But Tyler didn’t see it that way. “I respect that you want to do something noble, but the Army’s not the place to do it,” he kept saying. “Specially not for a girl.” He sang me old folk songs about wounded soldiers and loves lost forever, Bob Dylan songs about the evils of war. And he made me watch all those scary movies about Vietnam, Platoon and Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. He even told me my parents were wrong to support my decision to enlist, except he didn’t use the word “wrong.” The word he used was “misguided.”
“But it’s different now,” I said. “The recruiter said I’ll be traveling the world and keeping the peace. He said I’ll do things I can be proud of for the rest of my life.”
Tyler looked at me a moment, his cinnamon eyes droopy and sad. “Then marry me before you go.”
“Get serious! We’re seventeen. We haven’t even finished high school.”
“I am serious.”
“Listen, I’ll marry you later. We need to grow up first.”
So I joined the MP reserves, applied to Catholic colleges—the only kind my parents would let me go to—and went off to summer boot camp, coming back bulging with muscles and ready to fight. I thought I was so tough! I’d spent nine weeks marching for miles with huge weights on my back, singing songs about blood and bombs, learning hand-to-hand combat, jabbing bayonets into human-shaped sacks, screaming “Kill!” and “Yes, sir!” and “Hooah!” I still remember this one rhyme we used to chant while we marched:
What makes the green grass grow?
Blood, blood, bright red blood.
What makes the pretty flowers bloom?
Guts, guts, gritty grimy guts.
And you know, I liked it. I liked feeling strong and capable. I liked proving myself. What this had to do with keeping the peace wasn’t exactly clear to me anymore, but I figured clarity would come. One thing was clear, though: I was definitely no longer the type of girl you patted on the head.
I started at Saint Catherine’s College, up by Albany, in September 2001, the very same week those lunatic fuckers attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If I got called to do something about those bastards, I was ready! But nothing happened. The war in Afghanistan began. My freshman year went by. I hung out with Tyler, watching him play guitar and feeling sidelined and useless. My whole life seemed on hold.
Then, in February 2003, halfway through my sophomore year, I finally got the e-mail I’d been waiting for. It said that I was attached to the 800th Military Police Brigade out of Uniondale, New York, and that we were deploying in two days. What a scramble! Only forty-eight hours to quit college, pack up all my gear and say good-bye to everybody— my professors, my friends, Tyler and my family. I also had to make a will and sign all kinds of papers about what would happen if I got killed—something I hadn’t thought much about, to tell the truth. After all, Mom and Dad had always taught me that it’s all in God’s plan when we die. Makes no difference whether we go to war or stay at home knitting booties.
The night before I left, Mom took me to church to pray for protection and be blessed by our priest, Father Slattery. “May the Lord watch over you, child,” he said in his goofy Irish accent, making the sign of the cross above my head as I knelt in front of him. Then he told me to always obey the will of God with the same humility as the Virgin Mary. “A soldier is asked to lay down his life for others, just as Jesus did,” he added. And after we’d said the Lord’s Prayer and some Hail Marys, he cited a verse from the Psalms he’d picked out to give me courage:
The Lord lifts up the downtrodden, he casts the wicked to the ground.
That’s what I’ll be doing, I thought proudly. Lifting the downtrodden, casting the wicked to the ground. That’s what soldiers are for.
On the morning I had to leave, Tyler came down to New Jersey with my parents and April to wave good-bye at Fort Dix, along with all the other crying moms and dads, girlfriends and boyfriends and kids. I could see him in the crowd even from the airplane steps, big guy that he is. Football shoulders, back straight and strong. Long brown hair blowing in the wind. And below it, his soft face full of love and sadness.
Sometimes, standing at the checkpoint here, I see his face the way it looked that day. Like he’s watching me. Like he knows something I don’t.
When our shift is finally over, fourteen long hours after we started this morning, Kormick drives us back to our tents. Everybody’s in a crappy mood, exhausted and itchy and irritated as fuck. The one blessing is that Boner isn’t with us. He’s in Jimmy Donnell’s team and they leave separately.
