by David Poyer
Rice? Cabbage? Oh, for the Korean units. “Um, roger. Bagged rice, cabbage, cigarettes, small-arms ammo. I’ll get Hermelinda and Ollie on that, over.”
“There’s fighting ahead. TF 76 will be in the thick of it. Oh, and I sent you some Army point defense. For that keyhole problem. But … can I depend on you? Are you ready for sea? Over.”
For just the fraction of a moment she considered telling him they were undermanned. They needed a bottom strip and repaint. Their combat systems software was half-done and untested. Now she was taking the risks, not he.
“Yes, Admiral,” she said firmly, pressing the button with a suddenly desperately itchy finger. “We are ready for sea.”
4
Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina
THE Booger Squad had been marching all night. Up and down the rolling hills, through dead, crackling marsh grass. Splashing through cold water. Under icy clouds, buffeted by gusts of rain and bitter wind. Breaking into a staggering, lurching double time whenever they emerged onto the beach, to the crash of Atlantic waves. The shortest man, at the end, kept staggering, then catching himself just before he fell. Occasionally one of the others would drop back and pull him forward. Shouting into his ear, “Keep going, Ramos! You gotta keep up, man. Grab the drum if you have to. Let us drag you.”
Hector Ramos shook himself back into consciousness. Tried to remember where he was. What he was. To keep his rifle pointed toward the threat. But he kept sliding off into sleep. Staggering, losing his grip on the ropes that lashed him to their shared misery, their black, unendurable, hellish burden.
Back to the Line.
* * *
THE long low building is set back from the highway behind chain link topped by sparkling concertina wire. This early the mist from the bay lies over it, softening the angles of blue-and-white-painted concrete block, cooling towers, and boiler smokestacks in the main plant and the by-products plant. The morning light plays in bronze and rose and lavender through the white plumes of smoke and steam the exhaust fans expel, rising toward a light blue sky where seagulls soar and wheel.
But a disquieting stench of burnt feathers, manure, and ammonia breathes through the old Kia’s heater as seventeen-year-old Hector nears the plant. A whine begins under the hood. When he turns the wheel to swing into the lot, a vicious knocking throbs. The guard ducks to peer in, then waves him on. A sparkly rosary and a laminated picture of a dark-haired, sloe-eyed girl sway from Hector’s rearview. He heads for the corner that gets shade from one of the few trees. He doesn’t have the money to fix the car, or the credit to buy a better one, so he just parks, and hoists the rusty door back into place so it can latch, if not actually lock.
He follows the other arriving shift employees through the front guard shack and out back to receiving. He stalks tensely up the ramp into the rear loading area, past the idling line of trucks, nodding to Sazi and Fernando. Checking out of the corners of his eyes for Mahmou’, but the Arab isn’t in yet. Relieved, Hector sighs and punches in with his employee card.
The Line starts here, though it’s still early, so it isn’t moving yet. Dozens of trucks wait grille to tailgate, engines rumbling, diesel-smoke drifting up to join the mist. The drivers slouch by the ramp, jeans sagging on their hips, smoking and talking. They’re Peruvian, Salvadoran, Mexican. There were Haitians here when Hector hired on, but they made trouble over wages and one day were all gone. Desaparecido, though probably not in the way the Salvadorans mean. Yellow plastic modules flecked with curling down are stacked on the tractor trailers, twenty to twenty-five birds to a cell. A forklift will slide them off onto the conveyor. Hector walks past the door to his own cage, past José, his foreman, who’s studying a seagull with a broken wing, which is watching him hopefully from below on the loading dock.
But Hector doesn’t go in yet. Instead he heads back to the break room and puts the bag lunch his mother packed into the fridge. He fidgets in front of the drink machine, studying prices, then the buttons. Numbers puzzle him. He can add, but it takes time. If someone interrupts, he has to start over. The TV’s on. A fat white man with a comb-over is talking about Mexicans. They sneak over the border and anchor themselves with babies. They draw relief and don’t work. They sell drugs, rape, and kill. The camera pans to his audience. They’re chanting something Ramos can’t make out, shaking placards. The television shows a wall in a desert. Hector recalls that desert, but he doesn’t remember a wall.
The news changes to the war. Hector watches explosions, aircraft. He pushes sleeves up on thin arms. Dark, raised scars, like vines of poison ivy on a tree, run from the backs of his hands to above the elbows.
