Art After War: The Visual Diary of Danish Soldier Henrik Andersen

As the memory of U.S. participation in the Afghanistan War fades in the minds of most Americans (the report on the exit fiasco notwithstanding), there was probably even less awareness that the military did not “go it alone” but had NATO allies, including Denmark (which entered the war 2001), one of the twelve founding nations in 1949.  In Afghanistan the Danish military suffered 43 deaths from combat injuries, with 214 wounded in action.  The raw number is low compared to the U.S. but was the highest number of deaths any country suffered if considered per capita, and so had an outsized impact.

That the Danish participation in the war still looms large in the country is reflected in an installation at The Danish War Museum in Copenhagen, which developed A Distant War – A Danish Soldier in Afghanistan over 10 years ago.  It reflects an on-going presence of the war and its aftermath, a memory embodied in a physical space.

Mai Stenbjerg Jensen, the curator, told me that “the exhibition was made in collaboration with the Danish Armed Forces, more precisely with soldiers from ISAF team 10. Objects in the exhibition have all been brought home directly from Afghanistan. The exhibition shows the Danish soldier’s journey during a deployment to Afghanistan. The story is told from the soldiers’ perspective” (personal communication, July 4, 2023).  The exhibit follows a ternary pattern of a soldier going to war, in country, and back home.

The return home to civilian life can be problematic, as soldiers of any country’s forces can be affected by PTSD.  In the same way that the war for the American public is largely forgotten, the effects of war on the individual are likewise ignored or misunderstood by the broader civilian population.  This can lead to a sense of dislocation and alienation.  For many vets, the arts can offer a pathway to understanding their feelings of estrangement upon return by creating a visual or verbal representation of those feelings. Another intention of veterans’ artistic creation is to share their work with both the general public and with other vets.  The artwork can provide the non-vet with a window into the veterans’ war and post-war experiences, helping to bridge the vet/non-vet divide, while sharing their work with other vets can both inspire and create a sense of community, thus reducing that sense of isolation and estrangement.

Henrik Andersen, now 40, served in the Danish army for 15 years and was deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan from February to August 2017. He had the rank of Specialist. When he returned home he was eventually diagnosed with PTSD.  He decided that he would use artwork as a way of dealing with the various levels of how the diagnosis affected his daily life.  Starting on January 1, 2022 and until December of that year he created a new watercolor each day.  He notes in an artist’s statement: “Follow my painted diary for better or for worse with my daily companion PTSD.  A new picture every day in 2022 that both describes my world in and around me.”

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

Andersen told me that “the diary concept was one my wife came up with, and for me a way to express myself daily through both good and bad days with a troubled PTSD mind, the thoughts, the emotions and sense of things which made an impact that particular day. I usually made the picture at the end of the day to make sure I got the most important impact of the day down on paper. It’s sometimes really hard to go to a mentally neutral place when you’re filled with anger, depression and loneliness. To empty your mind of judgmental thoughts and emotions and find that one thing that mattered just that day, that in itself can become therapeutic.”

He continued: “It would be really nice for me to be able to reach as many veterans as possible with my art.  I hope that it will make a difference and maybe even inspire others and others like me, who are battling with the aftermath of their deployment, to inspire others to find new ways to express their daily struggle. Even though I have my Instagram account, I’ve still not reached out to as many as I would like to. I do think it is an important message to get out to veterans and their families, that there are other ways to express yourself than you might think. My artwork is very personal to me, and it was a big deal for me to go public with it. It is meant as a daily diary in pictures and every day a new picture in 2022. My wife convinced me to make it public through Instagram, so I would post a new picture, describing my day emotionally or physically.”

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

Andersen is not a formally-trained artist.  He was adept at drawing and painting from childhood and was influenced by an eclectic mix of comics, the figures in Warhammer, movies, and the classical sculptures and paintings in museums. Regardless of the medium or the genre he was always interested in how a thought, a question, or an emotion could be expressed. To him, the work begins with an idea and then the manner of expression evolves from the initial idea.  The finished product, he says “comes from trial and error, both so rewarding and frustrating.”

He does not plan any of his daily images but rather allows spontaneous moments to guide his work. The images are diverse, ranging from the relatively realistic to surrealistic to expressionistic. Even though they are created to reflect what Petersen is experiencing on any particular day they are not merely solipsistic and self-referential; they become a visual correlative that take on a broader meaning.  The titles to the works help in this regard.

Photo courtesy of Mads Ullerup

The early pictures set the tone for much of the rest of the year.  “Angsten og Vreden del. 1/The Anxiety and the Anger part. 1” is dated January 2, 2022, and depicts a fragment of a face in profile, just a nose and a wide-open mouth in a scream, with a ball of reddish-colored smoke emanating from the mouth.

“Selvvalgt ensomhed/Self-selected Loneliness” (January 3) depicts an empty chair in a barren room; a day later, “Fjernsynet viser ingenting/TV is Showing Nothing,” a TV set in a bare gray room has a blank green screen, connoting that there is nothing worthwhile being presented. Each depicts a sense of emptiness and the inability of some vets to re-integrate into the broader civilian society. “Mareridt i rodt, derefter sort/ Nightmare in Red, Then Black,” completed a few days later, shows a bleak, war-torn landscape with a few burned trees in red, mirroring a burned-out psychological landscape.

The January 5 work “Stenen i maven, mørk og varm/ Stone in the abdomen, dark and hot” refers to the physical impact of PTSD, and suggests that PTSD affects the vet not just psychologically but also physically.

As the year progresses the imagery takes on different dimensions.  A few works show recognizable scenes, like the river and bridge of “Ude for at se verden/ Out To See The World” (February 21), a floodlight on a lone power pole (“Sidst i rækken/Last in line,” March 6), steps going down a tunnel (“Sidst i rækken/ What happens if you look inside,” April 15),  a dilapidated house with collapsed roof (“Ja der er brug for genopbygning/ Yes rebuilding is needed,” October 11), and an isolated cabin (“Hyggeligt uhyggeligt/Cozy Cozy,” October 14).  Interestingly, none of these scenes include people, and even in “Cozy Cozy” there is a sense of isolation and remoteness, while in “What happens if you look inside” there is an intimation of foreboding as the steps lead to emptiness.

Faces, especially the eyes, and stylized bodies figure in a number of works, a few of which are self-portraits. “Sidder her bare del. 1, 2, 3/Just sitting here sharing 1, 2, 3” (August 26, 28, 29), is a triptych of sorts.  The first two panels depict a skeletal figure sitting on a rock leaning its skull on its right “hand.”  In 1, the background is a washed-out gray.  The same figure is in panel 2, but some color has been added.  In the third panel the figure is in the same posture but is now fleshed out in green. There are three human figures in the October 21 “Bare en fornemmelse/Just a Feeling.” The figures, in foreground, midground, and background, are dressed in brown and wear neckties, but are faceless. The two closest figures have flames around their feet, while the figure in the background is engulfed in flames. The figures appear impassive, accepting pain and death.  “Sådan føler jeg mig/This is how i feel” (October 30) is a self-portrait.  The figure is fleshed, not skeletal, yet the posture is reminiscent of the skeletons in “Just sitting here sharing 1 and 2.” The eyes are wide and the face anguished, suggesting the pain caused by PTSD.  Although the title “Trivialiteten er skræmmende/Triviality is scary” (February 8) might be considered a bit strange, it points toward the inability to fully reintegrate into the daily minutiae of civilian life. In this self-portrait, the predominant feature in the multicolored, somewhat blurred face are the eyes. Similar to other works, the eyes are wide, staring, fearful.  In the July 23 “Selvportræt/Self-portrait” the face is disembodied, outlined in gray and framed by red, and seems to be floating in the clouds over mountains, leading to a sense of disconnection and alienation from the world.

There is also a self-portrait entitled “Tabt forbindelse/Lost Connection” from October 11.  There is a disembodied head attached to tendrils with a green object next to the cheek.  Both of these works connote a sense of loss, even a dissociation from one’s own body.

Much of the work has an abstract quality.  “Drukner på land/Drowning on land” (November 10) depicts shapes of blue and brown, yet the title reveals a sense of struggle and suffocation.  The November 2 “Tankespin/Mind spin” is a burst of reds, and represents both the explosions of war on the battlefield and in the mind.  “Hvor brænder det ?//Where does it burn?” (August 20-22) is another series in three parts. In each piece, stylized and intermixed dark and lighter blue smoke rises from what could be hills. Looking closely at the first panel one sees what could be disembodied eyes in the smoke. In part 2 the eyes become a bit more pronounced. In part 3 an outline of a face in dark red, with what appears to be bared fang-like teeth, is revealed in the smoke. There is an agonized expression on the face. Again, the burning can refer to the destruction of war and also to a mind on fire.

Not all the watercolors represent negative emotions. The March 8, “Et sælsomt lille væsen er mødt op/A happy little creature has appeared” shows a rabbit in a field. In “Foråret kommer nu/Spring is coming” from March 9 a sprig of green grows out of a finger on a green hand, showing the regenerative power of Nature. There is the playful “Guleroden er der, jeg kan se den nu/ The carrot is there, I can see it now” (April 4); a teddy bear is the subject of the October 18 “Ren kærlighed/Pure love”; likewise, a bird is the subject of “Maskot/Mascot” (November 10). These more “gentle” works indicate that even with the traumatic aftereffects of war there is the possibility for beauty and clarity.

As he looks back on his visual diary he told me “this picture [the April 1 “Hænderne, der skaber og ødelægger/The Hands that Create and Destroy”] and others like it, of a withered, sick hand, gives a new meaning after I tried to take my own life in February 2023, and the attempt left me with exactly that, and really makes me think about the dual meaning in a lot of my pictures. I’ll admit that I didn’t succeed every day, but it was just as important to some days paint through a veil of tears or immense anger. I haven’t continued in 2023 with the diary but I am still painting, it is my little safe zone through the day and it has a calming effect to put paint on paper, the colors and the brush don’t expect anything from me, and as long as I don’t try to force something on to the paper it’s very fulfilling and stressless. My pictures surprise me in ways I would never have imagined.”

The range of Andersen’s images offers a broad insight into the post-war experience, including the effects of PTSD.  His images reveal the uncertainty and tenuousness of what any particular day will bring. At the same time, the very act of creation becomes a shield or bulwark against this uncertainty and provides a sense of order, not only in the finished product but also in the process itself, which provides a structure that my otherwise be lacking.

All statements by Mr. Andersen were from correspondence with him on October 7, 10 and 11, 2023.

All artwork images courtesy of Henrik Andersen.

All photographs of Andersen courtesy of Mads Ullerup.

Images available on Instagram:  henrikerladetmedptsd

References:

Danish casualties:  https://politiken.dk/udland/art4788077/Danmark-mister-flest-soldater-i-Afghanistan

A Distant War:  https://en.natmus.dk/museums-and-palaces/danish-war-museum/exhibitions/a-distant-war/

Mads Ullerup, “With Paintbrush and PTSD,” October 22, 2022, https://www.veterancentret.dk/da/nyheder/2022/med-pensel-og-ptsd/

The Oscar-nominated Danish film Krigen (A War; 2015, directed by Tobias Lindholm), with echoes of “Breaker Morant,” examines the moral quandaries that war occasions and reveals that these dilemmas occur regardless of the size of a nation’s forces. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/movies/tobias-lindholm-narrates-a-scene-from-a-war.html

Dubai is one gigantic, grey strip mall.

“Does anyone know why they call this place Dubai?”

I look away from my bus window. The tour guide sits on the edge of her seat in the front row, leaning into the aisle, microphone in hand.

“Come on,” her eyes wide, “Anyone want to guess? ‘Do’ and ‘Buy’! Dubai! Because everyone comes here to shop…”

I look back out the window. Like the last port visit, Bahrain, this port visit is one solid color. But instead of brown, this place is gray. We are on a wide highway. Cement buildings flicker past. We drive up and over a bridge, take the next exit off the highway, and wind back down and under the bridge. A pair of palm trees stand a little way ahead like two green phalanxes guarding the terracotta-roofed buildings behind them.

“…and up ahead is the Trump hotel,” the tour guide says.

Everyone continues to look out the windows. Trump became president the first month of our deployment. I wonder if the tour guide expected a different reaction.

“We’ll drive around the back and get out so everyone can get a good picture.”

The narrow street is lined with plots of manicured grass and palm trees. All the palm trees are exactly the same height.

The hotel looks like the palace at the end of the Candy Land board game.

We pull off to the side of the road. I look away from the hotel and out my window. The expanse of calm, turquoise water merges with the sky in an exact horizontal line. There are no waves. There are no dolphins. There are no seabirds.

I step out of the bus and walk over to the sea wall. It is a little higher than my waist. I lean over the top and look down. There is no sand, just turquoise water. It is as clear as drinking water. There are no clumps of algae, no seaweed, no barnacles in the nooks of the seawall. It is as if everything has been sterilized.

I look back at the hotel. A lot of money has made this a picturesque seaside destination. The bushes are trimmed into perfect geometric shapes; there are no cracks in the paved road. Everyone holds up their phones, their faces masked in the hotel’s shadow. I turn back to the water. I search for a ripple on the surface, anything that shows a scar, an imperfection, a smudge, anything that will tell me this place is alive.

“Ok, everyone!”

The tour guide claps her hands, gives a broad smile. She moved here from the Philippines to work as a promoter of this country. That is what a tour guide does, right? Represents this place in such a way as to get tourists to spend a lot of money, tell people about it, then return sometime in the future to do it again. I wonder if she knew this was going to be her job when she left her family behind. I have to believe there is something here that she has found, something more than money, that keeps her here. Has she found a real, living place here?

“Next stop, the Carpet Factory!”

If so, I don’t think we will be shown that place today.

“Surgeon, how was your tour?”

I look up from the liberty log. The Physician Assistant (PA) leans on the bulkhead in the lobby of Main Medical. Over the last five months of deployment, he has assisted me in taking care of patients and has been a workout companion during group cross-fit classes. He always listens when the sadness gets too great, and I need to tell someone I am missing my husband and two young daughters.

“The trip? Depressing.”

“How so?”

“Everything seems sanitized…”

He wrinkles his forehead.

“Or covered in sand.”

He nods, “Yes, that is everywhere.”

I put the pen down. “Any updates on the patient we transferred off the ship yesterday?”

“The pelvis abscess patient?” the PA asks.

I nod.

He looks behind him then says, “He had surgery, but I think he did ok. They took out his appendix and drained the abscess.”

I exhale. I was afraid of that. I was up all night worrying I did not adequately convey to the transfer service the potential difficulty of operating on this patient. Not being able to directly dictate a patient’s care, or even just talk to the surgeon taking care of the patient is a very frustrating part about being deployed in a part of the world where I know no one and know less about their medical systems. But often, it is not safe to operate on the ship. The safest thing to do for a patient is get them off the ship. And for me to give up control. I hate that. I had hoped the patient would have gotten an interventional radiology drain, that pelvis would have been a disaster to operate in. I have the equipment to drain a pelvis abscess, but he was at risk for getting very sick postoperatively. We have no blood bank, we are not equipped to take care of a sick post-surgical patient for very long, and he is in for a long recovery. Even though I love operating, the right thing to do was get him to a local hospital.

“They started him on a diet today,” the PA continues.

“Wow, that’s quick.” I pride myself in being somewhat aggressive when it comes to feeding a postoperative patient, but if I had been staring at a pelvis full of pus, I probably would have held off feeding him for at least a day or two. His intestines won’t work normally for a while.

“SMO (the Senior Medical Officer, pronounced Smoh) wants to see if he can be discharged in time to get back on the ship before we leave port tomorrow.”

I shake my head.

“Well, that might be ok, right?”

“No. He should not come back to this ship. Besides, he won’t be ready to be discharged in a week let alone tomorrow…”

“But his surgery went ok…”

“No,” I say again, “He won’t be ready. His guts are going to freeze up and not work. That’s why all you try to do with a pelvis abscess is drain the abscess, not operate on him. That’s what I tried to convey yesterday over the phone anyway.”

“Well,” the PA says, “We are in port, you couldn’t have operated on him anyway.”

“That’s not the point!”

The PA takes a step back.

I exhale. I can’t explain to him how frustrating it is when no one seems to listen; when no one seems to understand how sick this patient is still going to get. Instead, I say, “I’m sorry. I just really miss my family.”

He nods. “I know.”

“I’ll see you at dinner.” I walk past the PA, step over the hatch to the lobby, and into the cross-department passageway.

The patient was in septic shock. If I am honest with myself, I was afraid to operate on him, I was glad we were in port. If we were out to sea, I would have had no choice, he would have been too sick for a Medevac flight. And his surgery would have been close to impossible to perform without another set of knowledgeable hands, Surgeon hands. And there is no other Surgeon. There is just me. And as the lone general surgeon I have gotten into the habit of thinking of the worst outcomes. If the worst had happened – me not being able to get him off the OR table alive – I would not be able to walk into that operating room again. Then what would happen for the rest of deployment? There is no one else to take my place.

I walk into my office and turn on the light. There is a large box marked Priority Mail sitting on my desk. It’s from my mom.

I open the box, pick up the pink envelope on top and open it. It is a Mother’s Day card. Underneath the card there are four pounds of whole bean coffee. “Thanks, Mom.” I stow the coffee under my patient exam table then look back into the box. I pull out a large pack of Red Vines.

