by Ben Fountain
“I had the pleasure of visiting with our president recently, and he assured me we are winning this war. We are winning, make no mistake. We have the best troops in the world, the best equipment, the best technology, the best home-front support, and as long as we maintain our resolve, it’s only a matter of time before we prevail.”
The medias look, if not downright sullen, then definitely peckish and bored. Norm is talking longer than anyone expected, and even the Bravos, who are tired of answering questions from the press, grow impatient. Billy’s attention swings back to the cheerleaders and he does an experiment, walking his gaze down the row of women to his right. As he catches each cheerleader’s eye she breaks into pyrotechnic smiles—it’s like flipping on a row of klieg lights, bam bam bam bam. But somewhere down the line his gaze stops, backtracks of its own accord to a petite, fair-skinned girl with a teased-out corona of strawberry-blond hair, soft bolts of which drape the rising tide of her chest. She smiles again, then silently laughs and crinkles her eyes at him. He knows it’s her job, but still; his stomach does a drop-kick sort of bounce. A nice girl doing her part to support the troops.
The press is definitely sulking. All the little recording gadgets they were holding up at first, all of these have disappeared. Billy forces himself not to look at the cheerleader for the next thirty seconds, but he’s careful not to look at the TV cameras either. Nothing makes you feel more like a geek than seeing yourself on the tube staring straight back at yourself, there’s some peculiar quality of guilt or cluelessness that the camera seems to catch in the direct gaze.
“Ladies and gentlemen, nine-eleven was our national wake-up call. It took a tragedy of that magnitude for us realize there’s a battle going on for the souls of men. This is not an enemy that can be appeased or reasoned with. They don’t negotiate; terrorists do not unilaterally disarm. In a war like this, mixed signals only encourage our enemies . . .”
When Billy at last looks back, she’s waiting! She gives him a stupendous smile, then another eye crinkle, then winks. Of course it is all professional courtesy but Billy allows himself to pretend that, yes, she really digs him, that they’ll meet, exchange digits, go out on a date, go out on more dates, have sex/fall in love, marry, procreate, raise excellent children, and have incredible sex for the rest of their lives and why the hell not, dammit, humans have been doing it since the dawn of time so why can’t Billy have his turn? He has looked away, and when he looks back they both smile and silently chuckle over this little thing they have, whatever it is.
“ . . . these fine young men, these true American heroes,” Norm says, and at last he serves up Bravo for direct consumption. Welcome to Dallas, says their first interlocutor, which prompts cheers and pom-pom-flapping from the cheerleaders.
What have you been doing since you got here?
The Bravos look at one another. No one speaks. After a moment everyone laughs.
“Here, Dallas, or here at the stadium?” Dime asks.
Both.
“Well, in Dallas, we got in late yesterday afternoon, checked into the hotel, and went out for something to eat. Then we did some sightseeing.”
At night?
“You can see lots of interesting things at night,” Dime says straight-faced. This gets a nice laugh.
Where are you staying?
“The W Hotel downtown, which is probably the nicest place we’ve stayed the whole time. We feel like rock stars there.”
“W Hotel,” Lodis pipes up, “that have anything to do wif—”
Nooooooo, half the room bellows at him.
“Hunh. ’Cause I just thought maybe the president—”
No no no no no.
What’s been your favorite city so far?
“You mean besides Dallas?” Sykes says, which gets a shout-out from the cheerleaders.
Have you had any trouble sleeping, readjusting to life back home?
The Bravos look at one another. Nah.
What was your most unusual mission?
The raid on the chicken farm.
Hardest mission?
When we lost our guys.
Hottest?
Any trip to the port-a-pot.
Are we making a difference over there?
“I think we are,” Dime says carefully. “We are making a difference.”
For the better?
“In some places, yes, definitely better.”
And other places?
“We’re trying. We’re working hard to make it better.”
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the Sadr insurgency. What can you tell us about that?
“The Sadr insurgency. Well.” Dime reflects for a moment. “I wouldn’t bet on any group whose leader looks like Turtle on Entourage.”
Big laugh.
Do you play any sports over there, like intramural stuff ?
“It’s too hot for sports.”
What do you do during your downtime, for fun?
MASTURBATE!!! they all shriek, or would, except Dime would slowly kill them one by one. “The Army’s real good at task saturation,” he says, “so we don’t have a whole lot of downtime. Most days we’re putting in twelve, fourteen hours, lots of days more than that. But when we do get some kick-back, I don’t know. Guys, what is it we do for fun?”
Play video games.
Lift weights.
Buy stuff at the PX.
“I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women,” Crack says in a lumbering German accent. The room freezes, then exhales a laugh when he adds, “That’s from Conan. I just always wanted to say that.”
Billy and his cheerleader continue their face work—glances, smiles, brow-scrunching mugs, then this amazing soulful stare that lasts for several seconds. He feels strangely porous, as if his vital organs have turned into Nerf balls.
What was it like meeting the president?
