War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  These were the outcomes that were inevitable: When he squeezed the trigger, the firing pin would dimple the back of the cartridge, causing it to explode; the pressure of the explosion would force the round down the barrel, drive the bolt back, eject the brass shell casing out the side of the rifle, compress the recoil spring buffer, and chamber a new cartridge from the magazine. The round itself was no bigger than the pink cap eraser on a No. 2 pencil, but the barrel of his M4 was fourteen and a half inches long, and for every inch of that barrel, the round increased in velocity and spin, exiting the muzzle at twenty-nine hundred feet per second, at which point it traveled according to the laws of projectile motion, subject to gravity, air resistance, and wind.

  If he wanted to shoot Expert, he’d have to focus on what he could control. He positioned his body to support the rifle with his skeleton—try to muscle the rifle and it’ll shake. His breathing was slow and regular, like a lazy sine wave. When the target popped up, he would align his sights and wait until the end of his exhalation. He would be aware of his pulse, wait for a lull between heartbeats. He would not pull the trigger, he would squeeze it, so as not to jerk the round off course. The discharge should be a surprise. Like waking up, his drill sergeants had told him, covered in spooge.

  He started with both eyes open to observe his whole lane. A 150-meter target popped up and he shifted the rifle, lined up the sights on the torso-shaped black silhouette, and fired. The round hit the target and it went down. The shell landed next to his sleeve, hot. Another target was already up. Montauk aimed and fired. The target went down. He glanced to his right: Staff Sergeant Curtis Jackson, the 1st Squad leader, wasn’t looking at his own targets, he was looking at Montauk’s, just waiting for him to screw up. Jackson was nicknamed “Fitty Cent,” after the rapper, whose real name was also Curtis Jackson. Staff Sergeant Jackson was a small white guy who hadn’t been shot nine times, but he was a former Ranger. He could probably shoot straight. Montauk fired, the target went down. He fired again and missed a 300-meter target. He missed the next as well. He hit fourteen out of the next fifteen targets, and he managed to resist the impulse to see if Jackson or anyone else was watching, but near the end of his set, he missed two more. When he finished, he stood and kicked the sandbag. He’d shot 35, one below Expert.

  Within the hour, everyone had qualified with the M4. A dozen, like Montauk, had qualified as Sharpshooter. Another dozen had struggled to qualify at all.

  Only four men in the platoon had qualified as Expert. Among them, Olaf and Jackson. The surprise was Specialist Young-Bai Joh, or Sodium Joh, as they called him, a scrawny twenty-one-year-old teetotaling Korean nerd. Montauk was jealous, but he congratulated him and said, “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Video games?”

  “That’s it, LT, you need to play more video games.” It was Sergeant Jackson.

  He was always making snide comments. Excess of bile, Montauk thought. That’s how a seventeenth-century physician would have diagnosed him. He was the only guy in the platoon from whom Montauk felt actual hostility. He was also the only member of the platoon with a Ranger tab, which was unfortunate because it lent legitimacy to Jackson’s attitude: that he shouldn’t have to take orders from some non-Ranger chump just because he had a college degree and ninety days of OCS.

  Montauk assembled the platoon and informed them that they would be doing a firing drill in full MOPP-4, heavy charcoal-lined coveralls, rubber overboots, and bulky black gloves. “The range depot has the gear,” he said. “Get suited up and be prepared to fire under a notional cloud of Agent.” He felt a wave of relief wash over him as the platoon lined up at the depot. He couldn’t screw up while standing at the rear, observing.

  When they were suited up and back in position, Olaf ran down the line, yelling, “Gas! Gas! Gas!” and they all yanked the heavy black-and-green rubber masks out of their carrying pouches. They pulled down their green rubber hoods, placing their sweaty palms over the canisters and sucking the masks onto their faces to check the seal, tasting powdered latex and old drool. They scrambled into prone firing positions, struggling to angle their rifles so they could actually look down the sights.

  The tower called out, “Switch the selector to semi and watch your lanes!” The torso-shaped targets popped up downrange, and they began firing.

