehan

  “What do you need, Derr?”

  “I need a hard copy of my pay stub so I can show the bitchwife I ain’t holding out on her.”

  Derr considered himself a laugh riot, in addition to handsome and suave. Apparently some misguided young lady somewhere back in the United States thought so too. Derr was, inexplicably, married.

  “Bitchwife” was only one of the fond names by which Black had come to know Derr’s beloved. She was also, depending on the day, “fuckslut,” “my opinion,” or “the ‘ho,’” along with other names Black cared to forget. It occurred to him that he did not actually know the unfortunate girl’s name.

  “Such deep respect,” he said blandly as he turned to his computer.

  Derr snorted.

  “Pfft! You should hear what she makes me call her in bed.”

  He laughed and sent a fresh muddy slug into his dip bottle. He was proud of his ability to spit shining wads of tobacco phlegm cleanly through a two-centimeter Coke bottle opening, straight to the tidy puddle at the bottom, without leaving the brown residue often seen trickling down the insides of such receptacles. Derr considered this, alone among all aspects of the Army’s second-favorite pastime after smoking, to be unsightly.

  “You know,” he said, “that’s funny, Black, because ‘Deep Respect’ is actually our name for one of our things she makes me do.”

  He adopted an athletic stance and prepared an expressive tableau.

  “I sort of get her by the legs right here, and—”

  “Why don’t I print your thing.”

  Derr shrugged.

  “Suit yourself, bud. Deep Respect’s good stuff, though. Works every time.”

  Black did not ask and tried not to wonder what “works” meant. He called up Derr’s records and printed off his most recent Leave and Earnings Statement. He observed that, as fellow first lieutenants, he and Derr made precisely the same amount of money.

  Who should be more offended by that?

  “Here’s your L.E.S., man.”

  He handed it over.

  “Thanks, Black.”

  Derr turned to go, then stopped and thumbed at the paper on the desk.

  “And I’m telling you, dude. Don’t do it.”

  Black sighed. He finally bit.

  “Why not, Derr?”

  “Because you think you got hosed. You think the Army fucked you over that thing.”

  That thing.

  Black said nothing.

  “Okay, so you need to fuck it back,” Derr continued, shrugging as though this were the simplest thing. “Don’t sign that paper, and don’t take it to the commander. Fuck that shit.”

  Derr rotated ninety degrees left.

  “Am I right, Sergeant Cousins?”

  Cousins worked with Black in the “S-1 shop,” which was Army-speak for the battalion’s administrative office, handling personnel business for the unit’s four hundred people and supervising several paperwork soldiers, none of whom were present for some reason. He reclined heavily behind his desk with his feet up and his nose down in a men’s magazine.

  “Mmm, you got it, sir.”

  He didn’t look up.

  Black was searching for something else dry or snide to say to Derr when it occurred to him that, coming from a guy like Derr considered himself to be, to a guy like he believed Black to be, this was pretty generous and friendly advice.

  “Thanks, Derr.”

  “You got it, bud,” Derr said graciously.

  He wove his way through desks and makeshift workstations toward the makeshift door.

  “Take it easy, Sergeant Cousins. Gotta go fight and stuff.”

  Cousins turned a page. Derr called over his shoulder.

  “Don’t take no Deep Respect from the Army, Black.”

  He chuckled at his own wit and fired another clean shot through his spit bottle opening, which while walking was actually a good trick.

  “Nothin’ but net,” he told himself happily as the plywood door clattered shut behind him.

  The office was quiet again. Black resumed staring at the paper on his desk. Cousins tossed his magazine aside and turned a balding head and gentle eyes on Black.

  “You know, sir, far be it from me to agree with anything that Lieutenant Derr says, but he’s kind of right.”

  Black just stared at the paper.

  “I mean, you got your own opinion of things, so don’t let the Army tell you what’s what. You tell them.”

  “How does not signing this help me tell the Army?”

