by Nico Walker
“Who authorized the detail?”
“You’re insane, and you have no idea.”
“What did you say?”
“Eat a fucking dick.”
He turned to the trainee beside him and handed her his rubber M16. “Hold my weapon, Warrior Medic.”
I said, “Shit.”
He picked me up off the ground and body-slammed me. Fake-bloody Air Force uniforms went all over the place. He pinned my arms behind my back, while he was digging his knee into my right kidney, putting as much of his body weight into it as he could manage. I’d landed with my face on a little anthill, and ants crawled out and all over my face and bit me. I suppose I deserved it.
“Are you done mouthing off?”
“Fuck. You. Bitch.”
He wouldn’t let me go. I could see some of his make-believe patrol out of the corner of my eye. Kovak was with them.
I said, “Kovak, what the fuck is the matter with you?”
He said, “Hey, stop. That’s the guy who hurt his balls.”
* * *
—
WE GRADUATED. They played the Toby Keith song. We were free to leave. My balls were getting back to normal, but the penicillin I’d been taking for my epididymitis had made me ultrasensitive to sunlight and I was badly sunburned. Plus, there were the ant bites. I ran into Private Harlow just as I was leaving for the airport, and she saw me and she laughed in my face.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Emily was driving.
She said, “What if I chopped off your feet?”
I said, “No.”
“What? You’d like it. You’re fucking lazy. You could just sit around and smoke dope all day. Think about it. Save you the trip.”
“I think you’d get in trouble if you cut off my feet, baby.”
“Not if you don’t press charges.”
“Destruction of government property.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m afraid so. It’d be out of my hands.”
“Hmm.”
“They think of everything.”
“I wish I could chop your feet off.”
“I know, baby.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Emily’d be with me the whole time I was home, and she drove me around when I had to go places. Things were good. She was between jobs. She wasn’t a shot girl anymore. She had saved money up. She was caught up on her loans. She was caught up at school. She’d got all As. I was so proud of her. I was glad she wasn’t a shot girl anymore.
I had three weeks. The only catch was I had to spend two weeks doing some shit called Hometown Recruiting. I got to see Kelly and Space again. They didn’t remember me. That was fine. There was recruiting to be done at a fair in Mayfield. Sergeant Bellamy and I had brought the Army of One rock-climbing wall along with us. But the only people at the fair who wanted anything to do with it were the babies. I’d put the babies into harnesses and clip them to ropes attached to automatic belaying devices atop the Army of One rock-climbing wall. The belaying devices were good because the babies didn’t break their necks. But the problem was that the babies didn’t weigh enough and the devices pulled them up directly to the top of the wall. I’d clip a baby to a rope and up the wall the baby would go. I asked Bellamy what I ought to do. Bellamy was a recruiter who had come aboard at the Severance Armed Forces Career Center in the time since I’d gone through there that past January. He was a short paunchy man with dirty eyes, and he had a mouth full of gold like Space.
I said, “What am I supposed to do, Sarr? These kids can’t get on the thing right. They’re too light. They fly straight up and get stuck at the top.”
He said, “Just make it work, Pri.”
So I did what the man said and I kept hooking babies to the ropes and the babies kept flying away and I’d have to climb up the wall and fetch them down again. This went on for a long time. I don’t know where they got all the babies from but they did. They kept bringing me baby after baby till a thunderstorm came along to drive everybody away from the fair. And we took the Army of One rock-climbing wall down so it wouldn’t get struck by lightning.
Bellamy rode off in his late-model Dodge Durango. I hung around in the deluge and waited for Emily to come get me. I liked rain and I was already soaked so it didn’t make a difference if I stood in the rain or not. When Emily pulled up she looked perfect. She was very good to me.
We went to meet my parents at a Mexican restaurant. My dad asked me how things had gone at the fair and I recounted the babies for him and everyone agreed it was funny. We all had a nice time. And I couldn’t help but think that it was too bad that I was supposed to go to Iraq in a few weeks. But it couldn’t be helped. You make your bed, you lie in it.
* * *
—
I ASSUMED I’d be piss-tested about as soon as I got to Fort Hood, so I was trying to get a lot of weed smoking in early on. Most everyone I knew lived near enough to Severance, and this was easily done.
I had an hour before I had to be back at the Armed Forces Career Center. Emily picked me up and drove me over to James Lightfoot’s mom’s house. James Lightfoot and I got blazed as shit. Emily didn’t smoke weed. She only fucked with pills. I’d brought a razor with me, and I was shaving at the kitchen sink. I was cutting the shit out of myself, and James Lightfoot was telling me about Kashi the Indian. Kashi had been living in Cleveland the past four years, studying at Case. Now his student visa was up and he’d have to leave the country soon if he didn’t do something, and he was thinking about enlisting in the Army as a means of becoming an American citizen.
“Why does he want to be an American citizen?”
“It beats me. I guess he likes it here better than India.”
“Huh….Do you have any Clear Eyes?”