“Oh the president,” Dime enthuses, “what a totally charming guy!” The rest of the Bravos strain for studiously blank expressions, as Dime’s loathing for the Yale brat—his words—is well-known within the platoon. When their deployment began, Dime soaped “Bush’s Bitch” on the front passenger door of his Humvee with an arrow shooting up to the window, where he, Dime, usually sat, but the Lt. finally noticed and made him wash it off. “He made us feel incredibly welcome and relaxed, like, say, if you went down to your local Chase branch to get a car loan, he’s the nicest banker you’d ever hope to meet. He’s friendly, easy to talk to, you could sit down and have a beer with this guy. Except, hunh, I guess he doesn’t drink anymore, does he.”
This evokes a few sniggers from the medias, a few hostile stares, but mostly it’s business as usual.
What’s the food like over there? Do you have Internet? Cell service? Can you get any sports channels? The Bravos have this much in common with POWs, they are asked the same questions over and over. Someone asks about the day-to-day challenges of life in Iraq. Crack tells them about the camel spiders, A-bort talks about the horrible biting fleas, then Lodis gets off a free-associative riff about his skin problems, “how my skin dry out and get all crack and ashy, my boy Day always on me about moisturizer an’ I’m like snap, den gimme somma dat Jergens, dawg!” This goes on for a while.
Would any of you say you’re religious?
“Each of us in our own way.” Dime.
Have you become more so in your time over there?
“Well, you can’t see some of the things we’ve seen and not think about the big questions. Life, death, what it all might mean.”
We keep hearing they’re going to make a movie about you. What’s up with that?
“Yeah, right, the movie. Let me just say, we call Iraq the abnormal normal, ’cause over there the weirdest stuff is just everyday life. But based on what we know of Hollywood so far, that might be the one place that out-abnormals Iraq.”
Laughs. Big laugh. Albert shoots them the high sign without looking up from the BlackBerry. Please, God, Billy pra
ys, do not let it be Swank. Then a reporter asks what “inspired” Bravo to do what it did that fateful day at the Al-Ansakar Canal. Everyone looks to Dime, and Dime looks to Billy, and all eyes follow Dime’s.
“Specialist Lynn was the first to recognize what was happening out there, and he was the first to react. So I think he’s the appropriate one to answer your question.”
Oh for the fuck of shit. Billy’s not ready for this, plus he’s having a hard time with inspired. Inspired? This seems like a prissy way to put it, but he tries, he’s anxious to answer properly, to correctly or even approximately describe the experience of the battle, which was, in short, everything. The world happened that day, and he’s beginning to understand he will spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out.
Everyone’s staring, waiting. He starts talking just before the silence gets weird. “Well, ah”—he clears his throat—“to tell you the honest truth, I don’t remember all that much about it. It’s like I saw Shroo— Sergeant Breem, and, ah, just seeing him there, basically at the mercy of the insurgents, I don’t know, it was pretty clear we had to do something. We all know what they do to their prisoners, you can go into any street market over there and buy these videos of what they do. So I guess that was on my mind, in the back of my mind, not like I clearly had a conscious thought about it. There wasn’t much time to think about anything, really. I guess my training just kicked in.”
He feels like he talked too long, but at least it’s done. People are nodding, their faces seem sympathetic, so maybe he didn’t sound too much like an idiot. But they are coming at him again.
You were the first person to reach Sergeant Breem?
“Yes. Yes sir.” Billy feels his pulse starting to shred.
What did you do when you got to him?
“Returned fire and rendered aid.”
He was still alive when you got to him?
“He was still alive.”
The insurgents who were dragging him away, where were they?
“Well.” He glances to the side, coughs. “On the ground.”
They were dead?
“That was my impression.”
The medias laugh. Billy hadn’t meant to be funny, but he sort of sees the humor in it.
You shot them?
“Well, I had engaged those targets in route. There were several exchanges of fire. They basically dropped Sergeant Breem so they could engage, and we exchanged fire.”
So you shot them.
A rank nausea is spreading out from his armpits. “I can’t say that for sure. There was a lot of fire coming from a lot of different directions. It was a pretty crazy time.” Billy pauses, gathers himself; the words take so much effort. “I mean, look, it’s fine with me if I did shoot them—”
He means to say more, but the room erupts in thunderous applause. Billy is stunned, then worried that they have missed the point, then he’s sure they’ve missed the point but is too unconfident of his communication skills to try to force a clarification down their throats. They’re happy, so he will leave it at that. The flash cameras are really going now, and like so much of his nineteen years’ experience of life it has become mainly something to get through, then the applause dies down and he’s asked if he’ll be thinking of his friend Sergeant Breem during the playing of the national anthem today, and he says yes just to keep it upbeat and on track, Yes, I sure will, which sounds obscene to his ears, and he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody’s always talking about. They want it to be easy and it’s just not going to be.
“I’m sure we’ll all be thinking of him,” he adds, a final dollop on this big steaming turd of sentiment. Bitch of it is, he will be thinking of Shroom. And he loves the national anthem as much as anybody.
Who’s going to win today?
