As You Were

by David Tromblay

  Die

  Motherfucker

  Die

  That someone doesn’t stop when the gunner walks his rounds up to him, lifting dirt into the air all around. Sirens blare, and spotlights shine, and the SERT team suits up.

  When that someone walks into the harsh light of the halogens, he falls to the ground and disappears along with the settling dust.

  OUT OF THIS WORLD

  “I BROUGHT YOU INTO THIS WORLD, I can take you out.”

  That’s a mantra Dad repeats to remind you how tough he is, but it’s a bluff, like his welcome home speech: “The day you can take me is the day you can move out.” Though neither of those begins this story.

  They’re just the underpinnings.

  “You’re stealing from me,” he says, “you little thief.” He pauses between each word in the latter part of this sentence, catching his breath, or collecting his thoughts that have long since left him to his own devices on this latest drunken stupor.

  Little drops of spittle leave his lips and sprinkle your forehead, causing you to close your eyes, collect your thoughts, and let go of a long, slow breath.

  You’ll stop in your tracks and drop your book bag next to your feet. Maybe that’s more in response to the aluminum baseball bat landing along your widow’s peak, centered between the two caterpillars you call eyebrows, which is pretty good accuracy for how drunk he is. So is his saying you are stealing from him. You are stealing from him, admittedly, but not enough to make a bill go unpaid. You’re only lifting enough from his wallet to take karate classes. Twenty bucks a month. You don’t even take the belt tests. Those cost extra. You skip those weeks. Not that you’re above scribbling his signature on a permission slip.

  This is one of those life-altering moments. It’s an out-of-body experience. You’ll watch it all from the corner of the room. It’s as if you’re standing on a stepladder, looking over your own shoulder. If you were still standing, that is.

  You do this weird Michael Jackson thing—the dance move he does when it looks like he’s leaning so far over that he’ll fall. But then he stands straight up, effortlessly.

  It’s like you’re watching a movie of this, with the sound off. You can’t hear a thing. But then someone rewinds it, and just like that, you’re standing back up.

  Dad has an umbilical hernia. To fix it, he needs surgery. But it’s an elective surgery. Without the surgery, he gets a disability check.

  That bulging belly button is where your first punch lands. He drops the baseball bat, almost tripping over it, and stutter-steps toward you. He raises his hands toward your face and throat. He loves to choke people nowadays; he’s not much for hitting anymore.

  Your hand returns to your face before he has a chance to fully process what you’ve done. The movement is drilled into you over and again by the sensei. It’s robotic:

  One

  Two

  Out

  Back

  Thumb to cheekbone.

  Look over the tops of your fists.

  The punch begins with a rotation of the hips.

  The arm acts like a whip.

  Right punch, left kick.

  That left kick lands on his inseam, sending a testicle to either side of his tighty-whities and him to his knees. He charged at you, so he falls forward. You step back to let him fall flat on the floor, only he doesn’t. His knees crash into the carpet, his beer belly and barrel chest smack the top of his thighs, his ass cheeks plop down atop his heels, his chin sits on his chest with a sweaty-sounding slap, and your back foot flies forward, driving your right knee right into his nose. His false teeth fall to the floor.

  The rest is a bit blurry.

  You exhaust yourself, and when you take a breath or catch one, you see he’s out cold. His cheeks flutter like a snoring cartoon character. The fingers on your right hand fumble through Mom’s work number. You don’t dare take your eyes off him.

  You can’t remember much of the conversation, even seconds later when she says, “Say that again,” and, instead, you say, “Come get me before he wakes up,” stuff all the clothes you can into a trash bag, head to the bridge half a mile away.

  Before you leave, you’ll pull his 1955 Dove acoustic guitar out of the corner of the living room, give it a spin, look down the neck, admire the craftsmanship. Then you rest it up against his recliner and plant your foot where the neck meets the hollow body, leaving it lying there for him to find. You’re no thief.

  The calendar tacked to the kitchen door reads Tuesday, July 14, 1992.

