Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  Dear Jimmy,

  What has happened that you have not called again? I’d like to know, as I worry every day that I have done something wrong or not understood. I had thought our friendship would endure as long as forever.

  I would be happy in my heart to hear from you again.

  Affectionately,

  Lotte

  I absorb her note before tucking it into my shirt pocket, where it goes on feeling like a fragile bird settled in to rest where it’s warm. Her words affect me. I feel sorry for having hurt her feelings. There is her address and her number again at work. Tomorrow, when things settle and our insane night training shifts to another phase, I’ll steal time enough to write back…though I don’t know yet what I wish to say. That I’m sorry for making her worry? That we’ll be deploying soon and I won’t be able to see her for some time? That rumor has it that we’ll be gone from Germany for as long as six months, possibly longer? That in her affection I’ve begun to feel the same for her? That I know love a bit, from novels I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, and can see that it is love for her that has moved into the space between us.

  I guess my reply constitutes a love letter unlike anything I’ve ever written. It thrills me to write it (early in the morning), to seal it and drop it into the slot at the troop mail room.

  This day, a Saturday, we learn that we’ll be shipping out at 0530 Monday, in full field gear and carrying weapons. We’ll fly from Nuremberg to Dharhan, Saudi Arabia, where we’ll connect with our long-absent mud-bellies and commence an intensive training regimen before flat-bedding into Iraq or Kuwait to meet the Iraqi Elite Republican Guard head-on. In warfare. Just like that. Home-court advantage forsaken as we put our training, practice, and equipment on the line at last. As a wizened master sergeant puts it: “Everything you’ve ever known is gonna change forever.”

  The balance of the Sunday before deployment is identified as personal time, during which I look for DeMarcus in his barracks and learn from his roommate that he just left for Bayreuth…presumably to visit Magdalena von Benschotten prior to shipping out. Others are rushing about on last-minute visits of the kind, securing avowals and addresses, engaging in farewells, sex, and drinking in the face of repeated reminders (under threat of court martial and reduction in grade) that no alcohol is to be taken into Saudi Arabia!

  Myself, I’d like to head into Bindlach to visit Lotte, if only her office remained open and I were able to connect by telephone. My other choice is Bayreuth, to drink with DeMarcus and Magdalena at Club Miami Beach…if they happen to be there. What else to do before deploying to a war zone in the desert…before reconnecting with the big mud-bellies within which, in short order, we’ll begin to live like greasy rats handling live ammo? Soon enough I learn that all personnel are restricted to post until 1300, during which time we’ll be fitted with new gear, including camouflage boots and desert fatigues that are on the way at the moment from Rhein/Main.

  Determined again, in the confusion of things, I attempt to track down Lotte’s home number. Feeling cowardly for not having called or written, I gain assistance from a German lady at the telephone exchange who confirms Lotte’s small town address and readily places a call before directing me to a booth along the wall.

  Lotte astonishes me by agreeing at once to meet anywhere at any time. A final evening prior to shipping out in the darkness of the coming morning! As we settle on the Bindlach Gasthaus where we met previously, I change clothes and set off to arrive by 1700.

  The tension within which the rushing around is taking place reminds me of old-time war movies, especially those set in Europe during World War II. Running to catch trains and buses. Nervous soldiers and lovely young women. Near misses, hands waving, ultimate embraces. The pace has me wanting to slow down, to absorb what I’m doing, to be careful with my decisions and choices.

  Lotte’s culminating surprise is her suggestion that we take a hotel room for the evening, if doing so is what I would like to do. We’ve just embraced within the doorway to the Gasthaus and taken a table where we can have a few moments to sort things out. She makes her tentative offer as we hold hands on the table.

  Surprised by her offer (a stranger to experience of the kind) I’m intimidated by her devotion and what it implies. To be together? To make love? Have we gone that far? I smile as I say it isn’t anything she has to do, while wondering if being big-brotherly makes the occasion more romantic, or less so. In truth, I’m as much into shipping out as into romance, and have to wonder if her wish might be to get pregnant, to change her life (and mine) in ways for which I’m not sure I’m ready.

