Pup

by Christopher Slater

  My stomach started growling after about an hour of looking in slack-jawed awe at the wonderment around me. I decided to check out one more shop before I ate. I looked up and found a rather large one that looked like it carried a bit of everything. I read the sign and saw that it was the duty-free shop. I still had my music playing, so I didn’t realize that I was shouting when I announced, “That says doody!” Yes, I said it! I’m not proud of it! I told you that I had some social awkwardness. Of course, that goes beyond social awkwardness. That falls straight into the this-is-too-stupid-to-even-put-into-a-slapstick-comedy category.

  Naturally, everyone within a hundred feet looked up to see what I’d said. The good news is that most of them didn’t speak English and had no clue how moronic I just made myself appear. The bad news is that there were some soldiers nearby. Some shook their heads in disgust. Others closed their eyes and said a small prayer hoping that I wouldn’t wind up in their unit. A few responded with rude hand gestures. One suggested that I perform an anatomically impossible act. Another suggested that I perform that same anatomically impossible act with a relative. Hey, some of these guys were creative!

  I decided it would be smart for me to skip the shop and get some food. There was a massive variety of food available as well. Some of it looked exotically delicious. Some of it looked like it would fight back when I tried to eat it. I decided to play it safe. A meatball sub became the last peacetime meal that I would eat for a year. Man, that was a good sub! I kept my earbuds in and dragged my duffel bag to a chair where I enjoyed my sandwich, closed my eyes, and sang along with the music. I really didn’t care who stared at me as they walked by. See, Quack? I have some self-confidence.

  Why are some engineers sadists?

  җ

  It never occurred to me that focusing so much on my music could cause any problems. It’s music. When has music ever been an issue? If I have any history buffs reading this, don’t try to correct me. Surely you have better things to do with your time. The problem with focusing so much on my music was that I couldn’t hear the public address system in the airport. I didn’t hear the first call for my flight. I didn’t hear the second call for my flight. I didn’t hear the final call for my flight. What I did notice was a number of soldiers running past me trying to catch the flight. At first I thought that they might be running because of some kind of emergency. That instantly made me concerned. Then I realized that they were running to catch a flight. That instantly made me terrified! I grabbed my duffel bag and started to run after the other soldiers. I had no idea what gate I was supposed to get to, but I figured following someone in the same situation as me couldn’t hurt.

  It turned out that I was a pretty fast runner. In fact, my body ran faster than my brain did. I turned into a tall, skinny bulldozer in a uniform. I plowed over luggage, chairs, shoeshine kits, and one annoying, yapping dog. Don’t worry. It was OK. It yapped at me afterward. Even all of those little accidents were nothing compared to what was on the way. I continued barreling through the terminal and found myself baring down on some poor Japanese lady. She was dressed in a very nice business outfit that looked wonderful on her. She was only about twenty years old or so. I was running right at her, but because my body was faster than my brain, I never considered trying to dodge around her. I do remember thinking about how pretty she was. Stupid hormones. She turned toward me just in time for the collision.

  I’m not certain exactly how everything happened. I know that I almost tripped over her luggage. I also know that we were fortunate not to have our heads bonk together. What amazed me about the collision was that she didn’t fall down. In an unusual move of self-preservation, the young lady wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist in order to keep from falling down. I had not even slowed down, and I had a young lady along for the ride with me. I looked over at her and her shocked expression. For reasons that even I cannot explain, I smiled at her. Her face went from shocked to disgusted. Stupid hormones. I started telling her that I would let her down as soon as I reached my gate, but I stopped when she started yelling at me in Japanese. Obviously, communication was going to be an issue, so I stopped bothering with trying to talk and just kept running.

  Thankfully, the gate wasn’t very far away. I started to run through the door, but my arm was grabbed by an MP at the gate. I came to an abrupt halt and almost lost my balance, but the MP was remarkably strong and held me up. Once I had recovered he looked at me and then at the young lady who had accidentally attached herself to me. With mixed amusement and utter amazement, he said, “I don’t care how much you love her, you can’t take her with you.” I looked at him, confused at first, then I connected the dots about what he was referring to. The young lady lowered herself off of me. At this point, she seemed uncertain of what to make of the whole situation. She looked at the MP, then at me. Still unsure what to do, she bowed at us a little, then walked off muttering something in Japanese that I couldn’t understand.