“Ha! Well, at least they aren’t Twizzlers,” I say, remembering the sea story I had heard on my first day out to sea. On the ship’s last deployment, the supply ordering had gotten mixed up and the only things that were sent to the ship were pallets of Twizzlers. The joke was that there were surely still boxes of Twizzlers oozing red crust into the bowels of a ship storeroom somewhere. Ah, so that’s where the cockroaches are coming from, I had remarked, putting in my two cents like I always do. But I worried I had upset the storyteller. Instead, my comment was incorporated into future retellings, and will probably continue to be a part of this ship’s lore for longer than I will.

There is one last thing in the box, wrapped in floral paper. I pick it up and tear open the wrapping. It is a folded pink T-shirt. I hold it up and the shirt unfurls under the fluorescent lighting, its silver looped script sparkles: I am a mother and therefore blessed.

This is not what I need to hear today. I am about as far away from being a mother as I have ever been, even before I had children. I can’t ask my daughters about their day, I can’t tell them about mine, I can’t give them a hug. I have left their day-to-day care to a nanny – a very capable, loving nanny – but what mother leaves their five- and two-year-old children? For a career? For a duty? For medicine? I realize I am not the only mother who has deployed. I realize mothers will continue working, striving, and loving their children all at the same time. But it is hard to do everything all at once. Especially when I physically cannot right now. Being reminded of that impossibility is not what is going to help me feel better about being here. I refold the shirt with the words on the inside and toss it into the trashcan.

Just before Memorial Day, the ship re-enters the Gulf of Aden.

“Is it hot in here or what?” I ask the Radiation Health Officer (RHO), a member of the medical department in charge of monitoring shipboard dosimeters. Condensation drips down the bulkheads. Sweat drips down the side of my face. So much for taking a shower this morning.

RHO opens his mouth, raises a finger, but I cut him off. “Never mind. I’m going to breakfast; would you like to join me?”

“Sorry, I have a rad health physical with SMO in a few minutes.”

“Wow. Both of you here? This early in the morning? Is the world ending?”

“Don’t remind me! Plus, I think he said he was going flying later or something.”

“Oh, great. I really am always the last person to know.”

“Ha! I know!” RHO says, “And you are the one who has to cover for him…”

“Don’t remind me,” I echo and walk down the passageway.

I push open the Wardroom door. There are only two occupied tables. I exhale; some days it is preferrable to eat breakfast alone. I decide on a hard-boiled egg and a bowl of oatmeal and walk over to an empty table in the corner. I put my tray down, walk over to get some water, then head back to my spot. An officer who sometimes goes to the same weekly exercise class as I do sits at my previously empty table.

“I hope you don’t mind, Surgeon,” he says as I sit down, “But I hate eating alone.”

I nod because it’s the nice thing to do, roll the hard-boiled egg on the tray until it cracks, then start to peel it. I exhale; I need to make conversation. “How’s your day going?”

“Oh,” he replies, “I just came off duty. Going to get some sleep, then back on duty tonight.”

“Busy schedule on the Bridge?”

He nods, then puts his fork down. “Surgeon, are you ever not on duty? I mean, who covers for you if you get sick?”

“No one.”

“What’s your secret?”

“About working all the time?”

“No, about not getting sick.”

“Oh.” I look down at my oatmeal. It looks like a lumpier version of grade-school paste. “I don’t know.” I push the oatmeal away. “I have two young daughters at home, so my immune system is primed, I guess.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” He takes another huge bite of scrambled egg, swallows, then stands up. “Well, if I have your permission, Ma’am…”

“Yes, please.”

He picks up his tray. “I’m off to get some rest, we’ll be busy going through The BAM tonight.”

“The what?”

“The BAM…something,” he twirls his hand in the air, “Mandeb,” he shrugs, “You know, The Gate of Tears.”

“Oh,” I nod, but I have no idea what he means.

I wait until he leaves the wardroom then I pick up my tray, guiltily turn in my uneaten bowl of oatmeal at the dirty dishes window, and rush back to my office. I open the search engine on my computer, but per normal, the connection is painfully slow. I see sick call, clinic patients, cover for SMO while he goes flying, grab a quick lunch, see a walk-in abscess patient, and look at an X-ray for the PA before I can google, The BAM.

To re-enter the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, the ship has to traverse the Bab el-Mandeb, shortened to the BAM, translated as, the Gate of Tears. It is the narrowest part around the Arabian Peninsula, a choke point for container ships because of the minimal room they have to navigate safely around the point. Are aircraft carriers bigger than container ships? I don’t know. When we went through the first time, I did not know to ask that question. I was blissfully unaware; I did not question my own safety. Something has happened to me between the beginning of deployment and now.

I look up at the television screen on the bulkhead in my office. It is on the black and white flight deck camera channel. The sky is a deep grey, the water a dark black. I can’t clearly see the edge of the deck. We are going through this narrow passage at night. I know that I personally try not to do anything at night – I try not to operate at night, I try not to medevac patients at night – everything is riskier at night, right? Or does this mean that it is riskier to traverse this place during the day? I don’t know.

My heart races. I can’t make it slow down.

I want to go home. And I have no control over that desire. I have to trust that our Captain, just like a Surgeon, has tirelessly prepared for all possible contingencies. But I also know that not every part of a surgery can be planned. An anatomic variant, a hesitation from a team member, or just plain old bad luck, can end an operation prematurely. We got around this point the first time without a scratch – I didn’t even know I should have been worried.

I turn off the TV and rush out of my office.

The passageway is deserted. The ladderwell is deserted. The overhead lights in the hangar bay are off; everything has more shadows tonight. No one is working out in the hangar bay gym. All the Weapons Department office doors are closed. I make it all the way to my stateroom without seeing anyone. I am all alone.

I enter my stateroom. It is dark except for a small light on over the sink. My roommate’s bunk is empty. I take off my boots and lay down on top of my blanket. I don’t take my uniform off. I don’t take my hair out of its bun. Most nights I know I will be woken up in the middle of the night for a medical emergency, but I always change out of my uniform and get into pajamas to at least attempt to have a good night’s sleep. I don’t want to risk it tonight. I don’t want to use up all my luck. Perhaps, if I don’t change out of my uniform, the one thing I have control over tonight, I won’t be needed, I won’t have to get out of bed, and then perhaps we will have enough luck left to eventually get all the way back home.

“Surgeon?”

One of my Corpsmen stands in my office doorway. “Is it time, HM3?” His rank is Hospital Corpsman, third class.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the Corpsman says, “My flight leaves in an hour.”

I look back at the TV on the bulkhead. The morning after the BAM crossing, I rushed down to my office and turned it on. The waters of the Red Sea looked the same color grey, there was no indication on the screen that we had done anything significant while the TV was off. And this morning, the waters of the Mediterranean also look the same color grey. Perhaps that is the point.

I stand up and walk to the door. “Goodbye, HM3. Good luck at your next duty station.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

The Corpsman turns to leave, then stops. “Ma’am?”

“Yes, HM3?”

“When I first heard that you were leaving the Navy, I thought, there goes all the common sense.”

My breath catches in my throat. I don’t know what to say. Am I giving up? That is my greatest fear. And will there be anyone left who will continue?

“Ma’am?”

“Yes, HM3?”

“Can I get a hug?”

My chest aches. I nod and walk over to my Corpsman — my Corpsman who had worked tirelessly on the ward with me, who had carried his Medical Response Team bag to countless medical emergencies, who had cared for mass casualty patients and sailors in his repair locker, a remote location on the ship where sailors stop flooding, put out fires, and repair damage — and I pull him into a hug.

“Goodbye, HM3. Do good things.” And I let him go.

“Yes, Ma’am. Goodbye.”

I sit at my desk and close my eyes.

I shake hands with patients daily. I place a hand on a shoulder when I listen to a heartbeat inside a patient’s chest. My fingers touch tender abdomens. But in actuality, I have very little human contact.

I leave the department, change into gym clothes, and walk aft through the hangar deck. I catch a sliver of the turquoise sky just above the dark green of the sea. I walk up to the O-3 level, enter the cardio gym, and go for a long run on a treadmill. For the next hour, I forget about the pelvis abscess patient who flew back to the states and had to have another emergency surgery. I forget that my daughters are growing up without me. I ignore the constant questioning thought – What good am I really doing here? – and I just run.

At the end, I stop the treadmill, and clean the console. I exit the gym via the long port-side passageway. My chest burns: my legs are spent. I pass a berthing area, a lounge area, go up two steps, pass through a hatch, then walk by a humid open machinery room. I go through another hatch, go down two steps, and pass single-occupancy staterooms and the radio office. I stop in front of one of the midships knee knockers.

It is like all the other knee knockers — an oval opening for a hatch without the hatch, like the one that caused a large scalp laceration in one of my patients. The bottom metal rim of this knee knocker is immaculately shined. There is not one speck of dirt on it, no smudges, no fingerprints, no faint boot marks. I have never seen one so clean before. It is as reflective as a mirror.

I turn and look down the passageway behind me. I turn and look up the passageway in front of me. I am alone. I lean forward over the metal lip, hoping to see my face upside-down, like in a circus mirror, but all I see is a thin dark shadow.

I stand up, lift my foot over the shined metallic surface, and for a moment, my shoe meets only empty space. Where is the deck on the other side? I look down at the bottom of the oval. Its reflective surface is gone, replaced by one large shadow. I feel as if I am falling into that blurred image; I feel erased.

I am going to die.

I am going to die here, on this boat, and my family won’t ever know what happened.

I am going to die.

And I am all alone.

A rushing sound fills my ears. The bulkheads seem to vibrate.

Then, my daughter’s voice calls to me from across the void.

You aren’t going to die, Mama, just the part of you that you don’t need anymore. Everything is going to be ok.

I blink.

The rushing and vibrations stop.

I look back up and down the passageway. I am still alone. I am still going to die. Just maybe not today.

I lean forward, put my running shoe down on the solid deck, and continue walking down the passageway.

“Good run?” the RHO asks.

I nod. I open my mouth to ask if he ever felt like he was going to die. Now. Today. Or if he has ever heard his daughter’s voice in his head as clear as I hear his voice right now, calling him back from an abyss. But something tells me to shut my mouth. I can’t tell anyone about that shadow in the knee knocker, that void, that nothingness. But that also means that I can’t share my relief when I heard my oldest daughter, Evelyn’s voice.

Not that it matters. No one will believe me anyway.

Perhaps, I am just hungry. “Dinner?”

“Yes! I’m…”

“Medical Emergency! Medical Emergency! Medical Emergency in…”

The RHO looks at me. There is fear behind his eyes. “That is deep trunk extraction territory.”

In certain areas of the ship, particularly some Engineering spaces or Reactor spaces or Weapons spaces or Supply department storerooms, the only way to get in or out is up a long, narrow, vertical ladder. If a medical emergency occurs in any of these spaces, the Medical Response Team cannot carry the patient out on a stretcher. The only way to get out a non-ambulatory or unresponsive patient is by hooking them into a stretcher and hauling them up as quickly as possible by a big cable and pulley system.

“Surgeon!”

I unclip my radio. “This is Surgeon. Go ahead.”

“Surgeon. This is SMO. A sailor was found down, not sure if he’s breathing, not sure if he fell, either way, non-ambulatory. Senior Chief and HM1 are heading down there now.”

“A deep trunk extraction?”

“Yes. I already called CHENG.” CHENG is short for Chief Engineer. A team from the Engineering department manages the cable and pulley system.

I grab my go-bag from the bottom drawer of my desk. I push the talk button. “SMO. This is Surgeon. Where is the extraction point?”

“The aft mess decks. I’m on my way there, now.” My radio clicks off.

I look up at RHO. Do I ask him about that voice anyway?

I shake my head and run out of the department.

I jog down to the aft mess decks. If the patient fell, a closed head injury or a high cervical spine injury could cause airway compromise. But why did he fall? Sailors go up and down these ladder wells all the time, many times a day. Dehydration? Exhaustion? Did he have a heart attack? A stroke? Did he take too much Benadryl? Did he take too much of something else? Did he want to fall or was he just ok with not being able to re-grab a rung?

To erase one’s life, to take it away, means we all have failed that one person, our shipmate. It means there is no purpose in the mission anymore. And I am not talking about the dropping-bombs-on-bad-guys mission. I’m talking about the working together for something bigger mission. Freedom. Hope. Justice. Big lofty, naive ideals. Ideals I have had to hold close in the middle of the night. Tightly. If I did not naively believe, well, how would I have been able to treat patients with my limited supplies and personnel? How would I have been able to look a transfer patient in the eye and tell him he will be ok, he will be given better care at the host nation medical facility than with me on the ship, even though I fear I am lying? How would I have been able to hope that my daughters will someday understand why I had to leave?

And when those ideals fail us, it doesn’t matter how tightly you hold on. Like knowing the potential consequences of traversing the BAM in daylight. Like deciding, despite all the work it took to get to where I am, The Ship’s Surgeon, I cannot do it anymore.

The bulkhead closes in, the fluorescent lights buzz down, my vision flickers. I have to stop thinking about my decisions. I need to focus on helping this sailor. This is why I am here. And there is no one else.

Up ahead, a group of dark blue shapes bends and twists. I blink and my vision clears. There are so many people working to save this one sailor. Working, not for the mission of the ship, but for our shipmate.

I will my tired legs onward.

A group of sailors bends over a large pulley next to a hole in the deck, an open escape hatch. My Surgical Tech is crouched next to the opening, his Medical Response Team bag next to him. The Executive Officer (XO, the second in command of the ship), the Command Master Chief (CMC, the highest-ranking enlisted member on the ship), and the Senior Medical Officer stand off to the side. I nod to SMO. His role is clear – he will oversee, he will support the command, as needed. My role is less clear. I am supposed to do something, swiftly and expertly, if the patient needs it. No one cares if I will be called on to do something I have never done before. I am just supposed to be able to do it. Expertly.

My legs wobble. Even before surgeries I have done so often that I can do them in my sleep, there is always a brief moment before I operate when I doubt my abilities. That moment has gotten longer the longer I have been on this ship. It is hard to know if you are about to do the right thing when you are all alone and have no one to tell you that what you are doing is right.

“Ready?” one of the Engineering sailors yells down into the open hatch.

I cannot hear the response. I open my go-bag and take out two fourteen-gauge needles, the plastic wrapping slippery in my fingers. It is mechanical, my hands reaching for these life-saving devices. I do not think about it. If the sailor is unconscious from a fall, and cannot breathe from collapsed lungs, these needles will save his life. All I have to do is put them in the correct place.

Sound, buzzing, rushing returns to my ears. The clank of the cable against the metal hatch opening, the calls and grunts of the sailors around me.

It will be soon.

The machine clanks, pauses, then clanks again. My Surgical Tech stands up. The orange end of a stretcher peeks up over the hatch in the deck. He grabs the handle on the end as the stretcher emerges.

I cannot tell if the sailor is breathing. I want to rush at the stretcher, assess for signs of life, to work quickly. But I stay where I am. I wait until the stretcher is righted. I wait until it and my Corpsman are away from the gaping hole.

“Surgeon!”

I rush over to the patient. I see fog in the oxygen mask.

I bend down, place my fingers into the hole in front of his cervical collar. I feel a bounding pulse. “Stretcher bearers!” I yell.

I let our shipmates carry the stretcher down the passageway.

I lift my radio and call Main Medical. “We are on our way.”

I turn back to SMO. His face is tense. I nod and he returns it. Then I rush down the passageway.

“Surgeon, is the patient going to be ok?”

I nod, then hesitate. “I hope so, Nurse.”

I don’t know what it is like to be on the other end of a deep trunk extraction team. I can imagine it is far lonelier than stepping over a knee knocker and thinking there is nothing but blackness, an absence of hope. I can fix a collapsed lung, I can stabilize a broken neck, but I did not have to do any of those things for this patient. All I had to do was listen.

“Nurse, have a good night. Let me know if you need anything.”

“Yes, Surgeon.”

My patient is asleep in his bed on the ward. I nod to the shipmate already at the bedside, I hope my gratitude washes over him, and I walk on.

I walk past the closed OR doors. I don’t feel much like celebrating or raising a fist in the air. We work and we work, and we try to do the right thing. But is what we are doing, right?

I walk into my office and sit down.

How are we all going to be ok so we can continue to do this job until the end? I think that is the question Nurse is asking.

I look over at a drawing on the bulkhead next to my desk. My youngest daughter, Waverly, sent it to me. It has been next to me the whole deployment, retaped several times, the edges curling. It is labeled, My Family. I look at the row of faces with our arms and legs sprouting directly from our heads. That always makes me smile. There is a D beneath the biggest one, and an E and a W below the two smaller ones in the middle. And at the end of the row, beneath the medium-sized smiley face, there is an M. I lean forward. But there is something else. I have never noticed it before. Perhaps the pink construction paper needed to be faded enough for me to see it. Directly in front of the letter M there is a tiny, pink-colored heart scratched into the paper.

Perhaps that is the answer to Nurse’s question. With enough time, as long as it needs to take, we will eventually get to the answers. And hopefully, we will be ok.

29 April 1971

From: Naval Science Department

To: Midshipmen Second Class, Navigation and Piloting 301 (NAV 301)

Subject: Final Navigation Project-Due: 1600 hours, 13 May, Luce Hall, Room 104

Mastering navigation is critical for every Naval Officer. This project covers topics from the last eight months and represents 40% of your grade. Instructions, answer sheets, and charts are provided. The exercise simulates USS Robinson’s (DDG-12) transit from San Diego to Pearl Harbor as part of a carrier task force. You will serve as Robinson’s navigator.

****

“Company, ten-hut. Dress right. Attention to morning announcements.”

