Eat the Apple

by Matt Young

  This deployment has been nothing but routine. No IEDs, no firefights, no ambushes. The corporal still has not killed another human. He kills dogs, and this used to give him satisfaction for days, but now only moments. All they do is find caches and call EOD to blow them up. The low-crawling and threat of danger is the most alive he’s felt in months.

  He wonders where the intelligence alerting their unit to caches comes from. He wonders how the command decides it’s trustable. He wonders if his fiancée is walking to class in West Lafayette, Indiana, at that very moment. He wonders if she’s fucking someone else. He wonders what would happen if he won the lottery. He wonders how long it will be before there are colonies on Mars. He wonders why the platoon cares about this desert country, or why any of them think that maybe one day their presence in an unnamed Iraqi village might matter.

  The hours of boredom in that field waiting for EOD to blow the cache will become lost hours. What the corporal thought or talked about—whose girlfriends might be cheating on them or who was homesick or who had the best fuck story—will not even settle to the bottom of his gray matter. Its banality will simply vanish from memory forever.

  But the minutes in the wadi, waiting for the countdown for the detonation to begin, will remain—like a recollection of catastrophic pain. He knows it was there, that it existed. He will remember the deep marrow-sucking feeling of boredom dissipating, giving way to excitement, danger, exhilaration.

  Years later, the corporal will not be able to elicit the month or the day or the hour. In his mind there will be details he might overlay from some other moment: a grove of date palms on the north side of the wadi and more empty fields beyond taken from a different day or year or deployment or life; a sunrise that couldn’t have happened because it was already light when he and the lance corporal low-crawled toward the heap of unexploded ordnance; sitting with their backs against crumbling dirt talking about what would come when they were civilians, waiting for the countdown over the comms; a call over the radio ordering all personnel to increase standoff distance because of the amount of UXO—or he might misremember that fact to supplement his fear of their proximity to the blast. The deployment runs together.

  He will remember the platoon had already moved to Forward Operating Base Blackhawk on ASR Iron. He remembers FOB Blackhawk was beyond Observation Post Rock and closer to Observation Post Mansion—monolithic remnants of a previous deployment. He will remember how it felt to move back to old stomping grounds and escape Fallujah, the knobs of Humvee tires vibrating through the chassis and frame through his seat as they crossed New Bridge, the Euphrates lazing beneath them fading into the noise of their engines. He will remember Blackwater Bridge to the north and recall a photograph of contractors, burned and hung like meat on display from the green girders. He will remember how the city stopped and peeled into a wide expanse of desert peppered with tiny villages and mud huts and backed-up petrol stops.

  He will remember feeling at home making the left turn onto ASR Iron just east of the defunct train trestle, a turn made so many times on a previous deployment. He will remember feeling his face flush and the flesh of his testicles tighten. He will remember telling the Humvee driver to stop the truck as they roll over the culvert that two years before had been packed with one-five-five rounds and propane tanks and whatever other accelerants. He will remember staring at the amoebic concrete patch in the cracked macadam where there used to be a blast crater. He will remember feeling nostalgia and age and sadness that his war was coming to an end.

  In the moment, at the bottom of the wadi that cuts through a field in an unnamed Iraqi village just before the controlled cache destruction, he feels none of those things.

  In the wadi, the corporal feels young and stupid and is glad for both. He breathes in the dirt as he drags his body behind the lance corporal’s, as the soles of the lance corporal’s boots push off the corporal’s Kevlar helmet, jamming it down his sweat-slick forehead. The short count begins.

  The corporal hears the noise and feels the overpressure like being exploded from the inside and compressed from the out all at once. The dust kicks up and the sun shines through beams of filmy mahogany haze. At the bottom of the dry irrigation canal in the unnamed village southwest of Fallujah, which barely shows up on the map, he sees the lance corporal’s white teeth against his mauve lips. The look of his smiling mouth solders itself behind the corporal’s eyes, and his laugh resonates through muscle and nerve and tendon. He laughs until his abdominals feel like they tear, and rocks and hunks of tough salted earth poke his arms and legs and he’ll remember later how fast that moment seemed to pass.