  “Gotta show up to stand up, L.T.”

  L.T. The Army nickname for lieutenants, the most junior and least experienced of officers.

  It came from the way the rank was abbreviated in writing: capital L, capital T. Some sergeant sometime in prehistory thought it was funny to spell it out loud and address his green platoon leader that way instead of “sir” or “ma’am.”

  Over the years it evolved. Sometimes it was a term of familiarity or affection, of something approaching respect. Sometimes it was just a way to avoid having to say “sir” to some college kid who had been in the Army for about a fifth of the amount of time you had but was in charge of you because he had been anointed as an officer.

  Black was reasonably sure that where Cousins was concerned, it was more or less the former. Cousins considered him a worthy project.

  “Thanks, Sergeant Cousins.”

  “Got your back, sir. Now come on, let’s get some chow.”

  Chow was a frequent topic of conversation in the office. Cousins pushed back and eased himself to his feet.

  Black checked his watch and told Cousins he’d meet him there in a minute. Cousins gave a Suit yourself shrug and strolled out.

  Alone in the office, Black sat with the pen in his hand, hovering over the memo, for a long time before he finally put point to paper and scratched out his name. He put the memo into a manila envelope and sealed it, setting it on the desktop. He looked at it a long moment and left.

  Outside, the air was cool. An easy fall breeze cut across the front of the temporary office shack where he and Cousins and the paperwork soldiers spent their days sitting and doing paper and talking about food. He cut left, though he knew Cousins had cut right.

  The gravel network weaved its way between shipping containers, little prefab housing units, Porta-Potties, generator trailers, and all the tidy detritus of the American army deployed overseas. Soon he was walking on bare ground, climbing the dirt slope of a man-made hill.

  It was probably sixty feet high, standing solitary above the rest of the base. The top had been bulldozered flat and across its surface sprouted a crowded collection of antennas, transmitting dishes, and all manner of electronic communications gear. They called it Radio Hill.

  He turned at the top and had a sweeping view of Forward Operating Base Omaha. His “fob.” His home.

  It was as dreary and flat, aside from the hill he was standing on, as every large FOB in Afghanistan was dreary and flat. Like most others, it had grown in fits and starts as military needs changed over time. From above, its hodgepodge nature was clear to see, with different “neighborhoods” and working areas identifiable by the different types of temporary buildings and construction materials.

  He walked around to the far side of the antenna cluster to see what he’d come to see. Radio Hill was close to the edge of the FOB.

  One of Afghanistan’s great eastern plains spread before him. Brown grass and scrub rolled gently to the horizon. Beyond that rose the great dark mountain massifs of the Nuristan branch of the Hindu Kush.

  Black came to Radio Hill nearly every evening to watch the sun go down behind them, watch the shafts cut across their summits and the valley entrances fill with shadow.

  The mountains were where most of the fighting that FOB Omaha supported t
ook place. Oh, there were the usual mortar attacks on the base itself from time to time. But those were bands of jokers, paid small change to lob some shells from a safe distance and keep the Americans on their toes.

  The real-deal guys, the guys who fondly remembered the brief heady days when the law of an angry god was the law of the land and who wanted to make it so again, the guys with the forces and planning ability and networks to do it—those guys were in the mountains. The hills at the edge of the plain were where people like Derr spent their weeks, trading steel barbs.

  Other units went deeper, and the fighting got worse. A smaller number of thrill-seeking Americans more or less lived in those mountains, far up the deadly ridges and valleys in tiny outposts at the limits of Omaha’s lifelines.

  Those soldiers fought every day. Fought for their lives, for the tiny patches of ground they had staked out. They might spend a year in Afghanistan and only see the FOB once or twice.

  That’s who the antennas on Radio Hill were for talking to.

  Not directly, but through a series of retransmission hubs perched strategically on ridges and peaks like signal fires, bringing the signals over the summits and across the valleys until they found the little huddled enclaves of American life. Black would stand and imagine the invisible network, its tenuous threads running from where he stood, out through the air over the plain and beyond the horizon, and wonder what was happening at those outposts at that moment.

