Soldier Talk
As the reconstruction suits had their meticulously chosen but empty terms such as capacity building and Lines of Effort, the troops had their own language and it always came as a welcome change. Playfully obscene, sneeringly in-your-face, it was a way of drawing in others who knew the language while politely excluding the rest. Sometimes it was spat out in the terse tones of an order, other times it was streaming commentary as the soldiers made fun of one another and their world.
I got a crash course in soldier talk over the internal headset communication system inside Army vehicles. On many of our drives to and from project sites we were alone on rural roads and had no need to give or receive orders. To pass the time, the soldiers entertained themselves with conversations that did not start and end but instead picked up a thread left dangling from the last mission, from lunch, from a conversation started a day ago.
CORPORAL WEISS: That dude can bench like 375, no shit.
LIEUTENANT ORTIZ: Don’t hit that fucking dog up there.
CORPORAL WEISS: Why not, fucker is half lame anyway.
LIEUTENANT ORTIZ: You hit it, I’ll fuckin’ make you clean that fucking shit up.
Fucker is probably some kinda al Qaeda dog. Clear left?
Yeah, go ahead.
You seen the Staff Sergeant the other day?
No, what?
Fucker was all fucking high speed, like he was gonna dump the dismounts at some fricking railroad tracks.
Why?
Watch that.
OK, I fuckin’ see it.
You didn’t fuckin’ see that garbage can you hit yesterday, asshole.
Like I was sayin’, he said we had to see if we could cross but I told him we fucking crossed the other fucking day.
Yeah, fucking White is always like, “Watch that guy on the road, he got a cell phone, he could be triggering an IED,” like every motherfucker in Iraq ain’t got one.
That’s it. He’s all like, “He wearing a red shirt, and he got blue sandals, and he speaking Spanish” or some shit like it matters what the description says.
Check the radio.
LT, man, I just did.
I said check the fucking radio.
Falcon X-Ray, Red Cap One, Red Cap One, over.
I bought my wife like eight dozen roses online.
What the fuck for?
’Cause of our anniversary.
Red Cap One, this is Falcon X-Ray, send it, over.
Falcon X-Ray, Red Cap One, radio check, over.
You see the game last night?
No, my fucking hajji shop TV is fucked up again.
Fuckers cheat you.
Red Cap One, Falcon X-Ray, read you five by five, over, out.
No, why the fuck did you buy eight dozen fucking roses?
’Cause I thought they’d come from some real flower shop, you know, and some dude’ll bring ’em up to the door, but instead they came from some shit-ass factory and they showed up in like eight boxes and she had to put them together herself.
No, asshole, why’d you buy eight dozen? How much did they cost?
’Cause I tried to click twelve but ended up with eight.
Dipshit motherfucker can’t freakin’ count.
Three hundred bucks.
I’d only fuckin’ spend that on my girlfriend.
I’d fuck your girlfriend.
Like she would do you, no way. Checkpoint.
Where?
Up there by that rusted car.
Fuckin’ Iraqis, man, everything is shit here. Why we gotta stay ’til fucking December LT?
Watch your three o’clock.
I got it. Ain’t nothing.
Shit, look out for that little kid on the left.
I fuckin’ see her, shit.
You tried that Iron Man shit? Dude, get with the Sergeant Major, he got a video of it. Run a mile, then like fifty pull-ups—
I seen it, there was some chick in that video, right?
Yeah. She was like 120 pounds and she lifting like eighty-eight pounds fuckin’ forever.
She was wearing that blue spandex shit, right?
You think of anything but fucking? You a fucking freak, man. Even the train it stop sometimes. Shit, turn up there.
Where?
After that ditch, shit for brains, on the same fucking Route Fatboy where we always fucking turn.
Roger, I got it LT.