  Cold Turkey in Dogwood, Iraq

  Overnight, the sand—pulverized to silt by the tracks of tanks—has hardened, covering the ground with ankle-breaking pocks and craters. We smell like the cheap construction lumber out of which combat engineers built our barracks. It’s snowing. We are standing, smoking, not speaking in that quiet snow makes for itself.

  Listen up, gents. We’re going to Dogwood. We’re going to act as a screen for another unit operating to the north. We’re tasked with catching squirters. Hey! Put your goddamn cigarette out when I’m talking to you. You’ll regret that shit when you’re older. One day you’ll understand. We’re going to Dogwood. Load the trucks, perform inspections, plan to be Oscar Mike in ten. People are watching. We’ve got to make this look important.

  Inside the truck, our spines bend and chests cave, because no matter how much they want us to be boys we don’t fit shoulder to shoulder. Our eyes squint and burn against the acrid smoke filling the cabin from pilfered pines. Outside, I know that dogs bark and women cry out to their children but we can’t hear them for the engines.

  I said I would quit more often than I said I was sorry, so I’m sorry. I try to send the transmission telepathically. I set out that morning, with only one cigarette for the drive and hoped, but knew better, that the distraction of Dogwood might finally help me keep my promise.

  I’m awake and everyone nods and bobs. Bobbing for cock, DIs called it in basic. Back when I still wanted to know what it felt like to kill another man. In tiny crimped windows framed by lolling heads I can see my reflection in the perfect black, last cigarette smoldering.

  Something in Dogwood’s laid the buildings low. Not a one’s intact, and I think this might be how the world would look if gods were real and angry. We don’t need to use doors to get inside, just lift our legs. But for those watching, we pretend there are walls.

  It doesn’t take long. The itchy feeling at the base of my skull sends my gloved hand into my hip pocket in search of a fix. A man walks with a metal detector past the ruins of civilization. I know how this place might’ve looked once, but its fate was to be destroyed over and over. I drop my empty pack in the rubble.

  I’m thinking about hoofing hills on Pendleton. Huffing the wild fennel and dusty briny dusk of the Southern California coast and afterward sipping a cold one, the bottle’s perspiration sending shivers up my arm. Mountains silhouette themselves in the distance, the lights of barracks rooms like so many fireflies in a field.

  On the horizon in Dogwood to our northwest there are no mountains, there are oil refineries in the haze. They are like mountains, I think. I could walk there, make it in a few hours. I’d die of thirst before I got halfway. Heat vapors swim past my eyes and I wonder if the snow this morning was a hallucination.

  Do you have one, I ask. I ask everyone I know and they all say no. You can’t spare one? It’s my last. I’d give you mine—no I wouldn’t. I’d take a drag, just a puff. I’m saving it for the ride back. I haven’t thought about the ride back and I’m coated in dusty dry sweat, left thinking about all the cigarettes I’ll never have.

  I toe my way through chunks of sand and concrete like an only child on a vacation beach. A crackling voice from the radio attached to my flak jacket is tentative and reports it’s found something. I pick up my feet and try to focus.

  In movies, bombs beep, they even
vibrate—in real life they just explode. I don’t hear beeping. There are wires and a rusted artillery shell husk and I push people back. I say, Back up, and call over the radio and don’t notice the engineer turn on his metal detector, which begins to beep. My stomach drops and my intestines loosen and my asshole tightens just in time and right then I rethink my promise.

  The bomb becomes a shrine. Maybe it knew its destiny at the moment of creation. With its newfound fame come new fresh people who pilgrimage to bring offerings and gifts. A pilgrim offers me cigarettes for unearthing the shrine. When I pay respects with smoke and ash the pilgrims cease to be pilgrims and become explosive ordnance disposal techs. They explode the shrine like it never existed.

