Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

by Anthony Swofford

  Nurses and orderlies swam around us in a school of green and blue scrubs. From every room came the nauseating white sounds of resuscitation, prolongation, the beginnings of altered lives.

  One of the minders grabbed me at the elbow and ushered me on to another room.

  In the two visitor’s chairs of the room sat an extremely old woman and a girl who could not have been older than ten. They wore colorful indigenous clothing that to my untrained eye shouted Bolivia. The old woman chewed at her leathery lower lip and the young girl beamed a smile that was as incongruous as their dress.

  My minders introduced me to the marine. He was an infantry staff sergeant and had been blown up in a convoy. Both of his legs were in traction.

  He said, “I’m gonna walk, man. I’m gonna walk again.”

  His face bore the burns from human shrapnel.

  He said, “My guys got blown up. I lived, you know? I lived. I got blown up, and I woke up right here in this bed, how many days later I don’t know. I was having this dream of the Philippines, like a little island and there were women and I was with my platoon and we were partying with the women. But I open my eyes and look at the end of the bed and there is sitting my grandmother and my niece, and I haven’t seen anyone from Bolivia in fourteen years, since I left, and I think, ‘Well, goddamn, I died in Baghdad and here I am in heaven with my grandma and my niece. Isn’t that nice.’ But then I think, ‘Wait, they aren’t dead, how can they be dead?’ And they walk up to my side and say, ‘You are alive.’ ”

  The grandma eyed me suspiciously and the little girl continued her intense and beautiful smile.

  “I love the Corps. Can you believe I got blown up in Baghdad and before I wake up here in the US they bring in my grandma and my niece?”

  I had to admit that I was totally impressed.

  “All I want to do is go back over and fight again. Fight for my dead brothers.”

  I could see he was slightly doped up and it looked as if he got shot up again through his IV because he faded away into a deep mind wander. Where did the drugs take his brain? Back to the desert or that Philippine island stalked by willing women, the West’s Shangri-la, not unlike the Moslem’s promised land overflowing with virgins for every martyr?

  My minders showed me out of the hospital.

  I HAD NEVER driven in DC and had only the slightest idea where I was going. I wanted to visit the Marine Corps War Memorial, which abutted Arlington, prior to heading somewhere near Capitol Hill for the dinner, which started at seven. I found the memorial. It was a replica of the famous flag-raising at Iwo Jima, the second one, of course. Everyone knew the story about the poor bastards who’d done it the first time, stupidly, without a photographer in tow. Never go to combat without a camera (or a blog).

  Around the massive base of the memorial were stenciled the names of every campaign, large and small, that the Marine Corps had ever participated in. The crowd was one of those truly American collections of people: white, Latino, black, Asian, Middle Eastern, and recent Eastern European immigrants. Some of the men were Vietnam vets, others the sons and daughters of vets. A man being pushed in a wheelchair had to be from the Island Hopping Campaign; he wore a cap emblazoned with the badge of Guadalcanal and the 1st Marine Division, the division created specifically to jump the islands all the way north into the heart of mainland Japan.

  I wanted to feel deeply patriotic. I smelled burned sand and scorched asphalt. That was all.

  I walked toward the edge of Arlington. There were two funerals under way, each held beneath a blue plastic tarp. One coffin had already been dropped, the family and friends staring into earth; at the other a priest hovered above the box in mid-prayer, offering absolution. I wondered who rested in the coffins, young men from the current wars or old men passed on from emphysema or colon cancer, mad in the head from Alzheimer’s, or a peaceful sleepy end, just one last breath, a snore.

  Arlington’s austerity chilled me, a tapestry of green-and-white silence. The tapestry did not hide the fact that most of those men and women had died horrible deaths in combat.

  TWO TOUR BUSES unloaded their passengers in front of the appointed restaurant, a few blocks from the Hart Senate Office Building. These were the men and women, soldiers, sailors, and marines, undergoing outpatient care, on their way to recovery. They used crutches and walkers and wheelchairs, and some of them walked on their own: he with a prosthetic leg, I could tell by the slight flag-like snap of the pants leg, or she missing an arm and choosing thus far to go without the prosthetic, the left shirt sleeve delicately folded and pinned to the front of the shirt, the single phantom hand in a gesture half of prayer and half of defiance.