LT was a shorthand way to refer to the lieutenant who oversaw the small group of soldiers who protected us while driving around Iraq. His mom and dad once gave him a name, but here he was just LT. He was rumored to have a sense of humor, but the job required that the LT’s human side was on hold during the war. For example, when stopped near one of our projects off Route Fatboy, we saw a puppy, not more than a few weeks old, with no mama dog in sight. An enthusiastic debate opened up among the soldiers, with three wanting to bring the puppy back illegally onto the FOB (General Order Number One allowed for no pets) and two wanting to shoot the puppy and put it out of its misery. The debate ended with the LT saying, “We are not in Iraq to care about fucking puppies” and that was that. Another reason we were not fighting this war: it is not about puppies.
* * *
Route Fatboy was just one of the roads we commonly traveled on. Most roads in Iraq didn’t have names, so as the US military created detailed maps, it supplied them. It was unclear how the process unfolded, but the results were Cheese Whiz American. Out in the area we worked, one set of roads named after stock car drivers connected to another named after heavy metal bands, which connected to a network named after beers. There was a road called Route Ricky Bobby, which merged with Earhart before becoming Fatboy. Take Route Fatboy for a while and you could turn off onto Incubus, then Slipknot, before reaching Metallica. Metallica was a straight shot north, but you could turn off at Bud, PBR, or Miller. In other areas, the roads were named after cars or, more romantically, women left behind, Betty, Marie, and Elizabeth by the older soldiers, Brittany, Tawana, and Carlita by the younger men. You heard it on the radio—“Gladiator Six, turning now onto Ricky Bobby, over”—and no one said the names ironically. Of course, no Iraqi knew who Ricky Bobby or Carlita was, so the road names also served as a kind of code.
In a cross between slang and officialese, the military made strange use of some words. I liked how they used the word hasty, as in “We set up a hasty perimeter” or “We chose a hasty defense,” instead of quick, casual, or sloppy. You didn’t see hasty used commonly otherwise except by George Will. I also liked how they used the phrase get with to mean talk with, work with, coordinate with, or check with, as in “SGT Ponds can help you. Get with her on that” or “Soldiers need to get with MED for redeployment checkups.” Kinetic meant violent; a gunfight was kinetic, a tea party was nonkinetic. One soldier who served in Asia referred to snacks at a meeting as “licky-chewies.” The Army still used all the old Indian fighting words—troop, cavalry, saddle up. The best was guidon, which could refer to the unit flag or the soldier carrying the unit flag. What other twenty-four-year-olds in America knew that word? The military also used a strange form of verb tense. They wrote, “Soldiers will not wear civilian articles of clothing in the gym” instead of “Soldiers may not wear civilian articles of clothing in the gym.” It was as if the event had already not happened and the verb form described what already had not happened.
As in any other language, there were rules you had to follow to join the conversation. You never spoke about your spouse, kids, or pets by name. In soldier talk, names confused things. A guy had a girlfriend or a fiancée or a cat and that was that. The anonymity insulated you from troubling questions when the girlfriend left (Kristal was replaced by Shawna, still a girlfriend). No names allowed people to fudge the target of statements like “I am not believing I can’t be with her for another eight months. I am going fricking crazy.” Girlfriend? Wife? Who knew? But this way you could avoid violating another rule, speaking disparagingly of a current spouse or girlfr
iend. That was never done, and if you transgressed, the silence from your listeners slapped you across the face. It was permitted, however, to say pretty much anything about someone who had left you—cathartic for many and a challenge for the poets of profanity in our ranks.
When it came to talking about their profession, the soldiers would retreat to a set of clichés. Officers in particular seemed to need to repeat the same gung ho quotes over and over. They recited these tired lines to inspire at briefings and to perk up morale at meals and later memorialized them on plaques and fancy scrolls hung on the wall. My wish for when I left Iraq was never again to have to see or hear:
• Anything to do with Sparta.
• The phrase blood and treasure, as if we were paying for the war from a pirate chest overflowing with gold doubloons.
• The Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man outside the arena, that guy who knows neither victory nor defeat.
• Patton: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
• Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”
• Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan Jessep to the court: “You can’t handle the truth.… You want me on that wall, son. You need me on that wall.”
