Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  (It’s true, of course, that I like you more than as a friend, all the way to being touched with a smile and a wish to wash your ‘doity’ socks! Yes, Jimmy, it’s true.)

  For now, thank you for your wonderful letter. No, it is not the future great interpreter speaking to you now, just a girl waiting with fingers crossed that you are safe and to hear from you again.

  Your Lotte

  P.S. Do you have the same voice in the desert? It was a little husky and high when you were here, and I liked it so. I hope you aren’t changing too much. (Jimmy, I love you. That’s what I want to say over and over. I love you. I do.)

  Wow, is my response. I believe her…and feel immediately out of my depth. In addition to terror (what have I gotten myself into?) I feel responsible as a boy with a girl to protect. I hadn’t imagined that things would go this far.

  I recall my letter to her and the line I crossed within myself, and with her, and I see how easy she is making it now for us to be a couple. Boyfriend and girlfriend. In the name of love…of friendship, too, given her intelligence and seriousness. With a rush into my chest of love, I feel lucky to be in a relationship with such a bright and pretty girl! A girlfriend who likes me as I like her!

  At the same time, how can it have come to this, with me feeling like we’ve only just met? Did I really mean to commit myself in such a way?

  February 1991

  Saddam Hussein sees himself as the spider waiting for the fly. Sooner or later, he believes, the U.S.-led ground troops will push into Kuwait to drive out the Iraqi army. There they will be massacred by the thousands as they encounter one of the most formidable defenses ever built. Iraqi combat engineers have turned the Kuwait and Iraqi borders into a Maginot line in the sand. Their forces are dug in behind layers of defensive barriers 40 miles wide. Bulldozers have piled sand walls up to 40 feet high. Behind them is a network of ditches, some rigged with pipes to deliver oil that will be set on fire, and concrete tank traps. Behind those are miles of razor wire and at least 500,000 mines.

  –TIME Magazine, February 11, 1991

  Only when our deployment is over and we have returned to Bindlach am I able, reading dated issues of magazines and newspapers in the post library, to add some apt editorial passages to my journal. Knowing what I believe I know of U.S. power, it’s a surprise to hear what outsized fears existed at the time at home. Personal fear is known on facing combat (general unmentioned anxiety) while no such fear, nor much gloating or bravado, comes from NCOs and unit commanders. Our focus is more on smaller than larger things. Telling stories inside The Claw. Laughing with crewmates. Deciding to sleep inside, or outside, the vehicle? Making it to the field kitchen during the right hours? Discarding scorpion corpses slipped into your boots as a practical joke.

  As February slips by like windblown calendar days in an old movie, we give six days to preparing to move again, knowing that this time it will be into the fray, or into initiating the fray, whichever comes first. Beginning to live on MREs, we leave behind everything but ammo and combat gear as we reload our mud-bellies onto low-boys. Word has it we’ll be convoying right in the direction of Iraqi armor and infantry (the “Elite” Tawakalna, Hammurabi, and Medina Divisions) not to mention other Iraqi infantry divisions dug into a lethal, ensnaring, forty-mile width of defensive barriers, armed barricades, booby-trapped berms, explosive sink-holes, and mined expanses.

  From our perspective, we’re loaded for bear and heading into battle! The air campaign may have cut away Iraqi eyes to the skies, but their entrenched ground divisions are waiting to ensnare us like ant armadas they’re eager to exterminate without mercy. In addition to her sentimental songs, Baghdad Betty occasionally lets us know that we face “total annihilation.”

  While I remain anxious, I fear less for myself (knowing how loaded with firepower we are, how ready to engage) than for Lotte in Bindlach, hearing rumors and reports of horror and defeatist polemics and quarrelsome narratives riding radio frequencies from London, Cairo, Tehran.

  We’re advised not to listen to the garbage, but our mud-bellies are electronic marvels on treads and many of us listen when we can. Baghdad Betty knows enough, after all, to play songs that will slip into the heart if not into the mind. A Baghdad Betty favorite is “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” by Connie Francis, as is “What a Difference a Day Makes” by Dinah Washington. Also, the Ink Spots’ “I’ll Never Smile Again.” It’s music, all of it, that feeds a person’s lonely and frightened heart, if only in private.