The drive back to our tents takes twenty minutes, long enough for a serious nap, so I drop my head back against the cooler behind me and doze with my eyes half open like a cat. Rickman’s crammed in beside me and DJ’s up front with Kormick, but none of us says a word. We’re all too pooped even to move our mouths, let alone shout over the wind and the groans of the Humvee rattling over the stony desert. My neck bounces against the hard cooler as we bump along, and my knees are folded up almost to my ears because of all the crap stuffed in here—weapons and water and ammo and first aid and MREs and tools and toilet paper and baby wipes and God knows what. I ache all over and each bump feels like it’ll snap my head off. But I’m too frigging wiped out to care.
“What a fuckin’ dead day,” Kormick finally yells over the noise.
“Yeah, I hate this checkpoint shit,” DJ shouts back. “No action at all.”
“I saw some action,” zitty Rickman chimes in, grabbing a chance to push his way into the big-guy talk in the front. “Brady’s ass, hanging out there in the breeze.”
“You saw Brady’s ass?” Kormick snickers.
“Yep. Taking a piss. Nice little pink thing.”
“Hey, Brady.” It’s Kormick again.
I don’t answer, even though I’d love to tell Rickman that he’s a lying fuckface. “Pinkass, I’m talking to you,” Kormick says.
“That’s not my name,” I say warily. Why’s he picking on me so much today?
“That’s not my name, Sergeant,” he snaps.
I don’t answer that, either.
“You wish you had a cock, Brady?” Kormick says then. “A real cock like a man, so you can piss like a man? Nobody’d have to see your little pink ass then, would they?”
“Better than having to look at all your wormy little dicks,” I say before I can stop myself.
DJ chuckles.
Kormick glares at me in the rearview mirror, his blue eyes narrowed and framed by a rim of sand where his shades have been all day. When me and the other two girls in my platoon first saw him we had a fit, thinking, wow, they sent us a movie star for a sergeant, all chiseled and blue-eyed and blond. But his good looks are beginning to seem grotesque now. Brad Pitt’s evil twin.
“What the fuck makes you think you can talk to me like that, Pinkass?”
“Sar’nt?” DJ says cautiously. “We’ve all had a long day. You think maybe we should give it a rest?”
“Shut up, DJ. All of you, watch your fuckin’ mouths.” But Kormick doesn’t say a word after that.
We drive the rest of the way in silence.
THE NURSE TAKES the soldier gently by the arm. “Quiet down now,” she says. “It’s okay, honey-pie. Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Come sit.”
She leads the soldier back around the bed and makes her sit down. “It’s a flashback,” she says to the crying man. “She’ll be out of it in a moment. Maybe you should sit yourself down too, hon. She might take you in better that way.”
The soldier watches the man sit in the visitor’s chair and lean forward, his elbows on his knees and his bangs dangling into his wet eyes. “Katie?” His voice is still wobbly. “You do know I’m Tyler, right?”
She does now. Maybe. But when she tries to nod, the pain shoots through her neck and her mouth twists into a grimace. Her face feels hard and immobile, as if somebody’s glued a mask onto it. And she doesn’t feel like talking.
“Is your back any better
?” the man asks then. “Are they treating you right in here?” He sits up and looks around. “Seems okay. Clean. You never know what you’ll find with these VA hospitals, right?”
He pretends to smile. She doesn’t like that.
“I guess the food stinks, though, huh? Remember when I had my appendix out, how I hated the food?”
She stares at the polished floor. Bluish white, like the skin of a corpse. Her feet the same corpse color in their hospital slippers, only puffy, like rotting fish.
“Your mom and dad send their blessings. They’ll come Friday.”
That makes the soldier find her tongue. “I don’t want their fucking blessings. I don’t want them to come on Friday.”
“Oh, Katie.” The man leans toward her again, his face looking helpless. “You know you don’t mean that.”
[ NAEMA ]
MY POOR MOTHER is in a state. As soon as I return from my long absence at the prison, she flies at me in a panic. “Thanks be to Allah you’re safe!” she cries, clinging to me. “We’ve been waiting and waiting for you. Now tell me quickly—what did you find out?”
