Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  To close I admit that I love her…liked her from the beginning and have grown more fond of her since, despite being a thousand klicks away.

  Days become weeks as we process hundreds and thousands of devastated Iraqi soldiers and displaced Shiite Muslims, providing food and shelter in tents. My promotion to E-5 occurs, and the captain confirms that I will receive a Bronze Star, on a strong recommendation from Lieutenant Kline. The lieutenant pushed for a Silver Star, to distinguish a contribution as above and beyond, only to agree in the end that Bronze was appropriate. On approval, at squadron level, I’m told, the medal will be presented at a 2nd Cav ceremony on our return to Germany.

  “First in/first out, my ass” persists as an expression of our fate, so much so that the captain addresses the troop yet again on the issue. “Let’s be mature in our thinking,” he says. “There are countless mopping-up chores to be done, and our date of departure has to be closer to May than to April. We’ll still be first out, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to vacate before things have been put in order.”

  “Sir, they shouldn’t have told us we’d be first out if it isn’t true,” a staff sergeant (another gunner) from 3rd Platoon remarks. “Promise was made, Sir. Should be kept.”

  “Hear hear!” soldiers chime in.

  “I’ll pass on your sentiments to the colonel,” the captain says. “Just don’t forget that he has to answer to corps. Which has to answer to CentCom. Which has to answer to the Pentagon. And so on…as everybody has to answer to somebody. Let’s not get carried away. We’ll be first out. But it isn’t going to happen overnight.”

  2nd Cav moves at last to the Cease Fire Line in the Euphrates River Valley, while everyone would like to divert into Saudi Arabia as a stepping stone to our home base in Germany. Days slip by as we patrol the demarcation line and process hundreds of refugees escaping civil war befalling towns to the north. We resume a routine of tents, outdoor gravity showers with cold water, A-rations and T-rations prepared in field kitchens. Life in the field, in tents, is an improvement over life in mud-bellies.

  Alcohol remains unavailable, while rumor has it that white lightning is being made in stills. Nor is there much electricity at night, or any color in daily life much stronger than chocolate chip uniforms. Oil wells in Kuwait, further east, have been burning out of control for days and the sky, layered black and yellow, is filled with a stench of smoke that refuses not to be present no matter where you turn your nose. When the wind comes from the east the sky reflects a yellow world of burning smells and gray stench.

  Like workers at a Salvation Army outpost, our troop manages the distribution of food and medical supplies. The refugees are broken and pathetic, stringy and filthy, and the task, at once depressing, reinforces an awareness of the waste of war and folly of dictators, tyrants, corrupt politicians. Why has a country like Iraq not marketed its wares and oil reserves, and invested in progress, health, education?

  In mid-April orders come in to pack for the return to Saudi Arabia and we realize, with unbridled joy, that we’re heading home at last. Excused from spending weeks prepping and repainting our vehicles for duty in central Europe, the chore is passed on to others, and our reward for having served as the head of the spear and suffered casualties is that we are moving in the right direction at last.

  At Al Jubail it’s a return to lines at a consolidated mess, to a relentless confusion of dust and traffic jams where zones and roads had never before existed. Army planners (whoever they are, wherever they are) have not overlooked us or lost us to military chaos and seem to be fulfilling the promise to 2nd Cav of being the first out. We seem, at the least, to be on our way, headed for democratic Germany where beer flows with freshness, music plays in cafes, and pretty girls on the street may convey the merest Mona Lisa smiles.

  One breezy sunny afternoon at Al Jubail I hear my name being called and look around to see Dee riding in an open Humvee with his M-16 upright between his legs, giving me a salute…and tapping his arm to acknowledge my added stripes. He’s one person with whom I’d like to sit around and talk, even to discuss battlefield realities and experiences, no matter that leisure continues to be unavailable in Saudi Arabia. When I go looking for him during a free hour, however, I get lost yet again within a nightmare of moving vehicles, lanes, tent complexes, dumps for trash, motor pools, ginned-up athletic fields, open patches of barren desert.

