Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  Since Chris’s exodus, our squad has become a revolving door for soldiers. Take Alpha team: Joel, one of our original members, left when he became the company medic. Cola, the guy who replaced Joel, later joined the sniper section with Chris. Cola was then replaced by Johnny-O, a big Irish lug of a guy who, unfortunately, is now the butt of most of the squad’s jokes, some of which he deserves, some of which he doesn’t. The other two members of Alpha team are Anthony and Juan, two soldiers from my original company whom I’ve known for years. They are led by Kirk, an excitable firefighter from the Bronx, who uses the term “big titties” at least five times a day. Kirk has attention deficit disorder so bad that it’s virtually impossible to have a conversation with him about anything for more than six seconds, unless it’s about sex, preferably including the phrase “big titties.” Here’s a fictitious but plausible conversation:

  “Hey, J, who’s that package you got from?”

  “Just from a friend of mine, this girl I know in New Paltz.”

  “Oh yeah? Were you fuckin’ her? Does she have big titties?”

  “What? Dude, she’s married and I’m friends with her husb—”

  “Oh yeah? I love big titties. I was chatting with this girl online last night. Damn, she had”—he then pauses for a split second to reflect—“BIG TITTIES! They were like”—he bites his lower lip and cups his hands out in front of his chest in mock mammaelia—“bam! Out there, and shit! I was like, yeah!”

  Kirk is like the unapologetically two-dimensional co-starring character from your typical romantic comedy who acts as a foil to the protagonist. As human beings go, he’s a study done during god’s drunken ham-fisted chiaroscuro period. On one side, he’s incredibly caustic: He’s rude as hell to all Iraqis and won’t hesitate to put a barrel in the face of anyone with a name he can’t pronounce. He loves to yell for yelling’s sake and becomes legendarily ecstatic with assumed rage anytime he finds any garbage or clutter in our living area. And he generally treats lower-ranked troops with totally unwarranted disdain and contempt. His preoccupations with sex, big titties, and homophobia are near pathological. But the other side of this prurient and churlish brute is a very genuine nature, and he can be unassumingly affectionate, friendly, and inclusive. With Kirk, you always know what you’re getting. He’s completely free of guile and utterly upfront with everyone. His loyalty and forthrightness are like that of a dog you’ve had since you were five, who seems never to get tired of viciously barking at everything one moment, then the next, chasing his own tail and humping all your friends’ legs.

  Originally, Bravo team, the team I lead, had as its SAW gunner a young kid named Peter. He had a bad reputation with his original company for being a bit of a shitbag. He seemed to me to be somewhat unfairly picked on, and I believed I could easily rehabilitate him. He was egotistical and self-assured and ultimately turned out to be a defeatist shitbag. Somehow he managed to catch narcolepsy during training and get tagged as nondeployable. Before you tell me how narcolepsy is not contagious, understand that he was borderline enough to enlist but was able to use his condition as an out when it suited him. I tried really hard with this kid, and he made an ass of me. I tried to be understanding, but all it did was give me a reputation for being soft. Throughout training he was having trouble with his unfaithful teenage fiancée and wanted nothing more than to not deploy. But the song he sang was all about how badly he wanted to go into combat with his team and never let us down. Everyone told me I was wasting my time trying to help him, and I hate that they proved me right. Note to future soldiers: get your priorities straight before you join the Army. Your job is to fight, usually far away from your nubile girlfriend, and if that doesn’t work for you, don’t fucking enlist. Oh, and don’t count on her being faithful either. You won’t be, so why do you expect her to be?

  Peter was replaced by Orlando, another guy I’ve known for years. Orlando is one of these guys who always seems to be in a good mood. I love this guy. He likes to watch I Love Lucy DVDs and has a collection of animated Disney and Disneyesque DVDs that would make your kids jealous. He’s also a guy you can always count on to bring porn to the field. He’s not the most articulate guy, but his heart is in the right place, something that goes a long way with me. The thing that most of the other guys in the platoon don’t know about Orlando is how he used to be a real badass back in his days growing up on the Lower East Side. Orlando has been in the Army for over twenty years now and was recently promoted to sergeant. Normally, you need to be in a sergeant slot to get the promotion, but his promotion was one of the kind where you just get promoted because you’ve been in the military for so long, or something like that. I have no idea how this is possible, but regardless, my SAW gunner is the same rank as me.

