by Brooke King
I was half drunk while staring at Rob, who greeted me at my gate when the plane landed in Pennsylvania. I did not kiss him. I gave him a hug, and it was then that everyone around us started to clap, whistle, and cheer. I hated it. I hated the attention, and when I stopped fake-hugging Rob, I tried to break away quickly and walk toward baggage claim, but they gathered around me, shook my hand, patted me on the back, and told me welcome home. I was not home. I was in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, spending my R&R with a man I no longer loved, letting people touch me who had no idea that every pat on the back was like torture to my adrenal glands, and sensing that every time I raised my right arm to shake another hand, my uniform still smelled of charred flesh.
Rob insisted on us going to a house party the day I landed in Pennsylvania. I agreed only because there was free booze and because I didn’t want to be anywhere private with Rob. We walked into a house that smelled of cigarettes. The floor was sticky from spilled liquor. I walked past the throngs of people, shoulders square as I scanned the room. Rob looked left as I looked right. Both of us on edge. We made it to the kitchen, the keg sitting in a red Walmart special tub. It was almost empty. Rob got his drink and wandered off. I stood at the keg trying to pump it and pour at the same time. A guy came up to me, asked me if I needed help. I give him my stupid face. He smiled and pumped the keg until my drink cup was full. The music banged loudly against the walls, thumping downbeats into the floor, rattling the floorboards. Rob was in another room flirting with a girl about my age. She wore a U of P sweater and tight white jeans. I looked over at the guy who helped me and smiled. He introduced himself, said he was in a band, the lead singer of Pan.a.ce.a, whoever they were. He went on about how they had just come from a gig, how this was their friend’s house, and how I looked pretty in my Ramones shirt and zip-up black hoodie. For a moment I thought about walking away but decided that any conversation with anyone was better than being around Rob. He flirted with me, asked me my name, but I just smiled and asked for another beer and if he could show me to the bathroom. The tile of the bathroom was stained yellow around the edges, the sink too high up to sit on, so I stood. He wrapped his arms around me, kissed my neck, and told me that he might be too drunk to do this. I held the back of his head, tried to like him touching the small of my back, the smell of whiskey and beer on his breath, but by the time he worked up the nerve to undo my jeans, someone banging on the door startled me. He told me not to worry about it, told them to hold on, but I was scared, Rob was somewhere outside, and the bathroom was starting to feel smaller. He told me not to worry, that it’s some drunk asshole, but the banging got louder, my heartbeat heavier and faster, and soon I bolted out the door of the bathroom, down the hallway, out the front door, and toward the sidewalk. Rob came out, asked me if I was okay, and I told him I was in the bathroom with a guy. He wasn’t mad. Nodded his head and asked if I wanted to go home, and when the guy came out to find me, Rob turned and said, “She just got back from Iraq. She’s my wife. She’s fine.” The guy looked at me hunched over at the waist hyperventilating and said that I didn’t look fine. He came down, tried to calm me, but Rob wouldn’t let him near. And as Rob grabbed me and hustled me down the sidewalk, his hand wrapped tight around my arm, he whispered, “You had better get your shit in check. This is not your home. This is my home.” But I couldn’t and he knew it, so we found ways to keep me busy; spending my hard-earned blood money was one of them.