  On tracing the location of his scout platoon through the troop mail clerk, I locate his zone and tent complex only to learn that he’s pulling perimeter guard with other dismount scouts and isn’t due back until after 2000 hours. Nor, on this occasion, is there a tentmate with whom to leave a message.

  Deep within I continue to wonder if I’m infected with PTSD…in response to the lives I took (and the soldier’s heads Dee and I both blew away). I’d like to speak with him as someone who will understand and help with insights of his own. As soldiers who do not work together, might we reduce the pain and doubt, the cloud of images and shadows that are refusing to fade?

  A perk in Saudi Arabia comes in being able to pick up AFN Nuremberg where, as we hear, spring buds have arrived throughout Bavaria. In a note to Lotte I explain that we won’t know a departure date until we’re in line with our gear on the air strip in Dhahran, and that I’ll call as soon as I can on landing in Germany. One more week? Two or three? No one knows, though we keep hearing (not believing) that the army is working to return us to our home bases as quickly as possible.

  “It’s hard to believe we’ve been here and done what we’ve done,” I write to her. “Saddam bit off more than he could chew. We routed the Iraqis like they were conscripted prisoners wearing hand-me-downs. What was he thinking, taking on the U.S. Army? I guess he wasn’t thinking at all, and now hundreds are dead and the place is covered with a stench from carnage caused and self-inflicted.”

  Still again I consider mentioning the trauma with which I’m living, while feeling as before that it will go away in due time and that nothing can be gained by bringing it up. DeMarcus. He remains the lone buddy to whom I might confess my confused thinking…though I don’t know how he feels with a blown-away head on his own conscience. He was, after all, a gangbanger carrying a shank when I met him, and my sense of him changing (under the fierce tutelage of Magdalena von Benschotten) may only be wishful thinking.

  (Magdalena. Hasn’t she been living with a PTSD strain of her own…one she submerges in alcohol and a castigation of U.S. soldiers for racism, ignorance, selfishness? Do we all carry strains of PTSD, given the brutal quirks of history and existence?)

  Symptoms of PTSD

  Reliving: People with PTSD repeatedly relive the ordeal through thoughts and memories of the trauma. These may include flashbacks, hallucinations, and nightmares. They also may feel distress when certain things remind them of the trauma, such as the anniversary date of the event.

  Avoiding: The person may avoid people, places, thoughts, or situations that remind him or her of the trauma. This can lead to feelings of isolation and detachment from family and friends, as well as a loss of interest in activities the person once enjoyed.

  Increased arousal: This includes excessive emotions; problems relating to others, including feeling or showing affection; difficulty falling or staying asleep; irritability; outbursts of anger; difficulty concentrating; and being ‘jumpy’ or easily startled. The person may also suffer physical symptoms such as increased blood pressure and heart rate, rapid breathing, muscle tension, nausea, and diarrhea.

  –WebMD

  The affliction remains with me, I know, though I avoid dwelling on it as much as I can. I suffer daytime distractions, when I can’t help thinking of the brutal waste and horror, and nighttime distractions when I awaken, sweating, in the midst of terrifying reruns of blowing away the heads and lives of sobbing Iraqi soldiers who may or may not have been trying to surrender.

  My personal belief is that the trauma will lessen and all but disappear as time passes and as my life goes on. I
n departure check-outs and inquiries from medics, I always say that I’m doing okay, that I’ll be fine, that I saw some stuff but am leaving it behind. Who wants to self-identify as a weakling who has not been able to process the realities of war?

  Down through the plane’s windows, Germany looks as green as broccoli streaked with sunlight through a silver haze. Red clay courts and swimming pools resemble colorful postage stamps from the plane’s windows, telling on the country’s wealth and its promise of civilization by way of cafes, book stores, green grocers, flower stalls, and fruit stands. The feeling is one of returning home, of revisiting civilization and regaining freedoms that had been taken for granted.