I was five minutes late getting back. I had needed the extra time to get myself together. I was still blazed as shit. Bellamy was the only guy in the office when I came in. The rest of the recruiters had already left for the big freestyle basketball tournament downtown. Bellamy was pissed at me. He told me to start doing push-ups, and I went about doing that; then I said, “I apologize for being late, Sarr, but I have a good reason. I think I may have found somebody who wants to sign up.”
“Recover,” he said. “Tell me about it in the Durango.”
Once we were on our way I gave Bellamy the details about Kashi, and he made me promise not to tell any of the other recruiters. I said I wouldn’t.
Our stand was set up in a parking lot across the street from the arena. A great deal of basketball-related shit was taking place there. I milled around the crowd and tried to hand out flyers. Someone asked me what suburb I was from. His face was youthful at first glance, but then I saw the crow’s-feet and the laugh lines. He was missing a front tooth. He had his dirty-blond hair done up in cornrows, and he was wearing Cavs shorts and a Tall T. He said his name was Jug. I tried to recruit Jug for the Army but he said he wouldn’t do it because Vice President Cheney had conspired with the Illuminati to knock down the Twin Towers and take control of the world’s oil supply. I admitted that I hadn’t heard this.
“And yet here you are,” he said, “yer ignorant ass tryin to hoodwink all these young niggaz into spilling their blood for Dick the Devil and the Illuminati.”
I told him I had to be going because Sergeant Bellamy was probably looking for me.
He asked if I’d ever been to Iraq.
“I’m supposed to go this fall.”
“Better tell them people yer gay. Go to Canada or some shit.”
I said I didn’t think there was any way out of it.
He said, “Yer gonna die.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fort Hood was bleak, a new kind of desert, engineered to induce fatalism in the young. It worked like a charm.
4th ID put me in an armor battalion. It wasn’t all armor though. The battalions were getting mixed up then. There were two armor companies (Alpha and Bravo) and two infantry companies (Delta and Echo) and an engineer company (Charlie), along with a support company (Foxtrot) and a headquarters company (HHC). The latter two had a lot of different shit in them: cooks, mechanics, scouts, mortars, intelligence, finance. The medic platoon was part of HHC. I went there first. I’d either stay there as part of the aid station or get attached to one of the line companies (Alpha through Echo).
I didn’t like it in the medic platoon; most everybody in it was older than I was, and they put a premium on a kind of talking I wasn’t any good at. So I told the guy running the platoon that I wanted to be in one of the line companies and he attached me to Echo. That’s how I got into the infantry.
It was September. We were deploying in November. The company was a tight group. So it went about as you’d expect. There was a lot of Who the fuck are you?
Sergeant Shoo was my boss. Big kind of bro-ish motherfucker. The other two medics attached to Bravo were joes, lower enlisted, like I was. PFC Yuri and PFC Burnes. They were good people. Yuri was arrogant as fuck but it was alright, and the 11Bs liked him on account of he was batshit crazy in the heavy metal sense of the words. As for Burnes, he was maybe too smart to be in the Army. You could see it was killing him, how dumb it was. He kept to himself mostly and spent his off time studying differential calculus and drinking Icehouse beer. He was planning a career in politics. He was in his early 30s and seemed old as fuck to all of us who were just kids really.
* * *
—
I WAS lucky in that my roommates in the barracks were laid-back and not excessively patriotic. They were infantry from Delta Company: PFC Grace and Private Carranza. Grace was from Oregon. He was 20 like I was. He looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and he talked like a surfer. He was my assigned roommate. Carranza was staying there unofficially on Grace’s invitation. Carranza was married so he got BAH, the basic housing allowance, which meant he couldn’t get a place in the barracks. He had an apartment off-post in Killeen but, for whatever reason, Mrs. Carranza was pissed at him and he was kind of homeless.
It so happened that Grace and Carranza were fucking the same 17-year-old girl from Harker Heights. Carranza explained it all to me. “That’s my little snow bunny,” he said. “I’m keeping her on ice.”
Then Grace married her and that sorted it out. But the three of them still hung out together, and they watched Casino five or six times a week. Grace was going to die in Iraq and Carranza’s face would get destroyed there, but this was before any of those things happened, so hearts were light.
Apparently Grace was some kind of dynamo in the fucking department because the girl would go nuts whenever he fucked her. You could hear her through the wall. They’d go for hours. You got the idea that it was true love, sacred and unguarded. But it was none of my business. I was in the business of being lonely all the time. Weekends I’d go to the movies in Killeen. It was one of those big shopping center movie theaters, and I’d spent so much time there I’d run out of movies I hadn’t seen.
I talked to Emily as much as I could. I’d call her up after nine, when the minutes were free and it was ten her time so she’d usually be done with work. She was waiting tables at a chain restaurant. They served Caribbean food there. She said it was good. She worked full-time. She went to school full-time. She did all the homework. It was hard to imagine having the energy for all that. She was working her ass off. And it was good that we could at least talk, but there was a distance. I’d been in the Army going on nine months by then.
“People think you don’t exist,” she said. “They think I’m making you up.”
I said I was sorry about that.