  Dogwood stinks of concrete and my sweat and ancient desert dust made from the bones and skin of all the people who lived before me. In the whale skeleton of a bombed building, I stare at a bloodstained wall and ash my cigarette in the sand.

  The beiges and tans and yellows and grays of Dogwood blend and glob together. I am trying to recall other colors. I remember. I am fifteen, sitting poolside on a warm Indiana night, smoking cigarettes for the first time with a boy I don’t like. The tobacco tastes and smells like Midwest summer—chlorine and suntan lotion and baked skin and green. Miles and miles of green.

  The unit to our north ends their operation, so we rally. We egress from Dogwood and try to fit together on the road back home. I’m deflated—a Mylar birthday balloon left to tumble on roadsides. Someone snaps a picture and I wonder if there’s anything left to develop.

  Brothers

  We don’t ask. We don’t tell.

  We insult and suspect and speculate and then we wrestle and grab ass, feeling one another’s hard sinewy bodies beneath our palms while we huff hot breath into one another’s ears, whisper sweet nothings, threatening and delivering and dominating.

  We sit across from one another and move our callused fingertips up electric-hard thighs and ask over and over, Are you nervous? Are you nervous? while making an uncomfortable level of eye contact. There is no winning the game. If you get nervous you’re a pussy, if you don’t, you’re a fairy.

  We shave hair from our bodies to display thick, veined arms covered in tattoos, sweat beads divide like spermatozoa and chase the contours of our muscles into our palms. While we wait for our turn on the Freedom Bird we pop one another’s back zits and apply baby oil to naked shimmering bodies to ensure even tans.

  In our downtime we gather in shirtless hordes around tiny computer screens to catch a glimpse of money shots spurting from gargantuan cocks while we strain against the crotches of our trousers. We retreat to the showers, relieve the tension, and return for more.

  We call this brotherhood.

  You’re all a bunch of queers, says an outsider.

  Spartans fucked each other all the time, we say.

  You fight harder for someone you love, we say.

  Don’t you want to be loved? we ask.

  What happens in the field stays in the field, we say.

  I’d let Brad Pitt fuck me in the ass, one of us says.

  Let him, another says. Like he’d come around asking.

  We say these things for shock, for a laugh, but there is truth to them. There are reasons for their recurrence. We are trying to figure it out, trying to find ourselves in a world of testosterone and violence, a world where there is little room for love and tenderness. So we throw around faggot and queer and poke fun at the effeminate because we’ve learned to fear those intimate feelings, those intense moments of love that swell inside us.

  Guys, one of us says. I’m gay.

  We know, we say. We’ve always known.

  And maybe we have known, and maybe we haven’t, but in that moment it does not matter. In that moment we are reflecting on all the things we have said and done and all the ways we have insulted him and all the times he has kept quiet. We are ashamed to have treated one of our own this way. He has sweated with us and lost with us and bled with us and we are all the same inhuman things now, unloved and unwanted and cast again and again into the desert. We think about this and we understand that he has been cast further than us, that he has been struggling and sinking in the desert sands for years alone and it is because of us. We enfold him and defend him and love him like brothers.

  Mt. Marine Corps

  A good metaphor for the Marine Corps is to think of the organization like it is a mountain.

  But it’s a mountain with many false peaks.

  At the true peak, there’s one person in charge, but at every different false peak there’s also a person who is in charge and who thinks they live at the top.

  Then at the base of the mountain there is us, the junior enlisted. We stare up at the mountain and dream of life on one of the peaks.

  One problem with the metaphorical mountain is the conundrum of what to do with the metaphorical shit. Where to dispose of those bothersome turds?

  Command could walk down to the base to evacuate the metaphorical shit, dispose of it properly—but it is below their station. Easier to shit over the side and let gravity sort it out.

  When the shit rolls downhill, everyone who thought they were in charge gets reminded they aren’t and they get mad and send the shit even farther downhill, with their own shit added on. This is a cumulative process.

