War Flower

by Brooke King

  But it never became forgiveness. No, never that.

  Outprocessing

  Before I left Germany, I sat in a waiting room of the outprocessing medical facility and looked down at the reintegration questionnaire I was to fill out to better help the med board decipher my time in Iraq. Anderson, who had come back from Iraq early to outprocess because she had been granted a compassionate reassignment, sat next to me checking the boxes one after another, sometimes skipping over questions that asked,

  Have you seen or been near dead bodies?

  Have you incurred any physical trauma while stationed overseas?

  Do you feel that you are a danger to you and those around you?

  Have you had suicidal thoughts?

  She began reading them aloud to me, chuckling every time she came to one that she called a “duh” question. I sat there, legs crossed, staring at the wall, listening to her read the questions. She paused, looked over at me, and asked why I hadn’t checked any of the boxes. I looked at her. She saw my disheveled look and knew that no part of me was capable of filling out this form. She grabbed the clipboard from me and began checking boxes. I watched as she checked them all. She handed me the form back, pointed to the line at the bottom, and told me to sign. I looked at her, my tears welling up. She pressed her finger to the form. Sign here.

  *

  It wasn’t easy being pregnant, but being a female soldier who was pregnant in rear detachment was even worse. Everyone looked at you like you were a piece of shit. The stares became silent ones, derogatory remarks that read out “blue falcon” or “slut.” I tried to hold my head up, tell myself that they didn’t know me or what I had been through and that no one could cast judgment on me, but the truth was I secretly hated myself for getting pregnant, a cop-out, a way out of war that didn’t get me wounded or killed. But I still felt somewhat like a deserter, an impostor undeserving of the word soldier. I couldn’t take the suck, and so war spat me out all fucked up and pregnant, a how do you do with a reach around attached to it, but I couldn’t complain. I had no place. I was about to be free from all this shit, get away from the suck, and move on with my life. I didn’t know at the time if that was even possible, but I had to try; anything was better than doing back-to-back deployments to the sandbox and fuck all the tax-free money; for all I cared, the government, the military, and my unit could take this fucking job and shove it. I was leaving before BOHICA set in, so with separation papers and a one-way ticket home to San Diego, I left and hoped I’d never see this fucking place again.

  Inside of the Frankfurt airport, I studied James to gauge his longing, to see the shape of his heart made out on his face. As he said goodbye and told me to keep the boys safe. To keep myself safe. I wanted to tell him that I needed him, that I could not do this without him, that I would waiver, falter, and slip; that this was not for me; that this was just the beginning of the war, not the end; that I doubted myself entirely; that I was not ready; that I was not here; I was still there. But I said nothing except I love you. A hug, a kiss, a wave, and I was gone from sight, leaving him at the bottom of the escalator, tears dropping neatly onto the floor where he stood.

  Part 5

  SNAFU

  Shortly Thereafter

  I thought I had left the closeness of the war behind when I left Germany, but it followed me home. In truth I could not leave any of it behind. I was the sum total of my suffering made out in the form of a body. And in order to leave any of it behind, I would need to know who I was, but the war had made sure to strip me of that knowledge, and so I was a naked soul, shelled in a body, closed up tight with armor that kept everyone out and trapped me within.

  August twenty-eighth, when the plane touched down in San Diego, I was no longer in the army. I was just another civilian, a six-months-pregnant civilian. It was a short walk from the gate to baggage claim. There were people hugging and kissing around me as I waddled to the escalator, my family waiting at the bottom. Formal welcomes were batted off by outstretched arms, ones that wrapped tight and strong as if to say, you are here, you are home. There were no words, only toothy smiles and eyes creased in elation. A shuffling of bags off the carousel onto the ground catapulted an echoed thud through the terminal, and it was then that I noticed that, except for the other passengers on my plane and their loved ones, this part of the terminal was all but empty. We walked through the double doors to the parking garage. The air was crisp and cool, tinged with the smell of exhaust from the cab and shuttle line, but it did not reek of shit or smoke and it was not dry or overbearingly insulting to your senses. There was a quiet chaos to the traffic, trucks and cars, limos and shuttle vans driving in sync, following the lines smoothed out on the pavement. There were no holes or dunes of trash littering the road, and it was not for want that I searched for the familiarity of Iraq but for an understanding that this was what home should look like and that I should want that calm and peace, and that it should come easily. I scanned the parking lot, looked at the lines of cars, at my family, turning back every few seconds to make sure I was still there and that I was not a mirage or a ghost, at the people hurrying to some distant destination, a spot on a map placed there by topography and time, and it was then that my heart began to flutter with a dread that this was not home and these people were strangers and that I had no rifle, and the waves of cold air kept cresting until they capsized my expectation and I stopped in midstride to gasp and choke on my newfound freedom. Nobody noticed that I had stopped except for me, and in the silence I came to realize that the world was still the world, I was still breathing in it, and my widening gaze at everything as if I was still at war was only because I could not take a step without suffocating on my own fear.