  And here now more mothers. Of the many legacies this war would produce the one not yet considered by most observers was this, which the Marine Dad had pointed out to me in the hospital corridor: mothers—a few as young as forty, women a man my age might date—looked at the horizon and saw themselves escorting their sons to VA hospitals for the next forty years. The greatest burden of a war always falls on the mothers. The men on both sides kill; the men have their mortal fun, they blow each other up and post the deeds on YouTube, and the mothers carry the casualties to the Rasa River, wash and dress the wounds, count casualties. The mothers bathed the wounded at Hiroshima. They have done so on the Seine, the Thames, the Missouri, the Danube, the Oostanaula. Name a river. It has received our wounded from the backs of mothers.

  I heard someone calling my name. I watched the staff sergeant push Colon up the hill. Both men were wearing dress blues and Colon surreptitiously took a nip from a bottle of whiskey. It was a prelude to a horror film or a Dada fantasy, and I couldn’t decide which.

  Colon said, “We got big plans tonight, brother. After this proper sit-down meal we are going to show you how to get it on in DC. The girls are wild, man. There’s like forty thousand college girls within the city limits. How can that be bad?”

  “That sounds perfect, my friend.”

  “It’s a circus. Didn’t you come up here and party when you were in Jacksonville?”

  “Not really. I had a girlfriend in California. I spent most of my time running up a long-distance phone bill with her.”

  “A girlfriend,” Colon said. “I got one of those, but she’s in the DR, left me for the motherfucking pizza delivery man, I shit you not.”

  I could see this conversation turning south in no time. We were under the awning in front of the restaurant and the other injured servicemen and -women walked between and around us. Infidelity was a hot-button issue in the military that no one wanted to touch. Other than beer and sports and hamburgers, it was the main thing enlisted men talked about. Infidelity, the fear of it—real and more often imagined—haunted the ranks; it ranked just behind the fear of dying.

  I motioned to the two marines that we should head in. There was a serious queue at the elevator, we were expected in a ballroom on the second floor, and most of these men and women weren’t exactly prepared to climb the stairs. The guys told me to take the stairs and that they’d meet me up there. I offered Colon a piggyback ride but he said he didn’t trust my scrawny civilian legs.

  The reception looked like a middling version of the New York parties I’d casually attended for a few years. The food spread was not as ambitious as at a Hollywood party and about on par with something for a party a poetry magazine might throw. In ranking New York parties in terms of sex appeal and food and booze I’d give hedge funds the number-one spot, then the art world, television, magazines, books, and in an ugly and distant last, the NGOs.

  The bar here consisted of one guy behind a folding table, two kinds of bad wine, red or white, and a number of sixty-gallon coolers full of ice and beer and soda. But it didn’t matter. The arriving troops were pumped. They weren’t eating hospital food tonight, but rubbing elbows and wheelchair wheels and prosthetic limbs with the affluent and influential.

  I saw the secretary of the Army and an admiral whose face I recognized from some cong
ressional hearing or another. I saw Bob Dole. I saw half a dozen congressmen and a few senators whose faces I knew from the papers but whose names I couldn’t recall. Most if not all of these politicians were Republicans. Of course, this party didn’t hold priority this evening for these kings of social DC. They were the power wave in this room, the surge, and in this city, as in every other city in the world, when you are the power and the money you can spend only so much time around the masses before an uncomfortable silence falls over the room.

  The troops and their families will not be able to hold conversations with you about holidays in Europe, about that new sailboat, the new nanny, the summer home remodel.

  This gathering is supposed to be a casual social hour but eventually the masses will want to talk about health care and prescription drugs and a living wage. And how many times can you ask the kid with a metal plate in his head, the kid with no legs, the bomb-blinded kid, where he grew up and where in Iraq or Afghanistan did this horrible unfortunate awful thing happen and how he was progressing and if he missed the men in his unit; how many times could you ask these questions without the guilt and horror blinding you?