  There follows a two-day convoy, eighteen hours each day, carrying all we’ll need in our fight when a clash occurs. The head of the spear. Here we are, armed and fed, trained and ready. We constitute a moving arrow of armor of immense depth and power on its way to a broad target that will fight back, probably, as we keep hearing, the so-called Elite Tawakalna Republican Guard. The Iraqis will use their best ground forces against the spear that we (in their back yard, on their home field!) will set loose in a move to penetrate the beast they intend to use as a counter-punch against us. Do they have any idea of the force we are? Do we know what we will be taking on?

  What I’m learning of war is that you can only know what you can see. Otherwise, there are countless tricks and deceptions.

  Our immediate move, we learn, is to a secret location where we will finalize an order of attack. We proceed for thirty-six hours in radio silence, road-marching two hundred kilometers west before shifting northeast and resting forty kilometers south of the actual Iraqi border, where an enemy defensive perimeter is known to be in place. In our massive hammer-cocking, we have hauled, as we hear from the lieutenant, more than 20,000 tons of materiel with which to unload an opening assault intended to create an opening through which U.S. and Coalition infantry and armored divisions may follow with ease into the bowels of the Iraqi beast. A body punch by 2nd Armored Cav below the belt, and to kidneys and spleen, forcing their guard to drop and expose openings to the chin and nose of Iraqi armor, infantry, and artillery divisions. Bold power. Explosive strength. Aggressive action. Mike Tyson taking out the head and heart, causing the defenses to sag from their protection of the besieged brains and belly.

  The western desert offers deeper gullies and ridges, cooler air, even more desolation and gravel. As Day Two comes to an end, we create a new if tentative assembly area (Richardson) and dig in as other 2nd Cav squadrons complete their moves–all part of a broad thrust against an Iraqi division expected to quickly surface.

  Four days go to preparing the blast that has been road-marched into our new location. It’s greasy body odors without the amenities we knew at Seminole, and Captain Kinder warns that as many as six weeks could pass before we unload our ordnance in our move to undo whichever Iraqi units will be on the way. The 2nd Cav mission, as from the beginning, is to blast the Iraqi units back in a way that will allow the heavy hitters of VII Corps to rush through with their lethal combos, by which time we’ll need to have moved aside to avoid friendly fire miscues.

  Yet again the Captain reminds us that it’s time to become a lean, mean fighting machine. “Time to adapt like rats, to sharpen your incisors and point your claws…to rise to a high pitch of readiness! A clash of Titans is going to go down, and we will either kick their ass and reduce them to ground pork…or die at their hands.”

  At Richardson, gathered into a tightly guarded assembly area and living on MREs alone, we exercise in the air like recruits, doing jumping jacks; rehearse mud-belly moves in and out of anti-chemical gear; and create foot trails to slit trenches, command vehicles, water tanks. I make entries in my journal and write another love letter to Lotte Lengemann…to keep her in my mind, given that we’re too removed from military calendars and couriers for mail to be delivered or to receive messages that require stamps.

  It’s as I’m making my way to a water wagon with my canteen, carrying my M-16 as required, that I identify a soldier coming toward me to be DeMarcus Owens! My buddy from Bayreuth! My comrade from Christensen Barracks, from Club
Miami Beach, even from Rhein/Main on our arrival in Germany fresh out of Armor School at Knox! I’ve come around to liking him and am pleased to see him, as he appears pleased to see me, and we pull up to trade fist bumps, to laugh and talk, to hang as friends in the minutes we can spare at such a time! My buddy…more than anyone else in the army.

  In a rush we want to know how things are going? What’s new? What rumors have we heard? What news do we have from the babes in Germany? We had our troubles, to be sure, but there’s a friendship between us now, I sense and believe, one that needed months to fall into place like it has. Friendship is a surprising kick, and it’s a thrill to see a familiar face with a familiar history here in the Arabian Desert!