  The stench of death clings to my boots and BDUs, to my heart and craw, however, in a film that has come to cover my eyes. Severed limbs and incinerated bodies insinuate themselves. Tears, terror, irretrievable loss. Heartache. Human blood running red and linking all living creatures. Maybe the stench and the film over my eyes will never go away, as the price to be paid for having played my part in brutal human killing and destruction.

  My feeling as a soldier is of having been used in a game of power…on the way, like all soldiers, to receiving sparse benefits and a tiny pension. Soldiers are a commodity, like fuel oil and laboring muscles. We go on with our lives, receiving scant gratitude, and are quickly forgotten by the many who hardly care. Therapy and triple pensions are what soldiers should receive for killing in struggles of the kind. Therapy that will help us forget while allowing a deeper existence of being able again to inhale and see in greater distances. Not PTSD forever, but vision, creativity, clarity. Strength and self-reliance.

  Unloading on the tarmac in Nuremberg on a sunny spring day has me feeling out-of-body and experiencing double-exposure sensations of relief and happiness and lingering fears of death. On one side, in sunlight, there is new air to breathe. New aromas. Carrying our weighty gear to vans and buses, hundreds of us are soon rolling north into the flowing countryside of Franconia, into the strange and moving familiarity of Bayreuth, Bindlach, Christensen Barracks. Warm weather has been breaking across Europe for weeks. Civilians and dependents are walking on sidewalks and waiting to cross streets. Peace, quiet, cleanliness apart from the trauma and terror most of us are carrying within.

  As on other occasions in the army, one side of me is taking in the air and looking around as if with new eyes, while the other side is trying to reconcile who I am, what I have done, what it all means. Five months in the desert. Using M1A1 weapons of incredible power to destroy equipment, buildings, people. The co-ax machine gun with its irrefutable authority to rip through anything. A dozen Iraqi soldiers dead at my hands on being slow to surrender. A head blown into oblivion on a single spurt from an M-16? The same for DeMarcus, wherever he may be by now. A sensor within that insists on seeing and counting, while I try to ignore the tabulations.

  A Bronze Star will be mine. Bronze Stars are a dime a dozen. Yet they don’t come cheap, not in 2nd Armored Cav. Not if you comprehend what they have to say.

  On base, as on returning from any field exercise, I’ll drop off my gear and walk as soon as I can to the telephone exchange to call Lotte at her job, to make a date to get together as boyfriend and girlfriend, to embrace and weep, drink and talk and take a room at the same side-street hotel. Maybe to sleep deeply at last and leave PTSD behind, awakening after hours of sleep to a spring day with birds chirping.

  Everyday things trigger raw emotions. Near Bindlach where our bus leaves the Autobahn, a young girl is twirling on the grass and rising to ballet positions, to the astonishment of another young girl, who frames her wide eyes in both hands. The girl on her toes is black and swan-like, the other girl white, and I wonder if they are U.S. dependents, or German children hanging out as friends. Or one of each. U.S. children are less restrained in public, and maybe the black girl is German, given that nothing in the world ever remains the same.

  I’m also moved by a man waxing a Mercedes under trees near our approach to Christensen Barracks. He and the many bicyclists, male and female, young and old, pedaling the bike lane adjacent to the sidewalk arouse my emotions. Soldiers on my bus and manifest are wiry, tanned, hungry. The banter is running from hot showers and civvies to beer and real food, to beds and real mattresses, to sleep and clean air. We’re male, we tankers returning from killing and combat, and there is but little banter given to wives, children, girlfriends, as if those objects of visceral devotion are too tenuous to be taken for granted. To lay eyes on a wife or a daughter, a son after five months in a world of extinction and loss…what personal comfort or food item can match the pull of someone whose eyes will tell who you had been and who you hope once more to be?

