Due to the communications blackout, the phone trailer has been padlocked for nearly forty-eight hours. This is standard operating procedure for the commencement of hostilities. Turn off the phones. The brass don’t want any word leaking back home about exactly when the invasion might kick off. Also off-limits is the “Internet café,” yet another eggshell double-wide with institutional-looking desks and computers whose keyboards are yellowed from nicotine and coffee and skin oil, the keys rubbed shiny smooth and the most commonly used letters worn off. A satellite dish sits atop the Internet café. Of the uncountable transmissions sent through it, light-speed expressions of every trying shade of human emotion beamed into outer space and relayed around the world to disturb the peace at terminals back home, Cassandra has sent not one.
She processed into the army in Kansas City, the summer of 2001, after a daylong trip thumbing rides down state roads. Destination: Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the closest town with a bus station. She hasn’t seen her grandparents’ place since. Half a section of Milking Shorthorns and hog pens hedged by forested sedimentary hills on the northern fringes of the Ozarks. The land tamed only marginally over the course of five generations. The family responsible for its taming having spent itself in the effort. Nearly three hundred acres, the family’s land; the family land rich, and poor in most other material.
Far as she knows, it’s all still there. Prefab house. Shifty dirt road. Her Papaw and Meemaw tottering half-blind in homespun clothes like the apparitions of pioneers from an earlier century. Blankets of kudzu spreading out from the creek bed like a soft green cancer in the woods, and the nauseating smell of pig shit pressed into everything. An uncle she suspected of cooking meth as a side business, a few indolent cousins, and their broods scattered around the property in trailers and squalid bungalows pieced together with little more than salvaged materials and cunning. An occasional rifle shot cracking out over the hollows, silencing the birdsong, another deer poached; her family, she thinks unkindly: as a lot they’re about as glassy-eyed and ill bred as the livestock they tend for the best legal part of their livelihood. When she was a little girl she used to tell herself she was adopted. The day after she turned eighteen, she left.
“Think of your uncle Charles,” her mom said, sitting at the kitchen table and gesturing tiredly with her cigarette at the wall, in the general direction of her brother’s house. “You know, before he joined up he used to be a football star.”
“Mom. We’ve haven’t been at war in, what, ten years?”
“That’s not the point. If there was a war going on, I could see how you might get a crazy idea like this. But as it is, I’m baffled. You got too much potential for this, Cass. They use you up. That’s what they do. War or peace, you’re just a body to them. That kind of life is gonna change you.”
Cassandra shouldered her bag and headed for the door, yet to wear her country’s uniform but having already mastered one of the most critical skills of soldiering: how to say good-bye.
“I’m hoping it changes me,” she said. “Why else you think I’m doing this?”
She’d long been accustomed to male provocations. But the sandbox, this is another level; dawn to dusk some man’s gaze is always fixed on her. She’s a curiosity in the ranks, a curiosity just for being a woman, forget about the rest. More than most men, she joined up strictly to escape a hard life for one she hoped would be harder. The free college money had no part in her enlisting. She wasn’t interested in college and could’ve gotten an easier civilian job in Saint Louis or KC for about the same pay. To train to fight, to kill, to prove, to defy the small domestic compassions of kith and home, was why she joined.
Some soldiers despise what they think she is and behind her back call her bitch, ball breaker, dyke. No one calls her what she really is. No one, not in a very long time, has called her Cassandra, namesake of her grandmother. In the towel-snapping locker room of the army she’s become her last name, Wigheard, or, even more impersonally, her rank, Specialist.
There are the unabashed bigots and misogynists, and then there are those more common, like Sergeant McGinnis, men who feel too compelled to protect her, chivalrous to a fault. She likes McGinnis best when he allows her to operate like just another soldier doing her job. Yet more and more, the thought of going for a twenty-year pension has begun to feel like prolonged suffocation in a cavernous, airtight room.