  Life in the army. You go along. Spend time together. Get separated. Meet again. Share a common history. Move here and there. Experience tension that fades, or doesn’t fade. Then out of the blue, you run into each other yet again in a far-off locale, see, hey, here’s a guy with whom I bonded long ago and am pleased to see again! An army buddy with much in common. A comrade.

  “Man, I am getting used to livin’ out in the open,” DeMarcus says. “Ain’t so bad. Ain’t to say I wouldn’t rather be at Club Miami Beach drinking schnapps with Magdalena!”

  “You write to Magdalena? You guys write to each other? I been writing to that girl I met in Bindlach…maybe writing too much,” I add as a happy joke with myself.

  “It’s cool, man, gettin’ letters,” DeMarcus says without quite confirming Magdalena as his pen pal. “’Cept here in the middle of nowhere,” he adds. “Can’t wait’ll we get some real mail.”

  “Hear you talking. Been writing myself, without putting much in the mail…that probably takes weeks to arrive anyway!”

  “Les go to war an’ get it over, is what I say. Get outta this no man’s land. Get back to the babes of Bi-root!”

  “Tell her I say hello,” I say, feeling unexpected warmth for Magdalena and Bayreuth, for DeMarcus, too, even for the fight we had (no matter a segment of ear lobe hanging apart from my head!) as if we’re older now and looking back on when we were coming of age six months ago.

  “I’ll do that,” DeMarcus says, indicating a shared impulse to be moving on while I hear a genuineness in his voice that has been in my own.

  “The girl I’ve been writing,” I confess on pulling away. “You can get carried away out here. I don’t know. It’s lonely…has had me thinking I said too much the last time I wrote to her. Like maybe I’ve gotten myself into some hot water…assuming we survive this mess.”

  DeMarcus howls, making me laugh, admitting that he may have gone too far with Magdalena in a similar way. What are we, anyway, but a couple underage dog soldiers needing to grow wise to the ways of a world we barely understand?

  “We make it back…what we should do…me and her, and you and Magda…we should have a party, or a dinner or something. Have a big meal, drink some champagne.”

  “We’ll do it!” DeMarcus says.

  “You wanna?”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “We get outta here…get with our girlfriends…have us a big dinner with champagne… celebrate being alive. Man, I could go for that.”

  Exchanging a parting fist-tap to seal the deal, aware that it’s time (as always) to get back, I head in my direction as DeMarcus heads in his. “Be cool…don’t get yourself shot out there,” I call after him.

  “See you in Bayreuth, man.”

  As I move on I realize that DeMarcus is a soldier now, too. A soldier and a friend. We’re soldiers who have fought and bonded. He’s not a gangbanger at all but a warrior with an M-16 who has outgrown the kid he was when he climbed into that truck at Rhein/Main with a shank in his shoe. The best buddy I have… among the few I’ve known so far in the army.

  “Radio listening silence” means we can monitor what comes in on the air waves but are limited to frequencies that will not exceed our assembly and training areas. So it is that we learn from BBC London (no surprise) that the air campaign was “thoroughly successful” and is continuing. This though the screaming, low-flying fighter bombers and the horizons glowing like the Northern Lights have not visited our lonely outpost for weeks.

  Living day-in, day-out on MREs, we discover gourmet tricks that are available in tiny bottles of Tabasco sauce. Adding condoms to rifle barrels, we complain endlessly all the same about the talcum-like metallic dust coming to coat every vaguely moist body opening, covered in fabric or not. “Grit-shit coating lips fore and aft,” is an expression that goes around.

  “Think how it would season some rear-echelon pussy,” says a soldier filling his canteen at a water tank.

  “Always liked a dash of salt with my lunch,” says another.

  “I’ll take it any way I can get it,” says the first.

  “Goodness, dahlin’, why din’t you say so?” says another as the half-dozen in line laugh foolishly and avoid eye contact.

  Light rain is a godsend for keeping down the dust, while word has it that damp air will increase the staying power of nerve gas, mustard gas, anthrax and botulism germs Saddam will be raining down on us as soon as our reason to exist (the long-awaited ground offensive) commences. I take my Cipro capsules twice a day and nerve gas pills four times, and pay attention on sitting through skull sessions given to steps to follow if an alarm sounds, especially outside The Claw and its air-filtration. I hear the phrases so often they play in my dreams like rap refrains:

  *Botulism alarm: Use atropine injector at once.

