Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Before long a new and unexpected sensation flooded them: boredom. Guitars got tuned for the first time since being shipped from the States. Books got cracked. Giant camel spiders got dropped into boxes to fight, soldiers howling for the spider they’d bet on to prevail. A makeshift gym got built, with recycled foam ammunition sleeves for padding and sandbags and filled ammo cans for weights. A specialist in Lockwood’s squad, a tattoo artist back home in New Jersey, started painting murals everywhere—first the regimental insignia, to ease the captain in, but then weirder, darker scenes, like a pterodactyl carrying off a terrified-looking goat wearing basketball sneakers. (This inspired a graffiti artist to spray-paint the latrines like seventies-era subway cars, which was when the captain clamped down on what he called “home decorating.”) First Platoon organized a Halloween party where a trio of soldiers won best costume by going nude save for socks over their genitals to mimic the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the ANAs scratching their beards and whispering as they observed from a safe distance. For the party someone procured and slaughtered a cow and stayed up all night to barbecue it, the soldiers gnawing the bones then hurling them to the bare-ribbed dogs prowling outside the wire.

  And in the midst of all this, if you looked closely enough, you’d see two soldiers growing increasingly inseparable: eating their meals together in the mess tent, spotting one another in the gym, playing an Italian card game the younger of the pair learned in high school, laughing and talking nonstop together outside even as the bronze autumn sunlight shriveled into the steely cold dim of winter, standing side by side beneath the over-freckled night sky as the older of the two charted the same constellations his grandfather had taught him in the north Georgia mountains, and then later, alone in their cots, as they listened wide-awake to their barrack mates’ froggish snores and to the far-off thrum of helicopters, imagining the other imagining him.

  * * *

  Damarkus had long shed the confusion of his teen years, which weren’t entirely unlike Cameron’s minus the trauma of Tommy Landry—each man’s sexual awakenings had been incubated in the antigen culture of small-town Southern football. But whether the Army instilled this in him or whether this innate quality naturally fitted him for the Army, Damarkus tends to cleanly and coldly assess a situation, then devises a plan accordingly. He doesn’t mentally rework situations the way Cameron does, backpedaling through his mind, inventorying all the escape portals he failed to use, sweating the what-ifs. For Damarkus, all that matters is what is. And what is, he realized sometime late in his teens, was that he was gay.

  It shouldn’t detract from his otherwise patriotic motive to note that Damarkus saw joining the Army as a way out. Life as a young gay man in rural White County, Georgia—as well as at the loosely religious Mars Hill College—loomed as a cramped and rarely pleasurable existence. One mistake he made, he readily admits, was taking the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy at face value. “It’s right there in the name,” he says. “They wasn’t going to ask and I damn sure wasn’t going to tell. That seemed like a square deal. Thing is, though, when you’re eighteen years old, whether you’re gay or straight, you’re thinking about sex—I guess the better word is sexuality—as something that’s below the waist. You’re just thinking about hooking up. If you’re a country boy, like I was, you’re thinking about going to the city, man, you’re looking at the world out there like it’s some giant spinning disco ball. You ain’t thinking about maybe wanting to move in with somebody someday, how tricky that’s going to be. You ain’t thinking about how you might maybe want to get married someday—I mean, back in 2001, the only way you was having a gay wedding was if you lived in the damn Netherlands, but even so, man, you’re eighteen, you’re thinking why the hell would I ever even want to? That age, man, you got too much rooster in you. But here’s the other thing you ain’t thinking, if you’re me, because you don’t understand yet that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ain’t nothing like a square deal: The Army didn’t have to ask you if you’re gay. All they had to do was suspect it. And you not telling didn’t matter. You were out—you were gone that same fucking day.”

