by B. K. Dell
Caleb felt his mom’s fingers tighten on his elbow. She said loudly and forcefully, “If you don’t mind, I have not seen my son for three months. I would like to spend some more time with him alone before he goes off to fight for your freedom.”
Once alone with her son, she couldn’t stop embracing him. She never wanted to let him leave her again. She began to ask Caleb every question that she could ever think to ask. Caleb dutifully answered them the best he could, but Cheryl kept interrupting him with either another question or another hug. They talked until her eyes had finally dried, then Caleb asked if she would excuse him for one moment. He made his way over to where Jackson stood with Stephanie.
Caleb walked up so deliberately that it looked like he had something important to say. But when they both turned to look at him, he was momentarily rendered speechless. The three of them stood in silence. Caleb touched the tips of his fingers to his EGA. He made it sound like an insignificant and random remark when he said to Jackson, “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” In reality, it was the phrase that had been repeating in his head the whole time.
“Well, you must really resent me,” quipped Jackson.
“What are you talking about?” Caleb thought about adding, You’re the only friend I’ve got, but didn’t.
“Well, I didn’t work nearly as hard as you,” Jackson had a strange glint in his eye that indicated he was up to something.
“Okay, spill it,” smiled Caleb, knowing that Jackson was probably building to a point.
“Well, it’s not the price that upsets you, remember?” Jackson paraphrased Caleb. “It’s the fact that you would have to pay more. And someone else would have to pay less.” Jackson adjusted his own EGA. “I have certainly had to pay less.”
Caleb smirked and snuck a look at Stephanie. “It’s true that I said that, but I wasn’t talking about this.”
“It doesn’t still apply?”
Caleb shrugged. He didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know, I guess I just don’t feel that I’ve earned it. I think about legends like Chesty Puller and General Lejeune, and what it means to be a Marine, a jarhead, a leatherneck…”
“A devil dog,” Jackson jumped in.
“The few, the proud,” added Caleb. “I still don’t feel like I’ve done enough.”
“You feel like you’ve been given more than you deserve?” Jackson smiled because he knew that he had caught Caleb in a contradiction from before.
Caleb smiled because he meant it, “Yes, I have been given more than I deserve.”
“I’ve got a quick parable, you want to hear it?”
“Sure,” Caleb said and folded his arms.
“It’s about workers in a vineyard. A landowner sets out in the morning and gathers some workers for his vineyard. He informs them how much the pay will be; they agree and get to work. He then goes out a few hours later and gathers more, then a few hours later and gathers more again. By the eleventh hour, he finds even more workers who have been standing around all day. He tells them to go work in the field also.”
“Okay…”
“But at the end of the day, the landowner pays them all the same thing no matter how long they had been working. Well, the first workers hired that morning begin to complain.”
“I bet.”
“You know what the land owner says?”
“What?”
“He says, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you.’ He reminds them that they had agreed to the price when they started – maybe were even excited about the price. Maybe the reward for their work was even more than they deserved. So why should they worry about who got it for less?”
“Because it isn’t fair,” protested Caleb.
“So what?”
“But…” Caleb began but cut himself short. His mind was racing for the perfect rebuttal. The simple question, so what, presented itself as more of a hurdle than he would have predicted.
Jackson argued, “If you’ve already received more than you deserve, why worry about what anyone else has? Because it’s unfair? Life’s unfair. Keep your nose down and bask in the richness and joy that comes with knowing what you just told me – I have received more than I deserve.”
Caleb’s face became very pensive. He said quietly, almost a whisper, “But this isn’t some random parable, is it?”
Jackson gave a guilty look and his head shook slightly. “The reward is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“I get it,” said Caleb. “And, if I could believe the Bible, that would be enough for me.”
Jackson shrugged. “Of course you can believe it,” Jackson said. His voice was filled with both authority and optimism.
Caleb shook his head. “It’s not that easy. People don’t choose what they believe,” he said. “They consider all the evidence and then they either believe it or they don’t.”