“Cowboys!” yells Sykes, and the cheerleaders shout their approval, and with his maestro’s feel for the ripeness of things, Norm stands and brings the press conference to a close.
DRY-HUMPING FOR THE LORD
THE FRONT PAGE OF tomorrow’s Dallas Morning News will feature an enormous close-in photo of A-bort amid the post-press-conference scrum, a trio of cheerleaders cowled about him as he addresses a quiver of microphones. “Cowboys Host American Heroes” the caption header will read, then: “Specialist Brandon Hebert of Bravo Squad being interviewed yesterday at Texas Stadium. Spc. Hebert and Bravo visited Dallas on the final leg of their national victory tour. Cowboys lost, 31–7.”
Billy will notice several things about this news item, first and foremost being the screwup of A-bort’s name, which will result in his being known forever afterward as “Brandon” to his fellow Bravos. Or rather, Bran-dunn, always pronounced with a teacher’s-aide’s sort of pissy severity, as in Bran-dunn will be on the .50 cal this time out. Bran-dunn will go in first after Crack breaches the door. Bran-dunn grazed some wiring in the new shower stalls and got the living shit shocked out of him. Next, Billy will notice that while A-bort is turned quarter-profile to the camera, facing the unseen people with the microphones, the three cheerleaders are smiling directly at the camera, which has the effect of reducing A-bort to a prop. And, third, how happy he looks. He’s twenty-two, which makes him ancient in Billy’s eyes; not until he sees A-bort’s ecstatic smile in the photo, his headlong, boyish pleasure in the moment, will Billy appreciate that his squad mate is basically just a kid, a guy who reads the Harry Potter books over and over and once sent a “letter” home to his dog, which was a rag he’d kept stuffed under his arm for several days.
It will make Billy anxious, this photo. He’ll see too much trust in A-bort’s face, too much heedless good faith in the presumed blessings of being born American at a certain point in time, but at the moment of its taking Billy has his own hands full. It must be that every cheerleader has been given a specific charge, for as soon as the Bravos step off the stage each soldier is received by exactly three girls, a moment that packs the force, if not the content, of divine intercession. Billy is shy about actually touching them but they spoon right in with sisterly nonchalance. Their pancake makeup disappoints him a little, but he decides he doesn’t mind because they’re just so pretty and genuinely nice, and toned, good God, their bodies firm as steel-belted radials. Such an honor to meet you! Welcome to Texas Stadium! We’re so proud and thrilled to have you with us today! Oh mother of all fuck even a man with a pounding migraine feels restored among these girls, no, these women, these creatures with their thickets of fragrant hair and palmable little butts and Alpine crevasses of dizzying cleavage into which a man could fall, never to be seen or heard from again.
And that would be all right, just to disappear down there, vanished by a kind of reverse-rapture action into chasms of sheltering female flesh. Such tender feelings their bodies evoke in him, an almost irresistible instinct to root and nuzzle, to say I love you. I need you. Marry me. Candace’s boobs, incidentally, are fake, not that it matters a damn, those are regular warheads punching out from her chest, whereas Alicia and Lexis sport the more pliable slope of the real. By any measure they are all three stunning women with their sharp little noses and blinding white teeth and such tiny tiny isthmuses of biscuit-brown waists that it’s all he can do not to grab them, just to try those sylphy flexures out for size.
“You havin’ a good day so far?” Candace asks.
“Outstanding,” Billy says. “I hope I didn’t talk too much up there.”
“What?”
“Are you kidding?”
“No way!”
“You were super,” Lexis assures him. “Everybody was incredibly moved by your words.”
“Well, it just felt weird. Usually I don’
t talk that much.”
“You were excellent,” she says firmly. “Believe me. You were very concise and to the point.”
“And it’s not like you were putting yourself forward,” Alicia observes. “They kept asking you questions, what’re you gonna do?”
“Personally I thought it was kind of rude, some of the stuff they were asking,” says Lexis.
“You have to be so careful around the media,” Candace says.
Photographers and TV cameramen eddy through the crowd, along with reporters, team executives, and persons of no discernible purpose. Billy spots Mr. Jones sharking around the fringes, armed and presumably dangerous, or at least a pain in the ass to have to think about. It turns out that the cheerleaders have their own photographer, a balding, raw-faced little jockey of a man who dashes about barking “Hold!” before each shot, showing no more sensibility for the splendors of his subjects than a peeler at a meat-packing plant. Hold!—snnnizzzck. Hold!—snnnizzzck, the shutter spasming like an old man’s sphincter giving way. In between photo ops the girls tell Billy about the USO tour they did last spring, with stops in Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, and points beyond, plus a volunteers-only foray into Ramadi, where their Black Hawk helicopter could have taken fire.
“I don’t see how yall do it,” says Alicia. “That’s some hard living over there, boy, just how dry it is, all that wind and sand. And those people, the Iraqis, their houses? All those dirt huts, they’re like something Jesus might’ve lived in.”
“Your service is just so much more meaningful to us now,” Lexis tells him. “We have a lot more appreciation for the job you’re doing.”
