by Nico Walker
We went to talk to his boss, Sergeant First Class Space, and Kelly said, “Pardon me, Sarr, but I have a joker here says he wants to be a ninety-one whiskey, says he’s tryin to go ASAP.”
All Space’s teeth were gold and he was one long and thin motherfucker. I hadn’t known that people could be named Space. He said, “Have a seat, Mister Ninety-One Whiskey.”
I told him the same shit I’d told Kelly, and Space agreed that I was going about things the right way. He said I’d made a smart choice because 91Ws had it made in the Army; then he got on the phone, and when the other end picked up he said, “Hamburger hamburger hamburger,” and laughed like this was real funny.
And for whatever reason I wanted to say hamburger hamburger hamburger too, even though I knew he was laughing at me.
* * *
—
JOE CAME and got me from Severance and we went and got drunk with Roy. We made a big deal out of the drinking, the way you will when you’re young and you drink and a day’s momentous. Joe was just back from Camp Lejeune, and he’d be in town for a few weeks before his reserve battalion left for Fort Irwin and then Iraq. And now I was enlisting in the Army because I’d been saying I would. So we thought we were hot shit. It was Tuesday night.
We ended up at a bar on Mayfield. The place was dead, but we got to meet a Knight of Columbus. He had a black leather jacket on and his hair coiffed like he was Frankie Avalon or Robert Blake or one of those guys. He looked to be in his 50s. He asked us what we were carrying on about, and Roy explained it for him, and he approved. He said, “You know I used to teach hand-to-hand combat to the Special Forces guys down there at Camp Lee-Joon.”
Joe said he’d just come from SOI there.
“What’s SOI?”
“School of Infantry.”
“Yeah I forgot.”
The Knight of Columbus liked Joe because Joe looked like a TV dago, and so we had his company.
As for the barmaid, she was in her late 20s. She had white-blond hair and a tan that cost money, and she was skinny except for she had a little pooch in the front that gave a false impression of her being some months pregnant. We had been there before and we had seen her then; the pooch didn’t change, and she’d always act stuck-up like she was the one who served drinks to Ben Affleck or somefuckingbody. At first I’d just assumed she was a cunt, but then I’d come to wonder if there wasn’t a sadness in it.
The Knight of Columbus had been showing us fighting moves, and now he wanted to buy us a round. That’s how I saw that the barmaid wasn’t shitty to him. She even called him Mr. Something-or-Other. And I thought, There’s something to be learned here. But before I could figure out what it was, the Knight of Columbus made a toast.
“I bet you make it home alive, Joe,” he said. “Your friend here I’m not so sure about….Sah-loo!”
We drank the drinks. Roy said he was going to enlist in the Marines as a machine gunner. Everyone agreed it would be a fine thing for him to do. I said I had to go take a piss. So I did. I punched the bathroom mirror on accident when I was washing my hands. The mirror fell off the wall and took the sink with it.
I didn’t stay.
It had been a tremendous fucking crash and I needed to warn my friends. The barmaid was making for the wreckage. “We gotta go,” I said. “I mean like we gotta go right fuckin now.”
The barmaid was cussing in the bathroom and we said goodbye to the Knight of Columbus. He said not to worry about the barmaid. “That whore has had two abortions,” he said.
We didn’t have far to run to get home, and we had a fistfight in the driveway till one of the neighbors said he’d come down and shoot us if we didn’t be quiet and go to bed. So we went inside.
I called Emily. I wanted her to tell me I was good, maybe thank me or something. But she had her mind made up to give me grief, and I shook my head because I didn’t understand. I said, “Dearest, I told you before that I was gonna do this and you didn’t say anything then.”
She said, “That’s because I thought you were full of shit, baby.”
* * *
—
I WENT and saw my parents the following evening. They were doing alright. They thought the shit with the Army was dumb, but they were doing alright. They’d just bought a house, a nice house with plenty of room. I wanted nothing to do with it.
I said I was going Thursday to MEPS for a physical and some other tests, and if those went well I’d be at basic in a couple weeks. Sergeant First Class Space had said I’d fill out a wish list of the duty stations I’d like to be assigned to in order of preference, and since practically everybody got one of their top three, I was more or less guaranteed to stay close to Ohio. So I’d be able to visit often. And the life insurance policy was good for $300K if I opted to pay for the kicker.
My dad said, “Are you sure there isn’t anything else that you would rather do?”
I said I didn’t know what else there was to do.
My mom said, “I don’t see why you don’t wish to continue with your studies.”
I said, “What studies? I failed out of school eight months ago.”
“You can always go back,” she said.
“And I might. And if I do, the Army will pay for it. Sergeant First Class Space said—”
“Who the fuck is this sonofabitch? I’d like to speak to him.”
I said that couldn’t happen.
She said, “Why not?”
I said it was something I was doing on my own.