  One thing he could tell with certainty from atop Radio Hill was that there would be rain in those uplands tonight. Lots of it. A roiling block of thunderheads gathered over the peaks across the whole range. Some soldiers would be having some sucky guard shifts in some sucky mountain locales.

  The sun had gone down fully. Black headed back down and trudged a half mile to the “dining facility.” The chow hall. He wasn’t hungry but figured he needed to eat.

  It was one of the largest and newest buildings on the base. Steel exterior beams and stylish aluminum temp-to-perm exterior walls and adornments. A first-time visitor seeing it from the outside could have been forgiven for mistaking it for a college campus athletics center.

  Black marveled every time at the bacchanalian foodstravaganza inside. It was run by a major defense contractor, and it would have made the most well-appointed hospital cafeteria in America blush.

  Wings and burgers and steaks. Fries nightly. Entrees upon entrees. Buttered vegetables in steam trays. Grill-to-order station. Banks of refrigerator cases stocked with sodas and sports drinks. Sandwich bar. Salad bar. Pasta bar. Ice cream bar with thirty-two flavors. Soft-serve machine. Cookie piles. Selection of cakes. Four times a day, including Midnight Chow, every day. If you lived on the FOB, as Black did, it was now entirely possible to get fat while deployed to war.

  “Hey, shitbag.”

  There it was. He’d been moving through the tray line when he heard it. The voice came from the exit line passing by in the opposite direction a few feet away.

  He didn’t turn or look up. Didn’t have to. He knew the voice—knew most of the individual voices that periodically harassed him as he went about his business on the FOB. He knew which name he would have seen on the uniform next to the lieutenant’s or captain’s rank had he bothered to look up.

  So he didn’t look up, and the owner of the voice didn’t expect him to. It was more of an obligatory ritual by now. He’d grown used to it in the months since he came to Omaha. Almost numb to it, he told himself.

  “That’s right, shitbag,” said the voice, from behind him now, receding toward the exit. “See you next time.”

  Black got his food and went to a table in one of the big building’s distant corners. He didn’t find Cousins and didn’t try. He knew Cousins didn’t really mind anyway. He sat alone and read a mystery novel about a maladjusted Los Angeles detective named after a Renaissance painter who specialized in scenes of earthly sin and eternal damnation.

  He peered over the top of it from time to time, watching the spectacle.

  Hordes of soldiers lined the cafeteria tables beneath stark fluorescents, scarfing chow. Sports highlight reels traded places with Department of Defense commercials on plasma screens bolted below the rafters. Wall posters spoke of LEADERSHIP and DETERMINATION, accomplished through rock climbing or catamaran driving, or told 1940s-era recruits that Uncle Sam needed them.

  Soon, orange and brown vines of crepe paper would encircle the rafters and the walls would fill up with the paper cutouts of turkeys, pilgrims, and cornucopias that he remembered from Thanksgiving time at elementary school. The feast—four feasts, really—on that day would be unbelievable.

  “FOBbits” was the Army term for soldiers who spend their whole deployments living on the FOB, working in air-conditioned little office spaces and eating chow and rarely venturing outside the base. It was a term Black had once used himself, before he became one.

  It was dark when he emerged into the cooling night. Passing under an aluminum awning he heard another voice calling him. This one he didn’t recognize.

  “Excuse me there, sir.”

  He turned and saw the rank. He stopped, glaring.

  Sergeant major is the highest of the enlisted ranks. Sergeants’ sergeants, in for life.

  A favorite sergeant major project is squaring away young lieutenants, whom they generally view as bumbling embarrassments to the officer corps. Black didn’t know this one, but he looked the part. Short, stocky, fiftyish, square chin, mouth a grim line.

  “Well, sir, if you don’t mind, you’re just a little crooked here. . . .”