“Nothing,” I say, dropping into a chair, exhausted. She hands me a glass of water and I take a deep drink, parched from my hours of standing under the sun. “They told me nothing.”
Mama moans and rubs her face, her long, graying hair falling over her hands, her shirt and trousers crumpled. “Why has this happened to us? How can these Americans lock up your innocent father? How can they arrest a little boy? Zaki’s not even fully grown! Can’t they see this?”
“I know,” I say quietly. “I know, Mama.” I look about the room. “Where’s Granny?”
“In her bed at last. This terrible night has been too much for her.”
Mama crouches beside my chair, her face pale and drawn. Neither of us have had any sleep since Papa and Zaki were arrested. When the soldiers took them, I wanted to run after them to see where they were going, but Mama stopped me. “You can’t go now, alone in the night, you’ll be killed! We must wait and go in the morning with widow Fatima and the others.” So she, Granny and I stayed up all night, sick with worry and fright, watching for the first light of dawn so we could leave. But by the time that light finally came, Granny was in such a bad way that Mama could not leave after all. “Go,” she said to me, her voice breaking. “But, in the name of Allah, be careful.”
Now she looks up at me, her brow pinched. “Naema, what do you think they’ll do to your father? Will they torture him the way Saddam did? And what about Zaki? Will they starve him?”
I take her hands and kiss them. “I don’t know, Mama. But I met a girl soldier today and she doesn’t seem like a torturer, only a child.”
“But what did you hear from the other families? Have any of them seen their men? Have any been killed?”
“No, I told you, nobody knows anything. No dead were announced, we heard nothing. We had to wait outside the huge coils of wire they’ve put around the prison and we were too far away from the tents to see anything.”
I stand and pull my mother to her feet. “Try to keep up your courage, try not to think of the worst. The girl soldier said they’ll have a list of the prisoners soon. I’ll keep going back every day until I find out more, I promise.”
“But it’s so dangerous!” Mama steps away from me, compulsively rubbing her long fingers. “I don’t know which is worse, to let you go out there, exposing yourself to who knows what, or sitting here helplessly, knowing nothing. If only I could go with you!”
I wrap her in my arms. “I know it’s hard, but I can look after myself and you know I won’t ever go alone. There are plenty of people for me to walk with—I’ve already made friends with kind widow Fatima. I’ll find news of Papa and Zaki. Be patient.”
But as I hold her, I too am engulfed by sorrow and yearning. For Papa and Zaki to be home again. For Khalil, my love, his comfort and wisdom. And for the simple routine of school and work and meals that was once our life in Baghdad, and that I fear is now gone forever.
I wonder how much that little American soldier I met today understands of what she is doing to us. If I see her again, I would like to ask her. How would you feel, I would say, if I tore your mother’s children away from her, as you have done to mine? How would you feel if we flew over your cities and towns, dropping missiles and cluster bombs until your dead were lying in the street, shredded and putrefying? How would you feel if we dismantled your army and police, and destroyed the power that cleans your water, works your traffic lights and illuminates, heats and cools your homes? How would you feel if, having crippled your defenses, we opened the way for criminals and fanatics to come in and rob and murder and rape you—and then, when you tried to protect yourself, we arrested or shot you for being a terrorist? How would you feel if we drove you from your homes, scattered your friends and lovers and families, killed your children… ?
Yes, I would like to ask her all this, but I will not. For what could she tell me? She is young and ignorant. Nothing but a puppet.
[ KATE ]
AS SOON AS grumpfuck Kormick lets us out of the Humvee, I drag myself into the tent and drop onto my rack, wishing for the billionth time I could wave a wand and make every douche bag in sight disappear. Kormick sleeps in the NCO tent, thank God, but Rickman and DJ are right here with me across the aisle, so I can never get away from them, even for a frickin’ minute. They pull off their boots, stinking up the air as usual, take out their MREs and start to eat. DJ offers me his bag of chips—we’re always trading food in the hopes of getting some variety—but I shake my head. I owe him for shutting up Kormick, but I don’t want to deal right now. Not with him, not with anybody.