He’s pushing coins into the machine one at a time, counting aloud, when another teen bounces in, bony, wiry, dark, with high cheekbones and a tattoo on the side of his neck. “Ay, Hector!” Mahmou’ calls. “How is that hot little Mirielle? You get in her sweet pants yet?”
Hector flinches. The machine whirs, thunks, and disgorges a can. Almost too fast to see, the other boy snatches it. Hector lunges, but the other holds it away teasingly. He takes a long swallow, then upends it over a plastic-lined trash bin and lets it gurgle away. Flips him the empty, and slaps his back.”Got to be faster next time, ’migo. That is what I am training you for, the speed. You are not fast, you will not last. Not in the Cage.”
Outside a bell clangs long and loud, echoing. Motors begin powering up. A metallic crashing begins, underlain by an electric hum. When Hector steps out of the break room he has to jump back to avoid the polished prongs of a forklift. He hurries across gray-painted concrete, following Mahmou’, who pulls a pair of nylons from his back pocket and draws them up over his hands.
In the Hanging Room a long chain of stainless hooks sways, tinkling faintly, almost like music. Dozens of upside-down U’s of heavy, polished stainless metal, each just long enough to trap a man’s hand within. The chain passes through a vertical slot in the concrete wall to their right. Slot, wall, and floor are spattered with a brownish-black crust inches thick. The kill lines run faster than the eviscerating lines, two lines diverging into four, with the kill lines at 180 units a minute and the eviscerating lines at 90 or so. Hector stamps heavy steeltoes, testing his footing. The men fit goggles over their eyes. They pull on thin gloves, or, like Mahmou’, women’s nylons over their lower arms.
“Ready?” José, the production foreman growls, his single hand on the light switch. He lost the other in an ice-grinding machine. Without waiting for an answer from the men ranged tensely along the line of glittering hooks, like runners poised for the gun, he jerks down the heavy knife switch. The lights douse, then reignite a deep carmine red.
With a prolonged, grinding rattle, then a clashing metallic clanging, the Line surges into motion.
* * *
HECTOR came back sputtering, choking, cold seawater splashing his face, light dazzling his eyes. He blinked up into the Hat’s flashlight.
“Get the hell up, yoohoo!” the drill instructor screamed into his face. “Now, chickenhead. Get him on his feet. Get that rifle alert to the dirt! You point that thing at me again, I’m gonna personally kick you to Korea!”
They jerked him up on his boots. Sand grated in his MARPATs. For two hours that night they’d carried logs through the surf, trying to build a bridge out to an island. Burdened the entire time with the unendurable weight DI Brady had saddled them with. The DI thought them too weak to be in his Corps. Because they were pansies and good Army material and not trying hard enough, he’d torn up their stress cards and decided that wherever they went, even during the Crucible, the final hours of hell that marked the climax of boot camp, the Booger Squad would carry, in addition to their combat gear, a full fifty-five-gallon drum of water. A clumsy, four-hundred-pound, impossible-to-grip burden that after the first hour they would have traded instantly for a cross and a crown of thorns.
Boot camp in peacetime, the DIs told them, had been twelve weeks. In World War II, Korea I, Vietnam
, and now this war, it had been shortened. A special Corps good deal, so they could get to the best part of being a Marine: killing the enemy. The Booger Squad got everyone who bilged from other platoons. The men and women with ankle injuries, or who were too fat, not aggressive enough with the pugil sticks, who couldn’t get over the obstacles. Hector’s problem, aside from slow arithmetic, was that he couldn’t swim. Whenever his head went under, he panicked. He flailed around, choking, and had to be hauled out by the scruff.
Which Bleckford was doing now, hauling him along by the scruff. His fellow recruit had to be far beyond the peacetime body-fat standards, Bleckford was stupid, Bleckford never could come up with the right answer when the Hat started in on him. Yet his yard-wide ass was usually ahead of Hector on the confidence courses, balance beams, log runs. Squirming through muddy ditches with barbed wire hanging slack over them, waiting to snag their rifle barrels, helmets, their uniforms, coated with slick Carolina mud like the chocolate shell on an ice-cream bar.