  Damarkus’s closest brush, before Hila, came in 2006, between his second deployment to Iraq and his first to Afghanistan, when he was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. He had an off-base duplex apartment in Tacoma’s Stadium District where his boyfriend at the time, a waiter at a Tacoma bistro, more often than not spent the night. Late one evening he got a text: A group of fellow NCOs had been out drinking in the city, were now on their way to a strip club, and were picking him up along the way. He froze. No one had ever seen his apartment, which his boyfriend, not much to Damarkus’s liking, had taken it upon himself to “spruce.” He ordered his boyfriend under the bed while he careened from room to room gathering up framed photos of the two of them and hiding, in his words, “anything faggy—it was taking ‘straightening up’ to a whole new level.” By the time the NCOs arrived, though, Damarkus had come up with a ruse: He played sick, cracking the door to tell the drunk men, in a pained croak, that he was pretty sure it was pneumonia. The NCOs grumbled but relented. As they retreated down the steps one said, “Dig those pretty curtains of yours, Lockwood.”

  That Damarkus had to extend his ruse for the next two days—calling in sick doesn’t work in the Army—was the least of it. Slowly from under the bed came his boyfriend, his face warped with disgust. “This is totally sickening,” he said, brushing dust clods from his hair and torso. “I am nobody’s mistress.” Damarkus stepped forward to placate him but a torrent of resentments came spilling forth, blocking his path: The two of them couldn’t hold hands or show any other public affection, were forced to equip themselves with a creepy cover story (second cousins) to go out anywhere together, the boyfriend had to be listed under a female pseudonym in Damarkus’s phone, gay bars were no-go zones, merely shopping together was too risky, and if and when Damarkus got deployed again—contact was going to dry up almost completely, and if he got killed, the only way his boyfriend was going to hear of it was through a Google news alert. Damarkus weakly argued that last bit—he’d make sure his sister would know to tell him—but he had no counter to the rest; the way it was was simply the way it had to be. On his way out the door for the last time, the boyfriend said, half-sadly and half-acidly, “Don’t forget about Monday,” their secret texting code for I love you. All Damarkus could muster was a wince.

  Deployments, he found, supplied a peculiar kind of reprieve. In Iraq, and in Afghanistan the first time, it was easier to compartmentalize. The existential questions that chilled his nighttime hours in Tacoma—was he doomed to loneliness or to lying or just to alternating bouts of both?—got thrown aside for a much hotter, more pressing one: Were he and his guys going to make it out alive? And temptations were negligible—even less than that, they were abstractions. Fellow servicemen had always been off-limits because they only compounded the risks. (A straight friend of his, trying to understand this dynamic, once offered this analogy: “So everybody there is basically like your best friend’s wife—not just no touching, but no thinking about touching.” That seemed about right to Damarkus.)

  It wasn’t difficult, in a combat zone, to transform yourself into a machine, to become not the human operator of your weapon but rather an extension of it, to see your own flesh as steel, your joints as welds. And in some ways, wholly unrelated to the tangential pangs of sexuality, you had to do that anyway. In order to kill a man you have to turn something off. It doesn’t matter that he’s trying to kill you—there’s a lever inside and you’ve got to flip it off. And if you can pull one, you can easily pull another. You can turn off whatever needs turning off.

  Until there comes a night, as the first snowfall begins dusting an isolated mountain outpost in Afghanistan, when you discover, with dizzyingly exultant horror, that one of those levers is broken.

  * * *

  It was Cameron who discovered the junked Bronya.
Not that he was the first: What he found inside suggested that Afghans—one or more bored shepherds, probably—had been taking refuge inside it for decades. Littering the floor were ancient and thumbed-to-death magazines in Arabic: sports magazines with photos of cricket and soccer matches, ornamented brides staring proud-eyed from crinkled wedding magazines, raggedy celebrity tabloids with time-capsule shots of O. J. Simpson standing trial and Princess Diana cavorting in a swimsuit. Lumpy melted candles were everywhere like mushrooms. Someone had strung dyed feathers and beads and tinsel and lengths of painted chain around the dashboard, and thrown a small crimson rug across the thrashed troop seats, giving the space an eerie secret shrine vibe, eerie because all the powdery dust drifts and the slightly acrid funk betokened something lost and probably dead: whoever had made this sanctuary, plus whatever it was they’d dreamt here.