Which led, finally, to this one, dubiously attributed to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Different versions had those rough men standing on walls or “freedom’s walls.” But any which way, given that Orwell was no war lover, the quote sounded wrong. (It was. I looked it up: “He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”) Right or wrong, it lives on in a million e-mail signature lines.
Soldier talk needed to be negotiated around rank. Outside the FOB you could curse in front of an officer, while in the DFAC it was wise to start every sentence with “Sir” and keep it clean. The Sergeant who ran your squad might allow you to joke in some cases and demand a formal answer in others. Get it right and fit in, get it wrong and be labeled fresh meat. Civilians, lacking an explicit rank, confused the system and so some improvisation was required. One day, the main water pipe broke and everyone had to get in and out of the few working showers in ninety seconds. I must have stayed under the water too long, because the next man in line pounded on the door screaming, “Goddammit, get the hell out!” I heard someone say to him, “You can’t say that, he’s one of those State Department guys,” to which the man responded, “Goddammit, get the hell out, SIR!”
Deep in the soldiers’ language was a wry, sad humor that dispelled misery while acknowledging it existed. Almost nothing in this environment was in the soldiers’ control, not where or how they slept, not what or when they ate or when they got shot at, and so almost everything was worth complaining about. Of course, everyone was experiencing the same misery, so complaints were often redundant, but they were permitted as an escape valve. Complaining was in fact a privilege allowed to long-suffering soldiers since Napoleon’s time (grognard, meaning grumbler in French, came to mean an experienced combat vet). Complaining might build a kind of camaraderie. We could complain all the time, but then we would be sad all the time and that wouldn’t be good. Better the bitching came out as a joke, a mockery, in great phrases like Embrace the suck or Love the suck. The suck was anything/everything wrong. On good days, such as frozen shrimpette night at the DFAC, people said, “We suck less tonight.”
Sex
We all thought about it all of the time. A DJ flew in to play music as a morale thing. A blond nonsoldier woman with pneumatic breasts barely restrained by her T-shirt, the DJ thus attracted some attention. She was as comely as modern medical science could make her, her surgical enhancement a weird echo of the prosthetic limbs ubiquitous in this war. However, it was also 120 degrees outside and the DJ had set up in the sun on the shadeless basketball court, so even the most desperate soldiers stayed out only long enough to recharge their stores of fantasies. After two or three songs most soldiers realized she was not going to have sex with all several hundred of us, and the event ended up as dull as flat beer (also not allowed) that brought you nowhere but closer to the memory of better times and places.
In some of the small hajji shops on the FOB if you were a regular and things were, you know, cool, porn was available. Most of it was cheap stuff with four-letter verbs as titles, though with some effort you could score professional filth from India, Asia, the Arab world, and of course the United States. Publicly, at least, the Army was a chaste organization, and while rampant DVD intellectual piracy was OK, looking at boobs was not. By order of Congress, the PX sold no Playboy or Penthouse. The naughtiest thing you could buy was Maxim, which sold out within minutes of restocking. The joke was that the Army once wanted to research the difference between soldiers who looked at porn and those who didn’t. The problem was they couldn’t find any men who did not.
Imagination was not prohibited, but General Order Number One in Iraq outlawed all other forms of fun: no cohabitation, no sex with locals, no booze, no pets, and none of anything else you might enjoy.33 It was pretty thorough and lay like a wet blanket on top of a bunch of other military rules. For officers, adultery was an actual punishable crime, as, most likely, was dueling or having a handlebar mustache whilst commanding a cavalry charge. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was also a rule of sorts in force at the time and was aimed right at sex. The Army loved its rules and, to be fair, needed some way to control the actions of so many people living so close to one another under wartime conditions. But as comprehensive as the rules were, in practice penning up a bunch of twenty-something soldiers, male and female, gay and straight, tired and active, tops and bottoms, exposing them to danger and then saying NO SEX, PLEASE worked about as well in the military as it worked in prisons, in college dorms, and at out-of-town sales conventions.