  One of my riflemen is Matt. He looks a lot like me, tall and thin, brown hair and eyes, and he is a paramedic in Poughkeepsie in real life. Matt is intelligent and level-headed, and his medical skills are an invaluable (and comforting) asset. But he’s former Air Force and has a real penchant for doing his own thing while flaunting his disdain for military regulations, particularly about the wear of the uniform (such as having the pockets removed from the front of his blouse and sewn onto the arms like some fucking Delta Force operative). I’d say that Matt is an exceptional soldier other than the fact that he doesn’t know his place. He has single-handedly made a good part of this deployment utterly miserable for me with his condescending self-importance and self-righteousness. I’ve tried reasoning with him and I’ve tried smoking him. But he still manages to act like he’s a five-star general by always having his hands in everything: he attends op orders; he automatically makes himself the platoon spokesman anytime we meet other units while out on missions; the way he wears his uniform and gear makes him look like he’s in the Special Forces to the degree that he’s even managed to con the first sergeant into giving him his 9mm Beretta. And he gets away with it because he’s part of the good ol’ boy club, where people like our platoon sergeant are referred to as “Mike.” In this regard, he’s a team leader’s nightmare. But despite how much his attitude infuriates me and how much he undermines my authority, and the chain of command in general, I really can’t see the point in spending much energy to make him stop trying to be an effective soldier. If I really wanted to, I could squash this behavior altogether (at least that’s what I tell myself), but I’d rather have my energy and his energy spent on more productive activities than infighting, so I permit most of it, despite how much he sometimes makes me want to pull all my hair out.

  Up until a few weeks ago, Dan was a rifleman on my team, but he has since been promoted to sergeant and is now a team leader in another squad. Peter and I used to mockingly but affectionately refer to Dan as the “infantry wizard,” because of how much knowledge he has about being an infantryman. But he was accustomed to acting as a team leader and resented that he had to be led by someone less experienced than him. This made my job very difficult because he is one of the grumpiest people I’ve ever known. He would make it his job to show me up or correct me publicly whenever possible. In the Army, they call this “sharpshooting.” He and I had a talk about this early on, at Fort Drum, and he slowly got better about it. Now that he’s finally an NCO, his demeanor is remarkably more amiable. He strikes me as bipolar. When he’s in a good mood, he’s one of my favorite people to be around. He’s a bit of a geek about things, like I am, and he loves to tinker and figure stuff out, and we’ve had a lot of really good conversations. He’s incredibly observant and resourceful and has a natural talent for soldiering. But when he’s grumpy, he’s a fucking troll. The fact that he’s short, with a really broad build, adds to his trollness. His gait is even CroMagnon-like. Were it a few hundred years ago, he would most likely be carrying a battle-ax and have a long braided beard.

  And this brings us to Cesar. Cesar has always reminded me of the character in the Looney Tunes cartoons who insists he’s a chicken hawk. (“I’m not a chicken! I’m a chicken hawk!”) He’s a
diminutive Dominican firecracker who walks with his elbows back and his chest puffed out like a red-breasted robin trying to attract a mate. When he first came to our unit in the city, he was barely seventeen and had an arrogance and bravado that only the truly Napoleonic can achieve. He made his distaste for Caucasians readily known and directed a lot of his contempt toward me. (This was back when Willy and I were the only white soldiers in our company.) He was the rank of E-1 at the time, and I was an E-4. The first time I ever had to pull rank and put a soldier in his place was with Cesar. But that was a long time ago, and he’s since grown immeasurably, due largely in part to having Willy as his team leader.

  Up until the point where Cesar joined my team, he’d been in Third Platoon as Willy’s SAW gunner and protégé. Cesar’s development has been rapid and noticeable. All the hard work and tough love of turning him into a soldier from the unruly little fucker he was less than a year ago is something that I think Willy can be really proud of. I’m stoked as hell to finally have a soldier who is both worth a damn and can follow instructions. I don’t really deserve him, I’m just riding Willy’s coattails in having developed a good troop.

