Soldier Doll

by Jennifer Gold

  . . .

  Alex surveyed his room. There was still so much packing to do before he left for university. He had left it all to the last minute, figuring it wouldn’t take that long. Clearly, he realized now, he had miscalculated. His clothes were heaped in piles on the floor, only vaguely grouped into any kind of classification system. He had tried to separate the room into summer versus winter clothes, but at some point, the T-shirts and sweaters had intermingled into a single giant “shirts pile” in the center of the rug. He looked at his bookcases, which were nearly empty now. He noticed an old calculator on one shelf and frowned, wondering if he should take it as a backup. Had he remembered his graphing calculator? Leaning over, he ruffled through one of the boxes on his desk but didn’t see it. He pulled out an old Gumby toy and stared into its vacant eyes. Did he need to take Gumby? He wavered, debating. Then he shrugged. Why not? Gumby went back in the bag.

  In pursuit of his graphing calculator—it had cost his parents over a hundred bucks; they’d for sure kill him if he lost it—he reached for his desk drawer and yanked it open. Pens, pencils, scented markers, a broken geometry set, a crappy macramé bracelet from Katie Kastner before she’d decided she’d rather go out with one of the soccer guys, Disney Band-Aids, used tissues. Damn. Where was it? Alex rummaged through the back of the drawer.

  There it was. Relieved, Alex tossed the device into the box along with a couple more pens. You could never really have enough pens, he reasoned to himself. He aimed his pens at the cardboard box labeled “desk crap” and lobbed them inside.

  “Shoot,” he said, irritated, as one fell behind the desk. Sighing, he bent down to look for it. Reaching behind the desk, he felt for it with his hand and encountered a larger, odd-shaped object.

  Alex pulled at it and retrieved it from its hiding place.

  “Oh, you.” Alex stared at the soldier doll, feeling guilty. He was glad he’d found it before his mother had. It was lodged behind his desk between the computer and the wall. She’d have been furious with him. She’d only reluctantly handed it over to him after he’d begged for it as a plaything years ago. For a long time, it had sat perched on the corner of one of his bookshelves. He wondered when it had fallen.

  “From an American soldier,” his mother had said briefly, when he asked where she’d got it. “They sometimes gave out toys or candy to orphans in the anti-communist villages.”

  His father had been curious, too. “It looks older, though,” he’d said once, examining it. “Like an antique.”

  “I doubt it’s valuable,” his mother had said dismissively. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have given it away if it were.”

  His mom didn’t like to talk about the war. She’d immigrated to Canada in 1975 with a distant relative, a third cousin she’d called Auntie, who would beat her regularly for transgressions as minor as not buttoning a shirt properly, she’d told Alex. Alex had only a vague memory of the woman, who had died when he was four. When asked about the war, his mother would simply say, “it was a terrible time.” She didn’t elaborate, and his father warned him not to push her.

  “Don’t pester your mom about the war,” he’d say. “It was a very traumatic time.” He’d follow with his own lectures about the war, which, to Alex, were less history lessons and more political diatribes against various governments and someone named Nixon. Once he’d crept quietly out of the room, unnoticed, as his father railed against politicians who were no longer in power and, frequently, dead.

  His father was what people still referred to occasionally as a draft dodger. When his number had come up for the draft, he’d headed for the Canadian border rather than compromise his principles and fight in a war he opposed. He’d lived for a couple of years in Montreal before settling in Toronto, where he worked as a writer and occasional teacher. He’d met Alex’s mom sometime in the eighties at a reading, where she’d been impressed by his emotional deliverance and creativity. What his mother did, he was never quite sure; he knew she was a consultant, but what that meant baffled him. What he did know was that it paid well.

  He was an only child. His mother had been told she might never have children—years of poor health and hunger during the war had taken a toll on her body—but he had been a welcome surprise several years into his parents’ marriage. As a kid, he’d longed for a sibling: someone with whom to share the strangeness of being sort of Vietnamese and sort of not. When he was younger, he’d found it tougher. The other Vietnamese kids—not that there were that many at his school—all spoke fluent Vietnamese and brought dishes like pho and bun to school in their lunch boxes. His mother refused to speak Vietnamese, let alone teach it to him, and she didn’t cook any Vietnamese food, despite his dad’s fondness for rice noodles in chicken broth. The first time Alex had tried pho was with his father. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d said, offering Alex a plateful of the best spring rolls he’d ever tasted.

  Alex turned the carved wooden doll over in his hands. There was talk in the papers of war as retaliation for the attacks. Fingers pointed at Osama bin Laden. He was believed to be hiding out in Afghanistan, a country Alex only vaguely recalled hearing of before September 11, 2001.

  “It’s near Russia, right?” He’d been at the dinner table with his parents discussing the latest news on the terrorist attacks and the impending war.

  His father looked impressed. “That’s right,” he’d replied. He’d given his mother a smug look. “See? We didn’t need to send him to a private school.”

  “Actually, I know that from this video game on the PlayStation. It’s called—”

  His mother cut him off and looked at his father with raised eyebrows. “You were saying, Don?”