There was only one good mall in Bloomsburg, and even now, while I sit here looking on Google Maps to figure out which of the two malls was one the one we went to, I cannot for the life of me remember the name, but I do remember sitting in the food court with bags of clothes, trinkets, and a box containing samurai swords that, for some reason when I saw them in a shitty dollar store, I had to buy. I leaned over and opened the box, pulling out one of the swords. I unsheathed one of the katana blades. On the hilt was an inscription that I would later come to understand was the trademark of the sword maker. I lifted the sword up, looking at the handle wrapped in blue cloth, the curvature of the blade, and thought about a samurai warrior carrying it into battle, the feel of coming close enough in combat to pierce the flesh of your enemy with the edge of the blade. I knew my sword was a replica, not sharp enough to slice a piece of paper in half with one swipe, but I imagined that this shinsakuto could carry weight with its appearance alone. For a while I contemplated bringing it back to Iraq with me, carrying it around like a warrior given special permission to slice the enemy where he lay, but then I remembered—I don’t know my enemy, I am a woman, and this blade was not even sharp enough to cut a steak. Rob walked up and loudly asked me what the hell I was doing. I looked up. Everyone in the food court was staring at me. I was standing with the blade pointed in strike position at a ficus, the ficus with several shattered limbs, drooped over and limp, shredded leaves scattered on the floor. I stayed the blade back into the sheath and put it back in the box. Rob knew that I was some sort of fucked up war flower, that this mundane public area was no place for me. He knew that soon I would be returning to a place that felt more like home than this place would ever feel. We stood up to leave, but someone behind me banged their tray against the garbage can and I dropped to the floor, a piece of french fry smashes in to my hair, spilled soda presses against my skin and leaves a sticky residue on my forearm. Rob yelled at me to get up, that I was embarrassing him, that I was making a fool of myself, but the heat in my chest rose, my heart rate pulsed blood into my arteries, and the scabbed-over truth that the war was still with me broke the air of silence when I screamed at him that there were more coming, to get down. Rob reached for me, tried to drag me up from the floor, shook me, and yelled at me that we were not in Iraq. The crowd was still watching. He grabbed my face, pointed it at the people, showed me that we were not there, that I was home, but I did not feel at home, and for a moment, the heat in my chest was unbearable, the tightness of fear and fighting crashing against each other as every breath came out ridged and unmatched with its fury.
Later I was told by Rob’s mother that he carried me out of the food court over his shoulder as I screamed. And now, as I am sitting here, all I really remember of that day was how the sword’s blade was not sharp enough to cut through the ficus leaves in a single swipe.
In the in-between hours I sat awake in bed in Rob’s mother’s house, which was too quiet. I looked over at Rob sleeping and thought about how we hadn’t made love since I came. I didn’t want to be in the same room with him let alone touch him. So I sat up most of the night thinking about Iraq. Somewhere back in Iraq that very same day, an insurgent was doing his morning prayer, kneeling on the rug, chanting, eyes closed as he recites the lines recalled from memory. And after he is finished, he will rise, walk out of his house, get in his car, and drive down the road toward our company’s convoy. Private McDonald, who is sitting in my gunner’s seat, will look ahead on the road and see the car moving toward him. He will call it in, ask for permission to fire a warning shot, and take aim. The bullet will hit the side of the vehicle, but the car will keep coming. He will fire another and another until he hits the radiator grille. But the car will keep coming, the man inside unfazed by the shattering of metal sprayed up from the hood. McDonald will let another bullet go from my .50 cal. It will hit its mark, and though McDonald will tell me when I return from R&R that the headspace and timing are off on my machine gun, that he wasn’t cleared to kill the man, only deter the vehicle from getting close to the convoy, I will see the relief in his eyes—the certainty of knowing that the bullet saved him from dying that day. He will tell me that it was his first kill shot. I will nod. He’ll say that he has trouble sleeping now, that he is just a mechanic, not a machine gunner. I will tell him that I too was once just a mechanic, but not anymore. I will tell him all of this, but for now, I was lying in bed awake in Pennsylvania thinking about Iraq and getting back to the noise of war.