  I turned to the MP, who was snickering. “What was she saying?”

  The MP smirked. “It was the Japanese equivalent of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” He picked my duffel bag off the ground and handed it to me. “You better get on your way to the Hiss. Good luck, Private.” I gave the MP a salute, accepted my duffel bag, and walked through the gate onto the tarmac.

  As I walked onto the tarmac, I was led over to a table. There I was required to exchange my American money for military scrip. It looked like fancy Monopoly money. I swear, I was going to protest and accuse the corporal there of stealing my cash, but then I heard someone with obvious authority to their voice begin speaking over by the airplanes. I stuffed my toy money into my pockets, hefted my duffel bag, and ran over to where the other soldiers had assembled. At the front of the group was an Air Force officer in a flight suit. He looked about three decades past the mandatory retirement age. His legs creaked when he walked. He wore glasses that looked so thick that NASA could use them to track near-Earth asteroids. It was like receiving a briefing from Mr. Magoo. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Kiernan. I’ve been in the Air National Guard for twenty-five years now. I will be piloting aircraft two.” He pointed to one of the C-17 cargo planes on the tarmac. He was one of the freaking pilots. The man looked like he should be selling Metamucil on a television commercial that only comes on during morning game shows, but instead he was a pilot of one of the planes. I started to worry less about fighting in a war zone and more about getting killed in a plane because the pilot couldn’t see the airport terminal. “We will divide you among the aircraft for the flight to Daegu, South Korea. The three C-17 aircraft will be escorted by four Japanese fighters for the first half of the flight, and then by four American fighters when we reach the Sea of Japan. Enemy aircraft have attempted to attack cargo transports before, so be prepared. Stow all of your gear so that it will not move in the course of evasive maneuvers.” I started to feel my stomach knotting up. “Should evasive action be necessary, remain in your jump seats and listen for any orders. Pick up your gear and the loadmasters will assign you to your aircraft.”

  We all picked up our duffel bags and began filing toward the waiting planes. Three non-commissioned officers, the aircrafts’ loadmasters, were checking name tags and assigning each soldier to one of the three aircraft. As I moved closer to the front of the line I found myself muttering, “Not number two. Whatever else happens, don’t put me in aircraft two.” I got to the front of the line (technically it was the end of the line since I was the last one) and looked up expectantly. Imagine my unadulterated amazement when they assigned me to aircraft two. I’m sure the Fates were giggling at that one. With the look of a whipped puppy, I approached the rear of the aircraft and made my way aboard.

  I had seen pictures of this particular aircraft set up for carrying troops before. They were designed to use seats that were certainly not as comfortable as airline seats, but that were padded and decent for long journeys. Unfortunately,
as a means of saving weight and money, this plane had been equipped with the old-fashioned web jump seats. The loadmaster instructed me on how to stow my duffel bag, and then led me to my seat. I sat down and immediately considered jumping out of the plane. Maybe that’s where the name came from. The seat was evil. I don’t even understand how it could be referred to as a seat. It was three metal bars with nylon webbing stretched between them to take the shape of a seat. The loadmaster screamed at me to buckle my harness, which I did, and then I returned to contemplating the sheer masochistic qualities of those seats. It was in a perfect “L” shape, so I had to sit straight up. However, when I sat straight up I had a metal bar going under my knees, another right on my tailbone, and the third right at my head. I felt like I had a migraine, hemorrhoids, and arthritis in my knees all at once. What sadistic engineer put these things together? Did he have any bones, or was his entire body made of cartilage? It was absolutely mind-boggling.

  It must have really boggled my mind because by the time I stopped contemplating why anyone would design something so uncomfortable and what I would do to them if I met them in a dark alley, we were well over the Sea of Japan. At least the loadmaster claimed that we were. It’s not like we could see out of the airplane anyways. I finally began noticing some other things about the flight. First was the smell. There were over a hundred troops on our plane, and most of us had been traveling for nearly twenty hours. It turns out that when you are lugging a heavy duffel bag around, sitting on a hot tarmac, or sitting in an airliner seat for that long, you tend to sweat. The stench was almost unbearable. The next thing I noticed was the noise. It almost overwhelmed the stench. I had thought that things were a little noisy on the airliner because I was sitting near the engines. The cargo compartment we were flying in sounded like they had stuck us in the engines and cranked it up. I dug out my newly acquired iPod and tried to listen to some music, but I couldn’t seem to turn it up loud enough to drown out the noise of the compartment. I’d thought that the flight to Japan had been long. This flight was going to be excruciating. I started wishing for a bunch of motion sickness medicine and a Mountain Dew again.

