by Brooke King
I looked at him, disgusted that the gender bias was ready to fall from his lips, a full-throttled hatred for my kind, his masculine need to overpower the fact that even though we were the same rank in the army, he was in charge of this house. He grabbed my arm and yanked me toward him.
We had done this song and dance plenty of times before. My response was always the same, unyielding to his stance that he ruled the roost.
“Fuck you.”
The contempt for his position in my life rolled off my tongue like Dante’s seventh circle of hell, the violence on our lips patiently waiting for one of us to strike. His blow was hard and fast, across my cheek and nose, the blood slowly seeping out as I turned and spit in his face. With a handful of hair and a drag down the hall into the bedroom, I was thrown onto the bed and held down, his hands searching for the buttons in my jeans. A kick in the stomach kept him off as I scrambled for the door. A turn of fear had changed this fight into an all-out war, a fight to keep out of his reach, the first time his rage had turned to rape. He slammed me against the bed face down and fucked me from behind, his hand on the back of my head, shoving it into the feather down comforter. I cried into it, hoping the feathers would muffle my screams as he ripped the tissue between my ass and clit. My tears had become a puddle on the bed by the time he was finished; he shoved my head into the bed one last time before he got up and walked toward the kitchen. I got up, pulled my jeans up, but as I redid the top button and turned to leave, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on the wall. Clenching my hands, I walked into the kitchen. He stood there with a beer in his hand.
“Why do you make me do these things?” He looked at me and took a swig. “You know I don’t want to, but you know you deserve it.”
I started to plate the food I had prepared for him. As I went to hand it to him, he reached out, but I stopped short, dropping the plate on the floor.
He looked up at me; the glint of contempt in my eyes fueled his anger. He leaned up off the kitchen counter and moved toward me, but I had already grabbed the knife from the sink. He dared me not to do it, but I pointed the knife at him and swung, threatening that if he came closer to me I’d slit his throat.
“Fucking try me.”
I swiped the knife at him as he came closer. He moved out of the way, but his counter move was better than mine. The knife was his now and I, powerless in his chokehold grip. I had remembered my training—arms straight up, slip down, and use force. I was free and making a break for the door, but the lock proved my downfall. Like I said, the fall down the flight of stairs didn’t hurt until he started to drag me back up, my feet barely able to catch a step for footing. My screams echoed down the stairwell. Neighbors came out to look, but on a military base where domestic violence and fighting are common occurrences, my screams fell on the deaf ears of the men who came out to watch which woman was getting it that night. It was just luck—his mostly—that I didn’t have a broken bone, just bruises. He checked me over as I lay on the living room floor.
He threw a kitchen towel at me. “Clean yourself up; you’re bleeding on the new rug.”
When I first met Rob, he wasn’t mean or nasty or even close to anything resembling who he was that day in our apartment. We met at a bus stop outside of Ledward Barracks in Schweinfurt, Germany. I sat there shoveling hot seasoned fries from the Döner vending cart, trying my best get my stomach to stop gurgling. As I shoveled another handful into my mouth, I heard him say, “Those look pretty good.”
I smiled and looked over to see him, Rob. Standing there, large beret covering one eye, like an airborne paratrooper, briefcase in hand. Yes, he was carrying a briefcase. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone my age carry a briefcase, let alone a soldier. I thought it odd, but then again I dismissed it because, well, he was cute.
“You want one?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I don’t mind, really.” I dangled the fries toward him, as if to tempt a nag to an apple. He walked over and grabbed one and quickly ate it. He was hungry. Damn. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat them all, and so I asked him if he’d like to sit next to me and share them, hinting that I wouldn’t be able to finish them all and really didn’t mind sharing. He smiled, walked over, and sat on the bus stop bench with me and we began to talk. He was coy and funny, charming in a way that made you want to call him a dork but also made him endearing and lovable. I was smitten.