  Montauk’s infantry school platoon, class of ’99, had gone through the tear-gas chamber, in which they had to do push-ups and recite their General Orders while their eyes burned and unbelievably long ropes of mucus hung from their noses. Real nerve agents produced similar mucus ropes but with the addition of disorientation, painful spasming, paralysis, and death, which came within thirty minutes or sooner unless the heart was sped up with a shot from one of the atropine injectors that each soldier carried. Blister agents caused dermatological burns, blindness, and lung corrosion. Blood agents caused the quickest and most certain death, a nice big breath causing the blood to literally boil in the veins. It was hard to imagine anything more horrible than the Great War, when mustard gas had been merely one of the gears of death that undid the bodies and personalities of the young men trapped in its mill, the extent of the psychological horrors not really known because so few survived, and even fewer spoke of it afterward.

  The tower called cease-fire and the men rested their rifles against sandbags and moved to the rear of their foxholes. All except Ant.

  Montauk walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Private Ant, hello?” he yelled.

  “Sir. Sorry, sir,” Ant said after taking off his mask. He had fair skin, curly hair, and delicate features.

  “Can you not hear the tower?”

  “I forgot to put in my earplugs, and I didn’t realize until the pro mask was on and Sergeant Olaufsson was yelling, ‘Gas! Gas!’ I just kept firing, but it was so loud that I could barely focus on the targets.”

  “You like that tinnitus?”

  “At least I know what it’s like now.”

  Ant, like Fields, had taken on actual personhood in Montauk’s mind. They happened to be the only two other men in the platoon with bachelor’s degrees, and Montauk worried that he’d subconsciously associated himself with the educated few, further setting himself apart from the rest of the platoon. Ant was twenty-two and had a BA in Aesthetics from the hippie-fabulous Evergreen State College in Olympia. He had been on the verge of making sergeant when he pissed hot for marijuana during a random drug test earlier in the year. Captain Byrd had reduced him to buck private. Now, on the cusp of deployment, he was the lowest-ranking member of Montauk’s platoon.

  A few months back, he’d surprised Montauk by showing up at one of the Encyclopaedists parties—he knew one of Montauk’s housemates—and he’d opened up to Montauk about his new philosophical relationship with Army life. He had signed up thinking he might build a career, but now he was here to savor military experience, an attitude that comported well with his epicurean eating habits.

  “Remember your earplugs next time,” Montauk said. He walked away smiling, remembering when he had made the same mistake back in Basic. The crack of the rifles next to his had been painful and the discharge of his own, deafening—the ring appeared after firing the first round and increased in volume with each successive shot. He had tinnitus for hours afterward, an indication of how soft and vulnerable his body was to modern weaponry, that he could be hurt simply from hearing the sound of the 5.56 millimeter NATO jacketed rifle round.

  * * *

  Mani hit the last of a joint roach held in a bobby pin, then set it on the porch steps and took up a charcoal stick. She had a sketchpad open on her lap. She made a few swift and light strokes to form the oval outline of a face. In the center, she sketched an angular nose, smoothed the lines with her finger, then carefully articulated the wide flaring nostrils. She dashed off the rough almond shapes of the eyes, closer together than most people’s, added
a little nub for the tear duct, shaded the sockets, shaded under the cheekbones, added wrinkles near the nose, drew in the thin lips, protruding ears. It was beginning to look like President Bush.

  She held the drawing in the sunlight, dissatisfied. Something was off.

  She heard the muffled sound of her cell ringing in her pocket. It was her mother, who still didn’t know about her injury. She’d called several times last week, and Mani hadn’t picked up.

  As she answered, she took up the charcoal again and decided to fix her drawing. Bush looked too clean.

  “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Have you stopped answering your phone altogether?” Her mother tended to add an initial e to words that began with an s (have you e-stopped) and her ths sounded more like ds. She taught Farsi and Middle Eastern literature at Boston College, and as such, she had retained much more of her Iranian accent than Mani’s father had.