“I never see you,” she said. “It isn’t normal. Why don’t I get to have a boyfriend I can see?”
I said, “I think I’ll have the chance to make it up there around Columbus Day. Maybe Veterans Day at the latest.”
“…Okay.”
“Just hold on for me, you know?”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
And it was always that. That was most of all what we said to one another.
* * *
—
SINCE I was the Fucking New Guy, I got sent with the company when it went out to the field to train. It was considered a hassle to go and sit out there for days and do nothing, and it would have been a hassle for a Shoo or a Yuri or a Burnes, who’d done it a million and a half times already, but I didn’t mind. I would have just been lonely as shit anyway and I could smoke cigarettes as I pleased.
The weather had been dry for months, and when the company trained with live ammunition the tracer rounds set the grass on fire. I’d go out and run around with a square rubber mat on the end of a long stick and slap at the fires to put them out. Sometimes the grass fires crept into a tree and the tree would go up like a match. Which I liked.
* * *
—
IT WAS good to go AWOL. There wasn’t any training on the calendar for Columbus Day weekend, so there was a window. As long as I could make it back in time for the 06:00 formation that Tuesday, no one would know I’d been gone.
As I was going AWOL I couldn’t use the Killeen airport; there was a chance the Army would have some goons there checking paperwork. Fortunately Yuri had a pathological aversion to authority types, and he said he’d drive me to the regional airport in Temple. From there I could fly to Bush Intercontinental in Houston and make a connecting flight north.
When work was over we got out of town, Lamb of God blaring in his Honda Accord. I didn’t know how he could listen to that shit and not kill himself. But I was grateful to him.
* * *
—
IT RAINED all weekend in Elba. Emily and I lay around and slept through the days. We would go out and drive around at night. It was fall and you could really feel that it was fall. There was that ache. You were crushed by the beauty of it all: all the bare trees and the black sky and the streetlights. It was two years since we had met. We were older now; we both had money saved and we had our jobs and we were very much on our own. She’d be 21 in a month. We were so sure that we had grown up. We would get married before I went to Iraq. She brought it up this time. She said it made practical sense. If we were married I’d get paid more and she could be on my health insurance. And I’d get to marry Emily.
“But we’re going to get divorced,” she said.
I said that was fine.
I said, “We’ll get divorced if that’s what you want.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Emily and I were married in Elba by a justice of the peace the Tuesday after Veterans Day. Joe and Roy had made the drive over from Cleveland to visit Emily and me that Friday night, and Joe head-butted me in the face. It was all in good fun though. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He didn’t know that Emily and I were getting married. No one did. She didn’t want anyone to know.
My nose was busted and there was still blood on my windbreaker and we had no rings. Emily was wearing a blue mechanic’s jacket with a name tag on it that read MARIO. She looked like an angel. And we knew that at that moment we were the two most beautiful things in the world. How long it lasted, I don’t know, but it was true for at least a few minutes. Six billion people in the world and no one had it on us.
After we got married she drove me to the airport and we sat in her car in the parking lot and cried like babies till it was time for me to go.
PART THREE
CHERRY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Unless you happen to have been there, you’ve never heard of where we were, so it doesn’t matter. There was a FOB, a forward operating base. The FOB had been built up around a power plant beside the river. The power plant was a monster of a thing and made all kin
d of noise. It burned oil so oil was everywhere. Oil was in the air. Oil covered the ground. We lived in the shadow of the power plant, by the North Gate, in the Russian Village, which was a few buildings, concrete buildings, close together. That was our company area, where we slept and lived and all that. Delta Company was down at the other end of the motor pool. The aid station was down that way too, next to the LZ. The rest of the battalion was in the Tent City on the east end of the FOB, on the other side of the power plant, past the haji shops, towards the Main Gate. The battalion TOC was up that way, next to the Tent City. At first I thought people were saying “talk” because the radios were in the TOC and people talk on radios. But it wasn’t talk; it was TOC. And TOC stood for something and somebody had to tell me that or I’d have always had it wrong probably. So TOC. The battalion had its TOC. Each company had its own TOC. There were many TOCs. TOCs abounded. The battalion TOC was the big one though, two stories. It faced the road that ran along the north wall of the FOB. The road ran west to where we were, by the North Gate, where you could look out and see the river on the left-hand side and Route Martha going up through the fields and the palm groves. Route Martha wasn’t two lanes’ worth of tar.
We showed up in December. We were taking over for some Nasty Girls, the Mississippi Rifles. They weren’t big on ceremony. They said we were ate-the-fuck-up. They had pictures of their kills and they’d collated them into a PowerPoint slide show called “Towelhead Takedown.” We phased in as they phased out. We did right-seat/left-seat rides. The last of the Mississippi Rifles was on his way home by Christmas. Christmas was our first day on our own.
Third Platoon was on QRF1. I was Third Platoon’s medic. We were staging by the power plant when Haji shot the battalion TOC with a rocket. Three were wounded. But we didn’t see anything. We were 200 meters from where the rocket hit, and there were buildings in the way. It was a great disappointment. In the beginning you wanted to be where the action was.