  When my family looked back, I had started to walk again, but the welling of tears spilling over my cheek gave away that my slow, steady gait was not one of comfort or peace but rather the unsure steps of someone who didn’t know where they were and was afraid to ask. I looked as though I was a lost tourist in a faraway place, one that was neither familiar nor sympathetic to a frightened person clutching their jacket in the hopes that someone would take pity on them and guide them to a waiting car or taxi to take them back to a place they’d just come from—one where the roads were lined with bombs, where the enemy of our enemy was still a foe, and the air was stagnant and saturated with the smell of shit burning and bodies piling up in black bags next to blown-out trucks. A hand clutched mine and then another wrapped around my shoulder, but a shudder of my shoulders pulled their touches away and I was walking faster now to a car that I didn’t remember my family owning. The doors of a small gold Lexus sedan unlocked. I hurled myself into the backseat and shut the door with such force that my grandfather turned around in his seat and told me to take it easy on the car, that it was not new, and that I’d break the window if I wasn’t careful. Nana turned in the passenger seat and whacked him slightly. Nana asked me if I wanted to ride home with Dad, to which I nodded my head, and it was then that I realized that everyone was tiptoeing around me and just as unsure of their footing as I was, but this was still not home. This was only the airport.

  “Downtown Baghdad looks like the bad part of San Diego. You know, the place we used to live when John and I were little, the one off of Fairmont and El Cajon Boulevard.”

  “You mean Talmadge? That wasn’t the ghetto.”

  “No, the other one, south of that I guess, Normal Heights area.”

  “The one off Mountain View Drive?”

  “Yeah, that one. Looks just like that.”

  Dad nodded his head. It wasn’t a time in our family’s history that my father had been particularly proud of—the years after my parents’ divorce were dubbed the “dark ages.” I don’t recall much of it—too young, I guess, six or seven years old. Dad had been a druggie then, working two jobs and night shifts to keep food on the table and keep his drug use habitual. Most nights I could hear faint music coming through the walls—Jim Morrison’s deep melodic voice from “Ride
rs on the Storm” lulling me to sleep. John and I had only survived the dark ages because my grandparents intervened, providing the stable household where I ended up for the rest of my childhood. I looked out the window of my dad’s Honda Accord, the faded Steal Your Face Grateful Dead sticker covering the sinking California sun.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Nah, not too bad, almost like home, except for the people shooting at you and shit blowing up.”

  Dad fidgeted in his seat, straightening up a little. There was silence in the car, an awkward silence that usually was masked by the radio.

  “I mean, it wasn’t that bad.”

  “Right, well, just don’t tell Nana about any of it, even if she asks.” My dad looked a bit nervous, tense, as though he didn’t know what to do or say to me anymore. I wasn’t little anymore. I had experienced some of the world and had returned different—at least that’s how I saw it.

  I wasn’t planning on saying anything at all about Iraq. The whole sixteen-hour plane ride from Frankfurt I had thought about what I should and shouldn’t talk about, what topics were “safe” for me to discuss, but that was just it—nothing was safe anymore. The word itself was foreign to me, and I found myself wishing I wasn’t pregnant so I could be downing as many Jack and Cokes as the flight attendant would’ve given me for free in an attempt to put Iraq out of my mind. Once I had landed in Atlanta for my connecting flight to San Diego, I had decided that even if I had decided to drink while pregnant, there was no booze sufficient for me to forget or remember not to say anything about Iraq, so I opted for door number three. Fuck it, if I slipped up and said too much at home, I would just sneak off to my room and pretend like nothing happened.

  I sat there the whole ride back from the airport staring out the window. The buildings looked the same, nothing had changed, but all of it reminded me of Iraq—the close buildings in downtown as we got onto the I-5, the weaving of Dad’s car in and out of rush-hour traffic as he dodged the assholes trying to cut him off. Even the freeway looked like Iraq—the guardrails, the lines, the pavement—everything blurring together in one massive clump of fuck it all. The traffic lights, pedestrians, and people walking on crowded sidewalks near San Diego State University—my heart started racing. The horns, traffic helicopters, police sirens, and revving engines—my palms began to sweat. The smell of asphalt, exhaust, and roadkill on the side of the street—I cracked my knuckles and gripped my hands tight. The fast-moving cars, the loud music coming from the vehicle next to us as we waited at a stoplight—the sights, the sounds, my heavy breathing.

  “Brooke?”

  My dad touched my shoulder. I flinched and shoved him away, as I quickly grabbed the handle on the car door in an attempt to open it.

  “I gotta get out of here. You gotta let me out.” Struggling to open the door, I yanked harder and harder on the handle, tears spilling over onto my cheek. “I need to get out, let me out!” I shouted it over and over again until my dad reached over and unlocked the door. I opened it and bolted toward the tree line and canyon on the shoulder of College Avenue. Running frantically, I hit every clump of dirt and shrub in my path, trampling them down as I stumbled over them. I found it harder and harder to breathe the farther I got from my dad’s car. I tripped over a rock, stumbled, and fell to the ground, but this time I didn’t get up. I turned over and sat down. I tried to catch my breath, but it felt like someone choking the life out of me, strangling my neck, the imaginary fingers gripped around my esophagus.