The conversation carried over to the bus and the slow, trudging walk back onto base to my company buildings. Yes, he walked me all the way to my company door like a gentleman. Now, I think he truly did it so he would know what battalion I was in so he could track me down. I thought him weird like that, but it didn’t matter to me. I wanted to see him again and I did. Weeks turned into months of dating until he asked me to marry him, and like a doe-eyed young girl in love, I said yes in all my naiveté. It wasn’t until we had been married and living together for a month that he started to turn, like cheese sitting in the fridge too long. Our relationship became stagnant and corrupted by the stress of deploying. He began to become enraged for no reason, at small things that I did, and soon I no longer wanted to be around him. I dreaded coming home every night after work. Our apartment began to feel like a jail, a place where he could trap me and do and say whatever he wanted. Several times I tried to talk to him, but it only made him worse, throwing things, yelling, and sometimes taking hold of me and tossing me against a wall.
Life as a military wife and soldier had decidedly not been like I had wanted it, and for a short time I happily counted down the days to deployment like a child would count down the days till Christmas morning. Being deployed meant not being with Rob every day; it meant I was one step closer to being rid of him for good, and it was that part of me that wanted him to die in Iraq. However evil it sounds to say, I wanted to be rid of him and I knew there was a chance that Iraq would do it for me.
The night we made it to Baghdad International Airport’s runway, the lights flickered in slightly disjointed unison as the wheels on the metal bird were chocked and the cargo bay door lowered. Our 5-tons and LMTVs had made it up north before us. Several of them waited in the wings to transport us to the housing pad full of metal connexes made into living units: hooches that were more like prison cells with A/C units. The whole base looked like a rundown trailer park in the middle of Georgia or Missouri. We had been equipped with machines, weapons, and gear—the best the army could give us to help us survive. Our new ACU flak vests were given a facelift: extra padding around the shoulder. We called them bullshit wings. The rest of our gear was called full battle rattle: knee and elbow pads, flak vest with six magazine pouches loaded to the teeth with ammo, pistol holsters with Berettas cinched and buckled in place, gloves, eye protection, and a rifle. Our blood type was scrawled on the side of everything we wore—boots, helmet, the inside collar of our uniforms—anything to give us a one up on not dying. I scratched mine on the inside tongue of my boot with black Sharpie marker: O positive.
Our unit, 299 FSB, was a support battalion thrust into Baghdad proper to help First Cavalry carry out operations. AOR Baghdad swept through Route Irish, Highway 1, a corridor of violence, IEDs, and mortar fire. Camp Liberty was now my home, pad no. 14, the middle of the base next to Commo Hill. I threw my duffel down onto the ground outside of room 452A and looked around. No sign of a roommate yet, but I took no chances and told Tina, who was walking up behind me, that she had just inherited the role of my roommate. She smiled. I nodded, tossed her a key, opened the door, and stepped inside a room that smelled like a teenage boy’s dirty gym sock. Throwing my gear and duffel on the bunk nearest the door, I flipped on the light, looked around at the empty wooden wall lockers and bare mattresses, then stepped outside to light a smoke and began walking down the corridor. It had only taken me an hour to acquire a mini fridge and microwave from a nearby battalion on their way out. “You can’t take it with you,” a soldier says to me. I hand him fifty bucks, the l
ast of my paycheck for that month. Two trips from the soldier’s hooch and I had secured some sort of worldly goods that resembled comfort, a consolation for the bullshit I would probably have to endure this deployment. Tina looked at me, amazed at my ability to turn our piece-of-shit hooch into a mini dorm room within just hours of hitting boots on ground. Full set of sheets, an afghan blanket, and a pillow; my new home was complete. Tina walked to her side of the room and pulled out pink satin sheets from her duffel bag. I shook my head. I was not a satin sheet, doily, and flowers kind of girl. Mechanic, machine gunner—that was what I was good at, that was my niche. I pulled out my copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and stepped outside onto my stoop. The night air was slightly cool with a breeze. The sound of soldiers walking on gravel and rocks, skipping them as they shuffled to and from the battalion headquarters drowned out any chance of silence. I cracked the spine open to my place marker, a page bent over at the edge. The words on the page were foreign. Brett is fussing over her drink being empty and Jake is trying hard to succumb to Brett’s attempts at a good time, but the scene still was lost on me as the helicopter lifted off the helipad a couple hundred feet behind me, shaking the walls of my hooch and rattling the steps I sat on. I thought about Brett and the taste of champagne on my lips. The bubbling gurgle of it going down my throat sounded intoxicating and soon the book was like torture to read. I read the last line of Book I: “The door opened and I went up-stairs and went to bed.” If only it were that simple in this place.
