by Brooke King
Tina chimed in as the flight attendant prepared the doors for arrival: “Thank you for flying Iraq Airlines. We hope you enjoyed your flight. Please take all belongings with you as you exit the aircraft. Items left on the aircraft, such as hopes and dreams, will be thrown away upon your exit. We do hope you remember when going into a hostile territory that you think of Iraq Airlines as your number-one choice when flying to your death. We know you have no choice, but on behalf of Iraq Airlines and the flight crew, we thank you for letting us overcharge your government for this shitty flight and hope you have a horrible stay in country.”
Choking back a laugh as I sipped water from my canteen, I turned to look at Tina, who was holding her hand over her mouth like she was talking into the airplane intercom. She stood up and pulled her gear to her shoulders but fell back onto me. I put my canteen away and pushed her off me. Her gear weighed more than she did, but it didn’t stop the red-headed, freckle-framed, buck-o-five twig of a battle buddy I had from swinging her 120-pound flak vest onto her back again. It was loaded to the teeth with ammunition, and the vest looked as though it would swallow her tiny frame whole. “Tiny Tina,” as I called her, was one of the only female friends I had in the Bravo Company because I trusted her not to stab me in the back or throw me underneath the bus like all the other female soldiers. It was a girl thing that I could never understand; the kill-or-be-killed mentality that women in the military had for one another. Soon that wouldn’t matter much to me, not in this place.
“Are you just going sit there and watch me struggle or are you going help a sister out?”
Realizing that I was just sitting there watching her struggle, I tried to help. In a cramped airplane seat Tina and I tried to stand and lift the vest onto her back.
“Damn, Brooke, just stick your ass in my face why don’t you.”
I turned my head to look at Anderson, who had her arms up in the air in a big Y shape, as if silently saying with her gesture, “What the fuck!”
“It’s not the first time my ass has been in your face.”
“Yeah, well, you better move your ass before I slap it.”
I rolled my eyes and turned back around.
“Tina, why in the hell does your vest weigh more than mine? You’re a 92 Alpha. Supply clerks sit behind a desk all day and push paper around. How much ammo do you really need?”
“You’re a mechanic that fixes trucks all day. You think you need that much ammo too?”
“Touché.”
As I tried to get her arm through one of the vest armholes, I grumbled out a retort to her argument. “Well, at least I might actually see combat, seeing as I’m on the recovery team.”
“I wouldn’t advertise that, Brooke. Sergeant Lippert’s not exactly a nice guy.”
As she finally folded the front flap over, attached the Velcro to the vest front, and sat down, I glanced over at Sergeant Lippert. He was sitting next to Sergeant Helm, across the way from us and up one aisle. His black Oakley sunglasses scanned the airplane until he turned his head and made eye contact with me.
“Sit the fuck down, Private!”
It was not exactly what I was expecting and the shocked look on my face made him laugh.
“Are you deaf, Private?”
Tina yanked the handle on the back of my vest and pulled me to my seat.
“Have you lost your fucking mind? I told you not to go advertising. Do yourself a favor, since it’s your first deployment: keep your head down and your mouth shut. Don’t volunteer for anything or draw attention to yourself, and that includes standing up on a plane that is full of sergeants who would love to chew a newbie like you a new ass.”
Her advice sounded like something out of Full Metal Jacket. Sergeant Lippert looked like the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman type. I half expected him to come over and yell at me at the top of his lungs, eyes bulging out of his face, two inches from my head, screaming, “You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck.” I tried not to make eye contact with him again.
The plane was making its descent into Kuwait International Airport. As everyone prepared to land in full battle rattle, the soldiers shuffled their weight around trying to get comfortable in their seat, but no one spoke. The plane was silent. Tina was putting on her helmet, making sure to tuck her long red bangs behind each ear in an attempt to avoid helmet hair. I lowered my head in thought and straddled my M4.
