by David Abrams
12
Arrow
We’ll admit we’re men of flaws. What infantry company, corporate office, university teaching staff or night-shift crew at McDonald’s isn’t made up of imperfect people?
Looking at us marching across Baghdad, risking death to attend a funeral, you might think we’re great men on a brave mission: poster-worthy heroes with brass balls and solid-gold hearts.
But you’d be wrong. We are fucked up and flawed.
Take Arrow, for instance. He doesn’t get along with his parents. In fact, he hates them.
It’s not like they beat him as a child, or were alcoholics, or loved his sisters more than him. But there was a determined indifference tainting the Arogapoulos household all the years of his childhood. Arrow was a swimmer at sea, bobbing in the waves, semaphoring his arms, yelling for his parents’ attention as they sailed past on the yacht of their marriage, pretending not to see or hear him as they stood there on deck, their backs pressed against the railing, deep in conversation with the only person who mattered in their lives: each other. Arrow’s father, a vice president at the savings and loan, and Arrow’s mother, a ballerina who’d lost her bloom early and now ran a yoga studio, had enough patience and concentration for just one other person. They poured all their focus into the partner who shared the marital bed, leaving all others outside their sphere—including, and especially, their three children. Many were the nights Farris and Linda Arogapoulos went bowling, took in a movie, or set out on meandering drives that took them to neighboring towns to attend wine tastings, jazz festivals, and once an AKC dog show, leaving their three children behind, barely remembered during their carefree middle-age dates.
Linda used to joke, looking directly at her son Dmitri: “You’re nothing but a forgotten trip to the drugstore, my dear.”
“Or a hole in the rubber,” Farris cracked, holding up his half of the vaudeville show. Not that they didn’t keep up appearances as good parents—God knows, Mill Valley was too small for them to be anything but bright, shining examples of encouragement and support in the superficial areas at which all parents excel: chauffeuring to ballet class and piano lessons, pumping fists at the Cub Scout pinewood derby victories, engaging teachers with smart, pointed questions at school conferences. That was the mask. They gave off airs of being liberal parents who gave a shit. But when the front door was closed and the drapes were drawn—snap!—their smiles would twinkle out and they’d go off to separate rooms to pursue with laser-focused selfishness their hobbies and patterns: checking e-mail (so new and exciting in the late nineties), reading brick-size novels about English country estates, polishing the coin collection, cooking, drinking, and bowling, oh so many nights of bowling.
Dmitri, Brenda, and Lindsey came of age under the care of a succession of babysitters, teenage proxies for their real parents, girls (always girls, Farris and Linda never trusting a hormonal male alone with their daughters) who made popcorn, allowed them to watch forbidden TV, didn’t care if they brushed their teeth or not, got down on the floor with them to play Candy Land, or—the worst ones—sat sullen and distracted on the sofa with a book, shushing the three brats every five minutes with a “God, shut up, will you? Can’t you see I’m trying to read?”
And so, Dmitri, Bren, and Lindy-loo grew up without compasses. Arrow didn’t know how his sisters felt, but for his part, he longed for guidance, a goddamn rudder in the ocean, someone to take him by the shoulders, point him in a direction, and say, “Go this way for x number of miles, then turn south when you get to x location in your life, and hang a right two years later.” Arrow hated drifting. All through grade school, on into junior high and, especially, high school, he floundered, beating his arms against the sea current, growing more and more afraid of what lay in wait for him outside the Arogapoulos house, but at the same time longing for the day when he could escape Mill Valley. He often thought of slipping out in the middle of the night—when Farris and Linda were late returning from the Sonoma wine and cheese festival, for instance—and running to the bus station. But that frightened him more than staying. Where would he go? How would he eat?