  The first time Cameron showed it to Damarkus they sat beside one another in the drivers’ chairs, admiring the archaeological coolness of the periscope and the analog gauges and toggle switches and red and green dash bulbs, Damarkus supplying his best guesses as to what each Cyrillic gauge indicated and how the Soviets had operated the thing. “This shit was heavy back in the day,” he said, gripping the steering wheel like a kid playing make-believe in Dad’s truck. A note of gloom began shadowing his voice as he said, “This was state of the art. These were their Strykers.” Dots started connecting in his head, none he wanted to see. He expelled a long sigh. “That’s the thing about fighting wars here. These people here…they don’t gotta win. They only gotta stop us from winning. And that’s a whole different thing.”

  “Damn,” said Cameron, caught off-guard by the sudden bleak swerve. “You sounding like Beano now.” The other PFC in the squad, Jason Beenora aka Beano, was always going on about Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires, arguing a case—founded mostly upon Reddit comments, apparently—that the Two-Forty-Four, like the rest of the U.S. military, had its ankle locked in a geopolitical bear trap.

  “Don’t be laying that shit on me now.” Damarkus let out an uneasy laugh, fingers still curled around the steering wheel. As a squad leader, both here and in Iraq, he’d never once conceded doubts about the merit and sanctity of the greater mission—not even to himself, still-birthing such thoughts before they had the chance to develop in his mind. Something in the Bronya’s pinched, stirless atmosphere, however, was teasing out strange candor. He felt seduced by a sense that whatever was thought or said or enacted in that atmosphere wouldn’t exist or even be remembered outside it, that perhaps emanating from all the dyed feathers and the tinsel was a kind of protective, short-radius magic. Talking to Cameron felt like talking to himself. “All I’m saying is that somewhere under this dirt there’s probably a spear or a chariot from Alexander the Great’s army, you feeling me. And somewhere down this valley there might be some British cannon. I’m saying the junk piles up, but nothing else looks like it changes. I’m saying this right here”—with a single sweep of his hand he took in the dashboard’s quaint technology, the Bronya itself, the Soviet ghosts, the presence of every other invading force including their own—“might be all we really leave. That this is it, right here. This is it.”

  “This is it,” Cameron repeated, like a quiet announcement. He brushed a feather with the back of his hand and then eagerly rolled a hanging string of beads between his fingers, slaking an abrupt need for touch.

  The next time they went in together, just before Christmas, it was with a bottle of champagne that Damarkus had bought from a Slovakian helicopter pilot who ferried supplies to the outpost. The military outsourced these supply runs to civilian contractors, nicknamed “Jingle Air.” The Slovakian, named Janko, also had a nickname, Drunko, which he didn’t seem to mind or was always too intoxicated to notice, and he openly advertised himself as a one-man bazaar for mildly illicit goods. (He was quick to alliterate his limits: “No pork, no pills, no pussy.”) Damarkus scored three bottles from him: two to secretly share with the squad on Christmas, and one to share, far more secretly, with Cameron.

  “Cambo does the honors,” he said, passing the bottle onto Cameron’s lap. It wasn’t actually champagne—rather carbonated wine from China, with a snake on the label, but grand cru for a combat outpost.

  Cameron stared at the bottle, blanching. “I don’t know how.”

  “What you mean,” Damarkus grunted, his voice a teasing towel-snap, “you don’t know how?”

  Cameron shrugged, embarrassed as before his mother’s funeral when he had to confess to Jim that he didn’t know how to tie a tie; his mother or Tanya had always done it for him. Defensively he sniffed, “Wasn’t like there was a lot of champagne around my house growing up.”

  Damarkus’s laugh came out soft and consoling. “I feel you. Mine was the same way. Chief, he still drinks that old nasty Colt Forty-Five. I’m always like, c’mon, Chief, you can’t be serious drinking that shit. And he’s always like, ‘This here’s what Billy Dee Williams drinks!’—Lando Calrissian, you know, from the old Star Wars movies. I don’t know if he read that somewhere or what. That’s about as close to champagne as we got. But I had a b—” The candorous vapors of the tank came close to unloosening him, but Damarkus caught himself. “I had this friend back in Tacoma, worked at this high-end restaurant up on Pacific Ave. He was always drinking it. Guess he kinda got me hooked on the fizz.”

  Cameron gaped at the bottle. “What the hell do I do?”