The back wheels touched down, and from the runway you could see the vast desert that was Kuwait. A place in the middle of fucking nowhere and somewhere every soldier didn’t want to be. As the plane taxied, Tina lowered her head and whispered, “Brooke, it’s not as bad as you think. This is my second time around. Each time gets easier. I promise. I know that you’re scared, but so was I my first deployment.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You have a cake job. I’m a mechanic with recovery training. It’s not a matter of if I go outside the wire; it’s a matter of when.”
As she pulled on her tan military-issue combat aviator gloves, she peered at me. I sat there in my confined seat, still straddling my M4 with a newfound death grip. A long strand of my brown hair, not quite long enough to pull all the way back into my bun, kept falling in my face. I struggled to keep it out of my eyes, which were started to well up with tears. Tina could still make out that something was wrong with me beneath my reflective Oakley sunglasses. She placed her hand on my forearm.
“It’ll be okay. We’re in this thing together, battle.”
I looked at her and smiled. When the port door opened, each soldier stood, filed into the aisle, and walked off the plane. I followed Tina. Walking into the doorway of the plane, a wall of heat hit me, almost like your body slamming up against a brick building; there was no give. I could see the ripples of blistering heat wafting off the tarmac. Below the staircase were three rows of fully air-conditioned buses, but all I could think about as I walked down the staircase was if I was going to survive this deployment in one piece.
The long, unsteady trudge down the stairs had dowsed me in sweat, soaking my crisp new “fresh from basic” ACUs. I followed the lined procession of soldiers walking toward the buses, but for a moment I looked out over the desert beyond the tarmac as the sun began setting in violent oranges and reds and realized in that moment that even though I was far from home, I could still enjoy the sunset.
“Private, get on the fucking bus.”
Sergeant Lippert was behind me in the line and had been following me to the buses. My sudden pause and reflection had held up the line of soldiers. I turned around to see fifteen soldiers giving me the stink eye and Sergeant Lippert’s black Oakleys staring me straight in the face.
“Well, Private. You officially just made my shit list. You better hope to God you ain’t in my section.”
From behind me I felt someone yank me away from Sergeant Lippert, who was chuckling a low, bellowing laugh at the “scared shitless” look on my face. I whipped my head around to notice that Tina had pulled me to safety.
“This is going to be a long deployment if I have to keep pulling you out of the fire.”
With a blank stare on my face, Tina shook her head, rolled her eyes, and pushed me to the front of the line, where she had been before my second encounter with Sergeant Lippert.
I have to admit it: back then I had a knack for getting into trouble.
*
The heat coming off the land in Kuwait burned on your skin like a long day in the sun at the beach. The sweat poured down your back on your spinal column as it made its way to your belt line, gathering in a pool as it drenched your tan undershirt. The nights were cold, a reprieve from the heat, but they were longer and made it seems as though the weeks of not pushing north to Iraq were a scene from Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s stagnant face staring blankly off into space as he realizes the date on the newspaper is the same as it was the day before.
Our battalion began taking on equipment, hand-me-downs from the last brigade that wa
s making its way back home. We were their relief, but with no orders to go any farther than Kuwait we sat in the desert for a month waiting until it was our turn to jump into the sandbox and get our boots weighed down by the war. I had tried to avoid Rob, my husband, while in Kuwait, sticking to groups, never letting us be alone together, but somehow he managed to get me alone the night before we were to finally push north. He begged for my forgiveness, for all the time spent bickering and fighting, but I had none in me to give. I had told him as much, but the emptiness in his eyes told me that though he was at fault for his behavior, his training and previous deployments had worn his soul thin enough to make his mind incapable of being human again. He had succumbed to so much and still had not been able to come out the same. I looked at him that night knowing that this might be the last time I would see him, that somehow I would be rid of him after all this was over. In the motor pool that night, I looked over vehicles, checked connexes, and double-checked manifests to make sure all of our equipment would make it to Baghdad. At night I watched the C-130s take off from the airstrip toward Iraq. Their evasive combat aerial maneuvers were made like the ducks and dives of a water fowl trying to avoid the barrel of a hunter’s gun. I had watched this every night for a month. October had come and gone as we waited for orders that we thought would never come, but as I sat there watching them I thought about how fitting it was that tomorrow we were to be in the line of fire and how much courage I would need to summon for it.