I lie on my fart sack, the sleeping bag I use for a mattress, my arm over my eyes, trying to just breathe. The tent is always hot and dusty inside because we have no floor but sand and no air-conditioning but tent flaps. It’s overcrowded, too, with eighteen green cots lined up on each side and our crap stuffed into every available space in between: duffle bags and dirty underwear, helmets and rifles, boots and socks and backpacks. Even the tent poles are cluttered—fading photos of girlfriends and wives, good-luck rabbit feet and key rings, or in my case Fuzzy the spider and my crucifix. And then, of course, there are the men. The tent reeks of them. Sweat and farts, beard and balls.
“Hey, Freckles.” (That’s what my friends call me. Better than Tits or Pinkass, at least.) I lift my arm off my eyes, relieved to see another female at last. Third Eye walks over to me in her brown T-shirt and camo pants, looking as sand-crusted and exhausted as the rest of us, and parks her big self on her rack beside me. She’s six foot tall, with a round red face like a Russian’s, short dark hair and squinty black eyes. And she’s built like a bulldozer. She could scoop up most of the guys in my platoon and fold them up like a handkerchief.
“You eaten yet?” she says.
“Nope.”
“I figured. Eat this. Come on. You’re shrinking to nothing out here.”
She hands me an MRE—Meal Ready to Eat, that is. MREs come in these brown plastic sacks, and inside there’s a main course of cardboard disguised to look like greasy meat, along with a bunch of artery-clogging junk food and a chemical pouch for heating the mess up without fire, which probably tastes better than the stuff it’s supposed to cook. The MREs are famous for clogging up your guts like plaster—we call them Meals Refusing to Exit—and they only fill you up for about ten minutes, but they’re all we have to eat, along with our equally disgusting T-Rations, because neither the fucking Army nor its fat-cat contractor, KBR-Halliburton, has gotten around to building us a chow hall yet.
I sit up and tear the packet open, pick out a cold ball of grease and force myself to take a bite. Third Eye, meanwhile, is wolfing down a solid cube of spaghetti and red sauce like it’s mama’s home cooking.
Third Eye got that name because of this nasty black bump that appeared one day in the middle of her forehead. It’s gone down now, but it was quite a humdinger ther
e for a while. We all thought it was a zit at first, a bad one, but then it grew grotesquely huge and turned into a golf ball with a black dot in the middle of it. She had to have it operated on. Apparently some bug had laid its eggs and was raising a nice little family in there.
Third Eye’s real name is Lynnette McDougall, which doesn’t suit her at all, and she’s twenty-five, quite an old lady compared to most of us. She grew up not far from me and Jimmy Donnell, in Coxsackie, New York. Her dad’s a fireman, but when her parents divorced, she and her mom moved down to Virginia to live with an overweight cop who beats up on her mom all the time. Third Eye told me she signed up after 9/11 to get away from them and protect the American Way, but I think the real reason is because she’s a lesbian. Or I’m pretty sure she is, since she moves and talks like a guy. Lesbians love the Army.
“Hey,” she says, pointing to the spider on my tent pole. “What the fuck is that?”
I glance up at its hairy legs. “That’s Fuzzy. He’s a present for Macktruck.”
She chuckles and shakes her head.
After I’ve forced down a couple more grease balls, I pull out the snapshot that Iraqi girl gave me and hand it to Third Eye. “You ever seen either of these guys?” Third Eye guards the prison tents, so she sees more of the detainees than I do.
She glances at it. “How would I know? They all look the same to me. Where’d you get this?”
I tell her about my deal. “Will you keep an eye out for them? This girl’s English is amazing—she could be a real help.”
“If you want,” Third Eye says with a shrug, and hands the photo back. She slides her eyes over to Rickman and DJ, who are listening to our every word, as usual. “Let’s go. I need to get washed.”
We pick up our rifles and go out together, doing our battle-buddy thing. When we first landed in Kuwait, the command told us that no females could walk to the latrines or anywhere else at night without another female as a battle buddy, and the same rule applies here at Camp Bucca. That’s so we can protect each other from getting raped by one of our own fine comrades.
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