  Willy and Cesar’s platoon sergeant was our former platoon sergeant back in our home unit in the city. He’s a black city cop with an Italian first name and an Irish last name whose best talent is his ability to employ his argumentative and combative nature to get what he wants through coercion. Think Denzel Washington’s character in Training Day, but played by someone who looks like Wesley Snipes. His resemblance to Snipes is so uncanny, in fact, that we’ve taken to calling him “Daywalker” behind his back. His bullheadedness is unrivaled. Between Willy’s stubbornness, my smart mouth, and our utter inseparability, Willy and I were public enemies number one with Daywalker back in the city. Before we deployed, a drill never went by during which we weren’t being disciplined by this guy for some petty offense, usually in the form of him publicly pulling us aside or into his office for a private ass-chewing.

  Daywalker’s grudge against Willy didn’t diminish a bit just because I wasn’t with him anymore. And once chicken hawk Cesar got added to the mix, things really started to simmer in their platoon. Willy has already gotten four negative counseling statements from Daywalker since the deployment began, not to mention countless verbal confrontations. And the acrimony toward Daywalker is not only from Willy and Cesar. Almost everyone in their platoon now has an ax to grind with him. But one day, Cesar had had enough and decided to put his manuscript where his mouth was.

  That day, on the Third Platoon dry-erase scheduling board, Daywalker found taped a letter addressed to him from “a soldier.” In it was a list of his deficiencies that read like a cargo manifest. After two handwritten pages of his being slapped in the face with the journalistic equivalent of John Holmes’s cock, the real stinger was the last line—a reminder that we all knew his original job in the Army and that at his core he’d always be a pogue, probably the most subtle but egregious of insults against a grunt: “To us, you’ll always be Supply.”

  This of course warranted a witch hunt in Third Platoon. Day-walker interviewed each soldier individually. Cesar eventually admitted to it without too much arm-twisting. My guess is he really wanted Daywalker to know he’d done it, in that Jack-Nicholson-in-A-Few-Good-Men kind of way. (“Did you order the code red!” “YOU’RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!”)

  Justice was swift. Cesar got a one-way ticket out of Third Platoon and an Article 15, which included a one-time loss-of-pay and demotion from specialist to private first-class. The irony about the timing of the Article 15 is that Cesar, while on a raid only a few days earlier, had distinguished himself while under fire and arguably saved Willy’s life.

  ALL HAIL WILLY! THAT BASTARD! FINALE

  Willy’s mother is dying. She has cancer, and it has moved to her lungs. What especially sucks about his mother dying is that his grandmother, whom he had shared an apartment with in the Bronx for years, also passed away during this deployment. His grandmother, the tiniest cute little old lady, who couldn’t have weighed more than eighty-five pounds, seemed to always be sitting in her recliner—engulfed by her recliner would better describe it—watching TV, flipping channels, looking like a delicate sculpture more than a person. Until she spoke. From that tiny throat came a voice so enormous it was like a kick in the shins for your having dared think she might be feeble. “WILLY! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? DO YOU WORK TONIGHT?” (She was always very interested in where Willy was going and when he planned on being home and whether or not he was going to take it easy on the alcohol.) The first time I heard her speak, I think my fight-or-flight response kicked in, and if I had known karate I would have popped into a fighting stance. I was like, Holy shit! Where the fuck did that voice come from! Jesus! I think I just crapped my pants a little bit!

  The evening she died, she had complained of a cough, and Willy’s parents were going to take her to see a doctor in the morning. She sat down at the dining room table in a chair she never normally sat in, then apparently just gave up the ghost. She was eighty-nine. I’ve always been fascinated by the way she passed. To me it seemed dignified. It’s like she knew she was about to die, so she said to herself, Well, I guess I’d better sit down for this.

  When I first moved to New York City, I was a bit apprehensive about my new National Guard unit. I knew it would most likely be populated with city kids who had grown up on the streets, who were tough in ways that a mewling suburbanite like me could never convincingly have replicated. And although I had been to infantry school, I hadn’t done any real infantry work in years and was a little nervous that I wouldn’t remember the battle drills properly.

  The groups that soldiers hang out in tend to be divided down racial lines, so when I arrived it was basically assumed that I’d hang out with Willy since he was the only other white guy. The platoon was mostly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, with a handful of bruthas and the occasional random ethnicity like Moroccan, Guyanese, or Venezuelan. One of the first things Willy told me when I met him was, “Yo, I didn’t show up last drill. I didn’t call the first sergeant or anything. Oh well. Fuck it.” He told me this while we were smoking in front of the armory on Lexington Avenue, hiding out from whatever was going on at the moment. I remember thinking, Okay, this guy is a shitbag, I need to find someone else to hang out with before this guy gets me in trouble. I was in a slight panic thinking that I’d just shown up at a new unit and was already shamming out of work and associating with this lazy bastard.