  But that’s not really how things happened. You know that now. But it makes the most sense. It’s the most logical puzzle piece. There are only so many options: flight, fight, or freeze.

  When you are hit in the head with the baseball bat, you don’t freeze—you become stunned, overwhelmed with excruciating pain, and you black out. Blacking out is a defense mechanism meant to protect the body from physical trauma. It’s different from passing out into unconsciousness. When you’re blacked out, you’re still up and moving around. From an animalistic survival angle, it’s not advisable to fall to the floor and lie there like some say you should do with an attacking bear, hoping it’ll lose interest. Instead, the reptilian brain takes over and you fight until physical exhaustion consumes you.

  The next box to check on the list is flight. You know this. It’s a horror movie rule that goes ignored by everyone except those who survive to the end: get away from the monster—even if you think you’ve injured or killed it. So, you head to the bridge half a mile away. Except you don’t. And whether you survive until the end of this story is still debatable, depending on how you define survival.

  Jeremy says you stepped out onto the stoop with a black trash bag in hand and eased yourself down onto the cement step, staring out onto the street, as if you didn’t notice him standing on the lawn in front of the building tossing a ball for his dog, Lady. He asks, “What’s up?” knowing things don’t look right. You tell him you knocked out your dad and your mom is on her way. You’re going to meet her at the bridge, but you just sit there.

  THE BEST PART OF WAKING UP

  EACH MORNING, YOU SPIT OUT the night guard and stretch your aching jaw muscles courtesy of last night’s medley of rehashed missions gone awry. You haven’t broken a tooth since you were ordered to use it. Still, you stare at the reflection in the toaster, touching your tongue to one tooth after the other and feel the thin, sharpened edges and tongue the gash in your cheek, knowing if you make an appointment with the dentist to get them capped then the shrink will want to up your meds again.

  Bentley sits and waits while you dish out his food. He knows not to move toward his bowl until you tell him. Then you’ll measure two scoops of coffee and eight cups of water, which will be brewed by the time the two of you finish walking around the block.

  He sits and waits by the door alongside your shoes and his leash. You wear either flip-flops or Roman sandals until the snow falls, so nothing can hide inside.

  Bentley catapults himself toward a squirrel he sees through the window, and when your front foot lifts across the threshold, U.S. Forces coming out drowns out the screech of the stretching spring of the storm door, though you haven’t uttered a word. It’s ingrained, an inner monologue you can’t shut off like music only you can hear.

  Bentley makes his way down the stairs faster than you’d like, snapping the leash tight, and heads east. He shits, you bag it up, put it in the trash can. The trash can is full. The trash man comes tomorrow.

  Wednesday.

  Nordic Waste sounds like a metal band you’d listen to before you went outside the wire.

  The coffee is scalding hot, but what’s left from yesterday’s pot sits in the freezer. It sounds like a life hack—coffee cubes, that is. It doesn’t come close to the chocolate frappés you pound at the Green Bean while mortars are lobbed onto the flight line. You can’t get to a bunker, and you stop trying to get to one after the first full day of R&R at the KRAB, so you stay ins
ide and soak up the AC, order another.

  The Third Country National contractors take pogs, but they won’t accept the two-dollar bills Grandma Lynn puts inside your birthday card. They say, “No, sir,”

  One, yes.

  Five, yes.

  Ten, yes.

  Twenty, yes.

  Fifty, yes.

  One hundred, yes.

  Two is fake. No good.

  You say, “Mother fu—” before you stop and ask if anyone there wants to sell some pogs in exchange for two-dollar bills. Of course, some Lieuy does. He’s still trying to be everyone’s buddy.

  The swill you brew now doesn’t come close to the refreshment that washed over you with the Taster’s Choice packed between your cheek and gum outside the wire, doing what you could to stay awake once the cordon searches became a bore, a complacency that’ll kill you given enough time.

  KCP officers show you pictures of their single sisters and cousins in dire need of a husband. They don’t get the hint, how it’s against US foreign policy to talk to the women there. They say, “Sergeant, you good man,” handing the picture to you for the second time—distracting you from the task at hand in a place where blinking too many times can get you killed. So, you smile at the picture and make them think your interest is piqued. But the plan is to shut them up.