Jackson made a motion to respond, but at that moment Trey Tucker inserted himself into their circle of conversation. Caleb subconsciously leaned away. Trey reached out to shake Jackson’s hand. “Congratulations, Brooks,” Trey said.
“Congratulations, Tucker,” Jackson smiled.
Trey turned to Caleb, hesitated, then extended his hand. Caleb looked at him reluctantly before deciding to accept the handshake. There was no emotion on Trey Tucker’s face when he said, “Well done, Marine.”
They were looking each other in the eyes.
Caleb said nothing, but suddenly tightened his grip attempting to crush Trey’s hand.
Trey responded quickly by tightening his own hand. Their expressions remained impassive. Their eyes remained locked on each other’s.
Responding to Trey’s vice-like grip, Caleb clenched his hand as hard as he possibly could. Trey’s face showed no pain and no effort as it tightened again on Caleb’s hand. Caleb felt like his bones were being crushed underneath the tread of a tank, but still his face showed no strain. The white of Caleb’s knuckles was the only hint to anyone watching that this struggle was even taking place, until finally Caleb’s face turned a subtle shade of red and a vein protruded from his neck.
Trey let go. He laughed a warm chuckle, then turned around and left.
As soon as Trey’s head was turned, Caleb’s face winced with agony and he frantically tried to shake off the pain in his hand.
Jackson laughed, then became more serious as he pointed over Caleb’s shoulder and said, “Looks like you have to save your mother.”
Caleb turned to see a group of reporters forming around his mother. He panned his eyes from left to right and asked, “Now where is my rifle?”
Jackson smiled, but Stephanie laughed so hard that her head tilted forward and she reflexively covered her open mouth.
Caleb approached the crowd and could hear his mom’s conversation with a reporter. Caleb could tell that she was trying hard to keep her patience. He heard her saying, “No, actually I disagree with the entire premise of the question.”
Caleb walked up before the reporter had another chance to speak and said, “Excuse us, but I have a question that I have to ask her myself.” He put his arm protectively around her shoulders and guided her away from the reporters.
“You don’t really have a question for me, do you?” she laughed.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“You do?” she asked surprised.
“What did the lady at the hair salon say?”
“What?”
“The lady who did your nails? What did she tell you?”
Cheryl thought that she had gotten all of the crying out of her system, but instantly her eyes filled with tears again. She looked into her child’s face and told him, “She said that she had never seen The Wizard of Oz.”
“What?” The shock in Caleb’s voice was sincere, without the slightest hint of patronizing. “Not even when she was a kid?”
His mom continued to cry and laugh at the same time. She wrapped both arms tight around her son and said, “You’re the only one who really listens!”
<
br /> PART TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jackson slid the chicken from his MRE into the bag of chemicals called a flameless heater. He added water and tilted it just the right amount to activate it.
“No microwaves, no electricity…just magic,” said Teflon, as he witnessed the joy on Jackson’s face while he was performing a ritual that is uniquely military.
Jackson thought about this. “Are the processes of microwaves and electricity any less magical?”
“No, but microwaves and electricity are magic that I’ve had time to get over.” When Jackson opened the bag, hot steam came billowing out. Teflon said, “I don’t think I could ever get over that.”
Jackson was with Golf Company, 5th Battalion, 7th Marines. He was just starting to feel at home at Camp Kookaburra, twenty clicks west of Marjah in the Helmond Province of southern Afghanistan. Jackson’s bowels had emerged safely on the other side of the constipation that came with adding Meals Ready to Eat to his diet.
“What did you get?” Brit asked vaguely as he sat down with his own MRE.
Jackson was pretty sure he knew what Brit meant so he told him happily, “Skittles!”
“I got chocolate-covered pretzels, again…trade ya?”
“Not a chance,” snapped Jackson, grabbing his Skittles and moving them to a more secure location.
“You know that we could leave MREs out in the sun for years and they would still be good?” beamed Teflon.
