So I did what the man said and I kept hooking babies to the ropes and the babies kept flying away and I’d have to climb up the wall and fetch them down again. This went on for a long time. I don’t know where they got all the babies from but they did. They kept bringing me baby after baby till a thunderstorm came along to drive everybody away from the fair. And we took the Army of One rock-climbing wall down so it wouldn’t get struck by lightning.
Bellamy rode off in his late-model Dodge Durango. I hung around in the deluge and waited for Emily to come get me. I liked rain and I was already soaked so it didn’t make a difference if I stood in the rain or not. When Emily pulled up she looked perfect. She was very good to me.
We went to meet my parents at a Mexican restaurant. My dad asked me how things had gone at the fair and I recounted the babies for him and everyone agreed it was funny. We all had a nice time. And I couldn’t help but think that it was too bad that I was supposed to go to Iraq in a few weeks. But it couldn’t be helped. You make your bed, you lie in it.
* * *
—
I ASSUMED I’d be piss-tested about as soon as I got to Fort Hood, so I was trying to get a lot of weed smoking in early on. Most everyone I knew lived near enough to Severance, and this was easily done.
I had an hour before I had to be back at the Armed Forces Career Center. Emily picked me up and drove me over to James Lightfoot’s mom’s house. James Lightfoot and I got blazed as shit. Emily didn’t smoke weed. She only fucked with pills. I’d brought a razor with me, and I was shaving at the kitchen sink. I was cutting the shit out of myself, and James Lightfoot was telling me about Kashi the Indian. Kashi had been living in Cleveland the past four years, studying at Case. Now his student visa was up and he’d have to leave the country soon if he didn’t do something, and he was thinking about enlisting in the Army as a means of becoming an American citizen.
“Why does he want to be an American citizen?”
“It beats me. I guess he likes it here better than India.”
“Huh….Do you have any Clear Eyes?”
I was five minutes late getting back. I had needed the extra time to get myself together. I was still blazed as shit. Bellamy was the only guy in the office when I came in. The rest of the recruiters had already left for the big freestyle basketball tournament downtown. Bellamy was pissed at me. He told me to start doing push-ups, and I went about doing that; then I said, “I apologize for being late, Sarr, but I have a good reason. I think I may have found somebody who wants to sign up.”
“Recover,” he said. “Tell me about it in the Durango.”
Once we were on our way I gave Bellamy the details about Kashi, and he made me promise not to tell any of the other recruiters. I said I wouldn’t.
Our stand was set up in a parking lot across the street from the arena. A great deal of basketball-related shit was taking place there. I milled around the crowd and tried to hand out flyers. Someone asked me what suburb I was from. His face was youthful at first glance, but then I saw the crow’s-feet and the laugh lines. He was missing a front tooth. He had his dirty-blond hair done up in cornrows, and he was wearing Cavs shorts and a Tall T. He said his name was Jug. I tried to recruit Jug for the Army but he said he wouldn’t do it because Vice President Cheney had conspired with the Illuminati to knock down the Twin Towers and take control of the world’s oil supply. I admitted that I hadn’t heard this.
“And yet here you are,” he said, “yer ignorant ass tryin to hoodwink all these young niggaz into spilling their blood for Dick the Devil and the Illuminati.”
I told him I had to be going because Sergeant Bellamy was probably looking for me.
He asked if I’d ever been to Iraq.
“I’m supposed to go this fall.”
“Better tell them people yer gay. Go to Canada or some shit.”
I said I didn’t think there was any way out of it.
He said, “Yer gonna die.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fort Hood was bleak, a new kind of desert, engineered to induce fatalism in the young. It worked like a charm.
4th ID put me in an armor battalion. It wasn’t all armor though. The battalions were getting mixed up then. There were two armor companies (Alpha and Bravo) and two infantry companies (Delta and Echo) and an engineer company (Charlie), along with a support company (Foxtrot) and a headquarters company (HHC). The latter two had a lot of different shit in them: cooks, mechanics, scouts, mortars, intelligence, finance. The medic platoon was part of HHC. I went there first. I’d either stay there as part of the aid station or get attached to one of the line companies (Alpha through Echo).
I didn’t like it in the medic platoon; most everybody in it was older than I was, and they put a premium on a kind of talking I wasn’t any good at. So I told the guy running the platoon that I wanted to be in one of the line companies and he attached me to Echo. That’s how I got into the infantry.
It was September. We were deploying in November. The company was a tight group. So it went about as you’d expect. There was a lot of Who the fuck are you?
Sergeant Shoo was my boss. Big kind of bro-ish motherfucker. The other two medics attached to Bravo were joes, lower enlisted, like I was. PFC Yuri and PFC Burnes. They were good people. Yuri was arrogant as fuck but it was alright, and the 11Bs liked him on account of he was batshit crazy in the heavy metal sense of the words. As for Burnes, he was maybe too smart to be in the Army. You could see it was killing him, how dumb it was. He kept to himself mostly and spent his off time studying differential calculus and drinking Icehouse beer. He was planning a career in politics. He was in his early 30s and seemed old as fuck to all of us who were just kids really.
* * *
—
I WAS lucky in that my roommates in the barracks were laid-back and not excessively patriotic. They were infantry from Delta Company: PFC Grace and Private Carranza. Grace was from Oregon. He was 20 like I was. He looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and he talked like a surfer. He was my assigned roommate. Carranza was staying there unofficially on Grace’s invitation. Carranza was married so he got BAH, the basic housing allowance, which meant he couldn’t get a place in the barracks. He had an apartment off-post in Killeen but, for whatever reason, Mrs. Carranza was pissed at him and he was kind of homeless.
It so happened that Grace and Carranza were fucking the same 17-year-old girl from Harker Heights. Carranza explained it all to me. “That’s my little snow bunny,” he said. “I’m keeping her on ice.”
Then Grace married her and that sorted it out. But the three of them still hung out together, and they watched Casino five or six times a week. Grace was going to die in Iraq and Carranza’s face would get destroyed there, but this was before any of those things happened, so hearts were light.
Apparently Grace was some kind of dynamo in the fucking department because the girl would go nuts whenever he fucked her. You could hear her through the wall. They’d go for hours. You got the idea that it was true love, sacred and unguarded. But it was none of my business. I was in the business of being lonely all the time. Weekends I’d go to the movies in Killeen. It was one of those big shopping center movie theaters, and I’d spent so much time there I’d run out of movies I hadn’t seen.
I talked to Emily as much as I could. I’d call her up after nine, when the minutes were free and it was ten her time so she’d usually be done with work. She was waiting tables at a chain restaurant. They served Caribbean food there. She said it was good. She worked full-time. She went to school full-time. She did all the homework. It was hard to imagine having the energy for all that. She was working her ass off. And it was good that we could at least talk, but there was a distance. I’d been in the Army going on nine months by then.
“People think you don’t exist,” she said. “They think I’m making you up.”
I said I was sorry about that.
“I never see you,” she said. “It isn’t normal. Why don’t I get to have a boyfriend I can see?”
I said, “I think I’ll have the chance to make it up there around Columbus Day. Maybe Veterans Day at the latest.”
“…Okay.”
“Just hold on for me, you know?”
“I miss you.”