Operator Error
The Browning machine gun, caliber .50, M2, HB, is a belt-fed, recoil-operated, air-cooled, crew-served machine gun. The gun is capable of either single-shot delivery or automatic fire. It is used to support soldiers in both attack and defense, destroy lightly armored vehicles, and provide protection for motor movements. It weighs eighty-four pounds and has a barrel that is forty-five inches long. The maximum range of the .50 cal is 6,764 meters, but it is most effective at 1,800 meters.
I volunteered to train on the .50 cal in Kuwait. The range was hot, live-fire exercises. Sergeant Diaz, NCOIC of the range, showed me how to lock and load the machine gun. I looked up at him.
“How do I aim it?”
He laughed. “You don’t aim. You fire and fuck shit up.”
Seemed easy enough.
He was showing me the parts of the weapon: the butterfly trigger, the housing, how to switch out barrels and do the headspace and timing. I watched the distance as he spoke. A herd of camels had found its way onto our improvised shooting range. As they got closer, the firing stopped on the other ranges. Soldiers who had been lying in the prone position, legs canted off sideways, weapons on sandbags, stopped shooting and stood up. Sergeant Diaz came over and asked what the hell was going on. They pointed to the camels. He spouted off the maximum effective range of the M16 and M4 rifles and then assured them that they were too far in the distance to catch a bullet. Reluctantly the soldiers went back down in the prone position. The other sergeants on the range stood behind them and watched as the soldiers tried to get a grouping of three on their target board. Sometimes they bent down to point at what they were doing wrong, other times to hand them another magazine or critique their firing position. I watched as Sergeant Diaz came back over and loaded the .50 cal. He reminded me that the maximum effective range of a .50 cal machine gun was eighteen hundred meters and popped off the first couple of rounds. It exploded, clat-clat-clat, clat-clat. The rounds were sequencing in and spitting out as fast as Sergeant Diaz could make up his mind to pull the trigger. I looked off into the distance where Sergeant Diaz was shooting and watched as the camels fell one by one. He smiled. Target practice.
Hurry Up and Wait
We sat in the shadows of our Humvees. Others stood or crouched but never lay on the sand. We stared out across the desert, or at each other, or at nothing at all and waited, simply waited.
Though it had only been a month since they told us that we were leaving, our troubles weighed down our gear. We did not talk to one another. Some of us thought of home, others of family. We pulled drag after drag off a smoke stick, hoping that by the end of this cigarette the orders would be cast and Kuwait would look like a dot connected by dashes on a map.
The younger soldiers paced back and forth, fidgeted, asked too many questions, and answered them before anyone could speak. The older soldiers, the ones who had been in the suck, they said nothing, looked into the distance, stood with a lax in their back leg, as if to say, I’ve seen hell and that is where they’re sending us. The young didn’t look at the old; their eyes stared down at the ground. They didn’t want to know what hell looked like.
It was here that they said a man may find himself, gain the true measure of what it was to exist, but here was nowhere, a place in the desert set up and held, all of us roped in like cattle waiting for the slaughter. Here we ceased to exist as women or men. Here we were only the distant memory that our loved ones remembered. Here we were soldiers, and the remembering of training was of no consequence. Everything was now muscle memory, reactions, reflex, the texture of trigger pulls ingrained in fingertip feels and pressure points, the recall of radio 9 line medevac, call signs, and standard operating procedures.