  “You take that foil off there first,” Damarkus instructed him. The winter’s first real snow was falling outside, and inside the Bronya their breath came out in puffs of steam just barely visible in the closed-in darkness. “Now you take that cage thingie off—yeah, just untwist that part. Now that sucker’s weaponized, man. You shake it now and it’s popping a hole through the roof. No—I’m joking, man, cut that shit out. All right now, this here’s the finesse part. This is how you make it look smooth. Take your left hand now, put it ’round the cork—no, the other way, with your hand upside down. You got it. Now just work it on out of there.”

  Cameron’s expression, with his face turned away from the bottle, suggested he was working with live ordnance, which Damarkus pointed out to him. “Shut up,” Cameron bit back at him, with a grin. “Damn thing’s stuck.”

  “Nah, just keep twisting it up. You’re getting—”

  The popping of the cork seemed thunderously loud inside the Bronya, and for a brief moment both men froze; then they looked at one another and broke into laughter.

  Damarkus said, “See, ain’t nothing to it. This is one of them skills your recruiter promised you’d learn in the Army.” He pulled out the two canteen cups he’d brought along and held them steady while Cameron over-poured, froth rolling down the sides of the cups. “Whoa, easy now. This Chinese snake-fizz don’t come cheap.”

  They clinked cups and took long, slow swigs.

  “Man,” Damarkus finally said, swirling his cup around. “This shit—it ain’t that bad. I mean, for snake piss and pesticides.”

  “Ain’t bad at all,” Cameron said.

  “You think so, huh? You on Team D with the fizz?”

  “Honestly?” he said, going in for another swig. “Shit’s amazing.”

  Damarkus parroted him, going in for another swig of his own. He held the wine in his mouth for a while, feeling the bubbles popping against his tongue and gums. Then softly he said, “Yeah,” the word coming out heavy like a moan, Damarkus stricken with a sudden whirling dizziness and what felt like his insides tumbling downward, his heart sliding slick beside his mind as everything in him went gathering at his center—the sensation was of dropping, of being swallowed by a force as invincible as gravity, of rushing, ecstatic doom. A voice inside him was screaming but it was muffled and incoherent and while Damarkus knew what the screaming was for he pretended not to. “Yeah,” he said again, and as though from afar he heard himself keep saying it, unable or unwilling
to say anything else, not now, maybe not ever, yeah.

  * * *

  Christmas passed, and come January snow began filling the Darah Khujz valley in such thick and recurrent layers as to obliterate it. The low winter clouds sagged into the mountains, concealing their peaks in dingy gray swathing, while the mountains’ lower fissures and crevices turned to gently indented shadows, rendered toothless for the season. When the wind took a short cut through the valley, on its way to better places, it blew through with urgent contempt, whipping the outpost with an ice-white spray that felt laced with glass shards and cloaking its corners with glossy drifts that got shoveled into the Hescos. The light was mostly dismal but every once in a while the sun burned away the cloud deck and lit the valley with a vivid white that stabbed your eyes to look upon it during guard duty. The Darah Khujz dozed into hibernation: motionless, soundless, colorless, bloodless.

  Potbellied stoves appeared in the barracks and the soldiers took turns stoking and replenishing them. The heat melted the big blankets of snow on the roofs, meltwater dripping down through cracks into buckets that the soldiers took turns emptying. Not frequently, but occasionally enough, someone in Cameron’s squad would register his absence along with their staff sergeant’s and ask where the hell they were. “Astronomy lessons,” someone would jeer, though stars were rare in the winter-shrouded sky. “Smoking,” someone else might say, though only Cameron smoked, not Lockwood. “Out fucking,” someone else said more than once, though no one took this seriously. That some of their Afghan National Army counterparts smoked hashish was common knowledge; whiffs of hash smoke sometimes floated over from the huts, and Afghan soldiers often assembled for patrols with “eyes like the devil’s ball sack,” as one soldier put it, meaning veiny and red, their eyelids at half-mast. Lockwood and Harris were sometimes spotted heading together toward the Afghan huts back in the cleaver handle section, and a few soldiers wondered, whispered…