Carrying

by Theodore Weesner

  In an all but empty barracks (everyone home from Iraq seems to have gone somewhere, to be with someone), I find myself feeling out-of-body in the spring air flowing through opened windows. Here I am, where there are hallways, toilets, running water (hot and cold) from faucets, as well as nozzles in tiled gang showers. Free to come and go as I wish for a string of days. A life of my own to design and live. A future to weigh and plan…assuming that the flashbacks and hallucinations will come to an end.

  Wearing clean fatigues, I visit the all but abandoned mess hall to eat midday chow, really to be with people. I find the rows of unused tables lonely and depressing. A handful of soldiers has yet to return from Saudi Arabia, while all others seem to have gone to town, on trips, away. Not caring to eat alone, I suffer momentary confusion over who I am and what is happening. I won’t be seeing Lotte until tomorrow when her work day ends and we meet again to spend another night in a clean if (for me) unaffordable hotel with heated towels. (I guess it’s sort of a honeymoon, taking walks and having meals, curling in under a down comforter, having her to hold like a precious reward for what I happened to do in the desert.)

  In the quiet mess hall I try bites of cold cuts. What I know is that drink is what my body wishes to take in, as broomstick-lean and in need of nourishment as I may be. Lean and mean but also thin and unresolved. Happy and sad at once. Objective and subjective. Relieved to be in Germany on having been in smelly oblivion in a desert eating MREs and half-sleeping in a wad close under my screens, controls, triggers of life and death and lifelong disability. Pleased that Lotte is nearby and as eager to be with me as I am to be with her. In proximity to the skinny song that she is. The symphony her presence offers to my mind. Managing to smile as tears lurk beneath the surface, threatening to bring me down and make me look foolish.

  A new desire comes up to see DeMarcus, to speak with someone who may appreciate my confusion. To try out on him my frightening decision to leave the army when my enlistment is up. War and death. Life in uniform, in civvies, on post and in town. Weapons in hand. Targets ahead that must be destroyed. Begging for mercy while kissing boots. Blown into nothingness all the same.

  Did I do with the 7.62 mm coax what I know I did? Gunner Murphy. First in and first out? Did we go in as the proud, well-trained head of the spear and obliterate enemy armor, fragile wooden defenses, elite forces that weren’t elite at all? Despite knowing they would have done worse to us had the shoe been on the other foot, did we need to be so overpowering in our triumph, leaving in our wake so many crispy incinerated bodies, such waste and disabled lives? Limbless beggars to haunt the bazaars of Baghdad for a generation or more?

  Magdalena. She’s someone else I’d like to see, for whatever madness, wisdom, anger she might bring to bear. I’d like to hear it, if made to laugh or cry, smirk or cringe with guilt, suffer self-consciousness at her take on things, her criticism, her schoolmarm swatting of my knuckles with truths large and small. I’d like to hear it, knowing she might grant perspective and absolution by way of her intelligence and experience, her childhood memory of the unspeakable slaughter Germany wreaked on others and brought on itself during World War II.

  Wouldn’t she agree that governments pay soldiers to kill and then forget the soldiers as soon as possible, putting them out to pasture on subsistence pensions until they die, burying their remains and retaining no more memory of them the breezes passing between trees?

  Saddam brought it on himself, was an errant force needing to be stopped, but wouldn’t Magdalena say that individuals of wisdom could have used well-chosen words to oust him from Kuwait, avoiding the death, waste, and pillage? Wouldn’t she say that it is always an issue of rhetoric? of clarity and intelligence? of strength that teaches without annihilating? That Saddam might have been brought down not by M1A1s but by brilliance that had him grinning like a puppet on a string as he drove his armada back into Iraq and its bazaars and goat herds.

  I go searching for DeMarcus, wanting all the more to confer with him as a friend. I have a string of hours before my rendezvous with Lotte at the end of her work day, and seeing DeMarcus, talking and hanging out, is what I’d like to do. Not to reveal the neediness I know I’m suffering, but not to avoid it, either…if we can revisit what each of us did in the desert.