Our midshipman company commander’s voice was stern at our 0645 morning meal formation. “From the Battalion Officer: This is the final warning for whoever is bombarding the eighth wing tennis courts with debris. If littering continues, an all-night watch will be manned by eighth wing residents.”

Chortles and snickers filled the company ranks.

“It’s not my fault; business is business,” whispered my roommate, Billy Gleason, beside me in formation.

“Maybe it is your fault,” I said. “Did you look? Rubbers are everywhere.”

The company commander continued. “Alumni returning from their first duty stations will attend a reception in Memorial Hall at 1700 today. First Lieutenant James Creeson, USMC, class of 69 from our company is scheduled to attend if anyone wants to say hello.”

“We should go see him, hear his Vietnam stories,” I whispered.

After classes we changed from working uniforms to whites and rushed to the reception, anxious to see what had become of Jimmy Creeson. He was alone on the balcony, smoking Camels, flicking ashes into a plastic cup. He was five-six, muscular, a former collegiate wrestler. His skin had a yellow tinge, his hands quivered, the flame dancing when he lit his cigarette. The Marine Corps logo was engraved on his class ring stone. As our first midshipman squad leader when we were plebes, he’d been disciplined but upbeat, always smiling. We respected his demanding nature because the tasks he gave us seemed to have a purpose. We saluted him, excited to see him, but he didn’t return it, nor did he smile. He discreetly took a flask from inside his left sock and poured vodka into his Kool-Aid. He offered us some and Billy, at the risk of expulsion, accepted. We had listened intensely to periodic announcements of the Academy’s Vietnam casualties, including Creeson’s classmates, relieved that his name was not among them. He looked exhausted, his eyelids drooped, but he had survived. His uniform was immaculate, with three rows of new ribbons, including the Silver Star.

“How’s football?” he asked Billy.

“I didn’t make the team,” Billy said, slouching. “Lost my touch.”

“Football isn’t everything. It just seems like everything. It’s a diversion from all the BS,” Creeson said, his voice without inflection.

“How’s the Marine Corps? What’s Vietnam like?” I asked.

Creeson looked puzzled, perhaps offended, glancing about without eye contact. He took a long drag and gulped his drink. “I shouldn’t have come here. You guys, be careful. Really,” he said. He walked away, not checking out with the officer managing the reception. With perfect posture and bold cadence, he walked, heels clicking, down the Bancroft Hall stairway into Tecumseh Court.

I felt terrible about asking my questions. We talked with feigned interest to a few of the naval officers at the reception who had completed sea tours. Some had participated in naval gunfire support off Vietnam’s coast; others had cruised the Mediterranean, gladly assigned to ships far from war. None of them, except James Creeson, seemed damaged.

“Creeson looked terrible. He didn’t look like the same person. My uncle’s skin is like that when he needs dialysis,” said Billy.

“The Marine Corps is out of the question for me. I’m going to drive ships,” I declared. Billy, perhaps a little tipsy, was falling behind as we walked, maybe frightened by what he’d seen. “What about you, Billy? Ships? Planes? Submarines?”

“I haven’t thought much about it. We don’t have to decide until January. I guess the National Football League is off the table.”

We were not exactly model midshipmen but did the best our consciences allowed. Billy, from New Mexico, and I, from Nevada, roomed together during junior year. We were brothers in western solidarity, sons of landlocked mountain desert states that were isolated from the Navy. We stayed mostly under the radar, not shining, not failing, getting by. Billy’s business acumen made him famous in an underground way. By junior year, our classmates seemed to forget that he was a football recruit.

Billy’s right glutes, hamstrings, and calves were marvels. His right leg juxtaposed with his left appeared to be twice as big. He held his state’s high school records for the longest field goal and consecutive PATs, leading to his induction into New Mexico’s High School Football Hall of Fame. He was 5’10” and weighed 165—perfect for a kicker. His 800 math SAT and 20-20 vision, coupled with kicking skills, made him a perfect Navy recruit. He told me he’d dreamed of being interviewed on CBS following his winning kick in the Army-Navy game.

After a successful year on the freshman football team, Billy was cut from the varsity because he developed a chronic hook. His range exceeded fifty yards, but he couldn’t shake the portside hex. The team hired an ex-NFL kicker to assist—no luck. His father engaged a sports psychologist who calmed Billy’s sweating nightmares but didn’t correct kicking problems. The Academy medical staff warned his father that too much psychological treatment could hinder Billy’s ability to obtain a security clearance when the time came. Treatment ceased.

Ashore in Italy during a summer training cruise, a fortune teller told him he would live until he was ninety, but kicking was, “I am sorry, che sfortuna.” He tried confession in Saint Peters, seeking higher authority than the Academy Chapel confessional adjacent to the crypt of John Paul Jones. Religious entreaties failed. For two years, on his way to class, Billy threw pennies at Tecumseh’s statue overlooking the Yard. Tecumseh, a Shawnee warrior, brought luck to penny throwers.

“That won’t work,” Bobby Williams scoffed, throwing a penny on his way to an exam. “It only works for tests—not kicking.”

Billy suffered anxiety and boredom with the curriculum that he might have liked if playing football were included in his life. He suffered as an anonymous spectator among the rest of us. I marched next to him many times on our way through Annapolis to Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium for home games. Standing on the field within his kicking range of the south goalposts, waiting for the Brigade to complete the “march on,” he softly read aloud names of famous battles decorating stadium bulwarks—Leyte Gulf, Midway, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor.

“This is chip shot range for you,” I commented, attempting to change his mood.

“No kidding,” he whimpered.

In the first game of junior year with ten seconds to play, Navy’s kicker missed a thirty-five-yard field goal. We lost by one. A ray of hope emerged when Billy was invited to varsity practice on Monday—he was uninvited on Tuesday.

Billy searched for distractions. He wasn’t interested in Weapons Systems or Seamanship classes, earning lackluster C’s. He effortlessly earned A’s in calculus, physics, and physical education. He read passages aloud to me from his father’s letters, mocking his father’s chagrin. When the grades didn’t improve, sterner letters arrived.

“Can’t you try harder? You’re embarrassing us. How hard can ‘Introduction to Shipboard Weapons’ be? What’s going to happen when the weapons are real?”

Instead of studying more, he conjured a plan to become the entrepreneur of Bancroft Hall. He was our black-market Yossarian, a money-making machine, using his version of Wall Street analytical shrewdness.

“I can see the market,” he exclaimed in October before midterms. “Everybody wants comfort food that reminds them of home.”

“What?” I asked, looking up from homework.

“I can relieve homesickness. I’m going to sell grilled cheese sandwiches at night during finals week. We’re going to make a fortune. The sandwiches probably don’t even have to be good.”

He piloted his business plan during midterms. The Brigade had extended study time beyond normal taps during test weeks and midshipmen were hungry late at night. Billy borrowed money from our banker classmate, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and he recruited Bobby Williams and me as cooks. We practiced grilling in a Teflon-coated electric frying pan—a violation of every fire code and hygiene regulation in our universe. Billy hid the pan in his basement storage locker and retrieved it at night when we should have been studying. Instead, our spartan team wrapped steaming sandwiches in foil, stuffed them in paper bags with chips, and sold them door-to-door for two dollars each, quickly selling all we had.

When first semester finals week came, applying lessons from the pilot, Billy upgraded production capacity with six electric griddles and more workers. The buttery aroma of sandwiches filled the hall. We posted guards to ensure that our kitchens remained hidden. Our company’s seniors liked the grilled cheese so much that they turned a blind eye toward our enterprise and its brazen violations. We sold over 1000 sandwiches for four dollars a bag, five nights in a row. Miraculously we passed our exams, exhausted, cash happy. Billy repaid Stonewall with interest.

****

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, from South Carolina, was the son and grandson of Academy graduates; his father was an oil company president and a member of Augusta National Golf Club. Stonewall received unsolicited monthly deposits, “from Motha,” to his bank account and became a lender to classmates in need. After his successful investment in Billy’s business, the two briefly seemed like close friends. They played golf and Billy helped him with calculus. In April their friendship crumbled.

“You have Masters tickets?” Billy inquired, a month before Spring Break when the golf tournament was scheduled.

“Of course,” Stonewall replied. “Do you want to come? Mason’s coming. You should come too.”

“I can buy the tickets from you,” said Billy.

“Are you kidding? You’re a guest,” explained Stonewall.

Mason, from Raleigh, was Stonewall’s roommate and teammate on Navy’s golf team. Mason would do almost anything to escape Annapolis and return to Raleigh for weekends. He bragged obnoxiously about his harem there.

Two days before Spring Break, Stonewall cancelled Billy’s invitation explaining that his family “wasn’t going to the tournament because MeeMa was ill.” Billy had watched the Masters with his father on TV for years. He was heartbroken not to see it in person but gracious with the bad news. “Hope your grandmother gets well soon,” he said. We heard that Mason was still going on the trip, so Billy suspected that his own Yankee roots and lack of Navy “blue blood” had caused the family to veto the visit.

Instead of the Masters for Spring Break, Bobby Williams, Billy, and I took the train to New York, stayed in a Times Square hotel, drank beer, and watched the New York Knicks using free USO tickets. On Saturday in between tourist excursions, we watched the Masters on TV.

“Hey, that’s Mason,” yelled Bobby. “He’s wearing a Navy golf hat.”

Billy angrily glared at the screen, his blackball suspicions confirmed.

When we returned from break, Mason told us all about the Masters. Stonewall’s grandmother had miraculously, “praise the lord,” recovered. Mason bragged about the “ladies of Augusta” with whom he’d “had relaaations.” We didn’t believe him until we spotted the antibiotic on his desk a week later.

Billy became analytical about Mason’s illness and devised a new enterprise to exploit the ways of midshipmen tomcats. He ordered a case of condoms that arrived in an enormous box with no return address. “If I’m right, we have a bull market—more profitable than sandwiches,” he predicted. Advertising required delicacy—but he was convinced that confidential sales would be appealing. Mason and Stonewall were his first customers.

“Twenty dollars a box? Steep,” complained Mason.

“Not for quality,” explained Billy. “You don’t have to leave Bancroft Hall. I know you don’t want to be caught with your pants down again,” warned Billy, winking.

They bought two packages each and I thought Billy was going to be sick with excitement when he considered the profit potential.

Gradually, however, Billy realized what liars comprised the bragging Brigade. He made a few sales to guys like Mason, but no significant market emerged. Even when Billy lowered the price multiple times, nobody wanted rubbers. Occasionally someone would “buy one for my wallet, just in case, you know, better safe than sorry.” Billy sulked. “I should have run a pilot,” he lamented.

Reengineering Billy’s condom business was inspired by my chemistry professor, a Navy Commander whose whites were decorated with Vietnam War medals and a command-at-sea button. He seemed bored, unengaged with class, dreaming of the bridge of his destroyer. During class, he filled a latex glove with water and casually lobbed it to the lab’s deck where it exploded.

“The purpose of the Navy, gentlemen, is to deliver ordnance,” he proclaimed, suddenly inspired to provide us with important truths beyond the chemistry curriculum.

His explanation of the Navy baffled me. No one challenged his manifesto or even commented on the mess he created. My trouser legs were soaked, making me wonder how much water would fit in one of those high-quality condoms. Around three gallons, we discovered.

“The problem is lifting that little boy,” proclaimed Billy. He lowered his prices and began an aggressive advertising campaign, showing others a condom’s superb ordnance potential. They were nothing like conventional water balloons. Rubber wars erupted. Bombs were launched and booby traps set throughout Bancroft Hall. Vicious warriors, creative future ordnance deliverers, added Kool-Aid to their payloads—red water bombs were death sentences for Navy whites. For several weeks floods and condom remnants were everywhere.

Billy became a cautious arms supplier, warning overly aggressive warriors of risks. “Dropping three gallons from six flights up could injure somebody,” Billy counseled.

“We’re not going to hit anybody, just get them wet. This is America; shut the fuck up!”

Water wars waged by future Navy and Marine Corps officers escalated. Just opening a door could be disastrous and bomb squad pre-clearance became a requisite. Booby traps were planted in the most unexpected places. Halls were awash in a rainbow of colors, slippery, treacherous.

After a month, the antics died, skirmishes completed, scores settled; mutually assured destruction necessitated a cease-fire after so many uniforms had to be replaced. Business subsided and remaining condoms were sharply discounted, deployed mostly to nightly test bombings from rooms above the tennis courts at the base of Bancroft Hall. Spring-fevered weaponeers sick of studying jettisoned enormous bombs that barely fit through the windows. Noisy splashing geysers were so commonplace that we no longer watched them. Custodians grew tired of policing the mess and complained to the Battalion Officer.

****

Billy and Stonewall had jointly organized and financed a weekend party for eight of us earlier in the year. The party was scheduled for May, a month before our Ring Dance and the semester’s end. They had each paid half the deposit for a big house on Chesapeake Bay, ten miles from Annapolis. Because of continued tensions between them as the date approached, Billy requested a refund from the owner, a 1948 Academy graduate, who resolutely refused and reminded him that final payment was due. Seven of us wrote rental checks to Billy who consolidated payment. We cautiously proceeded with party plans, despite the lingering animus.

Along with our dates, or drags, in Academy vernacular, we arrived at the majestic, weathered house, greeted by warm southern breezes, azaleas exploding with color, Marvin Gaye blasting over speakers, and picturesque views of the shipping lane to Baltimore. The place was calming, filled with the owner’s Academy mementos including a signed poster of Roger Staubach. The intended calming effect of the party settled over us, temporarily easing the pressures of upcoming finals and the problematic Navigation Project. Our location, outside the seven-mile limit, a radius from the Academy’s chapel dome, allowed us to drink beer and other “laaabations,” Stonewall’s phrase, without violating Academy rules invoking severe penalties.

Billy prepared detailed plans for the weekend in the same manner he ran his businesses-an inclement weather plan, a transportation plan, menus, assignments for cooking, clean-up, sports equipment, security, safety. We mostly ignored his fastidiousness but were immediately thrilled to see the results of his food planning: blue crabs in bushel baskets and a keg of Michelob greeted us on the screened porch.

“How do you do this again?” asked Alison, Mason’s girlfriend.

With his mouth full of crab, Mason explained and demonstrated crab dissection. Alison, a student at Georgia Tech, was the reigning Peach Bowl Princess.

“See, there’s nothing to it. The biggest legs, that’s where it’s best.”

“Mason, I’ve ruined my nails. Can you hit this crab with the little mallet for me? The last one splattered crab guts. Smell your hands, Mason. How are you gonna get that off? If you think you’re gonna touch me with those hands, you’re dreamin, Darlin.”

We fifteen, minus Alison, pounded away at crabs, swilled beer, and occasionally took breaks to eat salad and cornbread and dance to the music. A salty breeze rustled our newspaper tablecloths as the sun disappeared. With his planning, Billy sought harmony, mostly for the sake of recovering his damage deposit. Nevertheless, his planning had gaps. In this case, his oversight was sleeping arrangements.

We had four bedrooms, eight couples, and no plan. Some would be stuck sleeping on couches or on the floor. The relationships, including mine, having just met my girlfriend in March, were in various stages. Most seemed relieved with sleeping arrangements that posed no pressures.

Mason, on the other hand, desperately wanted a bedroom. In the hastily executed straw drawing for bedrooms, Alison and Mason were stuck on the living room floor. Mason continued his entreaties.

“Please, Bobby, you don’t want a bedroom. You hardly know that girl and she’s only seventeen.”

“Fuck you, Mason,” Bobby’s date snarled, taking Bobby’s hand, leading him through the bedroom door, sticking out her tongue at Mason.

Mason waved his checkbook, offering to buy a bedroom. He whined and threatened to leave, but classmates who’d drawn bedrooms ignored him.

Alison had been steadily sipping Manhattans after declaring that she couldn’t deal with crabs. Her speech was slurred as she coddled Mason’s arm and kissed his neck. With no bedroom, she made a cocoon-like bed on the floor with two air mattresses, quilts, and blankets she’d found in a closet. She changed into her Georgia Tech T-shirt and silk gold shorts with a yellow-jacket insignia.

“Goodnight classmates and thanks so much for giving us a bedroom after I found this place and made the arrangements,” Mason spouted, emerging from the bathroom with toothpaste on his lips.

“Mason, you didn’t find this place, Billy did. And your contribution to the rent is pitiful. We should make you sleep on the beach,” I said.

“There’s room on that boat by the dock. You could move this little bed under the stars and practice celestial navigation,” Stonewall suggested.

Mason and Miss Peach Bowl looked comfortable, framed by the pinewood floor, perched between the wall with Staubach’s poster and a table filled with the owner’s collectibles. Twelve of us, now in sweatshirts, paraded past them. We took our drinks to the beach, revived the fire with driftwood, and breathed in cooling breezes. It was not yet midnight—why sleep with so much beer left? The lights shining from Bobby’s room ruined the starlight. We saw him through the window playing Yahtzee with his girlfriend. We banged on the panes, beckoning them to douse the lights and join us. The fire, the Old Bay aroma, beer, and female company created a lazy coziness.

“How far did you guys get on the Navigation Project?” Bobby asked.

“I’m past the fog in San Diego Harbor,” Stonewall said.

“Relax, enjoy this last weekend,” implored Billy. “We have until Thursday. It won’t be that hard once the enemy submarine gets out of sonar range and the ship doesn’t have to zig-zag. I think it’s a straight track from there to Pearl Harbor. If there’s some trick, we’ll find it.”