  “Sorry. Been busy.” After her cell had broken in the accident, Mani had bought the cheapest Nokia available. She’d spoken to her mother only once since then, in mid-August. Her mother had been furious that she’d been out of contact for a month and a half. Mani had apologized profusely and said her phone had been stolen.

  “Everything is fine?”

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t it be?” Mani smudged the charcoal around the eyes, making the sockets appear deeper. She hollowed out the cheeks.

  “We just haven’t heard from you. What have you been up to?”

  “Art.” Mani angled the tip of Bush’s nose, giving it more of a hook.

  “You’re still in Seattle?”

  “Yep.”

  “Your father says the University of Washington has a top-ten medical program.”

  Mani continued sketching.

  “Have you been reading the news?” her mother asked. “President Khatami refuses to give up the nuclear program. And now Shamkhani is saying they may resort to preemptive attacks to protect their nuclear facilities.”

  “Who’s Shamkhani?”

  “The defense minister.”

  Mani fell silent as two of Montauk’s housemates walked past her up the stairs. They all knew her by now and didn’t seem to mind that she was living on the couch, but she had yet to learn all their names.

  “Are you still there?” her mother asked.

  “That’s nice,” Mani said.

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Yeah. The nukes. What do you want me to say?” She dabbed her finger over the pupils, dulling them.

  “Well, we’d been talking about visiting this winter. But if things get worse, that may be impossible.”

  “I’m not really interested in going there anyway.”

  “But you haven’t even met your cousins.”

  “That’s why I don’t care. I don’t know them.”

  “They’re family.”

  Mani lightened the lips.

  “Your father and I think you should come home.”

  She carefully added small cracks to the skin. “I’m getting a lot of work done. I’ll visit sometime soon, okay?”

  “How soon?”

  “I gotta go. We’ll talk, okay?”

  “You say that, dear, but we don’t. You hardly answer your phone.”

  “Mom. We’ll talk. Okay. I promise.”

  “Mani.”

  Mani did miss her parents, but there was no way she was going to let them see her on crutches. She couldn’t handle the interrogation that would certainly expand beyond the accident to question, again, every important life choice she’d made in the last three years. “Love you, too, Mom. Bye.” She hung up and looked at her drawing. It was still Bush, but she’d gone too far: he looked ghoulish. She didn’t like this version, either. She ripped it up.

  5

  * * *

  Montauk left Captain Byrd’s office and walked toward his platoon’s classroom. Mount Rainier, so often hidden by cloud cover, was out in its full glory, reveling in the September sun, its permafrosted cap just starting to get seasonal legs. Ant and Sodium Joh were sitting on the wooden steps leading up to the classroom with their weapons spread out on rags. Joh ran a bore brush through the barrel and then held it to the sky, looking for leftover carbon residue, as Montauk trudged into the classroom. The rest of the platoon was in here, bullshitting loudly over the Top 40 R&B/Hip-Hop station KUBE 93.3, which was probably why the musically snobbish Ant and Joh were cleaning their weapons outside.

  The room’s setup suggested something halfway between a lunchroom and a classroom: up front were a chalkboard and a podium, which faced rows of large wooden tables lined with chairs on both sides. They were covered with dirty squares of cloth, bore brushes and non-bore brushes, tubes of Break-Free gun cleaner and lubricant, a few sixteen-ounce Powerade and Mountain Dew bottles from the vending machine down the hall, and assault rifles, grenade launchers, and machine guns in various states of disassembly. The black metal glinted in the sunlight coming through the open windows.

  In the middle of the room, and taking up the most physical space, were Sergeant Jackson and his alpha fireteam, known as the “Hardcores.” They all looked up to Jackson, especially Specialist Urritia, who seemed to Montauk to be a nice guy who never quite pulled off Jackson’s badass-jerk persona that he sought to emulate. Urritia was knocking back a can of caffeine- and taurine-fortified weight gainer. He was predisposed to relative scrawniness, so his regimen of pills and supplements gave him the chiseled look of an Abercrombie model, a look that Montauk both admired and thought kind of gay.