  Dressed once more in my new western duds (which will draw some ragging, I imagine, from DeMarcus), I make my way to his barracks only to discover that neither he nor his roommate is anywhere to be found in the all but deserted building. Every last soldier seems to be in town, with loved ones, off to Paris or Amsterdam or London, as removed as possible from uniforms and the weapons recently carried like weighty appendages capable, in spurts, of causing heads to go away. When I check his orderly room, the company clerk says, “Everybody gone with back pay and hazardous duty pay…don’t know where… don’t know when they be coming back…not till they has to.”

  With time yet on my hands, I track down DeMarcus at Club Miami Beach, at one of the big tables with half a dozen soldiers in civvies (all African American). And while he isn’t unfriendly when I greet him where he sits, and we fist-bump and each ask how the other is doing, he doesn’t invite me to join his crowd and I sense the old distance that says we’re not meant to invade each other’s worlds. We’re friends from somewhere, but not here among the brothers, is the message I can’t help receiving. All the same, he rags me some about my duds in a mocking and friendly way, says “threads be cowboy cool” while making no mention of Magdalena. When, standing, I mention our planned celebration, he says, “Have to see ’bout that, dunno.”

  As natural as it would seem to be to be invited to pull up a chair, no invitation occurs, and the dynamic of standing where others sit grows as oddly awkward as a teenage encounter in a high school cafeteria. After another moment I see no choice but to say, “Good to see you, man…see you soon,” and go on my way without further mention of the celebration of remaining alive that we had planned in the desert, with the women in our lives.

  In truth, I’m wounded at heart. How else to put it? My buddy from warfare and slaughter in Iraq. The comrade with whom I felt as a brother and through whom I assumed I had discarded every remnant of adolescent racial prejudice. He’s not into me as a friend, I can’t help acknowledging. It’s too bad that he’s as immature now as I was then, I also think. He’ll learn. It’ll take a while, as I well know. I’m sorry all the same that he isn’t able to open himself here in this larger world…if that’s his problem. That he isn’t able to accept friendship with a white boy in the presence of the critical brothers.

  The next time I see DeMarcus, it’s an accidental encounter at the PX. As I’m paying for my purchases on the way out, there he is, entering in my direction. We stand aside to joke some, as if a weird rift is not in place between us. “Hey, man, how you doing? You got promoted!” (He’s become a corporal, just as I’ve become a sergeant with a single rocker.)

  “What happened to that party we were going to have?” I hear myself go ahead and ask. “I felt like you blew me off at Club Miami Beach. Were you embarrassed in front of the brothers…?”

  There it is. Right or wrong, I’ve said what is on my mind…only to have him give me an angled look. “Nothing like that, man,” he says. “Nothing like that.”

  “Like what then?”

  “Man, you know. Back in Germany, back to the old routine.”

  At a loss for what else to say, sensing that I’m being blown off again, that DeMarcus is incapable of being friends with a white guy, I say, “I’m going strong with my girlfriend…who I invited to this blast we were gonna have. You cool with Magdalena? All these parades and S-2 things…we can still have a party and celebrate. Like we planned.”

  “You doin’ the parade? I’se doin the parade. See you there, we cook somethin’ up.”

  On which line (with things left unresolved) Dee proceeds into the PX and I feel like I just said the wrong thing. Does he not want me in the presence of Magdalena? Recalling his irrationa
l jealousy in the desert, thinking I was exchanging secret letters with her (had my reading and writing skills impressed her enough that she mentioned them to him?), it’s the only thing I can think of that seems to make any sense. The underlying reality in every thought coming to mind is that DeMarcus simply does not want (in the presence of the brothers) to enter into friendship with a white guy. It occurs to me that it may not be white prejudice that is in the way anymore, but black prejudice against whites. An inability to be intelligent with a white guy.