  “In America,” you say, “we don’t take home a car unless we test drive it first,” and the terp interprets and they get the metaphor and stuff the picture back into their billfold and say, “You no good—bash- knee-a.”

  They don’t understand “No shit, Sherlock.”

  The calluses you built pacing the concrete catwalk of the cellblock soften while you wade ankle-deep through the waters of the north shore where you take Bentley to fetch and swim. The agates and granite stones slide back deeper into the lake with every step you take, making you anything but surefooted and reminded how you are home. The water steeps your bones in a cold that could only come from the Anishinaabewi-gichigami.

  Bentley never sees an inch of the seven-mile-long beach for which your hometown is famous. Sand on your skin mixed with the scent of dead fish and the sight of women in sundresses and the sound of a roiling crowd baking in the summer sun sends you back to a market where all the men wear AKs slung across their backs. They say the situation is green. But no one can tell the Kurds from the Arabs or the Arabs from the Mexican-Americans or Puerto Ricans in the battalion, and they make everyone give away their uniforms before heading home, so you don’t know who to watch. So you watch everyone.

  HAPPY BUS

  DESPITE RETIRING TO THE AIR-CONDITIONED city that is your hometown, you still haven’t gotten used to hot coffee or warm meals. Or maybe you haven’t let yourself.

  All this makes dating fun.

  You can eat a full meal inside of five minutes, after which you stare at the woman across from you. Other times you talk until your food grows cold. You can’t stop looking over your shoulder or past hers, causing her to think you’re talking at her, not to her, or with her, or how you’re not even listening because you’re not even looking at her.

  What you wouldn’t give to eat some synthetic, freeze-dried, dehydrated insult to what the rest of the developed world calls food from a plastic pouch on the back bumper of a water truck while waiting to hear “We’re a go” after the chaplain wraps up his heartwarming little speech and a prayer—the same one you listen to every goddamn time you’re voluntold to go out on your one day off from the cellblock. You’ll help transport detainees on these Sunday drives. Some are on the Happy Bus to process out at Abu Ghraib for lack of evidence or because they’ve served out their sentences. Others will hang.

  The Big Show says, “I have my shackles,” lifting his zip-tied wrists, “and you have yours.” This makes you stop, look to the hood—to where his eyes should be—and say, “I don’t have shackles.” But he corrects you, saying, “You have Geneva.” Chuckling, he continues, “We kill soldiers, and you give us ice cream and air conditioning. Some of us never eat three times in one day before we come to Suse.”

  He wasn’t told far enough in advance to savor his last meal.

  There are two Sailors on each bus: one in the front, another in the back, plus the bus driver who is sweating profusely. It could be argued that sweating is normal, expected. Iraq is hot at this time of year, but it’s a dry heat, so it’s not a normal kind of sweat he’s perspiring. It’s more likely a nervous kind of sweating.

  Because they’re merely hooded and zip tied, no one is allowed a weapon—only a taser or a can of OC. It’s safe to assume the driver isn’t the only one who finds himself a little on the nervous side.

  Some of the detainees like to pull their zip ties tighter and tighter until it cuts into their skin, causing them to bleed and turning their hands purple. They hold their hands above their head and call out, “Sergeant, Sergeant,” thinking you’ll take out the trauma shears and cut them free.

  But you don’t.

  The fear instilled in you is they’ll overpower you and free their friends, hence: no rifle or pistol for you. Better to have them take a taser or OC than have access to a loaded weapon. So when you hear “Sergeant, Sergeant” and see purple hands and bloody wrists, you respond with a resounding, “Too fucking bad. Wait till we get to the airfield.”

  At the airfield, they’ll get double-locking handcuffs at gunpoint. Belly chains, too. Then they’ll be padlocked to one another in neat little rows and made to sit back to back like Forrest and Bubba, except they’re chained to the floor of the plane’s cargo hold. It’s an indelible sight, one which reminds you of the diagrams of the slave ships in your high school history books.