  Just as I was contemplating asking the loadmaster how much longer the flight would be, I heard him yell out, “Hold on to something!” He’d barely gotten the words out when my butt dropped out from underneath me. I had ridden a few roller coasters in my life. I always liked the twists and turns and even the loops, but I had always hated the dips. Now I remembered why. The plane and my body seemed to be diving faster than my food was. Like a complete idiot, I allowed my mind to remember what my last meal had been. The thought of having the meatball sub make an encore appearance made me feel even worse. I could tell I was turning green, and I began feeling myself break out into a cold sweat. The very large and intimidating soldier next to me must have seen the way I looked, because his deep voice bellowed out over all of the racket. “If you puke on me, boy, I will rip your nose off and eat it!” The urge to vomit ceased almost immediately. I believe that this occurred for two reasons. The first reason was that the man threatening me scared the living hell out of me. That man could have snapped me like a twig, compressed my body back together, and then turned me into a living accordion like they used to do in old cartoons. He probably could have done all of that without breaking a sweat. The other reason that I forgot to be sick was because of the manner of his threat. I mean, really? Rip my nose off and eat it? I’ve been threatened in a lot of ways, but nasal cannibalism was a new one. Rip my nose off and eat it. And I’m the one seeing a quack therapist these days?

  The dive finally started to level out, but then the plane began to make sharp, banking turns. I had no idea an airplane that big could come close to moving that much. During one of the turns, I discovered that there were, in fact, a few small windows in the cargo hold that had been blocked by the heads of some of the soldiers sitting there. I looked through the window and saw nothing but ocean. I don’t mean I saw ocean until the horizon. I mean that I saw nothing but ocean! We were so low that I could make out the whitecaps of the waves. I had almost decided that it was time to freak out when I felt something slip out of my pocket. The sudden movements and shaking must have loosened something. I reached down to check my pocket and realized what I’d lost. This couldn’t possibly end well. I had no sooner gotten the thought out when I heard someone yell, “Ow! What the hell?”

  I looked over and saw a soldier holding his ear with some blood dripping from between his fingers. As the plane started to level out, the loadmaster rushed over to check on the wounded man. Something had scratched a pretty good cut across his ear. He would be fine, but the wound bled a lot. He and the loadmaster searched around for the culprit that had caused the cut. I knew what it was. I tried to shrink down lower in the sadistic seat that they had me strapped into. It only took a moment, and then the loadmaster held up a set of keys. “Who the hell brought their house and car keys with them on deployment?” he shouted loud enough for all of us to hear.

  I guess I should explain that I am a creature of habit. I always had car keys in one hip pocket and a wallet in my back pocket. I’d been doing that since my parents had gotten me a set of house keys in middle school. I was accustomed to having them there. If I didn’t have my keys and wallet in my pockets, I spent the entire day feeling like something was missing. It never mattered what I was doing or what I was wearing, I always had those with me. Being . . . well, the way that I am, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be needing to unlock my house or drive my car for the next year. That realization hit me fast enough to keep me from claiming the keys as mine, though. I’d just have to get a spare set when I got back home, because both the loadmaster and the cut soldier looked mad enough to kill.

  The landing at Daegu was much smoother than the flight. As the cargo doors began to open and the soldiers began to unbuckle, the loadmaster shouted out to all of us, “Welcome to the Hiss, soldiers. Enjoy your stay. If you should have the pleasure of flying with us again, keep your keys at home, dumbass.” I didn’t look directly at the loadmaster on my way out.

  After I walked down the cargo ramp, I looked over and saw Lt. Col. Kiernan exiting the plane. I ran over to him and saluted. “Colonel Kiernan. I wanted to thank you for getting us away from those enemy fighters.”

