Redeployment

by Klay, Phil

  I nodded. That was absolutely what I was thinking.

  “And I’m not comparing what I’ve been through to what you have.” That surprised me. “Mine is just, whatever, and I’m sure you’ve gone through stuff . . .”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not saying mine’s as bad.”

  It didn’t seem appropriate to tell her she’d been through infinitely worse.

  We had sex a week later, when we were both drunk and lonely and after I’d told her about Vockler—partially as a way of getting it out and partially as a way of reciprocating for all the things she’d told me.

  • • •

  The first few months we had a lot of sex, and I went on a lot of runs. You run fast enough, it gets better, all the pent-up emotions expressed in the swing of your arms, the burn in your chest, the slow, heavy weight of exhaustion in your legs, and you can just think. You can think in a rage, in sorrow, in anything at all, and it doesn’t tear you up because you’re doing something, something hard enough to feel like an appropriate response to the turmoil in your head. Emotions need some kind of physical outlet. And if you’re lucky, the physical takes over completely. When I used to do mixed martial arts, that would happen. You exhaust yourself to the point where only pain and euphoria remain. When you’re in that state, you don’t miss everything else, all the little feelings you have.

  When I was in Iraq, I saw Marines come in injured and I’d go visit them with Lieutenant Colonel Motes, the incompetent asshole whose poor grasp of COIN was getting them hurt. A lot of them, they wouldn’t ask about themselves or about the terrible injuries they had. They’d ask about their buddies, the Marines with them, even the ones not hurt as bad. Inspiring stuff. Except when I saw those guys, they’d already been given anesthetics of some kind. Plus, all the really bad ones were unconscious. After the suicide bombing, though, some of the Iraqis we saw were in so much pain, they were just writhings. If their eyes were open, they weren’t seeing, and those whose ears hadn’t burst weren’t hearing, and I’m sure if they could have thought anything, they’d have thought about their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, friends, but their mouths were just screaming. A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal.

  You can’t get there with pleasure. You can try, but you can’t.

  • • •

  “Think termites,” I told Ed-the-banker two weeks after the breakup. We were in his apartment in the West Village, drinking his Scotch. It felt very grown-up.

  “There was a medical researcher named Lewis Thomas,” I said. “Thomas had something of a poet’s mind.”

  “I’m sure that’s a useful trait in a doctor,” Ed-the-banker said, since he wasn’t the sort to let you complete a thought.

  “Thomas says if you put two termites in a patch of dirt, they’ll roll it into little balls, move it from place to place. But they don’t accomplish anything.”

  “Like poets,” he said.

  “Thomas was the poet,” I said. “Not the termites.”

  He was smiling broadly now. He finds all my problems amusing, which I guess they are if you’ve got the right perspective.

  “They’re little Sisyphuses,” I said, “with their little balls of dirt. I’m sure for a termite, it’s a regular old existential crisis.”

  “Maybe they need a termitess.” This is Ed-the-banker’s solution to most problems, and it’s generally not a bad solution.

  “They need more termites,” I said. “Two won’t cut it. If they had enough brain cells to feel, they’d feel lost, awash in the loneliness in the heart of the universe or whatever. Nothing to depend on. Just dirt and each other. Two won’t cut it.”

  “So what? Ménage à trois?”

  “It doesn’t help to add only a few more termites. You might get piles of dirt, but the behavior is still purposeless.”

  “To you,” Ed-the-banker said. “Maybe pushing around little balls of dirt is like, the termite version of watching Internet porn.”

  “No,” I said, “they’re not excited until you start adding more and more termites. Eventually you reach critical mass, though, enough of the little fuckers to really do something. The termites get excited, and they get to work. Thomas says they work like artists. Bits of earth stacked on bits of earth, forming columns, arches, termites on both sides building toward one another. It’s all perfect, Thomas says, symmetrical. As though there’s a blueprint. Or an architect. And the columns reach each other, touching, forming chambers, and the termites connect chamber to chamber, form a hive, a home.”