Under the stars the only sounds were the fire and the squeak of rubber fenders on the motorboat rubbing against the pier. No one seemed sleepy. Suddenly, the embarrassing sound of Miss Peach Bowl’s groaning, muffled screaming, and pounding fists against the pinewood emerged from the house, providing evidence that Mason was indeed the biggest stud since War Admiral. The ending to our jealous, disdainful listening came with the crash of glass shattering–a lamp or vase had been knocked to the floor. We assumed the amorous noises would cease, but they continued. I knew Billy was cringing at the thought of paying damages, but he remained calm, sipping beer, adding firewood. “Mason is such an idiot,” he complained.

On Monday Billy’s bank called informing him that Mason’s rent check had insufficient funds. The landlord also called wanting to know “What the hell happened to my wife’s crystal vase? I am taking the replacement cost out of the deposit.”

Mason immediately promised to pay his rent money the following week but grew hysterical when he heard about the additional cost of the broken vase.

“If you assholes hadn’t made me sleep on the floor it wouldn’t have happened. How did we know that vase was on the table? I can’t pay for it for a while.”

“What about you, Stonewall? You want to help your roomie out here?” Billy asked. “Should we convene a meeting to see what our classmates think about this?”

“It’s not necessary. When the owner tells you how much, let me know,” Stonewall said.

****

We were deluged with end-of-semester work. The Navigation Project took hours, but Billy was uncharacteristically inspired to finish. Thirteen charts and ten pages of problems covered the spectrum of navigation and piloting we’d studied—deriving fixes, ship positions, using Loran, radar, magnetic and gyro compass readings, celestial navigation with stars, sun, and moon. My charts seemed messy, bleared, smeared with erasures, and sweat. In all, I thought the Naval Science faculty had created interesting problems. I finished on Wednesday evening and packaged my project as prescribed. Smiling, Billy returned from Luce Hall, waving his receipt after submitting his project early.

“You’re finished, right? We can talk about it without worrying about an honor violation?” Billy asked.

“My charts are ready. I’m not opening them again,” I declared.

“Did you find the math error in the Antares star line calculation? If you correct the math, the stars cross in a point, a perfect fix,” he explained.

Billy’s math error discovery was ingenious. I’d never considered the possibility that math errors would be purposefully inserted in the problem. He stood beside our window, rubbing the strings of a football.

“Having the task force arrive on a Sunday morning in December was a clever touch. You noticed that didn’t you?” I asked. Distracted, he didn’t hear me.

“Look at those idiots.” He was peering down at Stonewall and Mason’s room, kitty-corner to ours on the deck below. Bobby’s room was next to theirs. Football fields and the Chesapeake Bay formed a scenic panorama to the south. Rooms were not air conditioned so in spring everyone kept the windows open. A cacophony of music blared from the open windows.

“What idiots?” I asked, examining the court lit with lights from dozens of rooms where midshipmen were studying.

“Mason and Stonewall. Look at them down there. You know damn well they’re working on the project together. We should turn them in.”

We turned off our lights and clandestinely watched them, reviving our anger at Mason, confirming our distrust of Stonewall who was peering out the window, yawning, checking his Rolex Submariner. Mason was marking fixes and drawing tracks on the large-scale chart of Pearl Harbor where the transit ended a short distance from USS Arizona’s memorial.

“It wouldn’t be that hard to hit them from here, do you think?” Billy asked.

“With what? Noooo,” I said. “No.”

“Let me ask you something. If you’d broken the vase instead of Mason, do you think Stonewall would have offered to pay for it?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“We’re just not in the same Navy as they are. Don’t you think an attack is justified? My balloons?”

“It wouldn’t be that hard, but it’s a bad idea.”

“One try. If we miss, they’ll just think it was another tennis court water bomb. We’ll be Yamamoto—surprise attack.”

“I have some line and canvas we can use—we can’t just throw it. Aim and stealth are the problems.”

Billy smiled. “Where’s the hose? I’ve got red Kool-Aid that will be perfect.”

“Don’t fill it too much,” I warned. “The plebes always add too much water and end up exploding it on themselves.”

With the big red balloon, like a rising sun in the middle of our deck, we plotted our attack. We meticulously practiced with a shoe tied to the end of the line hung from a window in a room across the hall from us, out of sight from our target. As we prepared in the twilight some of the plebes noticed us slide the rope out the window. We decided to risk one more test and swing the shoe toward the target to validate trajectory and line length. I could see a sweaty sheen on Billy’s face.  Mason continued charting, head down, and Stonewall was adjusting his stereo, raising the volume of “Give Peace a Chance.” Despite their egos, they would surely see us. They glimpsed our way but somehow didn’t notice the line. After several perfect practice swings with the shoe, we marked the line length with chalk and pulled the rope inside. When we raised the giant red condom to our window ledge and fitted the canvas straps around it, we could hear the plebes above the music gasping and applauding. Billy shook his fist at them, demanding silence.

The ball was heavy but manageable. We lowered it slowly to the marked line length and began swaying from side to side across the sill. The red ball moved smoothly, gaining momentum, bulging where the latex was weak, inching toward the target. It grazed the bulkhead below us, and we cringed at the thought of a rupture.

“Okay, here we go,” Billy whispered. “One more big swing.”

I guess we didn’t account for the size of the ball compared to the shoe, or the added length of the cradle, or the line’s stretch from the weight. The enormous red orb swung directly through Bobby’s window and exploded over his Navigation Project, turning his world ubiquitously red. Bobby screamed, overwhelmed by the explosion, a casualty of friendly fire. The plebes were flashing lights, jumping up and down, shocked, awed.

We threw the rope to the middle of the tennis courts below. Billy sat down, pretending to read, listening to Bobby’s profanity echoing across the court; I held a pillow to my face, fighting an explosion of laughter. Of course, we’d missed our target, like Billy’s kicks, to the left.

****

Second Class Ring Dance traditions prescribe that class rings be strung on ribbons and worn as pendants around our dates’ necks until each couple ceremoniously dips them into a binnacle containing waters from the seven seas. We completed the ritual and donned our rings. After three years of anticipation, the ceremony seemed anticlimactic. We’d been counting the days, and now, entitled to wear rings like Jimmy Creeson’s, they embodied alarming burdens we’d face in one year when we were commissioned.

Billy and I returned to our room after the dance just before curfew. Billy was jumpy, energized, twisting his ring, singing songs from the dance. Two Navy ships were anchored in the Bay, ablaze with strings of celebratory lights. The athletic field to the south was abandoned, its goalposts lit by streetlamps and a waxing moon.

“Come on,” Billy insisted, pulling his bag of footballs from the closet.

“What?”

“Come on!”

We trudged down the back stairs in Navy tuxedos with yellow cummerbunds, pleated shirts, gold buttons, and dance-scuffed shoes. The damp grass soaked the knees of my trousers as I held the ball for Billy Gleason on the forty-yard line.

“Look,” he exclaimed. “Antares is right between the goalposts. This is for Jimmy Creeson.”

His kick soared triumphantly through the uprights.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Neruda wrote: You are mine; rest your dreams in my dream.
I wish that I could write that to you. I love you that much.
More. But because I do, I couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly.

We are approaching 80; the end is coming more and more into sight—
we’ve begun to feel it in our bones, our throats, even in our thoughts—
and women like you don’t rest their dreams in men’s dreams,
even in macho men’s, like the great Neruda’s. If they ever did.

You and I have had marriages that ended, spouses we watched die.
We have grandchildren, pensions, headaches, joint pains, and regrets
Books we started and will never finish, sweaters we haven’t worn for years.
Life promised so much and has given so much. If not everything.
Some of what we’ve done endures, some disintegrated to ashes, to dust.
You are my star, incandescent, lighting up the inevitable horizon.

As we complete the journey and feel the gravity of the black hole,
what can I offer you now, ask of you, try to provide?
Come in just a little closer and hold me even more tightly.
Walk alongside me, my love. Let’s lean on each other, lean together.
Wrap yourself around me and rest your warm old head on my old head.
Help me to remember. Help me to forget

COURSE CORRECTION

they told me Jesus would save me
but i have done all of the footwork
down here
on the ground
rolling my sleeves up
seeing what i have
a father who hates me
a mother who ignores me
a heart who turns the tenderness of each moment
into a tornado
i do the work
ask questions
write down thoughts
understand learned behavior
question patterns
slowly
brick by brick
i build the church of my own presence
and the altar of my own body

Somewhere near the Hải Vân Pass, Vietnam, 1969

I found her body tangled among a thicket of vines on the jungle floor. Our patrol stopped for the night, and we were digging into our defensive positions when I tripped over her shoeless feet.

“Grab your e-tool, Private,” the Sergeant said. “Let’s get her buried before sunup.”

I slung my M16 across my back and pulled the collapsible shovel from my rucksack. With the serrated edge, I hacked at the undergrowth snaked around her legs.

“Slowly,” the Sergeant said. “Check for wires.” The Viet Cong, we called them Charlie, booby-trapped the entire jungle. The Sergeant slowly ran his hand along the thickest vine, which wrapped around her shoulders. He followed it to the ground before slicing the root with the precision of a surgeon.

Around us, our platoon recovered from a nine-hour push through an uneven mountain pass. But in the boonies, sleep was elusive. Most nights, we sat back-to-back, resting in two-hour shifts, awaiting Charlie’s arrival. Their sadistic game of hide and seek.

Finally loose from her planted chains, the moonlight illuminated her body. She was short and thin, with calloused hands. Probably from a nearby farming village. The cotton threads that covered her torso were torn and blood-soaked. Her brown eyes peered through a veil of knotted black hair and followed me like Mona Lisa’s gaze. My stomach knotted.

“What are you going to do back home, Private?” the Sergeant asked. With the tip of his shovel, he drew a circle in the mud. A place to start digging.

I wrestled my gaze from hers. “I’d like to write. Fiction, maybe nonfiction. I don’t know.”

“Really, a famous author? Book signings, cafés in Paris, all that crap?”

“Not like that. I wouldn’t even use my real name.”

“Who in their right mind would do that?” the Sergeant said.

“Mark Twain was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.” I slid my shovel into the muck and tossed it off to the side, accidentally splashing across her face. With a rag, I wiped away the mud and pushed her hair from her eyes. In the trees, the nightbirds bellowed like a chorus of trombones.

“Is it one of ours?” the Sergeant asked. The hole in her ribcage was the size of a cherry tomato, but that wouldn’t tell where it came from. Charlie’s AK47 and our M16s made similar entry wounds but exited in different spots.

The AK47’s 7.62 round was powerful enough to blast straight through a femur. Our 5.56 rounds were smaller but faster. The bullet tumbled around inside the body, wreaking havoc on tendons, muscles, and organs before exiting somewhere completely different.

But she had no exit wound.

“Everyone knew who Twain was. He got the money and the fame,” the Sergeant said.

“The Bronte’s didn’t. Sure, they used men’s names because women had a tough time getting published. But Emily hated the notoriety.”

In the distance, the bushes rustled. Then, the jungle went silent. I froze. The Sergeant grabbed my flak jacket and pulled me into the hole. I strapped my helmet, pulled my M16 close, and held my breath.

Her body laid still at the mouth of the hole, staring up at the night sky. For over an hour, we crouched in silence, searching for eyeballs in the brush. But that night, no one came.

“I get it,” the Sergeant said after we went back to digging. “You just want to be broke.”

“No, it’s about the message. Orwell was a pen name to separate himself and his family from his ideology.”

“What kind of man puts ideas like that into the world and won’t stamp his name on it?”

“That’s the point. The story is more important than the name.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I think that’s just what people say because, in the end, most names will be lost. The story goes on without them.”

We finished the hole and tossed our shovels to the side. It wasn’t 6 feet deep, maybe half that. The Sergeant grabbed her shoulders. I lifted her feet, and we slid her into the muddy ditch.

“Do you want to say a prayer?” I asked.

He shook his head no. “You’re the writer. You say something.”

But I couldn’t find the right words. So, we bowed our heads in silence. Then we picked up our shovels and filled in the hole.

But vnto Kain and to his offering

he had no regarde: wherefore Kain

was exceeding wroth, and his countenance fell downe.

—Genesis 4:5, Geneva Bible of 1560

From first light until long after sunset, Cain worked the land, raising mustard, wheat, and rye in crooked furrows scratched from the hard earth. When he stood from his labors in the gathering dark, the evening star mocked his fears, its cold serenity foretokening another rainless day. In the end, all of it was lost—the shoots and the seed as well—during that first summer in the east.

Each day, while the crop withered, Cain’s brother Abel led his flock to the brackish pools beyond Shinar. In so doing, he managed to keep a few sheep alive. But the animals, too, grew meager and listless.

Because of this, Cain’s mother and father, Eve and Adam, despaired  of their lives. They took little of the food their sons gathered with such agonizing effort: tiny fry from the dying creek, a handful of desiccated almonds, a few locusts, a bird Cain killed with a stone. Whatever the brothers could find, they brought to their parents, and Adam and Eve sat beneath the tree and wept, and the tree, watered with their tears, turned the color of gypsum. When winter arrived with bitter winds, Cain and Abel built a low shelter, and the family shivered with cold and with fear of the prowling wolves whose hunger had brought them down from the hills. Day after day, Cain stalked the desert with a sling. He brought home such small creatures as he could fell, but it was never enough.

Sometimes at night, Cain wrapped a skin about him, crawled out of the shelter, and peered west toward Eden, where he could just discern the singular splinter of gold light that was the angel’s flaming sword. The angel stood sentry, without relief, night after night, season after season, and never was the sword not to be seen. At such times, Cain turned back to the shelter and lay down between his mother and his brother. During the short winter days spent hunting alone in the desert, he often daydreamed of the fruit to be had in Eden, the swollen and splitting windfall lying in untasted heaps beneath the sagging boughs. The waste sickened him.

One morning, without a word to his brother, he took the way back. At sight of Cain, the angel raised his sword of fire.

“Master,” Cain said, “I do not wish to return to the garden, but only desire a palmful of fruit-seed lying beneath the trees. Here,” and he took the treasure from his pouch, the gems he had found while hunting in the desert, topaz and chalcedony and sapphire. The gems shone brightly, hammered to brilliant hues by the sun. He held them out for the angel to see. “These are yours, Master, in return for a palmful of seed.”

The angel lowered the sword, and Cain let slip the prize into the angel’s palm.

“Wait here,” the angel said, and Cain was left alone, shivering in his tattered cloak, before the open stile to paradise.

From within came the sound of falling water, trickling like starlight. In the midst of the garden, the tree of desire sighed in a breeze. To Cain’s ears came the drowsy roar of an unseen lion. Something moved in the leaves near the waters, and Cain saw the bright shadow of a face turn toward him, and the breath caught in his throat.

The angel returned with a grape leaf enfolding a palmful of moist black seed, and a parting curse for the exile. Cain tucked the seed carefully into his pouch and turned back toward     the east.

*

For the murder of his brother, God condemns Cain to be “a fugitive and a wanderer.”

His guilt, Cain assumes, will be proclaimed by the fact of his banishment, and he protests that “anyone who meets me may kill me.”

Not so! God assures him.

And Lord God put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.

There comes a moment in many stories, when the future resolves in stark detail in the hero’s eye, and he sits amid the wreckage of his costliest dreams, filled with regret and with sorrow for a world that will not shape itself to his desires. Perhaps such a moment had come to God   .

*

The poor in spirit, the addicts, the despondent; the drinkers and thieves; those who transgress by loving too much, and those who love recklessly in hopes of mitigating their loneliness; the wanderers and the demobbed soldiers in their wornout boots; those whose anger threatens to consume the earth and all the people in it: these are the children of Cain, these are the children of God. You know them when you see them. They are objects of a sympathy that is often insincere. More commonly, they are despised for their weaknesses, their wrecked lives, their ineluctable and assured oblivion.

Therefore is the world divided between the children of Abel and the children of Cain, between the good sons and daughters hopeful of salvation—those vessels of election who pledge allegiance to the law—and those marked by their refusal to be saved.

*

According to another story, written long after Cain had vanished in the Land of Nod, God assumed a human likeness and became a wanderer in the earth, seeking the very one he had cursed and banished all those years ago. But the terms of reconciliation were from the beginning tangled and obscure.

The mechanism of redemption, in the revised version, turns on a paradox: the greater the sin, the greater the forgiveness. Of the woman who anointed the rabbi’s head and feet, Jesus said, “Many sins are forgiven her, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” Again, he asked the crowd, “Who will love his lord more? The man who is forgiven a debt of fifty shekels, or the man forgiven a debt of five hundred?”

*

The story of Cain appears in the fourth chapter of Genesis and achieved its familiar shape somewhere around the sixth century BCE. An echo is heard in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which appears centuries later in the Gospel of Luke, composed in the first century CE. The two stories from the two testa   ments—Cain and the Prodigal, Hebrew and Christian—though separated by half a millennium, are similar in some ways, complementary in others. Cain’s brother Abel and the Prodigal’s brother are both obedient to the law; the former meets his death, and the latter is wounded in his pride. Cain is set wandering; generations later, the Prodigal returns. Neither asks forgiveness, neither asks to be restored to his rights; they ask only to be suffered to live. To my mind, the Prodigal is Cain’s revenant, welcomed home after many years abroad, his faults forgiven, his advent recognized as the rebirth of one long dead.

But the conclusion of life’s journey will not be a joyous occasion where a pack of runaways are rewarded with the snowy albs of innocence. Not this, but a somber assembly where those who spent their days buried alive above ground will compel  Him to look into their faces.

*

The time will come, the Lord will ask his prodigal son:

“In your life on earth, were you happy?”

And I’ll forget it all, only remembering those

meadow paths among tall spears of grass,

and clasped against the knees of mercy I

will not respond, choked off by tears of joy.