  *Anthrax germs: Use atropine injector at once.

  *Black dots on skin: Minutes to live.

  *Nerve gas:

  Remove two injectors from pouch.

  Jab into outer thigh.

  Press plunger and count to ten.

  Remove and pray.

  On my own, inside and outside The Claw, I recall the sequence. A scenario begins with an imagined alarm (gas! gas! gas!) whereupon I follow the steps, if lying in my sleeping bag on the ground, eating an MRE, or slamming imaginary super-sabots into the breech. I’ll remain calm, I believe, even if others panic. Mask, hood, booties, gloves. I want to live, I think. In any contest of wills and skills, I want to do well and win. Mainly, I mean to remain alive. Should I be taken out by gas, what would it do to the only girlfriend I’ve ever had? She who has never had a boyfriend (as I’ve never had a girlfriend!), even if I’m nineteen and she’s twenty-three? I’ll suffer breathing pain unto my death while she’ll need, in her lonely life, to consult memories of what might have been. (During these thoughts, having a girlfriend is fine. It’s in clear daylight that having one raises terror in my heart.)

  A field kitchen arrives at Richardson but without a big refrigeration trailer, and the first gas alarm goes off one evening shortly after I’ve picked up a precious aluminum-covered T-ration and a pint of apple juice.

  “GAS! GAS! NOT A DRILL! NOT A DRILL!”

  The voice shouting through the damp air sets off a scramble that has soldiers bumping into each other. I sit down at once, place my T-ration in my lap, add my helmet, jerk my gas mask from its bag, and fit it over my head, clear the straps and seal, and, re-gripping the T-ration and juice, return to my feet (having expended some ten seconds) and jog on to the tent fly beside The Claw, to get into my chemical suit, gloves, booties.

  Only then do I realize that I’ve held onto the food because every alarm I’ve ever heard has proven false (should I have remained sitting on the ground?) and it’s then that other shouts follow, less intense and relieving: “False alarm!” Then louder and more angry: “FALSE ALARM! Fucking diesel fuel burning out a latrine!”

  My heart is thumping. My impulse is angry fear: Let’s get it on! Let’s get it over with!

  Okay, regard it as a trial run, I tell myself. Maybe it’ll save your dumb ass later. Still, my appetite, which had been at the ready, is ruined. For now. Half an hour later, mask returned to bag, breath settled, I peel away the cover of my cooled-down ravioli. Lean and mean fighting machine,
for sure. Have I ever heard an alarm (fire, bomb, tropical storm lashing Southie) that did not prove to be false?

  If not, I wouldn’t be sitting here knowing the luxury of being alive and taking in the chilly air.

  Mail resumes, and another cream-colored envelope arrives from Bindlach, as if it had floated in on wings of peace and love by way of a helicopter cutting through the rainy, grit-blown weather. Receipt of the letter on a Humvee tour by the mail clerk has me wondering if there may be something, after all, to the notion of heaven existing on high.

  Dearest Jimmy,

  I’m up in my room using the first moments of day to write to you. I’ve only brushed my teeth and dropped cold water on my face to become clear-headed. Is it true idealism (or true love?) to write on an empty stomach? Of course you have been with me in my dreams, and on awakening I want to grab you and kiss you! Can you know what a love-starved creature you have befriended?

  It is snowing this morning, quite cold and not a time to be alone beneath a feather comforter, do you think? All the world that I see from my window is draped in white at this time, and flakes are floating down large as popcorns to be bought only at the American movie theater in Bindlach!

  Now, my dear one, having said to you ‘Good morning,’ I think I’ll go downstairs, lay the table for breakfast, eat something, say good morning to Mama and Papa, and then go to church. Can you imagine, dare I say, how I would enjoy laying the table for you?

  Jimmy, please know that I love you madly and think of you every moment, both while awake and asleep.