  “Should we wait until I’ve won the war in Kuwait?” I ask, to make her smile.

  “I’ve embarrassed you,” she says.

  “Not really,” I say, which isn’t true. “It isn’t what I was thinking. Do I sound like a complete fool?”

  “I will tell you,” she says. “It is because I have never in my life felt so perfectly suited to another. I love your strength. All things about you I love. Your needs and desires are as a summons. I want to do anything I can to make you feel fulfilled.”

  Dumbfounded by her devotion, I can only smile and say at last, “Thank you.”

  “I’m in love…you see? You’ve come along in my life and I’ve fallen in love like a silly schoolgirl. Quickly, quietly, so deeply all the same. What is a silly schoolgirl to do?”

  She is smiling and weeping in happiness, I guess, and I’m at a loss for how to respond. “I love you, too,” I get out. “It’s what I said in my letter. This is all happening in a rush, but I thought you were special the first time I saw you.”

  “When you called…I’ve been wondering what to do that you will not be soon forgetting me,” she says more or less to the tabletop. “I’ve thought, as in the movies…I want only to make all things easy for you. To have no regret. Forgive me for embarrassing you.”

  Returning the shy smile she is sending my way, warmed by her person and her words–liking her and having felt her to be, it’s true, an ideal fit–I’m reluctant all the same to walk on through a doorway I’ve hardly considered, let alone determined to enter. “If I didn’t like you, you know, I wouldn’t be here,” I say to her but also to myself.

  “Forgive me for having been so forward.”

  “You don’t have to be forgiven. I’m young, you know. I’m the one who doesn’t know what is going on or what to say. I love you. I can say that. I love you a lot.”

  “We shall write…while you are away?”

  “I’d like to. I’ll send you my deployment address. You can write in turn.”

  “I’ll think of you every day. I will live only for your letters,” she adds.

  I grin in reply to her mischievous smile. “It’ll be nice to think of you being here…to get letters from you. I’ll have you to look forward to seeing when the deployment ends and we get to come home.”

  In the sharp November air, she takes my arm in both of her hands then and we proceed along the sidewalk as a couple. Our mutuality is warm and I like the excited sensation that is being generated. I like Lotte Lengemann more than I knew I would, and feel physically strong turning with her into a side-street hotel where we will pass some hours necking and connecting as lovebirds at last…before I walk her back out and wait, in time, for her bus home. No doubt about it, love and romance–as unknown as they have been–have me in their grip. Having been brotherly with her, haven’t I shown that she can use someone like me in her life? Haven’t I been more of a friend than a careless soldier looking to seize any opportunity? Hasn’t our approach been a good way to start a loving relationship?

  November 1990

  We stand on the brink of catastrophe.

  –Senator Paul Wellstone (Minnesota)

  The New York Times, November 3, 1990

  I had a community meeting in my district…a thousand people came out. I had never seen anything like it. We voted. The vote was on how they would vote on a resolution to go to war, and 95 percen
t said no. That was in my district in California.

  –Representative Barbara Boxer (California)

  The New York Times, November 3, 1990

  The flight from snow-covered Nuremberg is long (an opportunity to sleep if you can) and the air when de-boarding in Saudia Arabia is hotter than expected. From Dhahran, where we land, we’re bused to a port facility at Al Jubail, where our heavy equipment and trucks have been arriving for weeks from Amsterdam and Bremerhaven. The crisp air and tasty food of Germany is left behind in lieu of continuous tasks, added moves and chores, arming procedures to obey.

  Taking control of our vehicles, adding fuel, we load the monsters (two each) onto 26-wheel flat-bed HET trucks for road-marching to an assembly area on the Saudi/Iraq border. As we keep learning from COs and NCOs, Saudi Arabia is where we’ll live as we work into sharp physical shape, oil our equipment for action, begin positioning, as units, for a military thrust into Iraq. Steamy hot air and life in tents. Sleeping on cots. T-rations (meals packaged in trays heated in boiling water) for breakfast, A-rations (fresh food procured locally) supplemented with B-rations (food in cans) for lunch and dinner. Our MREs (meals ready to eat) are being saved for the ground war, when mess trucks and hot water will be no more available than caviar and champagne.