  But once Willy was in the field, he was an entirely different animal. The guy was hardworking, tough, and a clear thinker. For one of my first drills, our platoon went up against some West Point cadets. We were in the rocky wooded training area at Camp Smith, New York, in a standard defensive perimeter, and the cadets were an assaulting element, or OPFOR, as they’re called in training, for “opposing force.” I remember Willy had set up some early-warning devices outside our perimeter consisting of tin cans and a trip-wired chem light, something that is perfectly natural to want to employ, but I would never have thought to do it. I was so concerned with following plain-vanilla doctrine as closely as possible, while Willy was thinking in terms of practicality. Before this drill he was just some portly rookie cop from the Bronx with an Irish last name that I could never seem to remember how to pronounce. But after seeing how he worked in the field, I became immediately attached to him. I remember thinking that as long as I stuck by this guy, I’d always be safe. I was doing my best to hide the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing on so many different levels—as an infantryman, as a New Yorker, and (to be perfectly honest) as a man. I had moved to New York City several months after my relationship with Heather came to its indescribably horrific end, and the only way I’d been able to cope with it all had been to strip everything away from my life except the most basic elements of myself and start over. There’s no better place than New York City to reinvent yourself, and the solidness that was Willy could not have been better
timed at that point in my life.

  I think it was George Carlin who said he never really understood prayer. He said when people pray, they basically are just telling god all the things they want. He said it would make more sense if you told what you wanted to someone like Joe Pesci, because Joe Pesci seemed like someone who could get things done. I don’t pray and I don’t know Joe Pesci, but I’ll tell you what, Willy knows how to get things done.

  When the Red Cross message came through about his mom dying, Willy was granted emergency leave to return to the United States. Normally the trip from Iraq to the United States is this three-day ordeal, but Willy managed to do it in twenty-one hours, despite numerous obstacles. Here’s the compressed version of the story:

  Willy pulls a guard shift from midnight to 3:00 a.m. Goes to bed but can’t sleep, so watches Die Hard. Falls asleep around 5:30 a.m. Is woken up at 6:15 a.m., told that the Red Cross message has come through. Catches a ride to the Balad Air Base at 9:30 a.m. Sits in traffic as an enormous convoy slowly makes its way through the gate. (Think traffic jams suck? Try being stuck in traffic worrying about being blown up or shot.) Finally makes it to the airport, but the base gets hit with mortar fire, impacting right in front of him near the airstrip. His flight indefinitely delayed, he makes friends with some pilots and plays a game of whiffle ball with them while they wait for air traffic to be restored. Mentions his predicament, which is overheard by a lieutenant colonel. Next thing he knows, he’s on an empty C-17 by 2:00 p.m. with some pilots bound for training in Germany. (He was supposed to get a flight in the morning to Kuwait.) Lands in Germany at 6:30 p.m. The logistics rep tells him he can catch a flight to JFK in the morning. Screw that. Notices some soldiers on their way to Atlanta for R&R. Unsurprisingly, he talks his way onto the flight, but is told he’ll have to pay his own way to New York. Right, whatever. Is told to check in at 3:00 a.m. Drinks three German beers, returns to his room to shower and get ready, but is more drunk than expected and instead passes out on the bed. His infantryman’s internal alarm clock goes off and he wakes up on the floor at 3:45 a.m. (he does this for some reason when he’s drunk—sleeps on the floor). Freaks out, runs to the terminal but finds to his relief that boarding doesn’t begin until 6:00 a.m. Notices he’s hungover. Gets on the flight and sleeps through most of it. Once in Atlanta, uses his Jedi gift for bullshitting to convince the Delta ticket guy that he was supposed to be on a flight to New York. The Delta guy diligently finds a “fund code” to pay for the flight. Visits the USO in the airport. He’s still wearing body armor, so attracts a lot of attention. Patiently answers questions from well-wishers despite a splitting headache. Has a conversation with a Special Forces guy who says twelve-month complacency-inducing deployments are too long. At the ticket counter, is upgraded to first class (bear in mind that he never paid for this flight). Has a stiff Jack and Coke and passes out in the plush leather seat. Lands in New York and from the airport goes straight to the hospital, where his mother nearly goes crazy when she sees him.