  “Which would be the Marine Corps,” Ed-the-banker said.

  “Two hundred thousand workers all yoked to the same goal. Two hundred thousand workers risking their lives for that goal.”

  “Which would make the civilian world—”

  “A bunch of lone little animals, pushing their balls of dirt around.”

  Ed-the-banker laughed. “The civilian world,” he said, “or corporate law?”

  “Either,” I said. “Basically, I’m not sure which little group of confused, hopeless animals I should join, and how I can possibly bring myself to care about what they think they’re building.”

  “I told you,” he said. “You should have gone into finance.”

  • • •

  That was last fall. And now, two weeks after the phone call from Boylan that woke me up in the middle of the night, he’s here, trundling into Grand Central like an oversize toddler dressed in a hand-me-down suit he’s already outgrown. The breast pulls, the pant cuffs show too much of the socks, and his grin indicates a blissful lack of awareness of how absurdly his body has been crammed into the clothes of a lesser man. I’ve seen Boylan ripped, a hulking giant. And at the end of our shared deployment, I’d seen him a gaunt, enormous skeleton. But I’ve never seen him looking so soft—pudgy in the middle and fleshy in his face. He had a staff job in Afghanistan, and it shows.

  “I got this at a thrift store for twenty-five bucks,” he says, grabbing his lapel and spinning to show off his sartorial splendor.

  “Why are you in a suit?” I say, and his face registers a moment of confusion.

  “You said you’d take me to the Yale Club.”

  It takes me a moment, but I realize I had indeed said that, three years ago. Funny what people remember.

  “You don’t want to go there,” I say. “You don’t want to be anywhere around here.” I raise my arms to indicate Grand Central, the teeming masses, the cathedral beauty of it, with its constellation map gilt backward on the ceiling and its tasteful Apple store discreetly occupying the top of the east staircase. “Midtown’s got no life to it. Just seventeen-dollar drinks and the assholes that can pay for them.”

  “That’ll be you soon, Mister Hundred Sixty Thousand.”

  “Not yet,” I say. “And since I’m buying all drinks tonight—no, I am—we’re getting the fuck out of here.”

  We take the 6 train to Astor and head to a dive bar with an all-night special of $5 for a can of PBR and a shot of what they call “Jameson.” I figure we won’t be able to spend more than $80 before going into comas. We head in and sit at the bar, and I order the first round as Boylan untucks his shirt and loosens his tie.

  “I’m glad . . . ,” I start to tell him, and I want to say I’m glad he’s alive, but that’s too maudlin even if it’s true, so I finish with, “To see you,” and he grins. Once the drinks arrive, he clinks his whiskey to mine and we shoot them back.

  “Why didn’t you stay in the Corps, man?” he says.

  It’s becoming increasingly apparent Boylan is already a bit drunk, and I wonder who, if anyone, he could have been drinking with. Near most stations they sell plastic bottles for the commuters to get hammered on the train. If that’s what he was doing, he wouldn’t be the only one.

  “Why not, man?” he says. “You were good. Eve
rybody says you were good.”

  “Because I’m a pussy,” I say. “When you getting promoted to major?”

  “Never. I got a DUI.” He gives a sheepish grin and before I can respond says, “I know, I know, I’m an idiot. No more drunk driving for me.” And then he starts asking me about law school, about if I’m dating anybody, about all sorts of shit, and I realize that as much as I want to hear about his war shit, he wants to hear some civilian shit.

  So we talk civilian shit. I tell him about my girl and how the sex was good and the rest was bad but I wish her the best. And I tell him I’m going to go corporate and then figure shit out, because it’s impossible to figure out now. “A lot of people, their careers ping-pong back and forth between government and Big-law. Do something to feel good about yourself for a while, then go back and make money. Then feel good about yourself again. Then go back to Big-law and make some money. It’s like a karmic binge-and-purge.”