  The Arabian landscape is barren and soon blanketed by overcast skies and wind storms, the sand and dust contriving to invade every crack and crevice. Lying ahead, as we spray-paint our mud-bellies desert tan and war materiel keeps arriving by air from Germany and the ZI, is an intensified training regimen. Practice maneuvers are scheduled to begin at the end of a road-march during which we use HETs (heavy equipment transports) to ship our armor over a moonscape of gravel dirt and rolling plains… but for occasional green tufts where rare Bedouin shepherds are feeding sheep. It’s more orderly–if increasingly desolate–and more appealing than the smelly latrines, hour-long chow lines, delays, confusion, and crowding that ruled the staging area at Al Jubail. From looking four ways and overhearing relentless machinery twenty-four hours a day at Al Jubail, Tapline Highway is a lonely vein into the unknown offering a quiet beauty of its own by way of independence and temporary peacefulness. Iraq lies ahead. Upon weeks of training, forty-odd tracks will be plowed through the sand berm defining its national boundary, mines will be cleared, and 2nd Armored Cav–led by barrages from 210th Field Artillery and MLRS (multiple launch rocket systems)–will use force in a thrust into the country’s belly…to the tune of “The Ride of the Valkyries” on loudspeakers.

  Warfare grows ever more imminent, like an explosion waiting to occur at the end of a long burning fuse. Combat will be as real as the service ammo we loaded at Al Jubail, which only the colonel and a handful of senior noncoms have seen before, in Vietnam. HEAT rounds for tank cannons are no longer United Nations blue as in training but black and profoundly lethal. Depleted uranium sabot rounds are ice-pick sharp, able to split armor and implode within Russian-made T-72 tanks. Black ordnance is also heavier. “Black is sobering,” the lieutenant says as we fill our storage racks with the dark weighty shells.

  Temperatures along the roadway get colder, dropping into the sixties during the day and all at once turning gray and rainy. Dhahran temps in the nineties made life miserable for us visitors from northern Europe carrying sixty pounds and more on our backs and bodies, and the cooler temps are welcome. Mini-sandstorms flare as we roll north on the godforsaken highway. The sand is as hard as fragmented metal, fine enough to work its way into all body openings, including those covered by undershorts and BDU chocolate chip fatigues. The sand is so hard that helo blades give off sparks visible in darkness and need to be taped with resin that, after taking a beating, comes to resembles tape fixed on hockey sticks in Southie.

  All in all, the coordination of the armor arriving, being painted and loaded onto low-boys, gives an impression–as old-timers note–of the army having its shit together. If Saddam had a navy, one line goes, he’d have sent our mud-bellies to the bottom of the sea weeks ago and saved us the trouble of painting and oiling, and loading them with the heavy black ordnance.

  Of course, no one means it. It’s reassuring to spray the creepy crawlers with coats of tan paint, to which we re-fix old and new names, some in Fraktur as a tip of the hat to Germany as our home base. New names include Scorpion, Desert Rat, Instant Death, and, in response to the prohibition against alcohol: Miller Time.

  Our 2nd Cav colonel, a Yale PhD by way of Texas A&M, stops by, nods his approval, says the names show a spirit he admires, especially Desert Rat, which name was adopted by the Brits at El Alamein when a Desert Fox from Bavaria had to have wished he had remained at home. One M1A1 is named not Rocky or Rambo but Sylvester. We are, after all, Americans who are able and willing to fight, to apologize at last to no one.

  Readiness of equipment was everything in Germany, while here in the desert being in top physical shape personally leads the way. Young officers make it sound as if we’re sharpening ourselves in anticipation of a Super Bowl game while NCOs who served in Vietnam are rarely so gung-ho. “People who aren’t psyched will get hurt,” the first sergeant warns. “Staying on top of vehicle maintenance is a given. Keeping sand out of your weapons and your asshole is a given. As is keeping your gas mask and chemical gear at the ready and being alert to mines, booby traps, IEDs. Nothing means more, however, than being aggressive in your mind. Being tough. Eager for the fight. Mental acuity, you dog soldiers! That’s the key to victory. Fucking readiness!”