Sometimes it was sad. One female contractor, whose husband had unilaterally started divorce paperwork while she was still in Iraq, reacted by trying to sleep with as many married soldiers as possible. When word got to the Base Commander, he threatened to have her transferred until her employer balked, claiming she had essential technical skills needed to keep the computer network alive, and agreed to assign a 24/7 escort to keep her out of trouble. The Commander was responsible not only for the people on the FOB but also for the military spouses left behind. Word traveled fast between Iraq and the unit’s base back home, and the Army was becoming more and more sensitive to winning the homecoming as well as the war. Jesus, it was hard enough for the Commander to read devastating blogs by twenty-year-old war widows, never mind having to assume responsibility for not busting up marriages.34
On any given night, as I took a walk hoping to get sleepy instead of just tired, I couldn’t ignore the wet, sloppy sounds from behind nearby Hesco barriers. Latrines might be dirty and dark, but they also offered couples a bit of privacy. Liaisons were risky in a two-person trailer. A roommate could be bribed or begged to spend a little more time outside in sexile, but your neighbors might hear more than they cared to learn, and anyone could wander by and later decide to tell on you. One soldier acquired the keys to an empty CHU and shared his bounty with a lot of couples until a shower mishap put the soldier in a tough place—fess up to “borrowing” the keys or idly watch a broken pipe flood an entire daisy chain of sleeping quarters. He did the right thing, but the fun times ended after the KBR plumber ratted out the scam. If TDY meant “temporary duty” elsewhere in the world, in Iraq it stood for “temporarily divorced year.” For those desperate enough, toilet graffiti remained a reliable advertising channel, and the requests were remarkably specific (“Eight-inch cut dude needs rough sex tonight behind gym”). It was human. It happened. A lot.
The biggest sexual adventure in our office was most noteworthy as a failure. Even for a middle-aged man, our ePRT colleague Harold had no game. Divorced
equaled desperate in Iraq, and you could almost smell it on him. After weeks of trying to chat up a young female Lieutenant in the gym, Harold decided a nice e-mail inviting her for lunch would be just the thing. He spent so much time composing the text that just about everyone in the office had had a say in it. Most of us were ready to ask her out for him to get the process over; high school had gone smoother and quicker. Finally the e-mail was ready and Cupid hit SEND. Harold waited. We all waited. Follow-up strategies were discussed, and various reasons for the lack of an immediate response were suggested as the clock ticked.
The first sign something was wrong was at the gym, where said young Lieutenant began to appear not just in her somewhat clingy regulation workout gear but also with a tall Captain who seemed overly solicitous of her need for barbells and towels. The signs were all there, but the floor did not fall out until about three days later, when Harold’s e-mail to the young Lieutenant, which she had forwarded to her not-so-best friend with a snarky put-down was forwarded to the not-so-best friend’s friend with another remark about creepy old guys in the gym, which was forwarded to a fourth person, who sent it on to most of her company, who seemingly all had friends in Iraq (and eventually Afghanistan). It took about a week before Harold’s simple, innocent words to the young Lieutenant morphed into viral electronic statutory rape. Two snotty Facebook groups were set up just to pass on the e-mail. One page offered “Harold’s Pickup Lines” as contributed by fans: Do you want to become the ultimate measure of my success in Iraq? Please date me before the war ends. I really have nothing better to do so would you like to go out? Let us start our enduring legacy today. Hey, baby, give me your e-mail address so I can ask you out in a lame way. I have diplomatic immunity … wanna wrestle?
As Harold begged us to bring him sandwiches so he could avoid stepping outside during daylight hours, the e-mail found its way to the Colonel who knew the solicitous Captain, who it turned out was now engaged (timing was everything in war) to the young Lieutenant. Things would have been bad enough for Harold had he not, in a fit of passion, mentioned in the same e-mail that he had “lots of free time to meet, even during the business day.” That line reached the Embassy at the exact moment Harold’s contract extension was up for consideration. The intersection of the ever-spiraling rumors that Harold had proposed treason, plus the tossed-off remark that he had a lot of free time, hit the poor guy right in the balls. The Embassy fired him and sent him back to the United States, where no doubt he lived not so happily ever after in the land of eHarmony.
We Meant Well Page 15