“Really?”
“Yeah, these things are amazing. You can drop them from a hundred feet and they will survive,” Teflon said excitedly.
“I heard that there was this Marine once who came down with cancer, but he cured it by eating only MREs,” said Brit, with his eyes bright and his chest heaving slightly in mock excitement.
Teflon didn’t laugh, but Jackson couldn’t help himself and added, “Well, I heard that if you bury an MRE in the sand, two weeks later you will have a diamond.”
Brit laughed and Teflon just made a face. Teflon wasn’t sure if he should join in their fun laughing at him, tell them where to stick it, or just drop it. “Forget it,” he said, “I just think they’re cool, okay?”
“Oh, they’re cool,” said Brit, “I heard that if you lose your Kevlar vest, you can use an MRE to stop a bullet.”
“I heard that if you hide your face behind an MRE, the enemy can’t see you,” Jackson added.
“Oh yeah,” said Teflon, “Well I heard that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up all his intelligence because they fed him an MRE. Upon first bite he renounced terrorism and switched to our side. His next MRE had Peanut M&M’s so he stood up and started singing ‘God Bless America.’”
“God Bless America! Land that I love,” Jackson started to sing. With talent that did not rise to match their enthusiasm, everyone joined in.
“Stand beside her, and guide her…Through the night with a light from above.”
Brit’s real name was Sergeant Brandon Sparks and he grew up in Portland, Oregon. Both of his parents were born in the United States. To find the first immigrant in his family, you’d have to go all the way back to his great grandparents who came to America from Norway. He got the name Brit because he spent so much time watching Monty Python movies and British sit-coms on DVD that he would sometimes, intentionally or not, take on a British accent and diction. He would also phrase some of his sentences backward, like, “Tore me a new one, the Kill Hat did,” or to add extra attitude, he would convert his sentence to a question at the end, like, “Well, then I will have to shoot him first, won’t I?” or, “But if I don’t, that’s too bad, isn’t it?”
Teflon’s real name was Lance Corporal Edward Castillo. As soon as he got to boot camp he informed his fellow recruits that his nickname in school had been Teflon because of all the antics he had gotten away with right under the principal’s nose. None of the accusations the school tried to pin on him ever stuck, so they started calling him Teflon. It wasn’t true. He was called Big Eddie in school and he always hated it. When he got to combat training after boot camp, he informed a whole new set of people that he had been called Teflon in boot camp, which this time he actually had been. And when he reached Camp Kookaburra he informed a whole new group of people that he had been called Teflon in combat training. He only had to lie once. His plan was to finally arrive home and honestly be able to tell people that his nickname in the Marine Corps was Teflon. By this method, he aimed to become one of the world’s incredibly few men to choose his own nickname.
They were all still singing when Rider flopped his body down forcefully on the same bench. He said very angrily, “Did you hear? We are getting stuck with the fairy!”
Everyone stopped singing except for Teflon, “From the mountains…” he sang boisterously, then fizzled out once he noticed that he was the only one singing.
“Caleb?” Jackson asked Rider with an honest need to clarify.
Rider shot a strange look at Jackson; Rider didn’t know Caleb’s name and had only assumed that no one else at Camp Kookaburra cared to know his name either. He looked away, turned his head to the rest of their group and responded to Jackson’s question while looking at Teflon, “The fairy. That guy in the news. He’s coming here.”
“What’s wrong with that?” asked Jackson.
Rider shot another incredulous look at Jackson implying that he did not even need to bother with an answer. Jackson had passed on an opportunity to challenge Rider’s views on the guy in the news in a previous conversation, so Rider had no reason to suspect that Jackson had ever met him. The two continued to stare at each other. When Rider finally spoke, he ended up picking only his third or fourth choice of responses. “And that’s not to mention the embeds.” Rider said it as if he was adding another argument to the points he didn’t say, points that Jackson could have guessed. “Panty-waisted embeds. A bunch of them. They’ll be following him around like he’s their queen bee.”