Two weeks go by quickly and I drowned most of them in booze, but some I passe
d in silence sitting on the banks of the Susquehanna River watching the chunks of ice slide downstream and catch on each other. Most of that time I spent alone. But the day I was to leave, I sat with Rob on the bank and told him that I was leaving him, that this was not the life I wanted, that he was not what I wanted. He argued with my decision, told me that it was just because of the war, that I was confused, that I should wait until the dust settled and the deployment was over, but I could not wait. I told him that I’d drawn the papers, and as soon as the words left my lips, I felt the chill of the air finally brush my skin cold. He stood up and started shouting that I was his, that he would tell me when I could go, but I pulled out my dog tags and told him that I was never his, that I was bought with a ten-grand signing bonus and the job I wanted, that I was owned long before he knew me, and that I would be the property of the U.S. government until I died or got out, whichever came first. He shook his head, the tears forming in his eyes, the anger on the tip of his tongue, the urge to hit me in his balled-up fist that clenched my dog tags, wanting to rip them free from my neck and beat me with them. But he didn’t hit me. He didn’t say a thing. He spit in my face and walked over the hill, past his mother’s house, and out of my life completely. For a moment I felt what it was like to be relieved, unburdened. I walked back to the house and put on the same uniform I came in, the smell of flesh rotting within the fibers of digital gray. Soon enough I would hear the unified rotation of single blades thundering over my hooch, see the plumes of smoke as they separated the sky in vertical streaks, feel the heat from the metal on my machine gun as it radiated through my aviator gloves, heed the resonating warning sound of the bolt catching and clacking forward, understand once again what the weight of a soldier felt like in a body bag, and by the time I would reach the armory and retrieve my M4, I would remember what the noise of war sounded like again and ignore the notion of home.
And yet there was a strange stillness to the war when I returned, as if nothing had moved since I left, but everything was still in motion. The mortar rounds. The Paladin tanks. The bullets. The body bags stacked next to one another in a row. The crescendo of violence upturned by IED blast points emblazed in scorch marks in the road. But the machine gun felt heavy in my hands, my fingers forgetting the pulling pressure of triggers, the letting loose of bullets. Beyond the wire one day our convoy went past a known hostile village on Route Irish and I forgot to nametape defilade. I froze. Sergeant Gomez pulled at my pant leg, yanking me down into the Humvee. For a moment I forgot where I was, the goggles around my eyes fogged, the chinstrap too tight around my face, the flak vest too constricting for my chest. Inside my comm headset, I heard the word shoot, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I was locked inside myself, wondering what I was doing here, and contemplated the urge to remember home, but a slap on the leg reminded me that I was in Iraq and that this was where home was now.
After another mission, with the same result, I was permanently pulled from machine gunner, moved to Alpha Company, and given the option of working in the motor pool or recovery. I chose recovery. I chose death in a different form. I was back with Sergeant Lippert, and soon the missions become mini funerals, bringing back what was left in pieces and parts, an unjustifiable end to the means of war destruction. Weeks carry on into a month, and the body count kept rising. Our mission was to bring them back, but as I pored over a piece of flesh, a chunk of arm, my hand shook the pen marks on the description tags, ones that I wished read: I’m sorry, I didn’t know you before this or I will try to find all of you. Each bag was stacked in the back of the truck, brought back to base, and given to Mortuary Affairs. I watched as they carried them into the building. I saw the looks on the tired faces of the soldiers who sighed from having to put yet another name down on a clipboard. Sergeant Lippert told me that this one would be number thirty this month. He slapped me on the back. I flinched. He punched me twice in the arm, told me that the war wasn’t over yet, that we had months to go before this place was a pushpin on a map that we could say we visited once, but I watched the door of the building close, the finality of the metal handle snapping shut on the frame, and gripped my M4 tightly. It wasn’t long after being back with Sergeant Lippert on recovery, maybe a week at most, that Alpha Company moved me in between being a mechanic and doing recovery, but truth be told, I never wanted to go on another recovery mission again. I think Sergeant Lippert knew it because the number of recovery missions I went on became far fewer and my time in the motor pool more frequent, which was fine. Slowly, as the deployment worn into February, I no longer was called out for recovery missions. I was tasked out elsewhere. I had, in a sense, become a utility soldier, one that could be moved around, used for everything from turning wrenches to operating vehicles that moved connexes. I was still useful to the battalion, so I was moved from squad to squad, company to company, passed around like a wartime Vietnamese whore.