As they wait for the Scud drill to end, the grunts huddled in the bunker pass the time gossiping. Or, as they might say, engaged in back-channel communications. Gossip being an untenably feminized word. Goddamn men. In her darkest moments she sometimes wishes she’d been born a part of their little club. Not a wish to change gender, exactly, but that she’d been given an easier birthright to power. She has to game herself to stay grounded in her own body, tensing calves, then quads, abs, lats, traps, going up and down her anatomy and activating each muscle in as much isolation as possible. Left side, followed by right. Stay asymmetrical. Stay unpredictable. Stay alert, and you might stay alive.
“Buddy of mine up at battalion, he knew about this shit,” says one of the randoms. “He told me we’d get it tonight. Shoulda listened to his pogue ass. But no, I get two bites into my steak and then—wanh, wanh, wanh.” Here he does a decent impression of the hated chem-alert siren. “So no shit, there I was, trying to pack the whole damn steak in my mouth like a crackhead swallowing the evidence.”
Their voices in the dark are disembodied and hollow; a resonator plate in the mask allows for speech but renders it metallic, thin, like talking under water, the human voice vibrating through ball bearings sandwiched between steel disks set in front of the mouth.
The conversation in the bunker livens up as it turns to one of two felonies recently committed on Camp New York. A sudden rash of criminality has accompanied the start of the communications blackout, perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps as a direct, unintended consequence.
“Heard they ganked, like, two grand worth of cigs from the PX,” one grunt says, referring to the camp store where soldiers buy tobacco, candy, magazines, CD players, disposable cameras: all the minor consumer objects authorized for sale in a war zone. “Colonel’s got our whole battalion confined to quarters until they find who did it.”
She can barely discern the glint of polycarbonate eyepieces fixed like black gleaming bug eyes in their masks. They are near the entrance, talking about the burglary of the post exchange; aside from the fact that the break-in occurred in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert in the days leading to war, it’s nothing special. Typical army trash acting grimy. Seen that plenty of times. But the other felony, which is apparently unrelated, she cannot help but take personally.
Sergeant Williams, the victim, was until recently a tent mate. And there is a fragment of a history between them, a half-remembered drunken hookup last year in her barracks room after a night out at the bars in Killeen. Just the once, then seeing each other around post from time to time, fleeting awkwardness, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and fuck all that. But the army is worse for rumors than high school, and she’s heard Williams was raped at gunpoint in a porta-potty. The location did not surprise. Few other places on camp afford even that much privacy.
It makes her sick with rage, makes her want to reach out to Williams, but the fragment of a history renders that thought too uncomfortable. When dealing with other people’s tragedies, there’s the risk of taking on more grief than is appropriate, of lapsing into benevolent voyeurism, of making it all about you.
Other than the rumors, she doesn’t know much. She had only a brief look at Williams when, a few hours after reporting the attack, she returned to the tent they shared with sixty-two other women. At that time Cassandra knew nothing about what had happened but could see it was serious; Williams had an unfamiliar colonel chaperoning her, and a black eye and her arm in a sling. She collected her belongings from under her cot and left without talking to anyone. People said the CO had moved her out of the tent to private quarters until she coul
d be flown home. The guy who did it was still at large. Still is.
The group of men trading gossip in the bunker don’t seem to know Williams by name, swapping stories that match up pretty closely with what Cassandra has already heard. They mention the porta-potty—there are rows of them on camp like those at a music festival—and they wonder out loud why she didn’t use her own M16 to fight off her attacker. There’s a cruel innocence in how they talk about it, reminding her of the way children sometimes torture each other.
Their hard talk, this bleak transient life in the desert, mustard gas, VX nerve agent, Scud and al-Samoud missiles, mechanized warfare, the communications blackout, it’s bringing out the dog in them, she thinks: no wives, girlfriends, or mommas on hand to temper their manhood. Strip them of their satellite connection home and leave them to their own devices, and watch them go feral, the camp assuming qualities of a penal colony. Forty-eight hours is apparently about how long it takes for untended men to descend to the level of beasts.