  We get drunker, and eventually Boylan says, “You want to see a trick?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he crams the edge of the PBR can against his incisors, cutting into the aluminum. He rotates the can quickly, spinning it against his teeth until he slices it in a perfect circle, mouthfuls of beer spilling out the sides and onto his suit.

  “Ha!” he says, holding the two halves out to me. “Whaddaya think?”

  “Impressive,” I say. I notice he’s missing his tie, and I wonder if he knows where it is.

  The bartender walks over and says, “Don’t do that,” and Boylan tells him to fuck himself. Then he looks at me like, “You gonna back me up on this?”

  Long story short, we head to my apartment and start in on some whiskey, and when we get drunk enough, we finally get to war.

  I bring up the videos of air strikes they’d show us at the Basic School, grainy videos of some hajji hot spot and then, boom, dead hajjis. Though the explosions are never as big as you think they should be. Hollywood fucks that up for you.

  I tell Boylan, “It was like video games,” and he gets animated.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You see any of the helmet cams?”

  I haven’t, so he gets on my computer, standing by my desk and swaying back and forth while he tries to type into the YouTube search engine, his meaty hands spilling over and hitting multiple keys at once.

  “Dude, this is cool,” he says.

  Eventually he finds it, POV-style footage taken with a camera strapped to a Marine’s head during a firefight in Afghanistan.

  “Now this is like a video game,” he says, and as the video plays, I realize he’s right. The Marine ducks behind a wall and I see the barrel of his rifle cutting across the screen in the exact same way it does in Call of Duty. And then he pops up and lets off a few rounds, just like Call of Duty. No wonder Marines like that game so much.

  There’s a lot of yelling going on as well, and I catch a few commands but nothing clear. At the end of the video, one soldier has been shot, but not seriously.

  “So this is what it’s like,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve been in combat. This is what it’s like?”

  Boylan looks at the screen for a second. “Nah,” he says.

  I wait for more, but nothing’s coming.

  “Well then,” I say, “that’s what it looks like. At least, to shoot a bad guy.”

  He looks at the screen again. “Nah.”

  “But that’s an actual firefight.”

  “Fuck, dude,” he says. “Whatever.”

  “That’s a fucking video camera shooting an actual fucking firefight.”

  He looks at the screen for a long time. “Camera’s not the same,” he says, and he taps his head and smiles at me crooked.

  I look back at the screen, which has recommendations for other videos, mostly war related, though for whatever reason one of them is a screenshot of some Japanese writing and a cartoon squid.

  “I’d never let them put a camera on me,” he says.

  His skin is waxy, sallow. I want to ask if Vockler had an open casket or if his body was too damaged, though of course I can’t.

  “Iraq,” I say instead. “What do you think? Did we win?”

  “Uhh . . . we did okay,” he says, looking at the screen of combat videos and one cartoon squid.

  The first time I met Boylan, he was in his Alphas and the Bronze Star with the V was right there on his chest for anybody to see. I’d gone and looked it up immediately, but now I can’t remember exactly what it had been for. Boylan hadn’t meant much to me then, and the citation wasn’t as exciting or clear as Deme’s, since for Boylan it’d been a slow accumulation of minor heroic actions taken over the course of a long and hellish day, rather than the sort of intense crucible that makes for great drama. At least he got it, though. Vockler died in an IED, like the majority of combat casualties in these wars, a death that doesn’t offer a story younger Marines can read and get inspired by. IEDs don’t let you be a hero. That’s what makes Deme so important. The cold, hard courage that sends veterans like Vockler back to war is not what makes teenagers join the Corps in the first place. Without the rare stories like Deme’s, who’d sign up?

  Eventually, Boylan is sleeping on my floor and I’m sitting by his side, drinking whiskey slow and envying him from the depths of my noncombat heart. I don’t know why. He’s not proud of his Bronze Star. He refuses to tell the story. “It was a bad day,” is the most I’ve ever heard from him. I don’t even know what it is he has that I want. I just know I want it. And he’s right here in front of me, close enough that I’ve spilled whiskey on him twice.