  On stepping down from the bus, our contingent is met by American and German wives, by children out of school, by hugging, kissing, crying all around. With other underage soldiers who don’t have dependents, sidestepping with our gear, we encounter one after another teary-eyed NCO wife, seeing that we have no one to greet us, offering handshakes and “Welcome home” nods from glistening eyes. It comes to me that these are the people who sent packages with candy bars, stationery, playing cards, and cigarettes, and in passing, I shake hands with pre-teen girls and boys who half-bow and smile, youngsters hardly removed from my age who treat me like a grown-up, aware (more than other civilians will be) of where I’ve been and what I’ve done in my time away and in my earning of a Bronze Star soon to be awarded.

  Lotte cries with uncontrolled happiness when I get her on the phone, as we agree to meet in three hours, at the end of her work day, to spend the evening together talking, eating, drinking, and the night together in the hotel in Bindlach.

  When I ask, “Can you do that? What about your parents? We don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I’ve been thinking how pleasant it would be to sleep in a feather bed with a goose-down comforter…in a nice hotel…with you.”

  “We shall, of course,” she says. “I will telephone and explain to my father, who knows full well that we are a couple.”

  Walking on post with time to kill, I discover that I’m comforted (and vaguely frightened, as in a dream) by Lotte’s remark about being a couple. It’s reassuring to have someone to look forward to seeing, someone who is as anxious to see me as I am to see her. What I’ll do, I think, is proceed with her with a smile on my face. We’ll talk things out, make whatever plans we wish to make, have a chance to catch our breath before doing anything irreversible.

  Visiting the PX for toilet articles, I meander into the commissary, where I find myself making a spontaneous decision to shed my prior self and the stench of war and PTSD I’ve acquired. My decision is to start life over in new clothes as a new person. In anticipation of meeting Lotte, I buy: A western-style sports coat the color of sand with suede wings on the shoulders, a madras shirt presenting oranges, apples, green leaves, straight-legged Levi jeans, and western boots with leather heels that trigger an urge to kick and dance that I’ve never felt before. To tap my toes and high-step to loud music, to twirl Lotte in an imaginary flaring skirt like a girl from Montana or Idaho. To celebrate being nineteen and more profoundly alive than ever before. To be not a soldier for now, but an American cowboy ever true to being different in an American way.

  Carrying my purchases to my barracks, taking my time shaving and showering before dressing and buttoning in my room, I return to the latrine to see in the mirror before me a more mature person…not a desert-tanned soldier in civvies from Southie but a cowboy from the Red River Valley, from Wild West movies where bullets are made of putty and splat not blood but paint. From the Big Rock Candy Mountain, where streams of alky-hol are trickling down the rocks and Lotte and I are perspiring with strength and vitality and an impending visit to her core as well as to my own.

  Of a mind to keep things as quietly contented as they were in the past, we rendezvous at the Gasthaus where we first got together. I arrive ahead of time, waiting in the foyer, and skinny Lotte appears at the appointed time. We smil
e, embrace, kiss, laugh, and weep a bit, have second looks at each other as if to be certain, while her first words are that I look tanned and handsome despite having lost a lot of weight.

  I can only grin and feel flattered that she notices things about me that I’ve hardly noticed myself. I have lost weight. Who wouldn’t, living on MREs and Tabasco sauce for weeks? Who would notice but a mother…or a girlfriend? “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me since the last time I saw you,” I say, wrapping her into a strong embrace and feeling rushes of affection and desire.

  “I have a girlfriend!” I tell her, meaning to convey more than what the words are saying.

  So it is, with more smiling, an arm around her tiny waist, and a spontaneous kiss on her cheek, that we proceed through the door and along the sidewalk, having for the moment no destination other than the balance of our unformed, immature lives.

  There’s no dancing on my homecoming night (we’re unable to find a dance floor), though our time together is warm and loving, marked by embraces, laughter and teasing, confessions and avowals, a warm hotel comforter and excessive warm shower water (within which to embrace her tiny naked physique), plus an array of food items at breakfast in the dining room (the hotel is shockingly expensive!) meant, it seems, for kings and queens. After breakfast it’s back to the comforter, to deep sleeping, and back into gushing shower water on the way to checking out by noon, on the way to parting on a promise to meet two days later, when responsibilities and jobs have been clarified and managed.