* * *
With my daddy and my husband, my feelings didn’t matter much. What mattered was making them feel good. But Milt? Milt made me feel good about myself—
You fuck him?
Don’t. You didn’t let me finish. And don’t be like that. I’ve had enough of that kind of disrespect from the men in my life. Milt made me feel good about myself, but I don’t want to just feel good. Makes the world a damn lonely place. You, you make me feel good about the place. Feel like things might just be okay for once.
* * *
He allows himself to imagine a future for them. This allowance feels dangerous, deadly even, something he spent years daring never do, look ahead. In this future, he and Bellum tour the Blue Ridge Mountains in a spring season breaking like a warm, rideable wave.
* * *
With all the fucking we’re doing, we’ve got to talk about birth control.
Why?
And I thought you operators made plans to make plans. My periods haven’t been regular, but pulling out’s gonna get me an abortion. Don’t want to go through that again.
In high school?
Right before my first tour. Military facilities only do abortions to save the mother’s life. It was either Planned Parenthood, seek a pregnancy discharge—which isn’t automatic anymore—or stay home with Travis and have his baby while the 321st went to war without me. I chose Iraq. Pro-life I guess I aint.
* * *
Here’s the difference between us and them, and I’m not talking about all of them, just talking about the men. Our men kill women and kids, same as they do, but women and kids are not primary targets. With their suicide bombs and passenger-jet missiles, they set out to kill women and kids. To them, there are no innocents. Infants are infidels first. Cut off their little heads with kitchen knives and be sure to videotape it with your phone and beam it to Al Jazeera. That’s what we’re fighting. That’s the mission of the jihadi. And it’s that prehistory attitude, after a decade of war against it, that some of the weaker elements of the US military succumb to. I’m talking about the Staff Sergeant Gibbs and the other pawns from the Stryker brigade stationed at FOB Ramrod, murdering Afghan civilians for sport, taking fingers for trophies, snapping pictures with a kill like it’s a four-point buck. War’s the greatest intimacy. We get bashed in the press for not knowing the culture, and maybe that was true at the outset, but very quickly you get to know your enemy or you get killed. You meet them at their most essential. How they wash, what they wear, when they eat, where they shit, and why they fight. Learning these things keeps you alive and makes you a better-prepared soldier. Most of the guys and gals on the front line know their enemy better than they know their spouses. That’s what we have to confront when we come home.
* * *
I’ve got a plan.
If you’re making plans that involve me, I better damn well be on the planning committee.
We take a road trip. First stop, Jersey.
Atlantic City?
Highlands. Take you to meet my mother.
You’re not serious.
Dead serious. I haven’t seen her in, oh, five or so years.
Okay.
Then we go down to Key West. Spend a little time.
You know I’m one of those Floridians who’s never been.
Well this’ll be new then.
Why Key West?
I want to ride from the southernmost point in the US to the northernmost. Want to see the whole shebang and everything in between.
Northernmost point somewhere in Maine?
I want to go corner to corner. All the way to Deadhorse, Alaska. Farthest north you can drive on Alaska’s road system. The route that takes you through as little of Canada as possible’s about 6,000 miles. Supposed to be some 150 hours of driving, give or take. Called the Iron Butt Ultimate Coast to Coast Challenge.
And in what kind of vehicle do we make this ass-numbing road trip across America?
Not in, on. A motorcycle. And I want to make detours. Three detours.
We could visit my daddy.
That’s what I was thinking.
My daddy, and then Travis, to serve divorce papers.
That’s stop three.
And in between?
Fort Knox.
No.
You can’t go confronting your husband with your deserter wrap hanging over you.
Hell. The fuck. No.
Can’t get to Alaska without going through Canada. Rather not have to make an illegal border crossing coming and going.
Can’t we just go to the tip of Washington State?
We could, but that doesn’t solve the problem of your husband, which doesn’t solve the problem of birth control, which doesn’t solve the problem of my marrying you if and when you get pregnant.