It’s how I survived; I kept moving. Day in and day out I paced myself with the rhythm of battle drums banging on around me. If I became complacent, the steady percussion of explosions crescendoing outward into a symphonic overture just outside the FOB’s concrete walls made me realize that it was time once again for me to keep moving. A bomb had gone off somewhere in the city. A plume of smoke permeating the horizon with vertical streaks of black, a car explosion this time, but I kept walking. One foot in front of the other, my boots slapped the ground as my pace quickened. I walked faster and faster, my rifle in my hands, my momentum jostling my vest side to side, my helmet, too big, strapped down at the chin, pressed down on my black Oakleys, hair falling out of my bun, the collar of my uniform scratching at the back of my neck. One of my knee pads was sliding down toward my shin, the other riding up toward my thigh. And as I ran, all the buildings began to look like blurs, the smoke like clouds, the people, the soldiers like ghosts, the palm and eucalyptus trees like foreign creatures reaching out to snare and entangle me in vines. The road was once just dirt and mud, the grass long and overgrown. And then it came, the past war creeping back in, and soon Iraq was Vietnam all over again. My M4 was now an M16A1. My helmet green. My boonie hat now had a peace sign scrawled on the side in black ink. My hair was short and there was no need to be clean and kempt. My digital gray was now olive drab. But the helos still came in, and the past was now the horrible present, the wounded an unfathomable number. There was no enemy that we could see. We did not know why we were fighting. We could not see what tomorrow brought with its sunrise, but we felt it coming, like the heat that swelled off the land at midday. There were no words or cigarettes that comforted those who left for patrol. There was a look, a nod, and pace to their walk, a shuffling of boots that kept them moving forward in the hopes that this war wouldn’t be like the last. And yet . . .
James (#3)
After we had talked about family and life, about God and what we wanted to do after the army, we stopped speaking altogether. There were no more stories of childhood or growing up left between us that could break the silence of the room, so we watched movies instead or listened to music, anything to keep away the silence of our own static breath clinging to life in this place.
I climbed through his window. It was late in the evening, almost midnight, when I returned from the motor pool, a last-minute wiring job on a HEMTT flatbed that I was tasked out to help with so that another barrier mission could leave on time that night. All I could think about the whole time was a hug from James. It had been a long day in the motor pool trying to help the mechanics of Alpha Company clear their work orders. When I walked to the showers that night, no one was around. I was alone. I took a shower alone. I got dressed alone and walked to James’s hooch alone. When I crawled through the window and saw James waiting for me, his smile was a comfort telling me that, in this room, I was no longer alone. He was here. The half-glazed look on my face made him realize that it had been a long night. His smile disappeared. I sat my weapon down at the foot of his bed. I stood there and, for a moment, contemplated leaving. He grabbed my
hand and pulled me toward him and cupped my face with his hands. I looked into his eyes. The tears came. The first time I had let him see me weak. I crumpled into him and bawled as he held me tight and told me that whatever it was, whatever I had been through, it was okay now, that he was here, that I was alive, that everything was as it should be.
He made love to me, but I only went through the motions, staring at the ceiling as he finished and kissed my forehead. Before he went to bed, he looked at me, told me he loved me. I smiled politely but knew I was far from being able to tell him that I loved him, far from a place where it was possible for me to love him the way he needed me to. After a moment of silence, I said it back to him, hoping that with my saying it back he would be content enough to go to sleep. He smiled and rolled over, but I lay there watching the orange fluorescent light outside his window flicker on and off until dawn approached through the cracked windowpane and slithered up the bed toward where he lay. I turned and looked at him asleep. Peaceful and calm, he looked content with life, with me. I envied him. I rose gently from the bed, slipping out of the sheets sideways. I dressed and grabbed my weapon but looked back at him sleeping in the bed.