The next morning I sat in an uncomfortable desk chair steadying my M4 on its butt in between my legs, trying to get it to stand there without me having to hold it. The metal was hot to the touch. I didn’t wear my gloves that day—a mistake. A large projector flashed a blue screen onto the nearby wall. Sergeant Lippert walked in and sat beside me. Then the rest of the recovery team, Specialist Pierre and Sergeant Helm, walked in. A female sergeant from brigade pulled up the rear, shut the door, and started the debriefing with, “There’s only one thing you need to know about bagging and tagging bodies in a war zone: don’t fuck it up.”
We were told every soldier gets a black bag and every piece flesh, bone, or body part not connected to a full body was to have its own separate bag. Pierre raised his hand and asked the reason why each body part needed its own bag. Sergeant Lippert cracked back at him with a “because I fucking said so.” The female sergeant explained further, “Because there is no certainty that the leg lying near one body is actually that body’s leg. It’s not your job to figure that shit out. It’s your job to clean it up. Got it?”
Pierre nodded. I grimaced. Sergeant Lippert and Sergeant Helm sat there unmoved. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
A day later, or maybe it was a few days later, Sergeant Lippert and I stared at a Stryker burned up from an IED explosion. First Cav pulled security around us, cordoning off the area in a twenty-foot perimeter each way, blocking both sides of the road with their Humvees. The smoke was still wafting off the top hatch. Three bodies were inside—one burned, one beaten up by shrapnel, and one disemboweled. I began throwing up. The first time it landed on Sergeant Lippert’s boots, the second, next to the HET trailer’s hydraulic box, and the last in between the tires of the HET. I helped drag chains, called out when the Stryker hit midpoint of the HET semitruck trailer, and ratchet-strapped down loose debris, but the smell of iron lingered in the air, the smell of blood. We were only supposed to recover the wreck. The bodies, they were the hardest part.
The black body bags shifted their weight around in the cab of the semitruck as we maneuvered back through the base’s concrete blockades. The plastic crinkled with every move of an arm or leg, a piece of flesh resting not quite perfectly in its place. I looked ahead at the road, watching as the HET navigated its front end toward the red clearing barrels outside the front gate. We came to a stop and I swung open my door and grabbed my M4, but the front sight caught on one of the bags, dragging it closer to me. I recoiled, hoping that by jiggling my rifle it would free the bag, but it was no use. The bag slid farther off the backseat and thudded to the floorboard. Sergeant Lippert looked over at me. He was outside the door, already yelling at me to climb into the back and put the bag back, but I didn’t move. I just looked at the bag, the head of a soldier slumped down and mashed into the black abyss of that bag. Sergeant Lippert shouted at me, pointing to the bag. I looked at it, unmoved. I didn’t want to touch the bag. I didn’t want to know that it was the same soldier I had seen moments ago dead. Something about the blackness of the bag made me shudder, even now. The finality of the zipper being pulled closed and clasped shut, the tag labeled “KIA,” with the body parts stacked in ink on its face; it was enough to send me into a panic. The sum total of this soldier’s life wrapped up neatly in a black bag, as if by placing him there he was no longer part of this world but a dead thing needing to be buried and forgotten—much like what this war had become back in the States to those not directly connected to it. So I stared at the bag, frightened to touch it, frightened of everything it meant to be near it, and without me noticing, Sergeant Lippert climbed back into the cab and shoved me out of the way. Picking the bag up as though it were a priceless artifact found in some ancient Mesopotamian dig site, he gently placed his hand under the head, cradling it at the neck, and put the bag back onto the seat while I stared in shock, afraid to go near it, afraid of everything it stood for in this war.