“So. Who you think it was?” one man asks after a lull in the banter. She had just started to tune them out. Someone itched himself through his chem suit, making a swishing sound, and someone else ground his rifle butt slowly into the gravel underfoot.
“What I look like, fucking Miss Cleo or some shit?” says the one who started it.
“Shit, dude. Don’t take psychic powers to figure out who it was. Not like there’re that many females around.”
“Think it’s that little thang from the 115th?”
“Fat ass, tiny tits? One Silver fucked in the barracks before we left?”
“Naw, bro, not her. I mean that half-black half-Asian one.”
It takes Cassandra longer than it should’ve to realize they’re not speculating on the identity of the rapist. Who you think it was? Resentment, an electric charge prickling her scalp, the pressure rising behind her eyes—Ignorant fucks. Not one of them has voiced any outrage that one of their own has been attacked, that an able soldier has been taken out of commission on the eve of battle. They want to rubberneck, to pick out the victim as a kind of contest to see whether their killer instincts are honed enough to know her weakness by sight and rumor alone.
“Half-black half-Asian?”
“Yeah. A cook, I think.”
Cassandra shifts against the bunker wall, flexing her rubber chemical overboots on the seam where concrete meets gravel, leaning forward until her weight rests on the balls of her feet like rounded bone fulcrums. There are two-hundred-some-odd women on camp, and one of these assholes has just guessed Williams’s identity. This gets her blood up as much as anything, the fact that they are good at this game. They don’t even care, she thinks. Talking about it is just something to pass the time until the Scud drill ends.
She feels her hate sink to a dangerous place and wishes McGinnis were here; he would’ve ended their little guessing game before it got to this point. He would’ve ended it by appealing to decency, and if that didn’t work, the weight of his stripes. If he were here he could humiliate these guys without losing face. She could not: if she were to shame them, she would look weak herself, overly sensitive. We’re just talking, they’d say. What’s the big deal?
Her typical response to a situation like this is silence. Prove herself through action, the army’s universally accepted currency. Shame them without speaking. It’s a trivial kind of revenge, she knows, taciturn, passive. Still, she’ll take it. While the men around her prattle away, she endures stoically, the truest grunt of them all, disaffected and hard.
Three days later, riding shotgun down below, McGinnis reaches up and pounds on the Humvee’s roof to check whether she’s still alert and okay. She stands above and to his rear in the gunner’s hatch, breathing in the stale desert road wind and the exhaust fumes blown by the Abrams tank ahead of them in the convoy. She reaches forward and pounds back on the roof to let him know, yes, she’s fine. She has brought her fist down harder each time they’ve had this exchange, hammering the truck’s bouncy fiberglass roof with increasing force in an attempt to express her growing annoyance with McGinnis for not trusting her enough to let her do her goddamn job and scan her sector for at least fifteen minutes at a stretch without his constant oversight, which borders on coddling.
The two of them have devised this crude code, the roof pounding, out of battlefield necessity. To their front and rear, tank engines scream with a high-pitched whine like planes on the tarmac of a busy airport. In reality, the tank engines are jet turbines that blow withering hot exhaust in addition to making it impossible for McGinnis to give voice commands to her or their driver, Crump.
Originally, Cassandra was slated to drive. To get out of the duty, she almost had to go on strike, as much as a soldier can, giving McGinnis the silent treatment, interspersed with earnest arguments about her superior gunnery scores, compared to Crump’s, before McGinnis agreed to assign her to the more dangerous position manning the fifty.
The sonic roar of tanks on the ground, of jets flying sorties above, blots out all other sounds and means the war is on. In the dead of the previous night they crossed the sand berm marking the border with Iraq. As they rolled through a dozered breach in the berm, she ducked low in the hatch, half expecting enemy shells would start to fall around them at any moment. So far, none have. No sign of the Iraqi army. The sun has been up for hours, and, even though it’s March, she’s sweating in her chem suit, the third of four layers, counting the Kevlar.
Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles stretch one after another in a long column that disappears over the next dune on the horizon. Set beside that heavy armor, the trucks like hers look almost like toys. If the tanks can’t handle whatever’s coming, neither she nor any other Humvee gunner will be able to protect the convoy. Still, she’s satisfied to be rolling with a cavalry brigade; combat arms, she knows, is the all-male heart of the force: tankers, scouts, artillerymen, special ops, infantry. All other soldiers merely support combat arms. She would’ve enlisted for one of those jobs if she could have. Now, effectively, she has.
She scans her sector, twelve o’clock to three, the tint on her scratched desert goggles making the dunes look like dirty frozen waves. She glances back down the column, catching in her hair and teeth the grit of road dust rising from whirring tank tracks. The dust settles over everything, coating the goggles’ lenses, her lips, her hands and neck, with a fine white powder. It’s grueling, but she feels enlivened to be in the thick of things, finally pushing into Iraq, relieved that the interminable waiting has ended. Yet something irks her, unfinished business that eats away at the rightness of their movement. Leaving Kuwait means Williams’s rape is never going to get solved. She knows this in her gut. With each passing mile, they travel farther away from the scene of the crime. It’s been three days since the last Scud drill, four since the rape itself, and still no arrest. Riding somewhere in this long line of trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, some asshole is putting distance between himself and what he did.
After another hour on the move, they stop for a break and to take on fuel. The platoon leaders and company commanders confer on the ground about a change in the operations order. The precise location of this place where the brass has chosen to halt their advance seems like a bit of war tourism, too. On a scalloped ridge to the west they have caught the first real sight of the enemy: Republican Guard tanks line the distant high ground, a snaking mess of earthworks and T-72s annihilated by preparatory air strikes. She saw them the night before from northern Kuwait. From so far away, the bombing raids were indistinguishable from natural phenomena. They looked like the diffused white flashes of heat lightning on the horizon.
Now she takes up the binoculars hanging around her neck and focuses on the ridge. Black specks stand in contrast to the desert floor, where the only demarcation between earth and sky is a different shade of faded orange. The small black things are scattered among larger forms, the burned-out tanks, their turrets popped off like champagne corks, lying u
pside down or sideways, gun tubes drooping limply where their steel softened in the fires, the hulls heat-stripped of paint, now silver-gray, the color of raw ore, and after a few beats of looking, she realizes the small black things are corpses, torsos with arms charred to nubs, carcasses like the husks of beetle shells scorched into the earth. When she recognizes one, she sees them all. Bodies hang in gibbeted charcoal lumps from tank hatches. Others, unseen, did not make it that far and were trapped inside the turrets, armor becoming an oven, reducing them to ash and teeth. Those who escaped the tanks and ran for it are arrayed unnaturally, as if in the aftermath of a volcano’s eruption, of a thermonuclear flashbulb. There is no flesh left on their charred bodies to turn and bloat with that sickly-sweet smell. Burned to slim carbon shadows that died low crawling and grasping at the sand in many different poses but always aligned like the spokes on a wheel, with their heads facing away from the tanks, since all they knew at that point was get away from the fire.
She sets the binos on the truck’s roof and boosts herself out of the hatch. She hops to the ground and approaches McGinnis, who is poking around under the hood.
“We should go up there and do a battle damage assessment,” she says, gesturing casually to the ridgeline, the destroyed hardware, the dead. She’s curious—and who can blame her for wanting to see them closer? Good soldiers are by their nature morbid. For good soldiers, death is not a taboo but a stock-in-trade.
“Naw, you don’t need to be seeing that,” McGinnis says in his quiet way, not even looking at her, his attention focused entirely on the engine. He draws the dipstick through a folded rag. “We’re a quart low. Again.”
Spoils Page 4