  The metaphorical shit accumulates and rolls, picking up all the detritus in its path until it reaches us at the base and crashes like a giant shit tsunami.

  We end up covered in stinking metaphorical shit. It becomes our problem to deal with through no fault of our own … most of the time.

  But sometimes we get covered in our own shit. We think we’re getting one over on Command by sneaking to the top of the mountain and leaving a huge steaming metaphorical dump right on their doorstep.

  In our excitement, we forget that the metaphorical shit will roll downhill. That it is an irregular, foreign shit makes everyone want to know where it came from. The people on the way have a choice: find whoever was responsible, or take the blame.

  Our metaphorical shit is a video of us dancing on the hood of a truck while it rolls down a road in Ferris Town—an apartment community south of Fallujah—posted to the internet. In 2006 we had to run between the buildings in Ferris Town because of snipers. It isn’t like that in 2008.

  The video makes Command look like they don’t have any situational awareness, like they are incompetent, that they are the reason the war has lost public approval.

  Command interrogates us, seizes our electronics. They know who made the video, but they want to know whether or not we were all complicit. It only takes one to break.

  Command just wants the video to disappear, but the glory of the internet is forever and even though we are disbanded and our rank is taken, our contracts only last four years and they are almost up. Because of the internet and some serious dance moves, we managed to leave some shit at the top of the mountain. Sometimes, people ask us if it was worth it. Eat the apple, fuck the Corps, we say. Only that it makes a good story.

  Clean

  On our way out of Iraq in 2008 after our second pump to the desert we are delayed by a week of shamal winds and sandstorms that tint our world to ochre rust. There is no difference between sand and air. Running water becomes pointless. When we wake in the mornings our eyes are crusted shut by saline and dust. The muck cakes to the corners of our mouths, stains the exposed creases of our faces, aging us like bad stage makeup. Sand grinds down our molars and incisors and sends tinges of nerve pain through our fillings and we wash it down our gullets with sludge water, into our intestines where it’s absorbed and sweated back out of our pores.

  We don’t know it yet, but years later in the dead of night we’ll not be able to sleep because sleep won’t come easy after the war when we’re trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out why we went to war in the first place. We’ll sneak downstairs to our basements, or pull down attic doors and wince at the creaking echo of wood on metal,
or we’ll tiptoe to our garages or sheds or forgotten closets and sift through boxes of Christmas and Halloween decorations until we find a pilfered olive drab ruck or decaying cardboard box or thick plastic footlocker. We’ll run our hands over its surface, gooseflesh rising on our arms.

  Inside we’ll find that dust in crumpled seabags and in the pockets of old utilities and creases of stolen gear. It will stink of eons, a stale flat stink that will leave our mouths dry and our throats looking like the parched hardpan on which we used to piss. Finding the sand is like stumbling upon old nude photos of an ex and as our groins stir to life we’ll look over our guilty shoulders for our wives and girlfriends and partners. We’ll rub the grit between our forefingers and thumbs, the grains echoing like artillery against the deltas and islands of our fingerprints. Our hearts will race and we’ll stand inside our warm domestic houses remembering the thing we used to be in the desert, and we’ll know we won’t ever be able to leave the thing or the desert behind.

  Long hairs on our scalps will trap the grime, which will powder our eyelashes and stick to our nose hairs, and will seep over us like a spilled shadow, curling around us like a cat’s tail.

  We’ll pack the trinkets up and we’ll sneak to our bathrooms to shower and remove any evidence of our indiscretion, our wives and partners still dozing. The dust will leach red and thick from our bodies and spread to the chlorinated water collecting at our toes like blood trails from a shark bite.

  Some of us will shave our heads right there in the bathroom, thinking the dust is an infestation like lice. Thinking maybe we can get at it without our obstructing forest of hair. We’ll scrub and scrub and grate and rake and we’ll slough off dead dogs and detained children and widowed women. They’ll collect around our soaking legs and we’ll beg their lifeless and horrified eyes for forgiveness but they’ll already be circling the drain.