And when we gonna start this road trip?
Come spring. Road to Deadhorse is impassable in winter.
I’m not spending 6,000 miles on the back of no fucking bike.
I will.
You’ll ride bitch.
I’m man enough.
Be serious.
We’ll get a sidecar.
And our gear?
Ok, two side cars.
We gonna have a lot of gear?
One for our gear, one for your dog.
You gonna get me a new dog?
I’m gonna get you your dog.
* * *
Fucking could not understand why so many fucking Iraqis just would not stop at the fucking checkpoints. We were lighting up cars of women and kids. Fucking kids. Couldn’t imagine what they were thinking. Big signs, bigger guns. They kept right on fucking coming. The fuck? Know what we realized? They couldn’t see. Fuckers. No one could afford glasses or eye exams. Didn’t stop them from fucking driving but it stopped them from fucking stopping when we wanted them the fuck to stop. So they got shot. It’s all so stupid as fuck.
* * *
During an early January warm spell, Ray comes into camp from a forage with a handful of spindly mushrooms, what he says are Phrygian caps.
Found them in the empty alpaca paddock. Most of the animals are gone from the Standard. A few rabbits and chickens left.
Hope Vessey’s all right.
Studies show psychedelics help with anxiety and battle stress.
Feed me, Seymour.
* * *
Bellum stands dreamily, fuck-drunk, her posture regimented even when at ease, even when exhausted. She’d been a good soldier, he sees that. She makes him attentive, keeps him from clicking out, prevents the vibes of the yurt walls from becoming the indifferent cosmos, the two of them in karmic orbit around the radiant idol at the far end, the woodstove, indistinct, mute, omniscient.
All this time together, and he hasn’t considered the best way to off her. Hasn’t even occurred to him. Maybe that’s a soldier’s love. Being with someone you can’t think to kill.
She’s something else for sure, reminds him of no other woman he’s known. He pulls her down, and she rolls on her belly.
No need to be gentle.
Yes, ma’am.
* * *
My daddy was abusive. Mostly growing up, it was verbal. He’s mean, and creative with his meanness. When I was a girl, he’d lash me, hard, with a fan belt. As I got older, he seemed to get meaner. What I remember most is the last time he got rough. Grabbed me between my legs. Said, Grrl, they don’t call this a snatch for nothing. You don’t start behaving, stop screwing round with them niggers, I’m gonna be the one to give it you and it aint gonna be pretty. He never did, but the threat of it felt real fucking real. And his threat worked. I stopped seeing Lamar. I was sixteen, and the next day I started planning to get out. Went to the ROTC office at school and joined up. Second I graduated, I was off to boot camp.
* * *
I’ve got some sexual abuse in my past.
What, you date rape some poor girl in high school?
My brothers and me had a babysitter, Jimmer. His dad owned an
arcade on the boardwalk. Italian kid, fourteen, fifteen. I was all of six or seven, which made my brothers five and three, thereabouts. Started off Jimmer showing us porn mags. It was instructive, you know. Educational. This is a pussy. This is a penis. This is how they fit together. This is a blow job, this, anal sex. Then we got a lesson on how to masturbate. We were told to touch his come. To taste it. If we refused, we got punched. We had to jerk ourselves off. I was having dry orgasms. Boys don’t produce semen till they hit puberty. This all happened over a couple years. A slow schooling. I eventually graduated to jerking him off. Him humping my butt while I wore my undies. There was never any penetration, not that I remember. My younger brothers had smaller roles. I got the lead, which was a theme of my childhood. Abusive babysitters, my mom’s abusive boyfriends, her headcase of a second husband, they all keyed in on me, the oldest. Then I trickled it down to my little brothers. Ass kickings, mind you, never anything sexual. My molestation didn’t make me a molester. Isn’t true what they say. Molested grow up to be molesters. Cycle of child abuse is a myth. Makes a good story, easy, but that don’t make it true. Fact is, there’re far more child molesters out there who were never molested. Mine made me supersensitive to the slightest suggestion of sexual abuse, and maybe to everything else. Don’t relate to sex the same way other men do. Made me a bit of an outcast in the service. Sex for me’s more emotional, more complicated, than for most men. Never had me a one-night stand.