  Agamben speaks of the difference between men and animals being that animals are in thrall to stimuli. Think a deer in the headlights. He describes experiments where scientists give a worker bee a source of nectar. As it imbibes, they cut away its abdomen, so that instead of filling the bee up, the nectar falls out through the wound in a trickle that pours as fast as the bee drinks. You’d think the bee might change its behavior in response, but it doesn’t. It keeps happily sucking away at the nectar and will continue indefinitely, enthralled by one stimulus—the presence of nectar—until released by another—the sensation of satiety. But that second stimulus never comes—the wound keeps the bee drinking until it finally starves.

  I splash a little more whiskey on Boylan, halfway hoping he’ll wake up.

  TEN KLIKS SOUTH

  This morning our gun dropped about 270 pounds of ICM on a smuggler’s checkpoint ten kliks south of us. We took out a group of insurgents and then we went to the Fallujah chow hall for lunch. I got fish and lima beans. I try to eat healthy.

  At the table, all nine of us are smiling and laughing. I’m still jittery with nervous excitement over it, and I keep grinning and wringing my hands, twisting my wedding band about my finger. I’m sitting next to Voorstadt, our number one guy, and Jewett, who’s on the ammo team with me and Bolander. Voorstadt’s got a big plate of ravioli and Pop-Tarts, and before digging in, he looks up and down the table and says, “I can’t believe we finally had an arty mission.”

  Sanchez says, “It’s about time we killed someone,” and Sergeant Deetz laughs. Even I chuckle, a little. We’ve been in Iraq two months, one of the few artillery units actually doing artillery, except so far we’ve only shot illumination missions. The grunts usually don’t want to risk the collateral damage. Some of the other guns in the battery had shot bad guys, but not us. Not until today. Today, the whole damn battery fired. And we know we hit our target. The lieutenant told us so.

  Jewett, who’s been pretty quiet, asks, “How many insurgents do you think we killed?”

  “Platoon-sized element,” says Sergeant Deetz.

  “What?” says Bolander. He’s a rat-faced professional cynic, and he starts laughing. “Platoon-sized? Sergeant, AQI don’t have platoons.”

  “Why you think we needed t
he whole damn battery?” says Sergeant Deetz, grunting out the words.

  “We didn’t,” says Bolander. “Each gun only fired two rounds. I figure they just wanted us all to have gun time on an actual target. Besides, even one round of ICM would be enough to take out a platoon in open desert. No way we needed the whole battery. But it was fun.”

  Sergeant Deetz shakes his head slowly, his heavy shoulders hunched over the table. “Platoon-sized element,” he says again. “That’s what it was. And two rounds a gun was what we needed to take it out.”

  “But,” says Jewett in a small voice, “I didn’t mean the whole battery. I meant, our gun. How many did our gun, just our gun, kill?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” says Sergeant Deetz.

  “Platoon-sized is like, forty,” I say. “Figure, six guns, so divide and you got, six, I don’t know, six point six people per gun.”

  “Yeah,” says Bolander. “We killed exactly 6.6 people.”

  Sanchez takes out a notebook and starts doing the math, scratching out the numbers in his mechanically precise handwriting. “Divide it by nine Marines on the gun, and you, personally, you’ve killed zero point seven something people today. That’s like, a torso and a head. Or maybe a torso and a leg.”

  “That’s not funny,” says Jewett.

  “We definitely got more,” says Sergeant Deetz. “We’re the best shots in the battery.”

  Bolander snorts. “We’re just firing on the quadrant and deflection the FDC gives us, Sergeant. I mean . . .”

  “We’re better shots,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Put a round down a rabbit hole at eighteen miles.”

  “But even if we were on target . . . ,” says Jewett.

  “We were on target,” says Sergeant Deetz.

  “Okay, Sergeant, we were on target,” says Jewett. “But the other guns, their rounds could have hit first. Maybe everybody was already dead.”

  I can see that, the shrapnel thudding into shattered corpses, the force of it jerking the limbs this way and that.