                                                                 —Ivan Bunin

The moment Judas found himself  at the petitioner’s bar, before the twelve elderly men arrayed on tiered benches, his courage left him. From their high places, they regarded his sudden and unexpected return with surprise, and they waited for him to explain himself. When he didn’t speak, their surprise turned to suspicion. Who could predict what these agitators were capable of? But when he still could not bring himself to speak, their suspicion distilled to plain contempt, because it was clear by then what had brought the miserable man back.

Sure enough, the man produced the pouch of silver coins and held it out to them. I don’t want it, he said.

You don’t want it? Then give it to the poor. The collection box is beside the door. You can place it in there on your way out.

I don’t want it.

Donate it to the temple, said the chief elder. Throw it in the lake. It matters little to us.

I don’t want it.

He’s beside himself, said a second elder.

But a third, with genial exasperation, stood with effort, placed his hands on the rail, and spoke with pity and with kindness. We are charged by the people, the elder said, with preserving the peace. If we cannot maintain peace among  ourselves, we bring the Roman authority down on our heads. The man you helped us to apprehend had turned your mind with apocalyptic fantasies and Greek metaphysics. We understand that the whole business is unpleasant, but you have regained the path of reason and did the right thing. Now you seem to regret your decision. See here now. You’re a young man. You have a life ahead of you. Don’t be rash.

And the chief elder, turning back to his interrupted task, said, You’ve been paid for a service. Our business is finished. As for the money, see thou to that.

*

Anatole France, in The Garden of Epicurus, tells the story of one Abbé Oegger, Senior Vicaire of the Cathedral Church of Paris. The good Abbé “could not endure the idea that Judas was in hell.” The more he considered the matter, “the more baffling grew his doubts and difficulties.”

Having concluded that an all-merciful God cannot be other than merciful, and that it was God’s duty and obligation (his métier, as the German poet He ine would have it) to forgive, he prayed to God to reveal the forgiven Judas as “the chiefest masterpiece of Thy clemency.” The Abbé told his bishop that God had indeed heard his prayers and that, in a vision, the priest “felt two hands laid upon his head” and that he was now “consecrated Priest of Pity, after the order of Judas.”

There was precedent for this curious errand. Origen, third century theologian, had asserted that all living things would at last be reunited with God. For Origen, the idea that God would commit a soul to hell was tantamount to admitting that God could be defeated by mere human will. Gregory the Great and John Scot Erigena both affirmed that, at the final judgment, the whole world will be restored to its first perfection—including devils.

Their teachings were condemned, and so was the Abbé’s. The advocates of unconditional celestial clemency have always faced official denunciation. France relates that Oegger’s “mission ended in misery and madness.”

Abbé Oegger, said France, was the “last and most gentle-hearted of the Cainites.”

(Please God, not the last.)

*

The simple reasoning behind the Abbé’s doomed endeavor was that if Judas is forgiven, all are forgiven. Perhaps he was a bit unhinged, but I see in the Abbé’s efforts the compassion of one man for a cursed and friendless soul, a lawyer working pro deo for a hopeless reprobate. For Oegger, it was imperative that we pardon all, even—perhaps especially—the most hopeless of all criminals: the traitors. Nothing less than the salvation of the world depended on it. To admit a limit to God’s mercy was the only true heresy and the only unforgivable sin, the priest argued, with sound doctrine.

*

In grade school, one of the sisters punished students by making them kneel on the knuckles of their own hands. Years later, while reading an old story, I recalled that punishment.

“And, behold, a hand touched me,” I read, and remembered three boys kneeling on their fingers on the tile, with their noses touching the wall at the front of the classroom, “which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands.”

Did our teachers—did the priests and nuns who devised the rules and the consequences—believe that a child could be raised toward heaven by even so much as a knuckle’s breadth, through any merely human power? What, did they doubt the boundlessness of God’s mercy? Did they not understand the story of Cain? Had they never read the Book of Daniel?

*

And the stone on the roadside said then,

“How heavy your steps have grown.”

And the stone said, “Will you return now

To your forgotten home?”

                           —Leah Goldberg

A shepherd kept watch over a mixed flock of lambs and goats that browsed among the hillside tombs, but the man walking below the hill did not see the shepherd or the goats or the tombs. In the shadow of the hill, he stormed with anger at his own gullibility, and at the arrogance of the rabbi, the one who had evilly disavowed his own mother, his own sisters! Wild talk about destroying the temple, careless talk about coming with the clouds of heaven—to judge the world! So much good will squandered, so many trusting souls disappointed. So many lives endangered.

Pride was the rabbi’s avowed enemy, the man recalled bitterly. But by his own pride he is destroyed. And now the Romans, stirred to wrath, are going to destroy us all.

All that day and through the night, the man made his way through the mountains, away from the city. The next morning, exhausted, he sat beside a stream and saw, to his surprise, that he had arrived in the hills of his childhood. He recalled that, when he was very young, the river’s water was cold and clear and good to drink. But the water, he was sorry to see, had grown turgid. Cast-off shoes, broken jars and sheep bones, pot handles and a stained mat now littered the once-grassy bank. The people of the villages had fouled the waters, made them unfit for any creatures but swine. This valley, he thought, once the paradise of his youth, will become a place of desolation by the time the Romans are finished, and it will be returned to the dominion of storks. Perhaps, he thought, that will be for  the best.

On the path that ran beside the stream, two sparrows alighted for a dust bath. The brief fluttering of their wings raised delicate clouds of yellow dust in the morning air. His heart grew calm, his anger cooled. The sweat on his temples dried.

When he saw the tree, now in late summer splendor, standing alone in the field beyond the stream, he recalled the summers of his youth. Then, he had often led his father’s flock to rest in the tree’s shade. At those times, he sat beneath the tree and wondered at the green mysteries of the day. Many birds had made their homes in the tree then, and their restless piping recalled the turning of a thousand tiny cartwheels.

Now the tree stood in a neglected tract of bean flowers and harebells. Magpies had driven the songbirds away, then departed. Only a pair of ravens stalked the edge of a dry ditch. He looked again, a little surprised to see a rope hanging loose from the tree’s lowest branch. He leaned forward and peered closer, half-uncertain of what he saw.

A shepherd appeared on the road, driving his little flock with a switch. The goats passed by, but a single lamb paused to nibble the hem of his cloak, and he stroked its ear. The shepherd paused and raised his switch to the empty sky, the empty hills, and spoke with mild impatience in a language that the man had never heard before in his life. Then the shepherd walked on, and the lambs skipped away, and the man was alone once more.

He returned his gaze to the tree, and found that looking upon it made him glad, and he decided he would visit the tree again, after so many years. But not now. The tension of the previous morning—his humiliation before the elders—faded in the day’s mounting heat, and there came over him a sudden and a bone-deep weariness. He lay  back and slept.

When he woke, he was not alone. A young man, whose ways and looks seemed familiar, was seated beside him. The man held a fistful of sunflower seeds, and now and then he opened his hand and picked one and chewed it as he observed the sunlit field that contained a solitary old tree. He turned his head away and spat a husk, then resumed his brown study of the day. It was then that Judas noticed the wounds in the young man’s feet, and the blood.

Ravens’ shadows slipped, silent as fish, over the hard ground.

Judas of Kerioth, the young man said. I have something to tell you.

1.

A rocket hit the village. I woke up to the sound of the explosion. My eyes widened, I jumped out of bed, put on my bulletproof vest, grabbed my helmet and boots and headed for the door. Another missile hit nearby. The ground shook and the wooden beams of the house creaked. I heard nothing but the beating of my blood in my forehead. My nostrils flared, my muscles tensed. The adrenaline was making me unable to think. I was ready to run out into the night in my underwear.

“Calm down, there’s nothing wrong,” said Petya from his bed across the room. He was a miner from Kharkiv. A hundred and twenty kilos of fat and muscle, with dog eyes and a raspy baritone voice. When he slept, the wooden building shook from his snoring. It was like sharing a room with a bear.

“It’s ok,” he repeated. “They are randomly shooting the hill.”

He sounded as if talking to a child who had a bad dream. Not that I knew how he talked to his son, but his tone suggested the whole Russian invasion was just a bad dream, with missiles thundering down.

My mind began to clear.

I knew if the place took a direct hit, I’d be dead before I could run anywhere, and if it didn’t, it would be pretty pointless to run out into the night.

Yet this was always my reaction when the missiles hit too close.

Petya, seeing my confusion, got up, pulled his backpack out from under the bed, and took out a jar. “Come, have some honey,” he said. His English was terrible, but I hardly noticed anymore.

I got up and walked over to the window that yawned into the night. Petya unscrewed the lid off the jar and drew his knife. I took my knife out of my vest pocket, dipped it in the jar, and ran my tongue down the blade.

There was thick, black honey in the jar. Not the sickeningly sweet stuff you get in the store.

“I was dreaming about my wife,” he said.

“I wasn’t dreaming about anything.”  I gripped the knife tightly so he wouldn’t see my hand tremble.

“We were in little house in Ilovaisk, the one I tell you about. Her father’s house.”

“And?”

“The kids were in bed and she was in kitchen cleaning up.”

“Do I have to listen to one of your sex stories? It’ll give me nightmares.”

“Did not get to sex. I was smelling her hair when the Russians woke me up and fucked up my dream.”

“Too bad.”

“They fucked up your dream too.”

“I wasn’t dreaming anything.”

“You will if you stay here long enough.”

“You know perfectly well this is my last day at the front.”

“What time is it?”

“The sun will rise in two hours.”

There were crimson hints of dawn on the horizon as we stood by the window. We sipped our instant coffees, smoked, and watched the sparkling shards of glass in the grass under the windowpanes.

2.

They had found a bunk for me in a ghost village with the 72nd Ukrainian Motorized Rifle Division two weeks earlier. The place was on a hillside next to a coal-fired power station lake. A narrow concrete bridge cut across the lake, the only way into the town on the far side. Wild ducks nested in the mud under its pillars.

Gray block houses stared at us from the opposite hillside. The Ukrainians had put the artillery units between the buildings, but there were still plenty of people living in the town.

In the evenings, the lights in the apartments winked out as the village plunged into total darkness, with residents avoiding any signals that could reveal the soldiers’ sleeping locations to the Russian artillery.

The cannons rumbled during the day, but the real show started after the sun went down. The Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns operated throughout the nights, intercepting at least one or two Russian rockets. It wasn’t safe for the soldiers to stay consecutive days in the same house. The Russians seemed content to occupy ruins.

On the front, you swiftly learn to differentiate between the sound of your own artillery and that of the enemy. After two days, I had mastered this skill. While most shells landed kilometers away from us, if one hit closer, my lack of proper military training would instinctively lead me to throw myself to the ground, always providing the soldiers with a good laugh.

3.

A young boy took me from Kiyiv to Dnipropetrovsk in a camouflage all-terrain vehicle with no license plate. The closer we got to the front in the east, the more checkpoints there were.

The boy would pull up in front of the roadblocks, roll down the window, and shout the latest password, which was sent to the soldiers every day by the Ministry of War. We set out at dawn, and by afternoon we had reached the town. At a gas station, I had to switch cars. They put me in a car driven by two snipers from the 72nd Brigade. I shared the back seat with AKM machine guns and a hand grenade launcher all the way to Donetsk province. No one had to tell us we had reached the front. The continuous roar of the artillery made that clear enough.

For two or three hours, nobody bothered with the foreign correspondent. I took pictures of soldiers trying to fix shot-up SUVs in the yards of the houses they had requisitioned. The sun had already set by the time a soldier in his twenties who wouldn’t stop grinning came up to me.

“The commander of the Unit, Nazar wants to see you now.”

He took me to a two-story wooden house. The ground floor was full of soldiers eating eggs and chicken with potatoes roasted in their peels. The men were sitting on crates of NLAW anti-tank rockets pushed  against the wall. The commander who must have been about fifty, introduced himself, put a plate in my hand and gestured me to sit down and eat.

I had a few bites. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, and everyone was looking at me.

“So, you are Hungarian?” Nazar asked.

“Yes.”

“I know a Hungarian.”

I felt shivers go down my spine. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have to explain Hungarian foreign policy to a bunch of armed men in the middle of the night.

“Yes?”

“The best Hungarian, I think. The most talented. Do you know her name?”

“No.”

“Michelle Wild.”

The men in the room who were over forty laughed. The men in their twenties had no idea what he was talking about.

“She had a big influence on me too,” I said.

“Are you talking about a politician?” asked a twenty-something kid, called Vitya.

“No,” Nazar replied. “Talented actress.”

“How come I never hear of her?” asked Vitya.

“Because by time you were born, she already retired.”

“I could still know her.”

“You don’t know her because you’re homo and you don’t watch porn.”

“Yes I watch porn!”

“But you don’t watch classic porn. Because you’re homo.”

“I’m not a homo!”

“Yes, you are,” Nazar said, bringing the debate to an end.

“So what you come here for, Hungarian?”

“To film.”

“Porn?” the kid asked.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Ukraine!” Nazar said.

Someone found a bottle of American whiskey, and by the time we had finished it, they had assigned me to Vitya, who would take me to the front.

The war had been going on for eight months, and we all knew that eight months was more than enough time for people in the West to forget that the Russians had invaded a European country. Ukrainian resistance depended on getting military support. The presence of foreign journalists was a necessary evil to secure arms supplies.

4.

I met Petya upon my arrival to the frontline. Nazar assigned me to one of the wooden buildings where his soldiers slept. When I first stepped into the room with my backpack slung across my back, a huge man with a shaved head was standing in front of me in his underwear and a poison green T-shirt. He looked me up and down:

“I warn you that I snore like chainsaw.”

“It won’t bother me. Actually, makes me feel at home.”

“That’s what my wife says.”

“Does she snore?”

“I don’t know. I never heard her snore.”

“I snore.”

“No problem.”

I unpacked my stuff next to my bed, undressed, and went to bed. I listened to the night noises, the rumble of the cannons in the distance. The branches of the trees were heavy with fruit, and you could hear the wasps and bees buzzing around the rotting apples and pears in the leaves on the ground.

I had trouble falling asleep. Petya was wide awake too—I could tell because there wasn’t a hint of his usual snoring.We lay quietly on our beds for a while.

“Do you have a family?” Petya asked from his bed, breaking the silence.

“A wife and a son from my first marriage. How about you? Do you have any children?”

“Two. Two boys. Eight and twelve years old. Do you want to see picture?”

“Yes.”

Petya stood. Stepping over to my bed, the boards creaking underneath him, he held up a battered smartphone displaying a picture of two little boys wearing striped T-shirts and enjoying ice cream.

“They are very handsome,” I said. Then I shuddered because a shell had struck maybe a kilometer or two away.

“Do you have picture of your son?”

I took out my phone and brought up a pic of my son.

“He looks just like you.”

“Yeah. Lots of people say I had myself cloned.”

“My babies not look like me, good thing. They like their mother.”

“Lucky for them,” I said with a grin.

“You’re not most handsome man in world either, Sasha.”

5.

During the day, I toured the Ukrainian positions with Vitya and conducted interviews. I grew very fond of the kid very quickly. Once, right before we went to the front, I saw him wrestling on the ground with another soldier. He teased everyone relentlessly, but no one took offense at his rough jokes. Vitya belonged to the generation born into war. War cradled his crib, and armed resistance against the Russians was his first love. He graduated from the war.  At the age of twenty-three, he was already considered a veteran among the frontline soldiers. Nazar had instructed that I shouldn’t be sent to the active front until he was confident in my readiness.

About ten kilometers from the front, I interviewed the medics of the battalion or the guys returning in tanks. Several times, I was assigned to kitchen duty. This meant I had to accompany one of the soldiers and assist him in hunting pheasants at the edges of the wheat fields. The birds were confused by the thunder of the mortar shells, so they would run out to the side of the road, and you could just shoot them. There was always something freshly killed for dinner. During the two weeks I spent at the front, the soldiers shot pheasant for the most part. I managed to bag some wild rabbits once. Everyone was overjoyed that day.

I usually chatted with Petya in the evenings. He was stationed at the Browning machine guns. The Russians would shell the hell out of the Ukrainian positions dug in the ground between the stunted trees and then try to overrun them with infantry. There were more and more unburied bodies in the wheat fields under the October sky.

On the third night, Petya asked if I had a picture of my wife.

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

I showed him one of the pics on my phone. He looked at it for a long time.

“Too Jewish for me.”

“Jewish cunts are warmer, you know.”

“My wife’s cunt is hotter. Want to see picture?”

“Of your wife’s cunt?”

“No, idiot. Of wife.”

“Sure.”

Petya stepped over to my bed and put his phone in my hand. On the screen was a pic of a natural blond, a stunningly beautiful woman.”

“She’s my Tyina,” he said.

“Poor thing, she must be blind.”

“Why you say she is blind?”

“She married you.”

“What do you know about true love?”

“Everything. What the hell does she see in you?”

“I don’t know. We met at May ball of steelwork. She was in bright yellow dress, so beautiful I could not breathe.”

“What did you do to trick her into talking to you?”

“Nothing. I knew her father from factory. He introduced me. It was love at first sight. I dated her one month before she let me hold hand. No one had ever kissed me like.”

“Gimme a tissue so I can wipe away my tears.”

“Her kiss was sweet like honey.”

“You were born to be a poet, Petya, not a soldier.”

“After one year, I married her. The wedding was in Ilovaisk. And then came Petyaka and then little Volodya.”

“You think about them a lot.”

“I do not think about anything else.”

“When was the last time you saw them?”

“Seven months ago.”