He got his answer on Career Day during his senior year when a stocky, buzz-cut sergeant pulled him aside and lured him into his booth. Inside there was a gallery of photos velcroed to the blue fabric walls displaying images of beaming men and women in clean uniforms and skin toasted by a life spent outdoors in the woods, deserts, and oceans—people who looked like they had direction, purpose, compasses. Arrow listened, liked what he heard, and signed the papers that very afternoon. When he announced this to Farris and Linda—who were home for a rare dinner with their children that night—he was greeted with: “Well, if that’s really what you want to do …” Their indifference was all the answer he needed. And so, Arrow entered the Army, grateful for its structure and discipline. As the years went by and he talked to fellow soldiers and gained some perspective, he realized his parents had royally screwed him over, robbing him of a life most American teenagers seemed to have enjoyed.
In fact, Rafe was the one who made Arrow take a rearview look at his family life.
During his quarterly counseling sessions, Sergeant Morgan would always hurry through the official checklist of what the Army required him to talk about, and then he’d get right down to the part he liked the best: having a personal conversation with his soldiers, not only about their duty performance, but about what made a good soldier, a good citizen. Rafe liked to use himself as an example.
“Now take me, for instance,” he told Arrow one time when they were sitting across the desk from each other at Fort Drum. “Contrary to what you might think by looking at the color of my skin, I was not raised by a single mother on welfare, I was not a crack baby, I didn’t grow up in the projects—”
“I didn’t think anything like that, Sergeant,” Arrow said quickly—even though, if he was honest, that’s kind of what he had assumed.
“I was born and raised in Indianapolis in a happy, healthy, stable home,” Rafe said, steamrolling over Arrow’s protest. “Father a schoolteacher, mother a lawyer. They gave me everything a kid could want: love, attention, three square meals a day, help with my homework, a library card, birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese, the whole nine yards. But you know what, Specialist A.?”
“What, Sergeant?”
“It wasn’t enough. No sir, it wasn’t enough. I always felt like there was something lacking, some—some—” He searched the air for a word with his fingers until he found it. “Some purpose in life.”
To this day, Arrow isn’t sure if he gasped out loud or just in his head.
Rafe continued to talk, as if Arrow hadn’t made a sound: “They were the best parents in the world, but they couldn’t tell me what to do with the rest of my life. That’s one thing I had to discover on my own. And boy did I find it.” He grinned. “I guess you know the answer to that million-dollar question, huh?”
“The Army,” Arrow said.
“That’s right, the Army. I tell you what, I never knew who I was until I put on the uniform.”
Arrow can’t remember what they’d been talking about at the time: the military code of conduct? Improving his score at the rifle range? His need to loosen up and be more friendly with the others in the platoon? Or maybe this was one of those times Rafe went off on a tangent and Arrow just nodded along. Whatever the case, his NCO’s words had stuck.
“I think I know how you feel, Sergeant,” Arrow said. “And I appreciate you telling me all that, I really do.”
“That’s what I’m here for, Arrow. That’s my goddamn mission in life: looking out for the good ones like you.”
(Arrow didn’t know it at the time, but that’s the moment when his feelings for Rafe changed. If you’d asked him about it, his head would have balked and scoffed. But his heart knew otherwise.)
Sergeant Morgan had him sign the counseling form, then as he stapled the papers together he gave Arrow a deep look and said, “I can tell you didn’t al
ways have it easy growing up, Dmitri.”
Arrow must have had a shocked expression on his face because Rafe smiled and said, “Don’t ask me how I know—I just do. But the point I was going to make is, that doesn’t matter. You left that family behind when you raised your right hand and swore the oath. You don’t belong to them anymore. You belong to us. And I hope you see that as a good thing.”
Arrow’s throat had gone dry, but he managed to whisper: “Yes, Sergeant. Yes, I think I do.”
He left Rafe’s office that day feeling loose and light. His blood beat hard and fast.
Arrow often wondered what he would have been like if his parents had actually ever given a shit about him adrift on those waves, if Farris and Linda had ever once looked over the deck railing and thrown him a life preserver—just once. He grew to hate his parents and, though this saddened him to a degree, he stopped calling them after that counseling session with Rafe, stopped e-mailing, and all but wrote them out of his life. They didn’t even know he was here in Iraq. He could die on this Baghdad street—a blood spurt at the end of a bullet’s trajectory—and they wouldn’t know until the casualty assistance officers showed up on their doorstep. Provided they weren’t at bowling league that evening.