* * *
—
THURSDAY I found out I was color-blind. It wouldn’t be a problem though because 91W was one of the few MOSs you could hold in the Army while color-blind. “Because you already know what color blood is,” they said.
There was a lot of standing in line, and our legs ached because we weren’t used to it. They had us strip down to our underwear and duckwalk the circuit of a big room. The big room smelled like balls (unwashed) and feet (ditto) and open ass (regardless), and there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room. Fat kids. Acne. Acne on the face. Acne on the body. Skinny kids. I was a skinny kid. I wasn’t strong. We looked like shit. We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television; our bodies were full of pus; our brains skittered. They called us one by one into another room, a smaller room wherein there was a man whose job it was to check everybody’s asshole. He had you bend at the waist and spread your ass apart with your hands so he could get a good look at it, and when he had seen enough he said, “Okay.”
They took me. By three in the afternoon I had signed a contract and I was sworn in. Roy came and got me from MEPS, and he drove me up to Elba so that I could stay with Emily my last two weeks as a civilian. Joe had come along for the ride. Snow was falling when we passed Erie. By the time we had passed the exit for Jamestown, it was all-out night and the traffic on 90 was bound up in a proper storm. We were boxed in by semis. They were all around us, rattling against the wind. Were one of them to jackknife, were one of them to not see us and then change lanes, we’d have had a fair chance of death by machines out on the roadway. But we didn’t worry about it. We had Roy’s car and we had cigarettes; we had heat and music; and all the way through the tolls outside Elba, we didn’t ever doubt that we were some of the ones who wouldn’t be killed.
It was ten o’clock when we got to Emily’s. They dropped me off and turned the car around and went home.
* * *
—
THIS WAS my first time seeing Emily in her hometown. All the last summer she’d been saving up to go to school in Montreal. She’d worked a third shift six nights a week at a Walgreens. And she’d been living with her aunt, and her aunt was religious. So there’d been no time or place for me then.
I had gone to see her in Montreal just as soon as she’d moved there. That was late August. Twenty hours’ w
orth of Greyhound each way, and it was worth it: to be alone with her in a strange city (the Paris of Canada), to only know each other, to smoke Player’s with pictures of cancer or black heart on the packages. To stick our heads out onto the fire escape, to make dinner in her kitchenette, to drink liquor and have wild fucking arguments about different things—God, Oasis, my insufferable arrogance—whatever she felt like. We would get to screaming at one another, then fuck and sleep like young wolves in a shoe box. It was like a dream. And like in dreams I didn’t get to stay. And neither did she. Something to do with money. She dropped out and moved back to Elba. She rented an apartment and got a job at a Giant Eagle. She was waiting for the spring semester to start up at the local school.
It was strange with us not fighting at all. Now and then she’d say she thought the Army was a bad idea. But I didn’t know as it was a good idea either; it was only something that was happening. So there was nothing to fight about.
When she went to work I’d do jumping jacks and read Kurt Vonnegut books and chain-smoke. When she came home we’d fuck and take naps, listen to the Lead Belly CD we’d bought at the Borders down the street, drink gin. The girl loved gin; she’d drink gin and then she’d want to kiss you.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know I was better off there, but what was done was done and I wasn’t supposed to stay. The days ran out and she drove me back to Cleveland.
They put the recruits up in a hotel downtown. I was in a room with a kid my age from Steubenville who had enlisted as a military policeman in the Ohio National Guard. He said when he came home from basic he was going to wear his Class A uniform with his patches and his ribbons and take his fiancée out to dinner.
I wished him luck.
He wished me luck.
CHAPTER TEN
Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The head shavers were civilians—a fat fuck and his women. The women had silver-blue permanents; there were two of them and they were awful. So was the fat fuck. It wasn’t enough for them that we had to pay them money for these haircuts that we were ordered to get; they talked shit to us too. They cut a kid’s head so it was bleeding pretty good and he let on that he minded and they said he was a sissy. They wanted to know if he was from San Fran-sissy-co. Then they cut another kid and the blood was running down and they thought it was funny. They didn’t get bored of it. They had special vacuum clippers that sucked the hair up as they cut. The suction pulled the scalp up into the blades; that was how come they drew blood so much. The fat fuck and his women had to talk real loud so they could hear themselves over the sucking sounds. I wished death upon them.
Then we got a hundred fucking shots. We got all our Army stuff: uniforms, boots, helmets, shit like that. We took our papers with us everywhere. They signed our papers. This was in-processing. When we weren’t in-processing we sat in an auditorium and they taught us things: left face, right face, the Army song, whatever. When it was time to eat we acted like the food was really bad even though it wasn’t that bad.
One kid said, “I’m a spook. That’s counterintelligence.”
Another kid said, “I’m an eleven bravo.”
That was infantry.
But he couldn’t be an 11B because all the 11Bs went through at Fort Benning. Now we knew he was a liar.