How many women you fucked?
Six. My wife was the last, before you. You?
Women? Just one.
And men?
You will think me an absolute slut. I never needed to feel love in order to fuck.
You earned the right of a little promiscuity after eons of sexual repression.
That’s kind.
So what are we talking? A regiment?
I always confuse brigade and regiment. Regiment’s a thousand?
That’s a battalion. Regiment and brigade’s the same thing, three to five K.
Nice. But no. I’m easy but I’m not a professional near to retirement.
A company?
This little game’s making for some unflattering images. But no, not a company.
Company’s what—it’s been a while—62 to 190?
Say a platoon that’s taken some losses.
Platoon’s 16 to 44. I can live with that.
That’s where this is going, a number you can live with?
For the rest of my natural life.
Why don’t you tell me about your wife?
* * *
My second tour, we were in Baghdad, doing night raids. Couple months earlier, during the invasion, we seized the Haditha Dam on the Euphrates. Night raids were a Sunday walk by comparison. Got some skewed intel. Stormed the house of a nice family in the al-Dura neighborhood. We called it Dora. Scared the bejesus out of a striking young woman coming out of her bedroom. She had a kid brother, three younger sisters, a mother. No father. They were scraping by, and only just. Youngest girl, Larsa, had scurvy. I started bringing them food a few times a week, lots of citrus, would eat dinner with them when I could. Graduated to hounding a couple of neighbors challenging their claim on their house. They were squatting in their own home, feeling the squeeze. They were Iraqi Christians. Chaldo-Assyrians they call themselves. Maryam was eighteen. I was twenty. Knew each other less than a month—she was helping me with my Arabic—when I asked her to marry me. Told her it’d have to be secret. You know. US CENTCOM forbids intimate relations with foreign and local nationals. I’d’ve lost my security clearance. She probably wanted it kept secret more than me. She told me, Mumkin. Mumkin became my nickname for her. Means maybe. Rajaa’an, I said. I’m begging. She answered, Na’am.
Yes, a formal yes.
Month later, we had a secret wedding. Small ceremony in Amman. Didn’t bother to tell my mom or brothers. They still have no idea I was ever married.
This is incredible.
Nah. Had a war bride. Used to be one of the reasons we went to war. Freshen the bloodlines, stir up the gene pool.
It’s so … romantic.
Yeah, well, four-year tour was getting close to done. This was ’04. Things were getting worse. Sectarian violence we called it. Don’t have to tell you. All-out civil war at that point. Neighborhoods being ethnically cleansed by death squads. Plain genocide, no bones about it. But the Christian neighborhoods in Baghdad—Mansour, Baladiyat, Dora, al-Sana—were mostly left alone. In Mosul, things were already getting bad for Christians. They fled for Baghdad. It wasn’t yet like it was in ’10, when that kill squad from the Islamic State of Iraq stormed the Cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation, taking three priests hostage before offing fifty-plus worshipers. If you’re a practicing Catholic, guess there’s no better place to die. ISI didn’t stop there. Families of the mourners hung funeral signs outside their homes. Follow-up squads used the signs as targets for their mortars. But in ’04, we weren’t ready. No precedent. Went to check on them one night. Like most nights. Were my in-laws by then. There was a couple of old women there, cooking keşkek, Iranian dish, and cleaning up bloodstains. Dumped their stew all over the freshly mopped floors before they told me the whole family’d been hooded and hauled off. Men in Iraqi police uniforms. I’m not squeamish, but what they found of her, of them, even to this day.