“That’s a lot. Do you talk to them often?”

“Yes. Every day.”

6.

In the evenings, Petya talked about his family. He told me what his children’s favorite food was, how his wife made it, how they kept bees at his father-in-law’s place, twelve hives in all. I’d been among the soldiers for a week when Petya came to dinner one night with a bandage on his hand.

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing.”

He ate, drank some whisky, and went to bed. I played cards with the others.

“The Russians tried to break through today.” – said Vitya when he got bored of the game.

“Did you have to give up the position?”

“Yep. Fifty rounds left in the Browning. Can you imagine?”

“What happened to Petya?”

“He’s the only one left alive. A bullet went through his hand. We had to shout to get him to leave the post. He grabbed the gun, just in case.”

Petya was already snoring when I got back to the room. I went to bed. I was awakened by his moaning and swearing.

“What happened?”

“I rolled on hand. Stitches are torn, I think.”

The bandage was dripping with blood.

“We should go to the hospital.”

The hospital was about twenty kilometers away. I knew this, because I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures there. Anywhere but there. The Ukrainians wouldn’t let us report their losses.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Just bandage it up again.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Just bandage the fucking thing. I will go to hospital in morning.”

“Okay.”

“First aid kit is on vest.”

I unzipped the pouch marked with the white cross and took out the tourniquets. The gauze and iodine were at the bottom. I used the small scissors to cut the bandage on Petya’ hand. The stitches had torn badly. A mix of red and black blood.

“Clean it out.”

I wiped the wound with iodine and even poured a little in it. Petya was constantly cursing. English has a limited number of curse words compared to the Ukrainian language. In any of the Slavic languages, you can continue swearing for hours without repeating yourself. I couldn’t catch everything he said, but it seemed to involve the insertion of pine woods, John Deeres, and umbrellas into the enemy’s private parts. When his wound looked clean enough, I started to bandage it up.

“There you go,” I said. “But you should take better care of yourself. You’ve got your family waiting for you back home.”

“They will have to wait a little longer.”

“There’s no telling how long this war will last.”

“It lasts while it lasts. We will be together in end anyway.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“You don’t have to hope. We will be together for sure. But not now. I still have some Russians to kill.”

“I hope you get home soon.”

“You are a good man, Sasha.”

7.

While playing cards, Nazar said, “Tomorrow you can take the Hungarian out after the attack has started.” When I asked what attack he was talking about, no one said a word, not surprisingly.

It later turned out that, contrary to expectations, the Ukrainian forces had launched a successful counterattack at Kharkiv.Nazar thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to send me to the front lines and keep me safe at the same time. The offensive would distract the Russians enough to reduce the artillery fire on their positions.

We were cutting across fields of wheat, with the sun shining resplendently in the sky above us, when the Russians started shelling the position we were headed for. Two shells hit right next to our car, and it felt as if someone had pushed my head under water.

Vitya drove the car into the woods, mud splashing on the windshield from the shells. He stopped the car next to the trench where the Browning guys had dug themselves and ordered everyone out. Two other soldiers were in the car; they knelt to the ground and listened, then ran to take cover in the trees, dragging me along.

Dusty earth and mud. The trenches were like something out of a World War I movie. Petya was grinning as he came up from underground.

“Want some coffee?” he asked.

We did. I glanced where the barrels of the Browning machine guns were pointed. The Russians were less than a kilometer away on the far side. You couldn’t see the dead bodies because of the tall grass, but I knew there were a lot of them lying unburied in the field, because when the wind shifted, it brought with it the sweet smell of decay.

I had a cup of coffee in my hand when I heard the shriek of the mortar shell. I lurched to one side and splattered the whole cup on Vitya.

“That was more than ten meters away,” he said after the mortar struck, and he pulled me up off the ground. I couldn’t control the shaking of my hands.

The biggest problem with modern-day artillery is that you can’t see it at all. The legend that 82mm mortar shells were deliberately designed to whistle before impact is widely held. It’s nonsense, of course. No engineer would design a weapon so that the targets would know before it hit that it was about to strike. Mortar shells whistle because they cut through the air and leave a vacuum behind them.

But you only hear the whistle of the shells that God intended for someone else.

The Ukrainians knew when the Russians were firing missiles. I guess the front was close and they could hear them launching. Though I’m not really sure. I only know that on the way back to the car, Vitya suddenly grabbed me and pulled me down into a hole.

The ground shook. I heard a big crash, then nothing.

When Vitya pulled me to my feet,I was totally lost, didn’t know where to go. He steered me towards the car. My ears felt like they’d exploded, but my eardrums weren’t bleeding. Silence stuck around until we hit the ghost village. When my hearing kicked back in, every explosion made me feel like I was getting zapped by electricity. Trying not to hit the dirt took some work, but I held up okay unless the hits got too close.

8.

Nazar told me that there was a car leaving for Kiev at eight o’clock, and I would leave the front in it.

The brigade was hard at work. All the equipment had to be moved to a new location because the Russian missiles were getting closer and closer. Old flatbed trucks were rolling down the dirt roads, loaded up with fuel, rocket launchers, and ammunition. They drafted me to lend a hand, so I was lugging boxes too, muttering all the while about how nice it’d be if the Russians could please not fire any fucking rockets for just a little while.

The new headquarters was in a granary. It was a concrete building from the Cold War era, with bullet holes and boarded-up windows. We were still hard at work when a green all-terrain vehicle pulled up in front of the entrance.

“What about you?” I asked Petya.

“I am coming with you.”

“See, I told you you’d make it home,” I said, giving him a slap on the back. “I’m good luck for you.”

There were five of us in the all-terrain, and the trip back was a good twelve hours. Wasn’t exactly first-class. I was longing to get a shower and finally take a shit in a toilet, but most of all just to stretch my legs once we reached Kiev.

But that was out of the question. Nazar and the others insisted that we get a round of drinks.

In the city center, we went to a pub called Gorky’s. It was in a cellar, with heavy wooden tables and a bar. We could barely get a seat. I was shocked by the bustle. It felt as if we had arrived in a different country, a country that wasn’t being ripped apart by war.

The guys ordered Ukrainian vodka and beer. The waiter brought dried salted fish and five shot glasses.

Nazar filled everyone’s glass, and when he was done, he raised his own.

“A toast to those who gave their lives.”

He lifted his glass on high, then poured the vodka on the ground and threw the glass on the floor with all his might. The others did exactly the same thing. The place fell dead silent, and everyone looked at us.

“Is there a problem?” Nazar asked the bartender.

“Glory to Ukraine!” the bartender replied.

“Glory to the heroes!” the soldiers said, and everyone in the pub echoed their shout.

New glasses were brought to the table. Nazar filled them.

“And now a toast to the living,” he said, and he knocked it back in one gulp.

We drank quickly, and a lot.

“And now,” Nazar said after the second bottle of vodka, “we go to see the patriotic whores.”

Since the offensive began, downtown brothels gave a 20% discount to frontline fighters due to an 11 PM curfew. Keeping the places afloat and showing patriotic devotion played a part, but “patriotic” became the buzzword.

I was dizzy from alcohol and fatigue. I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t get out of it. The whorehouse was in a four-story building. We went on foot. Nazar rang the bell, and the door swung open.

The women were on the fourth floor. Two old, moderately spacious apartments that had been turned into one. There was a big Ukrainian flag on the wall in the hallway. A woman who must have been about fifty and whose cheeks were caked with rouge walked over to us and sat us down on the sofa.

She and Nazar started haggling in Ukrainian. It took me a while to realize that they were arguing about me. I was not a soldier, she was saying, and so I did not get any discount. I cast a glance at Petya, hoping he could get me out of the whole thing, but he was just staring at the wall. Eventually, Nazar must have reached some kind of agreement with the woman, because she walked over to the counter, picked up a bell, and gave it a shake.

The three doors off the hallway swung open, and soon six women were standing in front of us with business smiles on their faces. They were dressed in bras and panties.

“Take your pick,” the woman said, and even I understood.

I also understood the silence that fell over us. When it comes to committing a sinful act, no one wants to go first. Several seconds of silence passed, several unbearably awkward seconds.

And then Petya stood up. He had a bleary look in his eyes. He walked over to one of the brunettes, a girl who must have been in her twenties.

“Let’s go, sweetheart,” he said. She took his hand and led him into the room.

The other two soldiers immediately followed suit, chose a girl, and then left. I stared in shock.

“What?” Nazar asked, lighting a cigarette. “You look like you have seen a ghost.”

“No,” I replied, “I’m just a little surprised. Petya was always talking about his wife. I never would have thought he’d sleep with another woman.”

Nazar took a drag on his cigarette, grimaced a little, stubbed it out in the ashtray, and stood up.

“Petya’s apartment in Kharkiv was hit by a rocket the day after the invasion started,” he said. “His family was killed.”

He then walked over to one of the girls, took her hand, and withdrew with her into one of the rooms.

October 6, 1973. Los Angeles.

The stack of newspapers sat in front of me on the brown shag carpet, and next to it was a plastic bag half full of red rubber bands. I reached into the bag, took a dozen or so bands and slipped them onto my wrist. I pulled a newspaper from the stack and folded it methodically; the right third over the middle, then the left third over that. I snagged a rubber band from my wrist and slipped it over the tri-folded paper. Once done with the stack, I would load the papers into the twin green bags tied to my handlebars, straddle the bike, and start my route, as I did every Saturday.

But this Saturday, my customers would wait late into the afternoon for their morning edition of the Herald Examiner, while I stood statue-like in front of a grainy black and white television screen. A familiar desert landscape would erupt in fire before my eyes.

As was her ritual, my younger sister watched Scooby-Doo. I did too, as I folded newspapers. I could always identify the villains, the characters behind the mask of the Ghost of Captain Cutler, The Black Night, or The Caveman. Their disguises were thin and their guilt certain. Telling my sister who the villain was just before the unmasking was satisfying in a mean-spirited way.

My sister sat open-mouthed in front of the television and watched Shaggy, Scooby, and the rest in the final chase scene. With the masked villain captured, I pointed a finger at the screen, ready to reveal his identity and ruin the ending for her. But before I could utter the words, a news anchor’s face appeared.

“We interrupt our normally scheduled program to bring you a special news bulletin,” he said.

Images of tanks and armored vehicles raced across the sandy terrain of the Saini Desert in Egypt, and dark-faced soldiers fired Kalashnikovs at enemy positions. The contrail of a Phantom fighter jet ended in a white plume, intercepted by a surface-to-air missile. My sister looked at me in dismay, her expression asking: Where had Scooby gone?

I knew I shouldn’t wake my father. He was catching up on sleep after working a graveyard shift in a low-skill job, the only kind available to some immigrants.

I walked into the bedroom. “Dad…? Dad…? Egypt is at war.”

He was up. Glassy eyed, staring at the blurry screen, adjusting rabbit ears.

On the television, artillery shells rocked the desert in an unending barrage. Egyptian and Syrian troops, in a coordinated attack, advanced on enemy positions in the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights. On the Sinai front, tens of thousands of Egyptian infantrymen crossed the Suez Canal in inflatable boats under heavy shelling and through clouds of smoke. Key Israeli military positions throughout the Sinai were bombed by Egyptian jets, clearing the way for the advancing ground assault. The Yom Kippur War had begun.

Watching this war unfold before my eyes, I was thrown back in time to a day six years earlier. My mother was carrying my then baby sister and gripping my hand so tightly. Terror filled her eyes as she looked out the window of our Cairo apartment. The flash of bombs lit up the night sky and silhouetted darkened buildings. The air smelled of spent firecrackers. Israeli jets were bombing a nearby airport. A staccato of red tracers shot upward toward them, searching, not finding.

In June 1967, the Israeli Air Force struck airports across Egypt, targeting runways and rendering them useless, then picked off jet fighters on the ground. Egypt lost nearly its entire Air Force in a matter of hours. Then, in a haphazard retreat, the exposed Egyptian army suffered extensive losses and ultimately surrendered the Sinai Desert with hardly a fight. Victory for Israel was swift in what came to be known as the Six-Day War. For Egyptians, it was a humiliating defeat; a war lost as soon as it began.

In the few years that followed the ’67 war, Israel built one of the most formidable defensive lines the world had known, the Bar Lev Line, on the eastern shore of the Suez Canal. A seemingly impenetrable seventy-foot-high wall of sand studded with anti-tank mines spanned the length of the canal. Behind it, thirty-three heavily fortified military installations and hundreds of tanks kept watch, ready to open fire on Egyptian forces should they try to cross the canal and retake the Sinai. To Israel and the world, any such attempt by Egypt would have been suicidal. To Egyptians, the Bar Lev Line was an ever-present reminder of their defeat, a stain on their national honor.

The world didn’t seem to care about the lost pride of a defeated Egypt. Not as long as Arab oil was flowing, not with the Israeli military appearing, by all accounts, invincible, and not with the Arab nation lacking the military capability to change the reality on the ground. Egyptians, it seemed, were expected to simply live with their June ’67 defeat and accept the occupation of their cherished Sinai by their enemy. Egypt’s prized Suez Canal, a source of international prestige and badly needed money, would have to sit idle with Israeli soldiers on its eastern shore, taunting and humiliating. Nothing to be done about it, the world thought.

Six years later, I stood by my father in front of the television in our Los Angeles apartment, neither of us able to speak. A surge of patriotism rushed through me, and I felt my heart race as I watched columns of Egyptian tanks and infantrymen pour into the Sinai Desert to reclaim our occupied land.

I wished I was back in Egypt. I belonged in Cairo streets, among the crowds in Tahrir Square, all of us proudly waving our flag with the golden eagle. Had I been older than my twelve years , they might have let me donate blood. A little older yet, and maybe they would have given me a post where, ever-vigilant, I would stand with my finger on a trigger.

Why had my family ever left Egypt? I remember asking myself. And when the answer came to me, I felt ashamed. We left a defeated, virtually bankrupt nation for the American promise of economic prosperity. We left for the possibility of buying our own home, a car, and a television for every room. Things that seemed so trivial as I considered them in that moment.

I pulled myself away from the television, took another newspaper from the stack, pounded each fold flat, and stretched a rubber band around it. The rubber band snapped in my hand. I felt the burn on my fingers and in my soul.

#  #  #

The Yom Kippur War coincided with the month of Ramadan. I had always cherished the joyful celebration of this holy time in Egypt. I remembered the children carrying colorful, candle-lit holiday lanterns and prancing on the sidewalks in the early evening. I had watched their blue, red, and yellow lights dance on the sides of buildings as they sang, skipped, and twirled. But this Ramadan would be different, I knew. Lights in Egyptian cities would be extinguished, even the lanterns, to deprive enemy bombers of easy targets during their nighttime air raids.

That year, in America, Ramadan would be stranger yet.

In a time before call waiting, telephone lines were constantly busy. Our receiver sat on the hook only moments before the phone rang again. Instead of offering the customary Ramadan greetings, callers asked, “Are you watching this?” Shock and disbelief robbed the color from my parents’ faces even as they tried to reassure acquaintances who feared for relatives at home, for Egypt. The calls often ended with “Alhamdulillah,” an expression of gratitude and praise to God for the early military successes we were witnessing.

The day after the war began, Sunday, the downtown Los Angeles mosque was filled to capacity. Emotions in the grand room peaked with pride and hope. The fiery sermon the Imam gave rendered his voice raw. All in the mosque raised their hands to God. We prayed for victory, and more than that, we prayed for redemption. Let it not be like the last time. Let it not be another Six-Day war–another humiliation. At the end, the Imam gave many of the worshipers, including me, a firm handshake. He told me to be brave, to be proud.  I nodded and told him that I would.  But this, I later learned, would not be easy.

#  #  #

Monday afternoon, I sat in my seventh-grade classroom waiting for an instructor to arrive and begin teaching a subject I was hardly interested in. I wanted to be home, to pull a newspaper from the stack and thumb through it, looking for a headline with the word “…Egypt.” How many miles would it say we had taken back from our occupied land? How many enemy jets had our SAM-6 missiles shot down? And would it answer the big question: Were we still winning?

I fanned through pages of pencil sketches in my notebook, talentless drawings of tanks and jets in desert combat.  I was startled by a voice close to my ear. “Your country attacked my country,” said the taller of two boys standing over me, a known bully.

His country? He wasn’t Israeli. There was nothing foreign about him. I was the immigrant, the one with the strange name. The one who stuttered trying to decipher English words in a textbook while other kids snickered. I did not respond.

With his finger poking my thin chest, punctuating each word, he said: “Are you happy about it?” Again, I didn’t answer. He rested a fist on my desk, his face close to mine. His friend stood behind him, helping make the point. I looked for the teacher, who still hadn’t entered the classroom. I scanned the room for anyone who might help, anyone who would be on my side. Kids chatted and clowned about. None of them had taken notice, nor would they help if they had.

Looking up at my adversaries, I cowered. This was their classroom, their school. I was an immigrant, tolerated in their country. I was alone. I flinched at the boy’s feigned punches. I endured his provoking slaps, barely blocking them, never getting up from my seat. I did nothing to stop him. Finally, the teacher walked into the room and told my assailant to take his seat. The insult of that day lingered, as did the shame of having not stood up for my country’s honor.

In the days that followed, one question played on my mind. The American boy had said that Egypt attacked his country. Was Egypt fighting Israel or America? Or were they one and the same in this? How could America someday be my country, my home, if it gave aid and comfort to my enemy?