  We have our parade in any case, where I receive my Bronze Star but do not, in the warm weather atmosphere of many dependents and the army band from Nuremberg, set eyes on Dee in his unit. As I march with mine, he would be marching with his, and the reception that follows the ceremony on the parade field is like a carnival for children and guests from which single soldiers excuse themselves to return to their barracks or to their personal lives in town.

  My Bronze Star is one of several dozen lowered around the necks of soldiers, no matter that it’s a reminder to me of the Iraqi soldiers I ripped with the gunner’s 7.62, not to mention the damage I did with The Claw’s main cannon, taking out T-72s, APCs, buildings. A head blown away on a burst of firepower. I take pride in 2nd Cav receiving the army’s Valorous Unit Award while continuing to look through the Bronze Star and what it has me knowing all over again.

  Lotte is at work and doesn’t attend the Parade Field Ceremony. But when I have loitered about the grass and refreshment stands for a time and the army band has packed to return to Nuremberg, the balance of the day is free and I go off to change into civvies on the way to Bindlach, to meet Lotte and take her to dinner and out walking…on our way to another night in the expensive little side-street hotel.

  Rumor emerges that 2nd Cav will redeploy to Fort Lewis, Washington in four months, where it will become 2nd Stryker Cav Regiment. Having given an intense time in my life to 2nd Cav, having come of age here and lived and died with comrades in the desert, I feel more confused by this than I can admit…in the face of soldiers applauding the move, shouting in joy at the prospect of returning to the States, praising the climate and geography of Fort Lewis in proximity to the Pacific Ocean!

  When, as all but an afterthought, I mention 2nd Cav’s redeployment to Lotte, tears fill her eyes and she cries at once, “You are not taking me with you?”

  Wow.

  Like everything else during 2nd Cav’s few weeks back in Germany, the redeployment has come on suddenly. Still, it’s only a rumor, some words in one line and another, and more than I’ve taken time to process, while for Lotte it’s an immediate threat: She senses she is losing the young man who has made declarations of forever and with whom she has been living a honeymoon by way of candlelit meals and nights in an expensive hotel with heated towels…a U.S. soldier to whom she has devoted every dream.

  As she gets control of herself, we talk. Do I love her? she wants to know. Of course I love her, I say. Why else would I be saying so and spending so much time with her?

  “I love you more than I ever imagined loving anyone,” she has me know in turn. “I think only of you, moment by moment, every day. You mean all things to me. I believe I will die if I lose you…not to mention suffering a broken heart.”

  Looking at her, I try to understand what it is that I’m doing with myself…what I want from the world, what choices I have, if I wish to escape or not? Or, with another part of me, if I’d like to do whatever I can to make her happy?

  We agree to marry, as we sit talking and drinking at a table near the brick wall of our favorite Gasthaus. My proposal comes within our conversation as much as it is a question to be answered. I’m okay with marriage, given how much I love and admire her. For Lotte it’s a thrill bringing more tears to her eyes, together with an avowal that I am the singular love of her life. “I will do everything to make you happy,” she tells me. “You will see.”

  The plan we fashion (spontaneously, sitting yet in the Gasthaus) is that I will complete my enlistment and take my discharge from the army on the occasion, in September, of 2nd Cav’s redeployment to Fort Lewis. Army bureaucracy (as Lotte knows better than me) has it that if we marry prior to my discharge, my spouse will be privy to all privileges of U.S. citizenship and all benefits of being a dependent. Thereupon (in January) I will start college under the GI Bill (in all likelihood in Massachusetts) while she finds a job working as a translator in nearby Boston, Amherst, or Cambridge. Above all, we’ll be together. Happiness will be ours to enjoy day by day as we build a life.

  In a sequence of letters exchanged with my mother, I explain that I’m going to marry a German girl, in July, and that we plan to live in Massachusetts following my discharge from the army at Fort Lewis in September. Joined by her sister (Aunt Ellen), my mother makes plans to fly to Germany to attend the wedding on base. (She only hopes that the girl is not expecting and that I’m not rushing into something. In a reply I assure her that Lotte is not expecting, that she is a bright and educated young woman of whom to be proud and from whom to learn many things, especially concerning language.)