And somewhere back home, someone was missing you already, and even though they could still smell your scent on the sheets, they gripped the pillow tight every night for comfort. Some soldiers started to talk, and it was then that they spoke of home, of families, of too many nights wasted. The longing started to creep in and someone quickly changed the subject. A deck of cards was produced with pictures of known Iraqi militants and leaders plastered on the faces. We played gin, spades, Texas Hold’em. We sang Lynyrd Skynyrd, rapped Dr. Dre, and shouted the lyrics to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” We talked shit about the newbie’s ate-up rifle sling, pointed fingers and placed bets on how many NCOs would be going home to an empty house. We cleaned weapons, fixed trucks, talked more shit about the first sergeant’s bitch of a wife. We waited, and waited, until the waiting became unbearable. We didn’t want to go. We didn’t want to die, but they said that another battalion would take our place, that it wouldn’t be that long over in the box, that we might even get stationed somewhere safe, somewhere that didn’t see combat. They said to desert was dishonor, to stay and fight was courageous, but the young were scared and the old were restless, gun happy, and ready. And when the orders came down to push north, we all stood up and shouted “Hooah” because we had chosen war and there was nothing more tempting than looking death in the face and saying, “Fuck you.”
Baghdad, Iraq
33°20' N, 44°30' E
I looked outside the open bay door of the C-130 and down the runway of Baghdad International Airport to where the end of the tarmac met the land, and I thought about my husband, Rob, and how relieved I was to be here, that I was no longer sharing the same roof with him anymore. He had been deployed to Ramadi, away from me. I thought about the last time I had seen him and shivered at the distorted memory of spousal abuse as it played back in my head.
It was never the fall down the stairs that hurt. It was the being dragged back up that was painful—the feeling of having to do the same night on repeat for the fifth or sixth time that month. It almost always started the same way: I would forget that I was his wife. On these nights I would get home first, take a shower, and start dinner before he got home from end of day formation. I’d drape my uniform over the front of the couch, getting everything ready for the next day, the 0500 wake-up call for morning formation and PT, which lasted just long enough for me to contemplate why I got up in the first place.
He would come home late. I tried flipping the veggies over in the skillet on low heat as often as I could, but I had gotten lost in a Nelson DeMille novel Nana had sent me last week in a care package. Rob walked into a house smelling of burned veggies—that was strike one. So consumed in the novel, I hadn’t noticed him coming through the front door—strike two. When he came for his usual hug, I kissed him on the cheek—the last straw f
or him. Grabbing the book from my hands, he threw it against the front window of our apartment. Startled, I looked up, but my glance was too familiar to him: the look of a defiant, independent woman needing to be tamed. He snatched me up from the sofa by my arm and half-dragged me into the kitchen.
“Can’t even fucking cook vegetables.”
He shoved me toward the stove, told me I was no good. Slammed up against the stove, I braced myself for the inevitable as I turned around. He would let into his rant on how he worked all day, I would spit back that I worked just as hard but wasn’t bitching about it. And that’s when it would come, the first slap in the face.
I had married early, barely nineteen when I said “I do” to a man I had known barely three months. I was young, stupid, and afraid of deploying to Iraq with no one to talk to but my family. So, I did it. I married Rob without thinking. There was something about him I couldn’t shake, a mysteriousness about him that felt more like secure danger. It must have been his smile, but now I cannot remember why I truly decided to go against my family’s judgments and frustrations about my match, but either way, I had done it. I married Rob. It wasn’t the best decision to make right before deployment, but when you’re young and dumb and facing war, anything looks like a good idea. I wanted someone to love me, someone to look out for me over there. For all his faults and misgivings, Rob loved me; he cared, and for my nineteen-year-old self, it was the only reassurance I needed, but that feeling didn’t last long. Nearly a month after we married, after all the training for war had been completed, after we had settled down into our on-base apartment on the third floor, he began to change and so did I. I no longer wanted him because his love had turned sour, like milk that had sat out on the counter for a week or two. Our love for each other rotted and morphed into something that I’m sure now would be labeled as a volatile relationship, one I’m certain that we both created, but one that he took just a little too far.