“Ramos!” The Hat, right next to him, double-timing like he always did while the recruits were dragging one boot after the other. The man was inexhaustible. Relentless. Could see in the dark like a cat. Knew everything. Could curse in Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Had fought in Iraq, been wounded in Afghanistan. “That rifle points at a forty-five-degree angle to the direction of movement. It does not point at the back of the trooper ahead of you. It does not point at the ground. It does not do any good pointing at the ground, like your dick! Ramos! What are the characteristics of the Chinese standard rifle round?”
Hector stumbled over his boots, searching a fatigue-erased brain. Words reached his tongue by reflex, without any thought process. “Sir! The DB 95 cartridge has a 64-grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of three thousand feet per second. Sir!”
“When fired from what?”
“Sir! When fired from a Type 95 rifle with a rate of 650 rounds per minute in full automatic fire. Sir!”
“Bleckford! What is the cost of the standard Chinese rifle round?”
A hoarse, tired bark. “Sir! Uh … This … recruit … does not know the cost of the Chinese, uh, whatever you said. Sir.”
“You dumbass Detroit bullet stopper … the Chinese rifle round costs a yuan and a half. A yuan is worth ten cents. So that’s fifteen cents. Evans! How much does it cost the Corps to train you?”
“Sir, this recruit—”
“Louder, goddamn it. I can’t hear you!”
“Sir, this recruit does not know—”
“Shut the fuck up! It costs the United States Marine Corps a million dollars to train each of you meatheads. It costs the People’s Liberation Army fifteen cents to kill you. How in the name of Christ are we going to win this fucking war? Ramos, tell me.”
“Sir, this recruit is going to have to kill a shitload of Chinese, sir!”
“At last, he makes sense. Are you a fucking Christian, Ramos?”
“No, sir. I’m a Catholic, sir!”
Brady screamed into his right ear, “What is this ‘I’? There is no fucking ‘I’ in my Marine Corps, chickenhead!”
“Sir, this recruit is a Catholic!” Ramos screamed back, stripping his throat raw. “Sir!”
“Do you love all men, Ramos?”
“Sir, this recruit tries to, sir!”
“Do you love me, Ramos?”
“Sir, this recruit loves the drill instructor as a sinful piece of human shit, sir!”
Brady put his face close in the dark and snarled, “Barely acceptable, Ramos. Just barely. But do you love the Chinese, Recruit? That’s what you sad little motherfuckers are going to have to figure out. Or do you hate them, like, enough to blow their fucking guts all over the dirt and stamp on them?”
“I hate the—”
His helmet rang so hard he reeled in his boots. He bit back a gasp. “Sir, this recruit hates the fucking Chinese, Drill Instructor.”
Brady lifted his arms and howled, “I am here to bring clarity into your benighted universe, fools! To force you to gaze into the abyss of your fucking empty souls!” The howl faded to a mad chuckle, ominous in the dark against the dull thudding of boots, the dull clink of gear, the dull slosh of water in the drum, the dull exhausted gasps of the recruits, the dull crash of waves on sand. “There’ll be no stress cards and no safe words in Korea. Triple the size of the Corps, they said. So we get sandblowers, transdragons, shitforbrains, chickenplucking yardbirds. The bitched-up scrape of every fucked-up abortion. Every waddling, slowpaced, lefthanded, non-English-speaking, obese, wrong-eye-dominant Cat Five … pick up the pace, assholes! Tide’s a-comin’ in, gotta beat it before we drown. Ramos! Bleckford! Breuer! Conlin! Schultz! Evans! Vincent! Let’s hear it back there, ladies! Titcomb! Count, cadence, count!”
A deep Alabama voice foghorned,
“When ah slid out of mah mama’s womb,
Ah foun’ mahself in a delivery room.
All bloody an’ wet ah rappelled to the floor,
Cut mah umbilical an’ crawled to the doah.”
Wheezing, panting, struggling up sand hills and down, Hector Ramos blacked out and on again like a faulty computer. Sometimes he regained consciousness on his feet, sometimes on his knees. Sometimes carrying the drum, sometimes being dragged along. Even being dragged, his eyelids drooped closed.
Taking him back to the Line.
* * *
WITH a prolonged, grinding rattle, the chain of stainless hooks surges into motion. They sway back, then forward as they accelerate. They precess along without end, one every second.