  “I can’t. I can’t . . .”

  By now Dad had pulled the car over and was standing by the trunk. He started to walk toward me, but as I looked up, eyes full of tears, he paused. I put my head down, burying it in my arms. Moments later I felt a pair of hands touch my shoulder then wrap around to my back. My dad, for the first time since I had returned from Iraq, was hugging me. I had brushed off his first advance at the airport, but now I welcomed it—anything to ease the panic and overwhelming sadness that I felt. He didn’t say anything. He just lifted me up off the ground and gently maneuvered me back to the car. He eased me into the passenger seat and handed me my seat belt. I put it on as he eased the door shut, trying not to slam it as best he could. The rest of the way home we said nothing. He drove and I stared out the window, trying to focus on the world that I was passing by as the car turned into my neighborhood, past my old elementary school, past my best friend’s house, and down my street to the place I had called home. Nana, Grandpa, and John were waiting in the driveway, everyone eager for me to see the house for the first time since I had left a year ago.

  Dad turned to me. “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”

  I nodded, opened the door, and got out. The usual welcoming home that would’ve taken place at the airport ensued at home—the hugs, kisses, and let me look at you turns. Grandpa nodded. He didn’t hug me. He knew I didn’t want anyone touching me. He had served as a helicopter navigation copilot or something like that—he knew what I’d been through and he was the one who grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the welcoming entourage. I walked inside the house, carefully taking one step at a time. Molly, my Alaskan malamute, came running up to me but paused two feet away. She started to bark at me. I advanced her.

  “Molly Malone. Come here, girl.”

  I stretched out my hand and she growled at me. I tried to walk another step and she tried to bite my hand. I recoiled, pulling my hand into my chest.

  What the fuck was that?

  Dad walked past me and grabbed Molly, whose back hair was raised in a ridge line, her teeth gnarled up, her head down low.

  “Come on, Molly, dammit. It’s just Brooke.”

  Dad yanked her to the back door until she finally turned and walked with him, her tail between her legs. I stood back up and looked around. Everything looked the same—the same furniture, same scratchy blue carpet, same old, faded cream-colored drapes and squeaky sliding glass door, but somehow it felt different, as though time had changed the old house, as though I had stepped through the looking glass and the house was no longer as big as I had remembered it to be. It was smaller now, more confined. The countertop was not as tall anymore, the cabinets not as hard to reach, the stairs up to the second floor not as long as they used to be. Everything had changed, and yet it hadn’t. Was it just me? Had I changed so much that the house I used to live in now seemed like a Tinkertoy space made larger than life by a child’s imagination?

  I looked around the house as Nana and John walked into the kitchen and past me.

  “Don’t you want to go upstairs and put your things away?” Nana looked at me.

  I still had my green duffel bag on my shoulder. I nodded and walked up the stairs. I pushed open the door. My bed was neatly made, my dresser cleared off, with only a picture of me in my military uniform. I dropped my duffel and picked up the picture. I had been so young then, nineteen when I enlisted. Had I changed that much? I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the dresser, then back down at the picture. I placed it back on the dresser face down and walked over to my closet. All my things had been shoved to one side. Nana’s overflow from her closet now resided on one side, my clothes on the other. I turned around and looked at my bed. My leopard print comforter had been replaced with a nice navy blue one, an army throw folded neatly at the foot of the bed, army emblem facing up. I tossed it onto the floor, closed my eyes, and plopped down in the middle of the bed, letting my feet dangle over the side. I opened my eyes, hoping to see the stars on my ceiling, my one constant that kept me going through Iraq, remembering that the sky I was looking at was like the same one I had on my bedroom ceiling at home. They were gone—the plastic sticky stars, the full moon, everything—gone. The ceiling was bare, painted a fresh coat of white. I sat up and looked at the rest of the ceiling in my room. They were all gone. I began to panic and bolted up from the bed into the hallway, where I leaned over the banister and yelled, “What the fuck happened to my room?”

  Nana walked over and sto
od at the bottom of the stairs. “What do you mean?”

  “My stars, they’re gone, and where’s my old comforter?”

  “We gave that old comforter away, and as for the stars, well, we took them down and repainted the room.”

  “Why’d you touch my room?”

  “Honey, you were gone. I thought you wouldn’t mind. It’s just some silly plastic stars.”

  “This was my room. You had no right to change it without me being here.”

  “But, Brooke, honey. You were away in Iraq. We had to make your bedroom into the guest room.” Nana advanced up the stairs, but I walked over and down before she could get halfway up. I walked into the kitchen.

  “Dad, how could you let them do that?”

  “Don’t look at me. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “John?”

  “I wasn’t here. I just found out, same as you.”

  I turned to Grandpa, who was sitting in his chair. He just shrugged his shoulders.