  Black’s own hand slapped hard over his own American flag patch at just the instant he heard the tearing sound of the Velcro coming up. The sergeant major’s iron finger and thumb were momentarily caught beneath his palm. The man’s eyes went wide.

  “I do mind, Sergeant Major.”

  Black turned and stalked off into the dark, leaving the flabbergasted old soldier with his mouth hanging open.

  That was dumb.

  The guy would find out what unit Black was in. A sergeant major can find out anything. He would tell the story like Black had struck him, which was basically as bad as punching out a general.

  “Hey, sir!”

  He ignored the voice from behind him. Some other sergeant who saw the thing, no doubt, coming to do a citizen’s arrest on a lieutenant who’d violated the cardinal rule of always kissing a sergeant major’s ass.

  “Hey, sir!”

  Heavy hand on his shoulder. He windmilled it off him and spun around in the dark, hands up and ready to shove.

  “GET THE FU—”

  Cousins. Standing there wide-eyed in the dark, his face confusion.

  Black felt himself deflate. He said nothing. Just turned around and walked away.

  “Sorry, Sergeant Cousins,” he mumbled as he disappeared between a row of generators and shipping containers.

  He didn’t stop walking until he got back to the S-1 shop, didn’t stop to talk to the couple of S-1 soldiers who greeted him along the way—didn’t respond to their “evening, L.T.” or return their salutes. He didn’t stop as he weaved his way through the desks and swept up the manila envelope, already on his way back out the door.

  Didn’t even stop, really, as he knocked on his commander’s door, two temporary buildings over. Didn’t wait for the inevitable “Come!” but just strode through as he knocked, envelope clutched in his hand.

  Lieutenant Colonel Gayley, the battalion commander, responsible for the lives and welfare of the unit’s four hundred soldiers, barely looked up from the papers on his desk. He was busy signing something.

  “Oh, Lieutenant Black. Good. Sergeant Cousins found you.”

  Black blinked.

  “Here, have a seat. I’ve got something for you.”

  He gestured offhandedly at one of the two chairs permanently stationed before
his desk. Every commander in the Army had two chairs before his desk. He rooted among his stacks.

  “Okay, here we go.”

  Gayley located a packet of papers, which he began skimming.

  “This is the thing.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  2

  Black had decided a while back that Gayley was not a bad guy, as far as commanders went.

  True, the beating bureaucratic heart of the Army had a slobbering crush on officers like Gayley. Somewhere in a lab at West Point his instructors had mixed him in a bowl, whipping into him the precise proportions of accountability, flawless attention to detail, chipper optimism, and bold cooperativeness, folding in a hardy tolerance for paperwork and a relentless professional ambition, with a dash of tanned physical perfection for flavor. They had tried and failed many times before, but when they poured Gayley into the mold and pulled him from the oven, they saw what they’d made and cried, That’s it! then hugged one another and drank reasonable amounts of sparkling cider to celebrate.

  He was a little of everything and a little of nothing. He yelled at the right people, didn’t yell at the wrong people, didn’t fail in his duties, didn’t cause surprises or embarrassments. He was just so.

  Despite these attractive qualities, Black felt less of the natural suspicion that someone like Gayley would ordinarily fill him with. Most commanders in Gayley’s position, having a lieutenant in Black’s position fall into their lap, would have put that lieutenant in the flunkiest officer job in the whole battalion and forgotten all about him.

  Which was precisely what Gayley had done. Being assigned involuntarily to the S-1 job was essentially an announcement by the Army that This officer is not suited for any other task.

  But Gayley had not forgotten about Black entirely, and in his own way he’d made a project of his young lieutenant. Mostly this entailed asking him how things were going from time to time, and on the rare occasions when the two were alone giving well-meaning motivational talks on the themes of Making the Most of Things, Turning Setbacks into Opportunities, and Keeping Your Chin Up, sometimes with a bona fide clap on the shoulder for punctuation.