*
Many years later I was in Seattle at a writers’ conference, standing outside my hotel at night and smoking a cigarette as I stared at a homeless man lying in an alcove of a building across the street. It was cold outside. The clothes he was wearing did not protect him from the layer of mist that had started to come down. I watched as he walked over to a nearby trash can and rummaged through it. At first he picked out the cans, carefully walking over and placing them in small plastic grocery bags with the rest of his assorted aluminum hoard. Then he walked back, emptied the black trash bag’s contents into the gutter, and walked back to his alcove. Turning it inside out, he lay back down, sliding his legs into the bag. He pulled it as close to his chest as he could and then went back to sleep curled up on the pavement, bearing his body down into the black trash bag as best he could. I looked on from across the street and wondered if this was his version of a good night’s sleep.
Embracing the Suck
“King, don’t give them candy.”
Sergeant Lippert shook his head in disappointment as I looked at the throng of children surrounding me, their hands up in the air, and all of them asking for a lollipop. “A little candy isn’t going to hurt them,” I said, as I handed out every Blow Pop I had in my cargo pants pocket. After the last one was gone, the children ran away, but they came back ten minutes later asking again for candy. They called me “mister.” They couldn’t tell I was a woman behind the sunglasses and all the gear I wore. For all they knew, I was the nicest male soldier they had ever seen.
“I don’t have any more.” I opened my cargo pants pocket and revealed to them that it was empty. “See, all gone.”
A little boy no more than ten years old reached inside my pocket and felt around.
“No,” I said, pulling his hand out. “Go.” I gestured trying to shoo him away, but he wouldn’t leave.
He stood there staring at me, as if by magic I would produce another lollipop just for him.
“What the fuck did I tell you? Never give those little fuckers candy.” Sergeant Lippert pointed at the boy. “Now that little shit’s going to follow you around.”
“Well, how do you say ‘go away’ in Arabic?” I asked, but Sergeant Lippert said nothing. He just laughed and walked away.
Pushing the boy aside, I went about the mission, unhooking the ratchet straps from the eyelet hooks and tossing them up on the other side of the HET trailer. The little boy persisted, and every five minutes I had to stop, pull the boy’s hand out of my closed cargo pocket, and push him away from me.
“Go, get out of h
ere, damn it, and leave me alone.” I pushed the boy again, but this time he tripped over himself and fell to the ground. “Get lost, kid, before you get me in trouble.” I kicked some dirt at him.
It covered his face in a light gray cloud of dust. He wiped the dirt from his eyes with the front of his shirt and dusted his pants off at the knees. The dark brown sandals he wore on his feet had come off one of his heels. He slipped it back on and steadied himself as he stood up. I turned around and kept on removing the straps that held down the T-barriers on the HET trailer. Every so often I turned to look at the kid. He stood there staring at me with his hands at his side, like an Arabic statue, not moving, only blinking his small brown eyes as he watched me work. Women and men who lived in the nearby neighborhood walked past the outpost where we were unloading the barriers; they pointed and shook their heads at the concrete wall we were constructing to fortify the outside of the compound. Some would stop to look for a moment, but most kept moving for fear of being questioned by the security detail.
“What I tell you, King,” Sergeant Lippert said. “Don’t give those kids shit.”
I glanced over at the boy. He was still standing there, staring at me from five feet away. I turned, leaned up against the trailer, and glanced up at Sergeant Lippert, who was at the tail end of the trailer unlatching the last of the ratchet straps. “Well, Sarge, how do I make him go away?”
Sergeant Lippert walked around the end of the trailer toward where I stood, pulled off his Oakleys, and looked me in the eyes. “That’s how,” he whispered, as he tapped his Oakleys on the butt of my rifle, which was dangling from my weapons clip on my combat vest.