  The pilot quickly returned the salute and replied with a twinkle in his eye, “What enemy fighters?” He and his copilot were laughing as they walked off. I’d been bested by a hundred-year-old living cartoon character. All right, Humility. You’ve won this round!

  I guess I just need to learn the language . . .

  җ

  After landing in Daegu we were quickly ushered into a bunch of green busses. Getting on the bus was kind of disturbing. It was like a flashback to being in school. When I got on the bus all of the seats were taken. There was literally nowhere left to sit, and the other busses had already pulled away. I was left with no choice but to stand in the aisle with my duffel bag at my feet and with me holding on to the rack above everyone’s head that was holding their duffle bags. Everyone was fairly quiet as we pulled out of the airfield and began traveling to our destination, Camp Lincoln.

  Camp Lincoln was only about five miles outside of Daegu, but Daegu itself was a large city with three million people. Even though we had a police escort, our convoy ended up moving slowly through traffic. Most of the soldiers were looking out of the metal bar windows, but I couldn’t see through them while I was standing. As much as I wanted to gawk at the new sights like a tourist, I found myself faced with two other problems. The first problem was that I realized that I had to go to the bathroom. The second problem was that my legs were getting tired from standing up. I tried shifting my weight from one leg to another so that both of my legs wouldn’t be so tired, but I realized that when I shifted my weight, it shifted my hips, and the person to one side or the other received an uncomfortably close view of my butt. It also made me want to cross my legs since
I had to use the bathroom, and that was a decidedly unmanly pose. I eventually forced myself to stand straight and face ahead in a stalwart, manly pose. It just about killed me.

  One thing that I was truly grateful for was the fact that despite there being a war on, the roads through Daegu were well paved and smooth. If the bus had been bouncing around a lot over potholes or gravel, I probably would have been the victim of a terrible biological accident. As it was, by the time we took the exit off of the expressway, my eyes were literally watering with discomfort. Being on the plane while it was diving and banking (Kiernan had better be glad I never saw him again!) was nothing compared to this. I began to believe that if someone had offered me a Porta-Potty in exchange for replacing every piece of furniture I own with web jump seats for the rest of my life, I would have taken the deal. It was excruciating.

  Just when I thought that life as I knew it was about to end thanks to bodily functions, a miracle happened. This is not something that anyone else would have viewed as a miracle. In fact, most saw it as a disaster. However, I like to think that I take a much wider view of events than most people do. That is how I saw this miracle. Kids, if you’re reading this, try to remember that. You can find miracles in the strangest places. In this case, it was the miracle of an oncoming Hyundai.

  The bus had just taken the exit off of the expressway and merged onto a smaller highway. There must have been a sharp rock or piece of glass somewhere up ahead. Whatever it was, it shredded the tire of a Hyundai traveling in the other direction. The driver struggled to regain control, but he flew across oncoming traffic directly in front of our bus. The bus driver swerved to prevent a collision. He was good. He managed to avoid the car cleanly, but stress and fatigue on the rear axle caused it to snap. The bus was careening along the shoulder with the driver trying to bring it to a stop. Everyone was holding on for dear life, but no one more than me. I was the only idiot standing up. As the bus took a particularly vicious swerve, my duffle bag began to fly off to my right. I let go of the overhead rack I was holding on to with my right hand and reached out to grab my duffle bag before it could hurt someone. I was keeping my balance by holding on for dear life to the overhead rack on my left. Unfortunately, the weight of the duffle bags it was carrying and the stress of the maneuvers on top of the pressure I was placing on it was too much for it to take. The support I was holding on to ripped itself out of the metal body of the bus. I flew to the right but was caught out of reflex by the soldier sitting there. The soldiers sitting on the left were not so lucky. The rack tilted downward and all of their duffle bags began falling on top of them. There was a lot of angry shouting, cussing, and even some language that I couldn’t quite identify. Thankfully, the bags were loaded mostly with uniforms and the like, so they were more of a nuisance than a hazard. Even so, by the time the bus came to a complete stop, almost everyone on board looked ready to chew nails. Lucky for me, they all thought that the bus was just getting old and that the rack fell on its own. If any of those soldiers are reading this now, I would like to ask that you not try to find me. I have a family to take care of now, you know.