An aluminum door folds open with a grating rattle, revealing one of the yellow plastic modules. Shoulder to shoulder, the men reach deep into it for the birds, which mill around furiously, squawking and flapping clipped wings. Hector flips one upside down, facing him, so it can’t shit on him. Inverted, the bird suddenly goes quiet. Hector spins. As one of the U’s approaches, he hooks the bird’s claws dexterously into the wire loops. Hanging upside down in the shackles, struggling only a little, the bird is carried out of sight through the slot in the wall. Another follows it, hooked in by Mahmou’, then another by Joju.
Then comes a seagull, struggling wildly upside down in the shackles, its broken wing hanging down to drag on the dirty floor. José barks a mad laugh and holds up his right arm, wagging his stump at the boys. Then come two more chickens, hooked in by Fernando and Sazi.
Then an unfaltering, unbroken stream of upside-down birds leaves the Hanging Room as the team settles into a rhythm, bending, grabbing, straightening, in a flurry of feathers, cursing, cackling, scratching, the hum and clash of steel in the deep red light. Hector gets a deep scratch from a poorly clipped beak, and blood streams down his arm, mixing with the shit from the birds. He keeps his fingers clear of the shackle as he hooks each chicken. The Line does not stop. If he gets caught, he’ll go through the wall along with the poultry. Into the Kill Room, where the pre-stunner stiffens them with direct current so they don’t move as a hydraulic blade snicks through their throats. Then the post-stunner, where a different current keeps their hearts beating, the blood pumping out, as they circle over vats. Then on to the scalding area, the picker, eviscerating line, unloader.
After chilling for seventy-five minutes they slide down stainless chutes polished to a mirror-finish by the carcasses. Only a few drops of pinkish fluid now ooze from the pimpled skin. Women pull the units off the ramp and impale them on tapered stainless stakes. Holding her knife tightly, so it doesn’t slip, each slices off the ribbon of fat that circles the back of the unit. Seizes it with her left hand, tears it free, and without looking drops it on the conveyor to go to another area of the plant. Then turns, to face the next unit, and the next.
There are many lines and processes, deboning, whole bird, grading, cut up. All the lines run at different speeds, but no one can stop. Five minutes’ break every hour. Half an hour for lunch.
Around them, the drone and snarl of machinery, shouts, the pulsing whir of exhaust fans, th
e mutter of propane-driven forklifts bustling cartons of flensed flesh to the freezers. Brown faces, black, now and then the wrinkled visage of an older white. Above, looking down from their offices, the bosses. Walking between the machines, the supers and foremen. And the clattering endless whine of the Line echoes from the high ceiling, stainless, reinforced with steel mesh, greased with fat and blood. But the chicken is cheap in the bright red packages with cheerful, friendly Farmer Seth, lanky and white-bearded, smiling from the plastic wrapping.
Hector always thought he looked not all that different, really, from Uncle Sam.
* * *
THE Hats weren’t supposed to kick recruits, but somebody was kicking him. Hector came to clutching his gut and retching. He was curled at the bottom of a dune. The drum lay on top of him, and Brady was talking into the radio he wore on his belt. “Follow here. Got a casualty.”
“Get ’em all back here, ASAP,” the radio buzzed. Hector recognized the gravelly voice. It was the Heavy Hat, the second-to-senior drill instructor, who gave the junior Hats their orders. There were others above him, the officers, but only distantly glimpsed, unimaginable. “Shortest route, double time. They got a load, ditch it. Get ’em back to the Grinder. Out.”
Shouting above him. Hands, hoisting. The grating of the drum lifting from his legs, then the crackling hiss of it rolling off over the brittle grass. He kicked and feeling returned to his legs. Bleckford’s big soft mitts set him gently upright. Without the burden of the drum he felt ready to float up into the night. Like Jesus, ascending into the clouds in the holy pictures. They broke into double time, toward yellowish lights that suddenly winked on. Back to the Grinder.
* * *
THEY’D glimpsed the Senior only a few times during training. Usually standing off to one side, observing silently, his swagger stick locked behind him. Tall, thin, rugged. His dark face both severe and somehow compassionate, he looked across the heaving sea of recruits and DIs like God himself brooding over the sufferings of mortal men. From time to time his gaze sought one or another of the instructors, and a lifted chin or beckon of the stick would gesture him or her over. He’d called Brady over more than once. No one had heard what passed between them, but their DI had seemed subdued when he returned. Though unfortunately never for long.