  “Never mind.”

  His parents were at odds about the possibility of war. They’d argued over it again this morning at breakfast.

  “War is never the answer,” his father passionately declared. “It’s never the reasonable path.”

  His mother was more philosophical. “No one ever wants to go to war,” she said, calmly taking a bite of her toast. “But sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes you have to fight evil with a little bit of evil.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Thuy,” said his dad, shaking his head. “After living through war, seeing what it does to people.”

  “Not every war is the same,” she countered. “What if the Americans hadn’t fought the Nazis in World War II?”

  Alex sighed. He wondered how they could endure having the same conversation over and over. They’d go back and forth like that every day, neither of them ever budging. What was the point?

  Alex stayed out of these debates. He wasn’t sure how he felt about a war. On the one hand, if there were a war, lots of people would die. On the other hand, it seemed like the Americans were pretty justified in getting some kind of revenge against this bin Laden guy who supposedly planned the attacks. Alex wasn’t exactly sure how invading a whole country to find one guy worked, but he’d also read online that the people who ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban, were a pretty nasty group who wouldn’t let girls go to school and held massive public executions. Overthrowing them didn’t sound like such a bad idea. Still, he stayed out of it.

  Now, Alex looked at the small figure and turned it over in his hands. He’d loved it as a kid; its history was exciting to him. It represented mysterious faraway places and was the only tangible proof he had of his mother’s past in Vietnam. Should he take it with him to school? His hand hovered over the box, ready to drop it in, but he decided against it. Standing up, he went back and placed the toy figure on the top shelf of his bookcase. It’ll be safer here, he told himself. If anything happened to it at school, Mom would kill me.

  Alex stared at the soldier doll a moment longer, then turned his attention to the pile of books stacked precariously on his desk. He picked up the first book—a biology text. Will I need bio there? he wondered. Pr
obably not. There were no required bio courses in the math program. He was about to toss it onto the “stay pile” when he reconsidered. I might take it as an elective. He dropped it into a box marked “for school.” He picked up the next book, a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. It was his favorite novel.

  I’ve already read it, he reasoned, leaning toward the “stay” pile.

  But you might want to read it again! A little voice in the back of his head challenged him, and his hand froze as he reconsidered.

  Alex tossed the book in the “school box” and regarded the stack still in front of him: it was going to be a long day.

  . . .

  “You coming, dude?”

  “Coming where?” Alex looked at his new friend. It was the end of the day; classes were finally over. Alex was looking forward to collapsing on his bed for a nice nap before hitting the dining hall and puzzling over his geometry text. He hadn’t understood a word the professor had said in class this week and was worried. It had come to a point where the mere mention of the word geometry made him break into a sweat. Last night he’d awoken, heart pounding at three in the morning, muttering “Cosine! Cosine!” He couldn’t remember the details, but nightmare hadn’t been good. He’d never had any problems with geometry in high school, but in the three months since he’d started higher education, it had become the bane of his existence.

  “The meeting.” Benji looked surprised. “You haven’t heard?”

  “No.” Alex felt embarrassed. He hated being left out of things, and his new buddies, Benji and Steve and Teddy, always seemed to know about parties and meetings and groups and stuff. He never did, and it sometimes felt like he was tagging along.

  “Some army thing. Off campus—at the pizza place.”

  “Army thing?” Alex looked at his friend in disbelief. Benji had never shown any interest in politics. He didn’t even read the newspaper, dismissing it as “a waste of time that could be spent on calculus.”

  “Free pizza,” said Benji with a shrug. He lowered his voice. “Teddy said he heard there may also be free booze.”

  “Free booze? From the military?” Alex looked at his friend incredulously. “Doesn’t that seem a little unlikely to you?”

  “Dunno. Maybe it’s not official army, like? Maybe just some army guys?”

  “Benji, man, what the hell are you talking about?” Alex shook his head. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Trust me.” Benji put his hand on his friend’s backpack. “Free pizza, maybe free booze, and all you gotta do is pretend to care about the Caliban.”

  “Taliban.”

  “Whatever.”

  Alex didn’t say anything. While his friends were decidedly apolitical, Alex found himself spending more and more of his spare time engrossed in newspapers and online magazines, reading about terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the situation in the Middle East. He’d even signed up for a class next semester called The Middle East since World War II. He hadn’t told his friends, who assumed he’d signed up for the same music appreciation course all the math majors opted for.

  “So, you in?” Benji waited for an answer.

  “I guess.” Alex thought of his geometry book and felt his stomach turn; he pushed all thoughts of angles and mathematical proofs out of his head and tried to focus on pizza.

  “Great.” Benji slapped him on the back. Alex winced; Benji was a huge guy who didn’t realize that his playful slaps had the approximate force of a sledgehammer.

  “Go drop off your crap; I told the others we’d meet them outside the physics building at five.”

  “Okay.” Alex trudged backed to his room, where he happily dumped his textbook-laden backpack on the ground.

  “Where are you off to?” His roommate, Jonathan, looked up at him from his laptop.