  Montauk pulled up a chair next to Olaf and popped his rifle open. Olaf’s rifle was already cleaned and inspected. With twelve years of practice, he was the quickest and most methodical rifle cleaner in the platoon.

  “I can handle that lower receiver for you, sir,” Olaf said.

  “Thanks,” Montauk said as he disassembled the rest of the weapon. He looked over at 2nd Squad’s table. A tall and muscular guy—­Montauk couldn’t see his name tape—was choking out Specialist Antoine Thomas, who was struggling to turn his head and elbow his grappler in the ribs. Thomas was short and wide and wore big-framed googly glasses. He was a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, but especially of anime. To top it off, his speech was impeded by a lateral lisp. The ultimate 1980s caricature of a nerd. Except for one thing: he became infuriated rather than mortified when called out on his nerdiness.

  Montauk, although known in his hipster set for horsing around, found it difficult to gauge what was an acceptable amount of grab-ass and unseriousness in an infantry platoon. He didn’t want to be seen as schoolmarmish, but he had to maintain his authority. He settled on giving Staff Sergeant Ngo Nguyen, the 2nd Squad leader, a look that communicated annoyance with his squad. Nguyen commenced a halfhearted attempt to calm them down until Olaf bellowed across the room for them to knock it the fuck off and clean their weapons. Quiet settled, and the little clicks and scrapes of bore-brushing could be heard. Daddy was in the house. Montauk continued cleaning impassively, annoyed at how it had all gone down.

  Next to Thomas, PFC Lo was wearing his Kevlar, body armor, and ballistic goggles. Having to wear tactical protective gear indoors was the military version of the dunce cap. “What did Lo do this time?” Montauk asked Olaf.

  “He left the ballistic plates out of his flak vest so it’d be lighter during the react-to-contact drills,” Olaf said. “Nguyen found out.”

  Montauk glanced at Nguyen. He had two main facial expressions: calm or, in this case, with PFC Lo sweating under his body armor, delightedly cruel.

  Punitive corrective measures were encouraged to maintain discipline, but there were limits. The punishment must directly relate to the soldier’s deficiency. It must discontinue when the deficiency is overcome. Otherwise, it could constitute hazing, which is expressly forbidden by Army Command Policy. Lo had fucked up, and being forced to wear
his body armor was related to the way in which he’d fucked up. But Lo’s real deficiency was being stupid—his nickname was “Low-Q.” And when would that be overcome? Montauk felt bad for Lo, but he didn’t want to undercut Nguyen’s authority, which would be bad for Nguyen and bad for Montauk, who would likely lose Nguyen’s respect. He needed Olaf’s advice, but even more, he wanted to be able to handle this by himself.

  Montauk finished cleaning his weapon and signaled for Nguyen to step into the hallway with him. Before Nguyen could speak, Montauk said, “I know what Lo did. I’m just . . . concerned. That maybe you’re having too much fun.”

  “Sir, I’m looking out for him. Our mothers go to the same church in Tacoma. If he fucks up here, no big deal. I just don’t want him to fuck up when it counts.”

  Montauk nodded. He followed Nguyen back into the classroom, scolding himself for being so soft, for acting like a camp counselor instead of a platoon leader.

  Each soldier continued to work as fast as he could, first on his own weapon and then on the squads’ as Olaufsson moved from table to table, giving a thumbs-up or -down. No one went home until it was all done. It was a social system of intense peer pressure. After all, survival in the field was a collective task, not an individual one. Get through as a group or get fucked up as a group.

  It was late afternoon by the time the arms room was locked up and Montauk had dismissed his platoon. The thirty-six of them were supposed to feel like a large family, of which Montauk was ostensibly the patriarch. But next to Olaf, he felt more like a middle sibling who was in charge only because he was Captain Byrd’s favorite. He hoped that would change when he deployed, when there’d be more to think about than the monotony of weapons cleaning.