Took leave afterward. Followed one cold trail after another. Almost got myself a still on Dead TV. Three weeks went by. Camped out at the Baghdad morgue. They’d just opened the screening room. Four computers and a flat-screen television arranged in front of rows of blue plastic chairs. Saddest damn audience you ever seen. Image after image of Fulan al-Fulani and Fulana al-Fulaniyya. Unidentified Iraqi murder victims, John and Jane Does. They flash by, each image lasting no longer than a heartbeat. Blue-faced men who’ve been handcuffed, gagged and tortured. Headless corpses, corpses without limbs. Bulging eyes. Bullet holes. Burnt faces, frozen mid-scream. Want me to stop?
Yes, but don’t.
Wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, they wait for their turn in the screening room. They’d pass out and thrown up. Shake and wail. Guy smashed the back window. One of the employees I would talk to said at first his nightmares were of the lifeless bodies, but they’d gotten worse. Worse? I said. How could they get any worse? They’d become the faces of the families watching every day. So I get a call. They tell me they found a bag. I said, What do you mean a bag. They said, A bag. Only parts, but we’ve identified one of the sisters. Go down there, and it’s not even in the main building. In a portable, one of those cooler cars like a doublewide. They tell me they’re not bringing the bag out till I sit, like a good dog. They set this Hefty bag between my boots. Looks filled with soccer balls. One guy’s tearing up.
Oh, god.
Open it, paw through looking for Maryam’s face. Didn’t see it. See her brother and three kid sisters. Girls were nine, six, and five. Keep moving them aside. The two morgue guys are getting antsy now. I dump the contents on the floor. Heads roll. The morgue guys step back. Among the parts are two pair of breasts. I could tell which were Maryam’s.
Oh, Ray.
Mahdi Army drilled holes through them. Way the blood coagulated, they’d done the drilling while they were alive. Week later, bodies of Maryam and her mother—what was left—were found in with a dozen others. Empty peacock cage at the Baghdad Zoo.
* * *
If I’m gonna be the one spending all my time in the thing, shouldn’t I have some say?
First off, we’ll split the driving. I’m gonna be spending as much time in the sidecar as you. Number two, I’m paying. Number three, the sidecar I have in mind’s one I’ve wanted for a long damn time, I’ve just never had justification to spend the seventy-five hundred.
Where you gonna get that kind of money?
I have money.
We could buy another bike for that.
A used bike that runs on tamari and would only give us problems.
You sound like
my daddy. I can’t believe you’ve had a bike in storage all this time. Let’s go get ice cream.
You’re gonna love it. Sidecar’s a Steib S500. Looks like a Flash Gordon rocket. You climb in, you’ll feel like Major “King” Kong riding the bomb backwards into oblivion.
This Major Kong one of your Ranger COs?
Character in Dr. Strangelove. You never seen Dr. Strangelove? Every soldier should see Dr. Strangelove as part of Basic.
* * *
We catch flack for Abu Ghraib. Expected to be above the fray while in the thick of it, while instigating it. Doesn’t work like that. Poor Lynndie.
Lynndie’s a dumb cunt who got what she deserved.
Rumsfeld deserves what she got.
Rumsfeld deserves what your wife got.
Nobody deserves that shit. Not even the people who did it to her. Taken me all these years to be able to say that. Not saying they don’t deserve punishment. That they’re not guilty of war crimes. All I’m saying, for me to move on, to stay sane if not whole, I’ve had to try to understand their motives. Try to sympathize, sick as that sounds.
You’re either a better person than I am or you’re a bigger pussy.
This, sweetheart, this is me just trying to justify my cowardice after getting burnt out. But you got to find a way to keep open to the world. And the people in it. Even the people doing terrible things. Maybe them most of all. Because, as you know, anyone can do a terrible thing you put them in a warzone. Any fucking one. Difference between your martyr and your insurgent’s a matter of choosing sides. Can only imagine what the final hours of their lives were like. Spent the last however many years trying not to. Finally realized I’ve got to, imagine I mean, in order to put them to rest.
The Standard Grand Page 23