#  #  #

Ten days into the war, America’s Department of Defense delivered on a promise: an airlift so massive it reconstituted the Israeli army, which had been heavily compromised on the Egyptian front. Now, with even more advanced weapons in Israeli hands, the tide of the war would turn, and not in Egypt’s favor. I pulled the knife’s edge through the string holding my daily stack of newspapers. I took the top copy, and without looking at it, I began folding; the right third over the middle, and the left third over that.

The phone stopped ringing. Conversations about the goings-on of the war were less frequent, more subdued. I heard adults around me grumble about Egypt having to make do with outdated and inferior weapons from the Soviets. No bombers, no long-range missiles, only defensive weapons for Russia’s Arab client. In the eyes of many, this reflected the Soviet’s long-standing strategy: to help Egypt survive, but never win a war. A victorious Egypt might need Russia less. And if Russia lost its largest client in the region, its influence over the oil-rich Middle East would diminish. Frustrated by the limited access to needed weapons, Egypt’s then President Anwar El-Sadat had expelled 15,000 Russian military advisors a year before the start of the Yom Kippur War. While Israel had the full might of American power behind it, Egypt’s backer seemed less committed.

As a child, watching the politics play out with Egypt and America on opposite sides, I was torn. Where should my allegiance lie, with my native Egypt or my adopted U.S.? I feared what Americans would do to me, to my family, if they knew of my questionable loyalty.

#  #  #

A couple months passed, and the war was over. And mine, it seemed, was the last shaky voice crying out: “Egypt won. We did it.” But my truth was cast aside as fables of super-human feats by Israeli soldiers in the battlefield took center stage. Then came the pictures, splashed across magazines. Handsome Israeli soldiers with lovely light-eyed girls posing next to American tanks. Rockstars selling victory, democracy, freedom, and sex; a marketing campaign for a Western audience. And in time, I began to doubt my own truth. Perhaps our victory, the one talked about in Egyptian media, was exaggerated, even fabricated.

My heroes, once again, became cartoonish villains, unsophisticated and unrefined. Hopeless in their fight against a foe superior in every way. They were faceless in a grainy sepia-toned picture, a sandy landscape. Draw your best dark-faced bad guy here.

For the rest of that school year, my classmates largely ignored me. I was that kid who held on to a fantasy, a crazy story about a victorious Egypt, a version of events neither believed nor cared about. The world had moved on. In a noise-filled classroom, I sat alone.

#  #  #

A year later, in eighth grade homeroom, a boy with an accent introduced himself to me.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Egypt.”

“Oh… I’m from Israel.”

I tensed up, saying nothing.

He leaned over. “Here, in America… no war. Okay?”

Before I knew it, before I decided whether it was something I wanted to do, I extended my hand. We shook.

My new friend asked me if I had seen any fighting when I lived in Egypt. I thought of the night when I stood alongside my mother and watched the airport burn.

“No. I didn’t see any fighting.” I lied.

“I did,” he said. “Egyptian jets attacked my town. For a while, it was maybe once a week.”

I felt a jolt of pride run through me, though I kept it hidden from my friend. His words affirmed my belief. Egyptians had fought back. They had punished the enemy for its sins. That evening, done with my paper route, I held my bike on top of a hill. The empty green bags hung from the handlebars. Traffic had died, and the street was empty. I straddled the now light and agile bike, unburdened by the weight of newspapers. I rocked the Schwinn forward, then back, then forward again. I kicked off. Peddling, harder, faster. I raced down the hill, the cold air making my eyes water. The empty bags fluttered at my sides, their straps pulling. Could they tear away? I peddled faster still. A jitter, then a high-speed wobble tested me, but I held on. The fluttering sound grew louder in my ears, a make-believe engine, roaring—an Egyptian jet fighter. My front wheel lifted. I soared into the night sky.

#  #  #

Decades later, more was revealed about the Yom Kippur War—declassified top-secret reports, clandestine tape recordings, and never-before-seen newsreels. First came the picture of the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, her hand holding up her forehead, distraught at the calamity of a war she never saw coming. Then, a video of the Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, shaken, looking small in his military uniform, broadcasting to a frantic Israel on October 10, 1973; his words offering no relief. I pointed at the computer screen: There it is. Proof, we beat them. From their own mouths. Then, as the video stopped playing and the screen went black, I saw my own reflection. Sitting alone, no one by me to co-witness.

More recordings came: soldiers’ recollections, nightmares, acts of heroism and of humanity. One such recording still lives in my mind. A transmission by an Israeli soldier, a hold-out in an underground Bar Lev Line fortification. His frantic calls for reinforcements–tanks, airstrikes–go unheeded on a static-filled radio channel. He pleads for his life as the structure collapses around him. His voice strains, calling for God as artillery shells fall. “They’re coming… breaking in… I’m burning.” About to meet his end, he curses the ones who would leave him to his fate: “God will not forgive you…” Then, his final words, to his mother.

I had not prepared myself for this; a voice reaching through the decades and gripping my chest.

#  #  #

When she was in the ninth grade, my daughter’s class was given an assignment. “We’re going to have a town meeting about the Arab-Israeli conflict,” she said. “Each of us will talk, like…you know…like we live there. Like Arabs or Israelis.”

“Easy A,” I said. “I got you covered, kid. Your dad knows everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

“I’m supposed to give the perspective of someone my age. A boy. His name is Shlomo.”

“Shlomo? What kind of an Arabic name is Shlomo?”

“It’s not Arabic, Dad. It’s an Israeli name.”

“Wait. Does your teacher know you’re Egyptian?”

“Yes.”

I was impressed. It was a lesson in empathy.

#  #  #

Through the years, I had watched one fictionalized Mossad movie after another. Miraculous ventures projecting Israeli superiority. The same story, repeating, image-building, propagandizing.

But in 2013, I came across “the postmortem.” That was what the senior CIA analysts and directors called their video-recorded discussion held at the Richard Nixon Library. It was the intelligence community’s examination of what had gone wrong, how the CIA and the Israeli Mossad failed to see the Yom Kippur War coming. As the experts spoke, I leaned in. I watched, rewound, and watched again.

They said it plainly. Egypt’s President Sadat launched a war of deception that took advantage of inflexible American and Israeli mindsets. No one believed Sadat would start a war with his country in such a weak military position. Israel, still high on its victory in the Six-Day War, believed no Arab nation, least of all Egypt, had the will to fight. With every Sadat promise of an attack that didn’t come to be, with every mobilization of his military forces that he later recalled, Israel and the West became more certain that war would come no time soon. They grew to disregard what appeared to be Arab bravado, saber-rattling, amounting to nothing.

No one saw Sadat’s gamble for what it was: a limited war, not to conquer an enemy, but to reanimate a dead peace process.

#  #  #

Heroes achieve what in the moment seems unimaginable. In the first two hours of the war, Egyptian forces had overrun the formidable Bar Lev Line. They advanced into the Sinai and retook the Suez Canal, along with seven-hundred square miles of enemy occupied land. In so doing, they ripped away Israel’s mask of invincibility.

As the war progressed, Israel gained momentum. Israeli forces moved into the western side of the Suez Canal and encircled the Egyptian Third Army, cutting off its supply lines. But, as a condition of the ceasefire agreement that ultimately ended the war, Israel retreated from those gains. Pundits took turns spinning the outcome of the war, each claiming victory for their side. As, I presume, they forever will.

Having achieved his objectives in the Yom Kippur War and created a path for diplomacy, President Sadat walked into the Israeli Knesset and began the work of peacemaking. This time, Israel was less eager to let slip such an opportunity. It would no longer reject out of hand peace efforts that required it to surrender occupied Egyptian land.

I still remember Sadat putting a match to his smoking pipe and saying: “No one will capitulate here. I am not ready to capitulate. [We will not give up] an inch of land or a grain of sand from our land.”

In signing the 1978 Camp David Peace Accord with Israel, Egypt gave up its privilege to use its military against Israel in support of its Arab neighbors. But after twenty-five years of war, this was a privilege it no longer wanted. Within this Agreement, Egypt endorsed a framework for peace negotiations between Israel and its other Arab neighbors. This framework was used as a foundation for the Oslo Peace Accord signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the early eighties.

I knew the Camp David Peace Agreement was an admirable achievement. But at the time of its signing, my teenage heart had not yet learned to appreciate the virtue in peace-making. It still sought vengeance. I wanted the chance to stand before a classroom and bask in the light of undisputed victory. I searched for evidence of victory on the battlefield through books and news articles. What I found was this: No longer would Egypt stand in the shadow of its defeat in the Six-Day War. No longer could its enemy claim invincibility, not without a note in the margins, not without a question mark. That was what mattered to sixteen-year-old me.

On October 6th, 1981, the eighth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Sadat was assassinated. It was then that many began to speak of the man’s achievements and sacrifices, to contemplate his legacy. Anwar El-Sadat; the great strategist on the world stage.  The hero who did more than win a military objective, who did more than win back the Sinai for Egypt. Here was the man who successfully executed a war to win peace.

#  #  #

I recently turned on a Scooby-Doo episode for my grandson. It was The Funland Robot episode. One of my favorites, I told him. At the end, after the unmasking, I said: “You know, in real life, it’s not so easy to tell good guys from bad, winners from losers. Sometimes, you have to look hard to find the truth. It’s not like in cartoons.”

My grandson looked at me and said: “That show was boring, Grampa.” He reached for his game controller, ready for combat. Enemy soldiers scurried, shooting. He returned fire.

My daughter entered the room. “Time to go home, baby,” she said, as blood splattered the inside of the television screen.

“One more minute, mom.” He answered, ditching his AR-15 for a pump-action shotgun.

“Are you good with him playing these games?” I asked. “I mean, they desensitize.” She gave me that I-can-raise-my-child-on-my-own-thank-you-very-much look.

“Now, young man!” she said to my grandson. He obediently clicked off the game.

Teasing, I said: “Next time you come here, boy, you leave that game controller at home. We’ll play checkers.” I wanted to see them roll their eyes in exasperation at Grampa. They did, and I laughed.

Violent as my grandson’s game was, it fostered no hatred in him. I knew he saw no evil in his cartoon-like adversaries. I hoped that things would always remain this way, that he would never know a real enemy.

As I watched my grandson leave, I thought about another boy— on his bike, tossing newspapers. I thought about that boy seeking retribution. I thought about the rage in his voice, unheard. I thought about him growing up, so long unable to see the glory in the fight for peace.

Plowing Water

We return to nightmare
ground, looking over the scene

of the crime, the copper
reflection of little clouds

in the torpid, tainted
canal masking disquiet

and chaos created
in us. Toiling in soft sand

underneath a burden
that would make a mule bleat,

we bitch and moan when told
to drop the rucks. Now we must

dig in, not like blind moles,
but like crippled gravediggers

in broken ground started
by high angle hell. Mangled

sandbags and serrated
pieces of metal pulled from

dirt wounds, also a hand
only missing two fingers.

Using a bayonet,
we bury rancid, fetid

flesh in a hole, puking,
not worried about a name.

Sabat (Loyalty)

Dead bodies stop looking like bodies
after a certain point.

The face, like a popped milar balloon
with all the air blown out the top,

the legs, oddly angled, their bottoms
looking for all the world

like tubes of children’s toothpaste
unevenly squeezed.

No, the dead here never arrive in an
orderly manner, like in the movies.

This is Afghanistan, so they show up
carried in blankets or what’s left

of clothes, bandages waving
like May flags.

But they all go out the same way.

The mullah works systematically,
washing and praying, singsong in his labors.

Next to him, a step back Mortaza watches
them prepare his brother for the next life.

Mohammad Gul was the pride
of Ismail Khel.

Young, handsome, brave.  Funny.
Everyone said he was funny.

You don’t hear that much in Afghanistan,
someone being funny. As they lift what’s left

into the particle board box that looks like
an Ikea desk repurposed

hands seek to guide Mortaza out.  But
he pulls away, he stays.

He watches as they wrap Gul’s head in
cotton and prop it up on

pillows of cheap foam.  They spray him with Turkish
perfume from the bazaar, and then

drape the Afghan flag and the prayer rug over his
box, taping it down with rolls of

scotch tape.  Mortaza sniffs back a tear, both for
his brother and the debt

he knows he’ll now have to pay.  He’s not scared,
just tired, and knows

that somewhere, out in Lakan,  is a man he’s never
met but will kill, as the way demands.

When we walk out, together, my boots slip,
squeaking and squishing on the sodden, dirty
tile.

We’d been expecting the fascists for a few days but they’d gotten hung up on Newark. Usually they moved fast. Camden had gone quiet just a week after the government had evacuated from Washington, D.C. to some secret location. Then, abruptly, the fascists flowed south, a growing mob of pickup trucks and tractor trailers bristling with guns, fuel, flags, and ammunition: to Richmond, although Baltimore was closer; finally hastening back northward after wrecking that old city, the capital of The Confederacy. Each of those cities had fallen in weeks, carved into pieces and starved, capitulating before the threat of fire and murder that appeared to have come anyway, in spite of surrender. Here and there the cities of the South and Midwest still stood, but were cut off — separate from each other, separate from us, isolated by long stretches of forest and strip malls patrolled by men in multicam holding AR-15s and shotguns, lines of utility vehicles across tracts of the largely deracinated terrain.

The suburbs across the river in New Jersey were filling up with refugees and transients, huddled between the homes of New Yorkers who could afford to live outside the city. Hedge fund managers, software engineers, salesmen, bankers, cops, lawyers, university faculty handed out blankets and food at first. Then later they became stingy, alert to any word of crime. These people were of the city but not in it — their loyalty, dubious. The thousands and later hundreds of thousands fleeing the fascists were bound for sadness and tragedy, driven from homes that would likely never be seen again. Once the center began to crumble, none but the bravest returned to their previous lives, and the bravest were not those running headlong from the hatchet and gunfire.

Many of us still half-believed the whole thing was a joke taken too far, a mass hallucination or something illegal rather than outside the law, a matter for police or maybe the FBI. Even after D.C. and Richmond and Camden we felt that it would be stopped somewhere, by others. Certainly not by us. Psychologically we were in the denial stage of grief, preparing, though far too slowly for what was coming. In that moment they had laid siege to Newark. While we’d been waiting for the fascists to mount their inevitable northern push, the push had happened; like a bullet, or a hypersonic missile, they’d moved too fast for us to track.

This sent us into a frenzy of preparation. The George Washington Bridge came down, and the Tappen Zee. All week, tens of thousands of anxious eyes stared round the clock at the western approaches to New York. But once news from Newark slowed, it was almost a week before we saw the first movement from our perch in Manhattan, across the Muhheakunnuk River.

I’d dropped out of my fifth year at Muhlenberg college to join the 1st People’s Revolutionary Corps. Academics came slowly to me so college was taking more time than it should have. My dad didn’t believe much in getting a bachelor’s degree. He’d done fine for himself in construction without one. But it was important to my mom that I graduate from college. That’s how I ended up at Muhlenberg instead of the Army or Marines like my dad wanted. As far as I knew, my folks supported the fascists. I hadn’t heard from them in months.

Now I was in a reserve detachment of scouts stationed at an observation post (or OP) in what used to be called Washington Heights. We’d renamed it Canarsee Hill. The OP overlooked the Muhheakunnuk. Mostly we were watching to the northwest but just before the weekend, Smith, another scout, who had come down from Yonkers, spotted men moving on the bluffs opposite us due west. Smith called Vargas over to the telescope to confirm.

Vargas was our leader, though our unit’s military hierarchy was still inchoate. We didn’t have ranks, we were all volunteers and organized in a broadly egalitarian way. He was our leader because he’d been (or claimed to have been) an Army Scout during the 1990s, and had definitely been in the fighting that first broke out south of here. He seemed to know his business and we respected him for his quiet competence and willingness to teach us basic fieldcraft. His crypto-reactionary loyalties and remarks we overlooked with trepidation.

“That’s them all right,” he said, his flat, battered mug pressed squinting and grimacing against the telescope. Vargas’s life hadn’t been easy since leaving the military, and in addition to a scar running across his face from eye to cheek, his nose had been mashed in a fight and never fixed. He motioned to me. “Take a look kid. See how they move? That’s discipline. They’re out of range but they’re spaced out, two by two. Way you need to remember to do things. Understand?”

In the round, magnified slice of world across the river, there they were: camouflaged shapes hunched over, moving tactically in pairs. One would stop while another moved, rifles up and at the high ready, in both pairs, presenting an appearance of constant motion and menace, rippling like a snake.

“Here, you’ve had enough,” Vargas said, taking back his position. “Ok: total 8 troops, that’s a squad… one tactical vehicle. Looks like an M-ATV. Must be another back there somewhere, or a technical. Smith, you report that up to HQ yet?”

Smith gestured at the radio. “It’s offline. I think the batteries are dead.”

“Christ,” Vargas mumbled. “Well call them with your phone. Look this is important. Tonight get new batteries from the command post.”

“I’ll get the batteries,” I said, wanting to impress Vargas. Also my girlfriend, Tandy, lived down near 180^th. It wasn’t far off the way to her place, an excuse to drop in and get some home cooking.

“You think we’ll see some action?” Smith said.

“Action, action, all you want is action,” Vargas said. “If you’d seen what I did in DC, you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get your gun on. But yeah, if there’s one thing the fascists mean, it’s action. Sooner or later.”