  Filling out forms on base and reserving the post chapel for a small wedding on Saturday, 27 July, I seek out Dee yet again, of a mind to ask him to be my best man and to invite him and Magda to attend a reception at a Kirchenleibach Gasthaus that Lotte’s parents will be renting for the occasion. The brief appeal I have in mind includes explaining to Dee that my friendships with him and Magdalena are among my most significant experiences in Germany and that having him as best man would top things off perfectly before Lotte and I leave by train to honeymoon for five days in Venice.

  Everything is suddenly in order and, while I’m terrified, I’m also pleased, willing, ready. A big step for each of us, which we are undertaking in a sensible and practical way. An admirable girl of intelligence of whom to be proud. A partner to enjoy knowing. A lovely, skinny girl with whom to be pleased.

  I also want to speak to Dee of what happened in Iraq. What each of us did there. How he feels about it and what he’s doing to fight off any demons. Who else to speak to if not to Dee, no matter that our friendship seems to have faded? The lieutenant is a possibility; still, the lieutenant is the lieutenant and I know he’d somehow turn my PTSD confession into a teaching moment that I’d like to work out on my own.

  Flashbacks and hallucinations continue to visit, especially during the night. Nightmares of irretrievable horror. Depression lurking as a shadow intent on taking control. Still, who wants to live with the stigma of an admission of such weakness? Undergoing sappy therapy at the hands of medical people who are too sweet, too unmanly, too accepting. Re-experiencing the ripping shells, the incinerated torsos, the blown-away heads. Would I be asked to wear a yellow star like a helpless Jew in Warsaw?

  In the light of day, PTSD is hardly present, letting me know, I think, that in time I will be free of the recurring trauma. PTSD is not something I plan anymore to mention to Lotte, at least not until the wedding and honeymoon are over and I’m less subject to mood swings and nightmares. In the meantime, as the troop resumes orderly days and actions and Lotte and I forgo our nights in the expensive hotel with the gushing shower and heated towels, we enjoy an unfolding summer interlude of get-togethers to plan the future and visit her parents in their home, just as I know unstressed days with crewmates packing now for the redeployment to Fort Lewis in September.

  A wedding at the end of July. A honeymoon into the first days of August. Separation from Lotte and redeployment to Fort Lewis in early September. Reconciliation on the west coast in late September. Discharge from the army in early October. The purchase of a car and a cross-country drive to Massachusetts, to rent an apartment in Amherst, find jobs, and prepare for classes to begin in January. It’s a blocking out of a life together. As someone given to history and planning, the warm summer days could hardly be more satisfying to me in my get-togethers with Lotte in Bindlach. This is our life, and we’re putting it together in just the way that we wish. />
  It’s still June, however, when I track down Dee and extend my invitation to him to serve as my best man. Not unaware that I’m more of a buddy to him than he is to me, that the history of things is important to me (as history has always been), my thought is that making my case directly is the only way to have it happen as it should.

  The time comes. I track him down at Club Miami Beach and get out to him the role I’d like him to play as my best man on Saturday, 27 July, at the post chapel.

  “You jokin’?” he says at once.

  “Not at all,” I say. “It would make things perfect. Germany’s been a big experience for me! You’ve been a big part of it. I’m asking you as my best friend.”

  “You crazy,” he tells me. “Ain’t doin’ that! No way! Get all dressed up an’ all that shit. Not me, man.”

  “You wear Class A’s, that’s all. You come to the chapel. Attend the reception in Kirchenleibach. Give a little toast. No sweat. We drink and dance and have the big time we planned when we talked about it in the desert! A celebration of being alive after having been in a war! This is our history!”

  “Not me, man. Ain’t doin’ no shit like that. Get somebody else. Ain’t me!”

  I ask him to think about it, assure him again that it’s our history and something to which we should be true, while he keeps shaking his head and saying, “No way, not me. Ain’t doin’ no shit like that. Find yo’self some white boy…fit right in.”