  “Some, um, army thing.” Alex felt embarrassed. “There’s free pizza,” he added feebly.

  “You’re going to an army recruiting event for the pizza?”

  “My friends are dragging me,” Alex mumbled.

  Jonathan shook his head. “You math guys,” he said. “They should force you to take some history and poli-sci.” Jonathan hadn’t yet declared a major, but he told anyone who would listen that he was pre-law.

  “I know history,” retorted Alex.

  “Relax, Cameron. I was only kidding.” Jonathan made a face and went back to his computer.

  Alex grabbed his coat and headed for the physics building. Jonathan was wrong; he wasn’t ignorant. Just because he was a “math guy” didn’t mean he didn’t understand politics and current events. He was sure he knew more about the Taliban than Jonathan did about logarithms. Angrily, he kicked a stone and watched it bounce along the dusty road.

  . . .

  There was no free beer. They were real army guys, and they weren’t about to risk buying booze for a bunch of underage kids. Benji and the others were disappointed, but were soon consoled with unlimited slices of free pizza.

  “This is great pie,” said Teddy, taking a third slice of pepperoni.

  “It was worth coming for,” agreed Steve.

  Alex said nothing. He had eaten his two slices of pizza quietly, not really talking to the recruiters who were trying too hard to be friendly with the kids around the table. His friends had chatted freely with the guys, not realizing or caring that they were being manipulated.

  “Hi there.” One of the military guys sat down next to Alex and gave him a big smile. Alex felt himself cringe. “Hey,” he muttered.

  “What’s your major? I’m Rory, by the way.”

  “Alex. I’m in math.”

  “That’s great.” Rory gave him another phony smile. “I did chemistry.”

  “You went to university?” Alex looked at him, surprised.

  “Of course I did,” said Rory. “And the army paid for it.”

  “Really?” said Alex. He currently had a scholarship, but he had a to maintain an A average to keep it and stay in the Honors Math program: an average that was seeming less and less likely given the current geometry situation.

  “Yup. And I had a guaranteed job once I’d finished school, too.”

  “Huh,” said Alex. “With the army?”

  “Yes. A great job, in chemistry, with benefits and a great salary.”

  A guaranteed job in his field. Right after graduation. Alex pondered this.

  “I don’t think I’m really the army type,” he said to Rory cautiously. “I’m not sure how I feel about the war in Afghanistan.”

  “I used to feel the same way,” said Rory. “I thought, do we really have the right to be involved in a country so far away? Is it any of our business?”

  Alex nodded; this meddling concerned him. It made him think of Vietnam.

  “But,” Rory went on, “I did some more reading. And you know what? I realized it’s more immoral not to do something.”

  “You think so?” asked Alex. “Because they don’t let girls go to school and stuff?”

  Rory banged his fist on the table. “They don’t just not let them go to school, Alex,” he said. “They make them cover themselves from head to toe. They are not allowed to drive. They aren’t allowed to do anything, and if they do, they’re punished by law. And these aren’t laws like we have here in Canada. Oh no! They can be beaten or stoned for something as small as trying to buy food for their children.” Rory paused dramatically and shook his head.

  Alex found himself nodding. He thought about what his mother had said, about it sometimes being necessary to fight evil with a little evil. Maybe she was right.

  “Here’s my card,” said Rory. He handed Alex a little Armed Forces business card. Alex took it, surprised. He hadn’t realized that soldiers carried cards like lawyers or bankers or whatever. “Call me if you’re interested. There are lo
ts of opportunities for someone like you. We’re always looking for math guys, people to work in encryption. Code breaking, stuff like that.”

  “Thanks,” Alex replied automatically. He watched Rory’s back as he turned to talk to another student. Alex thought about what he’d said. He pictured the burkas he’d seen on television, the long tent-like garments that women in Afghanistan were forced to wear. All they had was some netting at the eye area so the women could see. It wasn’t at all clear to him how they could breathe in those things, and he was pretty sure Afghanistan was hot. It looked hot, anyway, on TV. He also remembered that big public execution he’d heard about, the one they’d held in, like, a soccer stadium so everyone could watch, like it was some big game.

  . . .

  “So, did you enjoy your free pizza?” Jonathan was still awake and working at his laptop when Alex got back. Jonathan shunned his desk in favor of his bed; he liked to spread his books around him like pillows and work in a slumped over, half-reclining position. Alex couldn’t understand how he got any work done like that. If he laid down on his bed to work, he’d be asleep in under five minutes.

  “It was fine,” said Alex neutrally. He sat down at his desk chair and unlaced his boots.

  “Was there booze?” Jonathan asked.

  “No.” Alex kicked off his boots. “They were real army guys. They weren’t about to buy booze for us.”

  “Right,” said Jonathan. “Because the army has never done anything wrong or illegal before.” He smirked, tapping on his keyboard.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jonathan snorted. “The military does all kinds of bad stuff. Didn’t your mom teach you anything about the Vietnam War? You think we should be in Afghanistan?”

  “I don’t think they’re at all the same, actually,” retorted Alex. “What about women’s rights? You support the Taliban?”