13
O
O’s flaw? He loves his ex-wife too much.
And that distraction could get him killed today.
We worry about O. He’s too soft and daydreamy. Which makes him the perfect candidate to be a bullet sponge. We know he can’t help it. We know O thinks of her all the time. We don’t blame him. Not that O’s ex–old lady is hot or even lukewarm—her looks are stretched and softened by too many kids—but like O, she’s kind and gentle and that makes her hot in her own MILF-y way. We can see why she’s always in O’s head.
We’re on something like mile three of our Sergeant Morgan memorial hike and the heat and the pavement and the dust are killing us. But not O. His head is all rainbows and kittens and heart-shaped candy boxes.
And the e-mail he sent his ex-wife last week. Still unanswered.
Melinda, mi corazón. My dear, sweet Melinda. How are you, my darling? Did you get the letter I mailed two weeks ago? It should have gotten to you by now. Do you like the stationery? I picked it out at the PX with you in mind. It’s a nice color, I thought. Maybe not your favorite, at least not that I remember. By now, maybe you’ve changed colors and I don’t know what the new one is. People change. I know this, ya lo sé. There’s so much I don’t know about you since—you know, since the split. You’ve moved on to new colors, new foods, a new town, maybe new lovers. Por Dios, it hurts to think that. It hurts too much, so I’ll keep pretending it’s not true, that you haven’t taken anyone else into your bed, that you’ve kept it sacred as our bed—at least in your heart. Have you kept it sacred? Is it still our bed? Let’s make it our bed again when I get back, Melinda. Let’s try. That’s what I said in the letter, in case you haven’t read it yet. I said let’s try again when I get back. Let’s give it another go. If you’re willing, I think we can work it out. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over here, it’s that we never have enough time to get everything right. So what if you and I had problems? Everyone, todo el mundo, has problems and we just have to work through them. Life is too short to worry about getting everything perfect. You’re going along, working hard, and then BAM your life gets chopped off—the end, se acabó —I’ve seen this happen over here nearly every day. CHOP-CHOP you’re through and you never managed to make things right with the ones you’ve hurt. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I want to make it right with you, Melinda. It doesn’t have to be like the way it was before. It won’t be like that. I see things better now. I understand how it needs to be, how I need to be. I think I’ve changed. I hope I’ve changed enough for you, mi amor. I think we can put us back together, only better this time. I’m willing to—
Okay, that’s enough. We can only take so much of this hearts-and-flowers shit. But you get the idea. O needs to keep some situational awareness out here today if he ever wants to get back to Melinda, his corazón.
14
James and Jinx
The sprinter and his son will be fine. The mother will live. Fish is okay. Everything’s good. We real cool.
Keep walking. Put one foot in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking across the floor. That’s Baghdad Survival 101.
We can do this, despite the setbacks. What mission doesn’t have setbacks and roadblocks, right? We’ve been through worse.
That time in Baqubah, for instance. The one with the dogs. That was a bad one.
The first dog was black with a patch of white at his throat in the shape of a bow tie. That’s why Sergeant Morgan named him James Bond—that, and the fact he was cool as a martini, total stealth, slipping in and out of the company area on Taji like a shadow flickering at the periphery of our sight.
We all loved the dog: from the time Sergeant Morgan showed up with him one night, saying, “Hey, look what I found,” to that last blood-spattered moment inside the armored personnel carrier. JB was a good mutt. Like Rafe, he didn’t deserve what he got.
The dog was illegal. He broke every regulation the generals and sergeants major decreed once we were over here in the sandbox (dreamed up out of late-night bullshit sessions in those first days of the war when they sat around a table lit by kerosene lanterns and said to themselves: “Gentlemen, how can we legally make our soldiers’ lives harder and more unbearable?”). But we could give two shits. We found James Bond—or he found us—and it was finders keepers all the way to the end.
Sergeant Morgan later told us he’d been checking on Gerard and Buckley, who were pulling guard shift that night. “The dog came out of nowhere, thought he was gonna attack me, until I remembered I’d smuggled a blueberry muffin out of the chow hall in my cargo pocket.”