  I sensed that these princes of the ocean would debark from our listing cocktail lounge within twenty minutes and jump in a schooner and sail to a party where none of the tough questions had to be asked: calm seas, no visible injuries, good martinis, Beltway bottle blondes. And I was right. Twenty minutes later someone on a microphone asked us all to be seated and the power left through the back door having done their good deed for the week.

  I sat at a table with Colon and the staff sergeant, two injured army personnel, two female volunteers for a nonprofit veterans advocacy group, and two members of a lobbying firm who seemed to be a couple. I gathered that the guy from the lobbying couple ran a celebrity gossip blog on the side. He had a digital recorder in front of him and he was talking about Britney Spears. I wanted to tell him that his marks had just escaped through the emergency exit, that the famous among us had left. As the salad arrived I began to talk to the woman at my right, his date.

  She introduced herself in a Texas accent that sounded like summer and smelled of the color yellow and tasted of watermelon and pit BBQ.

  “I’m Amy. I work for a lobbying firm. Health care, mostly. But in my spare time I shoot short docs.”

  “You kill vertically challenged physicians?”

  She didn’t like my joke.

  “I direct and produce short documentary films, films with a social conscience. Films about America. What is your name?”

  She stabbed a tomato on her plate and kept her fork in it and with the tomato acting as a broom head she pushed her salad in circles around her plate.

  “My name is Anthony. I sit in a chair. I punch small square keys on a keyboard and try to find meaning.”

  “Does it pay?” she asked.

  “It depends on the weather.”

  I could tell by the way his left leg was shaking and the number of times he’d taken a drink of nothing from his empty water glass that the gossip blogger next to her was getting a little antsy. This Amy was a truly lovely piece of Texas, the main bed partner, I assumed, for the freelance gossip blogger. Twenty-eight years old, probably a year out of grad school. By the length of her upper torso and the bit of leg I could see that wasn’t hidden under the table I guessed she was five feet ten. Her natural blond hair was full, with a flip and bounce on the ends. She had those Texas blue eyes that make one think of hunting and roasting wild boar on the back forty, feeding the family, and then fucking for the next ten hours of one’s life.

  “Sweetheart,” the gossip blogger said, “you really need to eat. You know what happens when you don’t eat and you have a few drinks.”

  “I become a total irredeemable bitch?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But last night you used that phrase.”

  I extracted myself from earshot of the quarrel and said hello to the young woman at my left. Young girl, I thought. She looked about sixteen, strawberry-blond hair, wide sweet smile, blue jeans and a flower-print blouse. I wondered if her father was one of the injured men among us. I looked for him.

  She said to me, “I served as a private in the 82nd Airborne Military Police.” She lifted her right leg and with her knuckles pounded on it. The sound was of titanium. “Guess how they got me? You don’t have to guess. IED.”

  It was the first time that day that I’d found myself speechless. This girl, this woman, who looked as though this very morning her mother had made her scrambled eggs and rushed her off to homeroom, was living the pain of war right here next to me while at the same table a pair of ill-fit lovers quarreled stupidly about nothing.

  I thought I’d been handling the carnage fairly well: the ruined mother holding the clippings from her son’s newspaper story, the Bolivian sergeant with his grandma and niece, Colon with his lessons in cunnilingus. None of it had been pretty but it had all been tolerable. In advance of this trip I’d prepared psychic shelves for these brands of trauma.

  The injured young female private had drilled this war too deep.

  Our salad plates were replaced with entrées, steak.

  “Hello, Private,” I said. “I was in the Marine Corps during the first Gulf War. But I’m out now. How is your treatment?”