  Our first assembly area, north of Tapline Highway below Iraq, gets named Seminole, after the Regiment’s first mission in 1836, when its long rifles fought the Seminole Wars in Florida and were named 2nd Regiment Dragoons. Our training in the assembly area becomes so real that five soldiers in First Squadron alone are injured in accidents. The first sergeant remarks, “That’s okay. It’s good. Working out the kinks. When the time comes, we wanna be hitting on all six.”

  The landscape remains uninhabited but for the occasional Bedouins with camels and sheep we see whenever we move beyond our perimeter. There are more gritty sandstorms and an ever-increasing sense, based on rumors that sound factual, that we will move west in time, in radio silence, before turning north to breach cleared berms and roll into Iraq in an attack…in response to the country seizing Kuwait and embracing the small country as its own. Big Iraq bullying tiny Kuwait. Coalition forces will bully the bully ten times over. “Iraq invading Kuwait would be like the U.S. invading Panama,” Lieutenant Kline remarks, to which Sherman replies, “Only we wouldn’t get in and out, sir. We’d make them build a canal and stay on as our slaves, working forever.”

  “Sherman, give it a break,” the lieutenant says. “We made Panama rich, not poor! We helped Panama! Nor are we invaders in Iraq, we’re liberators! Get your history straight! Stop seeing everything through a lens of slavery that ended a hundred years ago!”

  Tanks maneuvering like vessels at sea, weapons exercises and refresher courses in chemical warfare–nerve gas remaining the most likely threat–and desert survival fill each day and, increasingly, each night, as we devote twelve, fourteen hours a day to training. Captain Kinder, ever present, keeps urging us to make our skills and techniques second nature by way of practice, and by remaining in tip-top shape physically. “Be smart and fierce,” he likes to say. “Put your head and heart into everything you do. Be thoughtful, and you’ll help Geo write a chapter in military history.”

  (None of us had any idea at the time that the engagement toward which we were tending was one wherein our war machine would hit on all six and would be used in training manuals as the way to do it! We knew that we were well-trained and ready, that our equipment was state-of-the-art, but we had yet to really know what this meant in terms of warfare and life and death.)

  KP and latrine burning details also become part of daily life, together with vehicle guard, maintenance, and daily PT. Perimeter guard (around our wagon-wheel tent cities, VCR movie tents, stepped-off football, volleyball,
and softball fields) becomes the responsibility of MPs and cav scouts in Humvees and Bradleys with mounted machine guns. On one occasion, I believe I recognize DeMarcus (among the dozens of soldiers moving throughout Seminole) riding in an open Humvee in battle gear. But when I give a half-salute the soldier ignores me, and I’m left to think it wasn’t him at all but some other African American who had answered the dismount scout call.

  Friendship visits my mind again as an abstract reality. Apart from Sherman, Noordy, and the lieutenant (each of whom, like other soldiers in Geo, remains more acquaintance than friend), there is no one with whom I feel the comfort of good humor and familiarity. I like my crewmates and others well enough and am respectful of the lieutenant, but they aren’t people with whom I can laugh beyond awareness of consequences. I’d like to hang out with Dee as a friend with whom to joke candidly, but I am fixed to The Claw just as he is fixed to his Bradley and dismount scout platoon. (Buddies in the army. But rarely do military barriers get pre-empted and allow friendships and rapport to form and last.)

  Security this far into the desert comes not only from cav scouts in recon teams but, weather permitting, from Cobras and Apaches. Our Squadron is a county of wagon-wheel layouts, each honing its skills, muscles, and machines while the heavy VII Corps units, the infantry and armored divisions we’ll spearhead into Iraq, are arriving from the ZI and other bases in Germany. I have to say that we’re awed by the massive force, the wide sea of power to which we belong. Confidence is endemic if low-key. Gloating can jinx any big contest, as everybody knows. If there is gloating in my presence it comes only in the form of an NCO noting how surprised Saddam is going to be when he wakes up to what he has bitten into.