The group I came in with was B1, as in bravo one. That night another group came in, B2.
We thought the B2s were decadent children.
We said, “These bravo twos are ate-the-fuck-up.”
We said, “They sure are.”
The B2s thought we were weird losers.
The mutual enmity between B1s and B2s lasted three days; then we were redistributed at random into three platoons called Alpha Company, and no one could remember who anyone was. The universal baldness made it difficult to recognize people. They packed us into cattle cars and we rode up the hill to boot camp.
* * *
—
IT WAS a lot of yelling. They called us names like High Speed and Dick With Ears. Our hands were dick skinners. Our mouths were cock holsters. Our enemy was Haji. Our friends were battle buddies. It was real trashy.
There were girls in our company. They couldn’t do the exercises. We carried their equipment for them. It was a hassle. There were dudes who were fucked up too, but nothing like the girls.
The drill sergeants pretended they were real angry. They said not to come close to them because they could wig out and snap our necks. PTSD, they said. And a drill sergeant did choke a recruit. The kid was unconscious. He had choked the kid out. It wasn’t because of PTSD, though; the drill sergeant had no combat patch, he hadn’t ever been anywhere. He was full of shit.
We had drill sergeants who had been to Iraq, and they were full of shit too. They said they’d killed children over there. They said in Iraq there were children who tried to sneak up on American soldiers so as to blow them up with hand grenades. When it came to those types of situations, they said, it’s either you or the kid, so you had better kill the kid. One of the drill sergeants was an 88M, a truck driver. He said he had run over the hand grenade children with his truck. He said that was why he was crazy.
I stayed out of the way most of the time, and so I didn’t get fucked with much. Still there was no avoiding it entirely. Like when I told Drill Sergeant Cordero I needed to trade my Country Captain Chicken MRE for a vegetarian one because I was a vegetarian. Cordero got angry as fuck. He said, “WHY DON’T YOU EAT MEAT, PRIVATE? ARE YOU RICH?”
He talked like a Chicano Macho Man Randy Savage.
I said I wasn’t rich.
He said, “I SAW A SHOW ON TV. IT SAID THAT PEOPLE WHO DON’T EAT MEAT HAVE WEAK MINDS. THEY ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH. THAT MEANS THAT YOU ARE EASY TO BRAINWASH.”
“YES, DRILL SERGEANT.”
One day I was shooting my rifle at some silhouettes on a practice range, and I was sucking because I couldn’t see the silhouettes too well. The silhouettes on this range were light green, whereas normally they were something darker: black, I think. And Cordero was standing over me, losing his fucking mind. He said, “SHOOT THE TARGET, PRIVATE. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?”
I said, “I’M HAVING A HARD TIME SEEING THE SILHOUETTES, DRILL SERGEANT.”
“WHY CAN YOU NOT SEE THE SILHOUETTES?”
“I’M COLOR-BLIND, DRILL SERGEANT. RED-GREEN.”
“WELL THEN MAYBE, SINCE YOU ARE COLOR-BLIND, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE JOINED THE UNITED! STATES! ARMY!”
He bent the brass cleaning rod he was holding on account of his hitting me on the head with it. But I wasn’t hurt because I was wearing a helmet. I left the range. I had to be patted down: NO BRASS, NO AMMO. Drill Sergeant Cole punched me in the penis for no reason. You’d have that though. You just had to remember it was all make-believe. The drill sergeants were just pretending to be drill sergeants. We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.
The only thing I worried about was Emily. Dave from the Giant Eagle was gonna try to fuck her. I’d met him two nights before I left Elba. Emily had invited him over after they got off of work. He’d been rude as shit to me. I knew what he was about. I’d said to Emily, “That guy’s gonna try to fuck you.”
She said he wasn’t like that.
I said, “That’s exactly what he’s like.”
* * *
—
I CRAWLED out of the barracks window to use the pay phone. It was night. I had a calling card. The phone rang. She picked up. “Hello?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Hello?”
I was talking low. “It’s me.”
“Oh, hi!”
“How are you?”
“What?”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m fine. What about you? I’m surprised you’re calling.”
“I snuck out of the barracks.”
“I’m good now. Whatcha up to?”
“Oh, nothing. Just hanging out with some friends from work….Hello?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“I can’t stop thinking about you. I snuck out the window to call you.”
“Can you hold on a second?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…Are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“So how have you been? What’s it like? What have you been doing?”
“Oh, I’m fine. It’s not really terrible. Just this, that, and the other thing, you know? I snuck out the window. Third-story window. No big deal though. There’s ledges. I’m not supposed to be out here.”
“I can barely hear you.”
“I’ve got to talk quietly. If I get caught out here I’m fucked.”
“You said you snuck out the window? I can barely hear you.”
“Fuck.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“I wish I was there right now.”
“I wish you were here too.”