  “Mostly good, sir. It’s a long process, you know. The barracks are kind of cruddy, worst I’ve ever had. Food tastes like shit; that’s why I come to these as often as possible. That, and I got an autograph from Tiger Woods for my dad a couple months ago. And I get to see Fernando.” She motioned to her left. A young kid sat up straight in his chair, chewing steak, Army cap with sergeant stripes pulled down tough over his forehead, black silk Army jacket, alert eyes. Fernando nodded slowly at me, every move tentative with pain.

  “The Army doesn’t want us together because he’s a sergeant and all, but we’re both getting out; he broke his back when his Bradley flipped, so we’re getting out. But they can’t stop us here. They can’t keep us from these dinners.”

  On my other side, from Amy and her man, I heard the low-voiced, choking hatred of two people who are no longer in love. They’d traveled shockingly far from the early romantic terrain where you buy each other used copies of your favorite books and spend whole weekends fucking and drinking Bloody Marys or margaritas, depending on the weather, and nothing on Earth strikes you as more romantic or fulfilling than the relationship that is a slowly closing noose around your neck.

  I had no appetite. I nodded at the private and her illicit sergeant boyfriend and excused myself to the terrace. Here, mostly male soldiers and marines stood or leaned and smoked. I’d never smoked, I’d never had a cigarette in my life, but I asked a young marine with a high and tight haircut if he could spare one.

  “Sure thing, dude,” he said. He’d flared dude into a sharp and shrill California beach cliché. His buddies loved it.

  My hair wasn’t long, but it was longer than any military guy’s. I tried to fake the carriage of a US Marine, especially around this crowd, but my hair read Slimy Civilian and so did those extra pounds and my suit. I noticed myself looking at the men, grading their appearance and behavior for military bearing and discipline. How absurd. The marine lit my cigarette for me and I inhaled deeply and coughed. The smoke was bitter and burned. I threw the thing into a planter that was being used as an ashtray. This drew a chorus of laughs.

  “Damn, where’d you learn to smoke?” the kid who’d given me the cigarette asked. “You owe me like a dollar, man.”

  “I’ll smoke it.” And someone else picked up my waste and lit it.

  “That was my first one ever. And my last,” I said.

  “If that’s the case,” the kid said, “could you go on a beer run?”

  “What are you guys drinking?”

  “Beer.” The huddle of smokers laughed.

  I counted eight of them. “Eight beers.”

  “Make it sixteen,” one of them chortled.
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br />   “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Inside, waiters set dessert in front of diners and at the stage a country band made ready for its show. I asked the bartender for sixteen beers. He didn’t want to give them to me.

  He said, “We can’t get these kids too wasted. Some bad shit has gone down in the past. Who knows what meds they’re on.”

  I pulled a fifty out of my wallet and handed it to him, and he put sixteen beers in a wine box.

  On the terrace I put the beer at the feet of the smokers and they all exclaimed and whistled and clapped their hands, as though I’d handed them the spigot from the fountain of life.

  “Those bastards will never give us more than one beer per person. They think we’re going to get drunk and get in a fight back at the barracks, a bunch of gimps beating the shit out of each other with crutches and canes.”

  “No, they’re worried that we’ll skip out on the bus and go to a bar and beat the shit out of some civilians.”

  “All I want to do is get drunk. I don’t give no fuck about the senator’s son and I don’t give no fuck about you gimps.”

  “It’s a fuck. I don’t give a fuck, not no fuck.”

  “He learned to cuss in the Air Force. They use proper grammar when telling you to go fuck your mother.”

  “How’d you get sixteen beers out of that guy?”

  “I pulled rank,” I said.

  Back at my table the staff sergeant and Colon seemed to be making exemplary progress with the two ladies from the nonprofits. Maybe for these girls tonight there would be true profit in veteran advocacy.

  Amy and her man were still engaged in clenched-mouth carpet-bombing of each other’s character. The private and the sergeant had disappeared, likely to a broom closet or toilet stall, I assumed. I tried to figure out how a guy with a broken back and a woman with a prosthetic leg would fuck in a toilet stall. There had to be a joke in there somewhere, but I could not locate it.

  I ate my spongy mousse cake in peace and solitude.