“Ha…queen,” laughed Teflon
“Long live the Queen,” said Brit with a thick, fake cockney accent.
Just then, the room was called to attention as Major Nash entered. Behind him stood Caleb and a man named Michael Ponce. Caleb looked, dressed, and walked like a Marine. Michael Ponce did not. Despite what Rider predicted, they had only accepted the request of one news agency. Michael Ponce was sent to cover Caleb for the Times. He was there to be Caleb’s shadow.
Major Nash did not draw any attention to Caleb – the type of attention that Rider was anxious to draw – but rather focused on the reporter. “Gentlemen, we’ve got ourselves an embed. All of you have received a pamphlet on embedded war reporters and I suggest that you re-read it, especially the part about nothing being off record. If you remember only one thing about this gentlemen on my right, remember this: He is not your friend.”
Michael Ponce’s eyes widened. This was not going as well as he had hoped and he had not hoped for much. He looked around at the Marines with morbid embarrassment, but discovered that none of them were even bothering to look back. They were all looking at Caleb.
Caleb, just like his first day on the bus, returned their glances and met their eyes fearlessly. He did this systematically, moving from face to face. Most of the men turned to look away. The fourth face he came to was the face of Jackson Brooks. Jackson was grinning from ear to ear. Caleb’s eyes froze on his. He hadn’t known that he would be fighting by Jackson’s side. His face warmed and he felt a quick burst of comfort and happiness.
“You also need to know that Michael Ponce has – without the requirement of any boot camp or training – been given the title of Honorary Major. This means that he is welcome to all the comforts of an officer.” Everyone knew this actually didn’t mean anything. It was designed for nothing more than to spur the resentment the Marines would feel toward him – or anyone – given a higher rank without the requirement of working for it. “You will also be expected to fight for him in the field as if he were a fellow Marine, and if it comes to it, retriev
e his remains as if he were a Marine. But, make no mistake men, he is not a Marine.”
Michael Ponce grimaced as things went from bad to worse, but still no one looked at him. Caleb knew that Major Nash’s intentions were to use the embed to draw fire away from him, but it didn’t work. No one in that room could have picked the embed out of a line up. The Times could have sent a reporter with two heads and none of the men would have yet noticed that fact. Major Nash left and Caleb walked slowly into the throng of men in silence. The crowd seemed to part as every man drew away from Caleb on his approach. The men who were standing around Jackson stepped backward as Caleb got near them, giving the illusion that Jackson had stepped forward. The two men laughed while they reached to hug each other, despite the eyes watching. They slammed their fists into the other’s back, like men do when they hug.
***
Jackson was reading the Bible alone that night, but he could not focus on a single word. Sand was in the cracks of the pages, even between pages that Jackson had not opened while in Afghanistan.
Sand was everywhere. It was like no sand he had ever seen before. It wasn’t granular, but fine like powder. Once kicked up, it seemed to float on the air. Sand was in every breath that he took, and in every nook and crevice of his body. Sand would come out of his mouth every time he sneezed. He had not had the occasion yet to bleed or cry, but wouldn’t have been surprised if he found sand in both his blood and his tears. Occasionally when he would step outside the hooch, he would discover that the wind had blown so much sand into the air that he felt like he was wearing orange tinted shades. It was a visual sensation so surreal that he felt grateful he had never done acid. Sometimes Afghanistan gave Jackson the creeps. He was starting to sympathize with the men he’d heard about who put a bullet through their own femurs just so they’d be sent home.
Frustrated, Jackson closed the Bible and looked around. He wondered how Caleb might be settling in. He knew he was most likely already sleeping. His ears had almost certainly been ringing from the CH-53 engines up until the second he lost consciousness. It was probably for the best – that way Caleb couldn’t hear the scoffs, sighs, grunts, and little laughs that Rider had made at every opening to make his objections to Caleb’s presence known.