  Back before the GWOT tribunals began, back when your unit did transport for the guys getting released from GITMO, they got returned handcuffed and hooded, shuffling in ankle restraints back to their home countries where being suspected of terrorism is viewed in a different light. While standing with them on the tarmac, turning them over and whatnot, before the cuffs came off the wrists of the first man in the conga line, their military police began to plug them in the head with their pistols, leaving them bleeding and twitching on the tarmac. Which is why zip ties are used nowadays.

  The real danger is you’re guarding a busload of Arabs traveling through Kurdish-controlled territory, and the Kurds hate the Arabs for reasons they cannot articulate—they simply do. The reasons, it seems, are so steeped in tradition they’re woven into their DNA, and you’re well aware the only thing between them and sweet, sweet revenge is you and your teeny, tiny bottle of pepper spray. This is why you’ll volunteer to ride on the spare bus. There’s no one other than you and the driver. You’re not even technically part of the convoy. For that reason, you’re allowed to carry the M4 and ninety rounds of ammunition along with your M9 service pistol and two extra mags—forty-five rounds total. For some added peace of mind, you pack two knives, one of which is carved out of the jawbone of an American alligator—both the blade and handle in one single piece. It’s sold as an oversized letter opener and kept tucked into your boot when you travel abroad, and now slid into the nylon loops on the front of your body armor. The other knife is a standard-issue KA-BAR.

  Your biggest fear is the bus breaking down. But it doesn’t, so you have to listen to some local radio station playing something sounding like bagpipes, fingernails scraping along a never-ending chalkboard, and a yowling cat in heat, all mashed together with the screeches of a prepubescent Arab Idol contestant who is laughed off stage but somehow still got a recording contract like the She-Bang guy.

  And the driver is jamming out.

  Before you leave, you message your wife, “Heading out for a Sunday drive.” A code she understands and is haunted by until Yahoo! Chat pings again letting her know you are safe and sound inside the wire. But that isn’t exactly true. She doesn’t need to know that. She doesn’t need to know you are part of a defensive unit, that you take incoming small arms fire all day long and can do nothing about it
because they shoot from the MSR knowing you cannot return fire and risk hitting an innocent commuter traveling alongside them or undoing the work of the Korean construction crew repaving the road between Suely and the KRAB. She doesn’t need to know they like to lob mortars into the FOB or how one finds its way onto the running track, but your call sign is Marathon and you get your miles in every single day regardless—even if it means wearing a Kevlar helmet and flak jacket. It’s the same for the time spent on the basketball court. Though no one is taking jump shots.

  She doesn’t need to know the phone conversations don’t always end because the balance on the phone card runs out, but because someone martyred themselves a few hundred yards from the SPAWAR MWR phone bank, or some fucktard violated OPSEC saying convoy or some other shit despite the WWII posters with slogans like Loose Lips Sink Ships or If You Tell Them Where You’re Going, You Might Not Come Back littering the walls.

  She doesn’t need to know your R&R is spent basking in the retaliation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death, jumping each time a mortar leaves another crater out on the flight line, being rocked awake by three VBIEDs, sleeping through two others along with some of the spray-and-pray that follows.

  You’ll sleep through this stuff once you submit to the fact you don’t know which direction it’s coming from. You’ll put a Kevlar helmet on and lie on the floor behind a pile of extra flak jackets the battalion keeps in the transient tent and hope it’s coming from the other direction. But, before you close your eyes again, you tuck yourself in using your own flak jacket for a blanket, making sure the ceramic plates are situated where they’ll do some good. You still hear it. But you stop reacting. Your subconscious does take note, however. Implanting the memory,the shrinks call it.

  You’ll grind your teeth down to nothing the way a tweaker does. You wake with a few cracked teeth, others chipped, and some are broken damn near down to the gum line. But it’s not really your teeth that are breaking. It’s the stuff the dentist shaped around what was left of your teeth after Grandma Audrey shoved you when you bumped into her on the porch steps at the cabin, the first Friday after the first grade let out.