The creature slunk low to the ground and a snarl lifted his lip, bared his teeth, though no growl rumbled in his throat. It was all an act, false hostility. Really, the dog was frightened and unsure of this human looming out of the dark with his gunpowder smell, hard metal head, and clinking body gear.
Sergeant Morgan let the dog approach and eat the crumbled muffin out of his palm, then reached out with his other hand to stroke the bony head. The dog whipped around like he’d been hit with a tire iron, but rather than snapping off Rafe’s fingers, he licked them.
“Looks like Sarge got himself a pet puppy,” said Buckley.
“Hey, bud.” Gerard made clicks and kissing noises with his tongue and lips to try and draw the dog away from the sergeant of the guard. “C’mere, bud.”
But the dog stuck by Sergeant Morgan, nose batting around his cargo pocket for more muffin. “Hey,” Rafe said. “Hey, hey, hey.”
From that moment on, they went around like high school sweethearts.
The dog followed Sergeant Morgan, always at his heels. When we went for our morning runs, the dog was there, slinking like a coyote through the underbrush. When we went into the latrine for our showers, the dog sat outside staring at the door, ears cocked forward. When we went off the FOB for the day, the dog found a place to hide, usually in the shade-cool gravel beneath one of the trailers. When Rafe made his sergeant-of-the-guard rounds at night, the dog was by his side, squad mascot extraordinaire.
Right away we saw this was going to be trouble, because pets were forbidden according to General Order No. 1B. “Prohibited: adopting as pets or mascots, caring for, or feeding any type of domestic or wild animal,” signed by those fat fucks in HQ.
When he first arrived on Taji, the dog hung back, head low to the ground. Its fur was patchy, bitten away in clumps, raw skin showing through. There was a dried scratch of blood on one of its hind legs. His rheumy eyes had leaked down the muzzle. If life under Hussein had been bad, this dog had been at the bottom of the pile of neglect. The zoo animals Saddam kept caged on his palace’s hunting preserve in West Baghdad had had it better than this mutt.
Sergeant Mo
rgan must have sensed this; we could see it in the way he leaned down and stroked the side of the dog’s head. With every brush of the fingers, he pushed the Hussein years further and further into the past. We don’t know about dog brains, but if it had been us, after what we’d already seen here in Iraq, nothing could have wiped away those memories, nice as Rafe’s fingers might have been.
James Bond hung around the platoon area, tongue lolling as he stretched in the narrow bars of shade during the day while we were out on patrol. He’d come and go at random, somehow managing to cross the border between our FOB and Baghdad without being caught by the gate guards, but always staying at Rafe’s side when he was with us, chilling after a long hard day. We fed him lunch meat from the dining facility and gave him sips of near beer, the nonalcohol the Army teased us with.
Those nights, the rest of us would distract ourselves with Xbox or dominoes or the latest issue of Maxim—pages wrinkled from the humidity of our masturbation—but Sergeant Morgan would always be playing with his dog.
“C’mere, boy.” Rafe sat up on his cot and pulled James Bond to him, running his hands over the rib-thin body, grooming him with his fingers, pulling cockleburs from the fur. “Those badass hajjis treating you okay out there? Huh? Huh? You being a good boy for those terrorists?” The dog lifted his head and swiped a tongue across Rafe’s chin. “You a good boy. Yes you are! Yes you are!”
We pretended not to notice, turning our heads. If Sergeant Morgan was unashamed to show affection toward this dog, his one true friend in all of Iraq right now, and if baby talk was involved, then so be it. We knew he’d nut kick any of us who made a wisecrack or arched an eyebrow in his direction.
James Bond laid his head in Rafe’s lap and released a chuffy, muzzle-flapping sigh that said, Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
Easy for him to say. The rest of us were out there in the shit every day, making nice with Local Nationals. Day in, day out. Beanie Babies and handshakes, long drives out to the provinces to deliver supplies to the latest school beautification project, pulling security as colonels sipped tea with sheiks. Days and days of driving, walking, and watching. Like Drew was fond of saying, “It sucked the dust off my granddaddy’s balls.”