The Revolutionary Corps at that point was mustered mostly from New England and the suburbs of NYC itself. It hadn’t seen fighting in the winter and spring since the contested election. Smith and most of the others (myself included) hadn’t been there in D.C. when the fascists had made it almost to the White House and a motley, improvised group of citizens, soldiers, and loyal law enforcement had gone street to street pushing them back so the government could escape. Vargas was there — he’d been someone’s bodyguard. Who — a Senator — a woman from New York? The Midwest? What was her name… It doesn’t matter any more, though at the time it was an interesting anecdote…

Like everywhere, New England had seen violence when the fascists rose up, but nothing like what happened on the West Coast, the South, or the mid-Atlantic. Up in New England things had been resolved quickly. There weren’t enough fascists to make a go of it outside New Hampshire, and those fascists who did rise up in New Hampshire were brutally repressed after their comrades were defeated in Boston, Springfield, and Hartford. Enough police forces and national guard units had refused to betray their oaths to the Constitution, enough of the democratic revolutionary spirit remained within the breasts of New England men and women, that the reactionaries there had floundered and failed early — spectacularly so, even.

Whether they did so as part of a plan or not, what the fascists of New England accomplished was to tie northern pro-democracy states up with fighting internal enemies instead of helping their neighbors. We didn’t know that at the time, but at moments when swift and decisive help might have forestalled great bloodshed, the attention on potential local foes consumed everyone’s attention. It wasn’t long before a second wave of those enemies would appear at their borders, a howling, hostile army.

But in most other places the fascists had translated their quick offensive into victory more often than not and with surprising scope. Perhaps they sensed their vulnerabilities lay in us being able to organize our superior strength in manpower and industry. They’d been chewing the national and most state governments up since January, keeping the legitimately elected authorities and their forces on their heels, hitting them over and over where they least expected it. In our region Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had time to brace and fortify, so the fascists ran at Camden with full strength — wiped it nearly off the map. In their haste to capture Newark, they’d surrounded nearly 22,000 anti-fascist volunteers there, the entire 3^rd People’s Revolutionary Corps. Most evenings one could see flashes and hear the fascist artillery thumping in the distance.

Smith and Boucher and a few of the other guys had been excited to see the fascists arrive. To them it meant taking part in a battle. Boucher, a Marxist from New London, compared them to the Germans outside Moscow. Morale was high, and Vargas didn’t do much to pour cold water on it.

A few hours after reporting their scouts up to higher, we’d observed several armored fighting vehicles and a tank maneuvering on the bluffs. The fascists put up a couple drones and tried to fly them across the river, then sent them high into the air when they realized we were outside the drones’ range. What struck me more than the size of the group was its cohesion, and its audacity. They moved up to a point and acted. They didn’t ask for permission or wait for orders from higher. We had armored fighting vehicles, we had tanks, just like them. We didn’t have artillery — only the Army had artillery — but we had drones. Seeing the fascists there, flying their black and white flag with a blue stripe down the middle, made me nervous. They’d reduced the space between them and us to that narrow band of water on which so much depended. A free and diverse New York City, the heart of our revolution, was exposed and vulnerable. How had this happened?

A half hour or hour later, further down the river, the fascists launched a motorboat. Vargas told me to observe its progress through the telescope and report movement to him as it crept across the sun-dappled surface. The boat circled wider and wider, seeing how close it could come to our lines. At the middle of the river at the apex of its approach it abruptly beelined for the city. An old red “MAGA” flag was visible on its stern, flapping in the wind. The boat’s three occupants wore tactical vests and helmets; one was scanning our side with a sniper rifle, another was piloting, and the third was talking on a portable radio, probably doing to us what we should’ve been doing to them.

I appreciated their daring. They presented a confident, professional air, like they were straight out of a movie or video game about the Navy SEALs. They knew exactly what to do. Slapping across the water at high speed, these fascists, veterans of the bigger battles to the south, were getting down to business, getting it done.

We were far enough upriver from the source that we saw the boat tossed high into the air, tumbling end over end from the explosion before we heard the shot and the boom. No forms emerged from the wreckage, and the boat sank slowly into the river. This was the first time I’d seen our side fire first. I was glad we had.

***

Shortly after the fascists had turned their attention to Richmond, while New England, New York, and Pennsylvania were wrestling with their own fascist problems, New York City had declared itself a free city. Run by an alliance of Democratic Socialists, progressive Democrats, anarchists, and independents, the historic agreement put an end to strikes and labor walk offs, stabilized a questionable police force, and, in short, unified and anchored what we all hoped would be a fresh start for the city and maybe for America, too. Hopes were high for a nonviolent revolution ushering in the promise of a full, meritocratic democratic polity.

Many people left the city, but many more came, attracted by the promise of a just new world. One of the first things we did was rename things: The Hudson River became The Muhheakunnuk, or “River that flows two ways,” in the original Lenape. Madison Avenue became Liberty Avenue. Rockefeller Plaza, Veblen Plaza. Trump Tower became Mohican tower, for the indigenous Mohican peoples. And soforth.

Where we could reduce the damage done by naming places and things for white European settler colonialists who caused real and literal ethnic cleansing and genocide, we remedied as best we could. While the fascists were shooting and murdering, we were getting resolutions passed in bipartisan committees. As the shitlib pro-government forces were fighting desperate retrogrades, we were setting up a new way of compensating labor on the blockchain: Hours (pronounced “ours”) of labor were our new, profession-blind currency. A person worked the hours they did and were rewarded based on that flat rate, digitally, plus a small bonus in consideration for specialty labor or difficult labor nobody wanted to do. My daily wages, for example, were 14 ½ Hours per day: 12 Hours for the 12 hours of work I did for the militia, plus a 2 ½ Hour bonus for the hazardous nature of my work (though I had, up until that point, done little hazardous duty — that would change soon).

What a sound and simple system; what a fair and just means of compensation. I’d never seen anything like it, and haven’t since, though home ownership and other realities of adult life have given me a better appreciation for modern economies than I had in my youth.

The People’s Council of New York had compensated those New Yorkers who had stayed in the city with Hours on a prorated basis for the dollars and real estate it confiscated in order to trade with external partners, and signed an alliance with its neighboring states, the state of New York, and the federal government. Everyone was relieved it hadn’t come to shooting. Putting nearly 120,000 people under arms, such as myself, made the city by itself one of the largest standing armies on the territory of the former U.S.A. We were all proud of what we’d accomplished in such a short amount of time.

***

At the end of our shift, I took the spent batteries from our radio and headed down to HQ. The arrival of the fascists had sent everyone into a frenzy of activity and worry. When I poked my head into the command tent, I caught our commander, a woman who had flown C-17s for the Air Force, yelling at our XO for the comms situation. I saw that there weren’t any fresh batteries to be had, then made a swift retreat from the scene so as not to contribute to the man’s confusion and embarrassment.

“Where’s the RTO,” I asked one of the guards who was vaping and lounging outside the entrance.

“Over there,” he said, gesturing upslope toward another tent about 50 meters away. I walked over, passing three soldiers setting up some sort of fortified machinegun position.

“Look downhill at the road. Now look at the sandbags. Now look at the barrel of the gun,” the first soldier was saying. “Aha! Aha! Now do you see the problem? Move the machinegun around, like so… now you see more problems. Do it again!”

Scenes like this were common. None of us had more than a week’s training — it wasn’t even formal training, more like pre-basic. While there were more leftist veterans than many had probably thought before the war, in general the stereotype of veterans as moderates or pro-fascist was pretty true. A small group of sympathetic veterans were running round-the-clock training ranges up in Connecticut and Long Island, and NYC’s soldiery was permitted to access this as part of our agreement with our neighbors.

At the signals tent, I found the commander’s radio operator fiddling with two banks of battery rechargers. “You need to get these up to your position ASAP, the CO’s on the warpath about bad comms and using smartphones,” he said.

“I’ll be back in six hours,” I said, and left the heavy green blocks on the black recharger alongside several others, while the recharge status blinked red.

Next I headed north to Tandy’s building, a fin de siècle mansion that had been converted to high-ceilinged apartments, and was now housing for students and workers. It was a 10 minute bike ride from our positions, or a 25 minute jog, easily accomplished if the sirens signaled an attack.

I checked my Hours on my phone which promptly updated on the hour with my day’s work, plus the bonus for military service. Then I stopped at a bodega for provisions. One of the best-managed parts of the city was its city-wide revolutionary food cooperative. Food came in from upstate and Connecticut, and was rationed. There was enough of it on any given day, but hoarding was strictly forbidden so what was available was whatever happened to be on hand, often local produce.

The proprietor of this bodega was an Iraqi man who’d immigrated to the U.S. after the war there, Ahmed. Together with his family he supervised the bodega’s co-op labor, and had a keen eye for organizing. He greeted me when he saw me walk in, much as he greeted everyone in uniform.

“My friend, thank you for protecting us! You must be hungry: what would you like? Eggs, corn from Poughkeepsie, sausage? Please, take what you need, eat, stay strong and healthy! And say hello to your beautiful girlfriend! You’re a lucky man!”

Ahmed may or may not have known me, but he certainly seemed to know me, and that was appreciated in a strange city. I picked up a couple sausages, a quart of milk, and a half dozen eggs. There wasn’t any cheese, so I had to hope Tandy or one of what she called her “mates” had some at their place. Then, in the back, I procured a glass bottle of Long Island red wine.

“Five and one half Hours,” Ahmed said. “Did you hear our forces repelled a fascist invasion today? Maybe you were part of that?”

He was talking about the boat. “We spotted them,” I said. “It wasn’t anything serious.”

“Please, it wasn’t serious, you sound like me when I was in the Iraqi Army. I helped liberate Mosul from ISIS, you know. It’s never serious. Until you’re in the hospital!” He raised his shirt, and pointed at several scars near his abdomen. “Here, take some chewing gum, free. It helped me stay awake during long nights. When you don’t have your girlfriend around,” he said, winking conspiratorially.

Tandy was still at class when I arrived. James, a PhD candidate in Political Science at Columbia greeted me at the door and when he saw what I was carrying he invited me in, shepherding me to the kitchen where Vince, a militiaman from Danbury, Connecticut, gladly took my contribution to the dinner. “You’re always welcome here,” Vince said, “when you have food and wine!

 This was one practical way in which being a militia volunteer translated into good social standing, but I didn’t lord it over people, just showed up with what I had and got whatever amounted to a single portion in return.

This particular collective was mostly students, so my portion was usually appreciated, in spite of my taking part in what was a violent endeavor. Only the most radical students felt that in defending our political ideals, I was participating in an immoral and unethical war, but even they sat down to eat with me. The main course was a cabbage- and barley- based soup with my eggs and sausages as a garnish— again, no cheese — food wasn’t in short supply, but the variety had significantly diminished thanks to the war. The Californians and Midwesterners were probably eating great.

Seven of us sat around a small round table. I was briefly the center of attention as I talked about the motorboat reconnaissance, and the arrival of the fascists. Before I offered my eyewitness account, I was treated to another more outlandish product of the rumor mill I’d first encountered at Ahmed’s: the fascists, I heard, had attempted a crossing in force, and were driven back only by the killing of their general in the lead boat. I was glad to correct the record.

My much more prosaic account of the fascists’ arrival was held up to the various perspectives present at the meal. Some felt as my fellow militiamen did, that this was an opportunity to strike back while the fascists were few, that we should take the fight to them. Others that the fascists were too strong — that they’d make their way across the river sooner or later and so we should head up to Canada while we still could. Most held the opinion that nonviolent resistance was the way to resolve this, that fighting would only lead to more fighting, that perhaps the situation could be resolved through discussion and diplomacy. Reports of atrocities, this last group dismissed as liberal, pro-government propaganda.

The apartment’s owner, who also owned the building and had been well liked and admired before the war for his egalitarian and attentive approach to ownership, asked why we couldn’t come to some accommodation with the fascists.

“Let them have their wretched dystopian hell. Let them live in the rot that accompanies dictatorship, fascism, and all abominable authoritarian places,” he said. “Give them the land they have and tell them not to come any further.”

“What about our comrades in Newark?” said one of his tenants, Jenny, a black girl whose parents had moved to New York City from South Carolina in the 1960s for work. Jenny worked at a small factory sewing uniforms for the militia, and was one of the more prescient of us when it came to the threat of the fascists, and the importance of fighting. “If we abandon those like us in the South, or in Newark, why did we abstain from voting for Biden? If we don’t fight for our convictions, to help each other, shouldn’t we just join the fascists?”

“I voted for RFK Jr.,” said the former apartment owner to good natured jeers and boos, “I voted for RFK Jr. and I’d do it again” he yelled, with similar good-natured energy. Here, having voted for RFK Jr. was far less objectionable than voting for “Genocide Joe Biden,” which was tantamount to heresy.

Vince spoke in the lull that followed the yelling. “Anyway the fascists have started and they won’t stop. The real choices are Canada — assuming they don’t roll up there next — or fight. Fight or flee and hope someone else beats them. They’ll chase us to the end of the earth, they’ll never halt. Might as well be here.”

“They’ll negotiate when they’re punched out,” said Christina, a journalism student at City University of New York and one of the more moderate people in the collective. She was a bit older, in her 40s, and had been a public school teacher during an earlier life that hadn’t quite worked out on Long Island, near one of the Hamptons. “If we make a deal they agree to — ceasefire, a demarcation of borders — they’ll just rearm and keep going. These people are always the same — Hitler, Genghis Khan, Putin, Alexander the Great. Read history. They stop when they’re stopped, which is when they die. Because they know stopping means dealing with the violent energies they’ve unleashed, and they want to be fighting external enemies, not internal enemies.”

“It would have happened sooner or later,” added Jenny. “The moderates, the Democrats and shitlibs spent the years since the end of the Cold War selling everything as fast as they could, and supporting global racism and genocide. They’re as responsible for creating this movement as anyone else.”

Sometimes I wished I was confident and practiced in my public speaking, like the students. My first day with the unit I’d brought this line of reasoning, about Biden and the Democrats and the shitlibs, to Vargas, and he’d scoffed at what he called my naiveté.

“What happened in D.C. was, when they couldn’t get to the people they said they were mad at — the government, the globalists — the fascists made do with the vulnerable. They headed right for the poorest neighborhoods on their way out of the city and just about wrecked them,” he’d said. “As bad as Biden and the Democrats were over the years, I’ve never saw the suburbs where most of his supporters lived reduced to a smoking ruin, their inhabitants murdered, captured, or fled.”

I didn’t mention that perspective here at the table. It didn’t seem like the time or the place for it. Besides I wasn’t sure what I thought about it all. Sometimes in describing the fascists as intolerant of other viewpoints and dogmatic in their application of violence, I thought maybe we were guilty of that, too, in some ways. Certainly nothing like what the fascists did, but still… when I thought about our project, sometimes I questioned its wisdom or justice.

“You’ll never convince me violence is the answer,” said James. Soft-spoken and charismatic, when he spoke, people listened. His father was a first-generation immigrant from Cuba, and his mother, a Chinese immigrant. They’d met in Flushing, Queens, a real American love story. “Violence begets violence. Without anyone to fight, the fascists will fight each other. Ultimately they’ll lose interest in the cities and fall to quarreling among each other. You’ll see.”

We did see, just not in the way James meant. But those dark days were yet to come.

***

After dinner I waited around for Tandy, but she still hadn’t come home. After an hour, still restless after the day’s events, I decided that rather than hang around and look desperate, I’d put in some volunteer time. It was still too early to get the batteries. I picked up my rifle and wandered down to the Muhheakunnuk. It was summer, and the weather wasn’t bad. Ideal for nighttime strolling provided one had the proper identification so one wasn’t accidentally shot.

At the river’s edge I stopped and stared at what remained of the George Washington Bridge. The moon illuminated the ruined structure’s contours, rendered its demise somehow more tragic, more human. Its skeletal wreckage jutted up from the river’s calm surface, like ancient ruins. In places, the bridge had twisted as it fell, partially damming the river’s flow. Now it resembled nothing so much as a memorial to America, the ruins of a vision for peace and prosperity that could not last forever, because nothing in this universe ever does.

Destroying the GW made sense from the perspective of guns and firepower; the fascists had an edge in that department owing to personal stockpiles as well as those seized by various police and traitorous military units, but weapons require people, and they had far fewer volunteers than we did. In spite of their military successes, their victories over larger but poorly-led, poorly equipped units, everywhere they went they engendered fear and hatred, an occupying force that looked and talked like your racist neighbor. The strategy, then, was to attrit them, draw them into the cities, grind them down until there weren’t enough of them to the point where we could start pushing back. Of course as I mentioned earlier the hope at that time was that some disaster or calamity or miracle would forestall our having to fight them at all.

The fascists fielded excellent soldiers and combat leaders. Their units moved quickly and punched hard, and wrecked or absorbed local and state law enforcement organizations wholesale. Their units hung together well, and were led (mostly competently and capably) by veterans and former police officers.

Further down toward the bay loyalist Army units kept the Verrazano intact and were fortifying our side. I didn’t understand the logic behind keeping that bridge but taking out the much larger GW and Tappan Zee. Maybe the destruction was partly for the symbolism. The fascists claimed to stand for law and order and tradition, and part of how it had all started (insane as it sounds to say it now looking back over the great Golgothas we made for each other during the fighting) was over statues and names. What was an iconic bridge between New York and New Jersey, named for one of America’s founders, if not a statue, a monument to an idea like traffic, interstate commerce, a community based on trust and the exchange of goods?

Then again, it was also a symbolic loss for us—if we couldn’t control the George Washington Bridge, what did that say about our long term prospects? Vargas said slowing the fascists down was our best shot and the people who were placed in charge of our efforts at first — people who as time would demonstrate were not up to the effort — were a little too enthusiastic about doing so, and less enthusiastic about actually preparing us for what came next.

Loyalist Army units had sealed the Lincoln Tunnel, which was similar to blowing it. The decision had been made with some procedure for removing concrete in mind, but when you walked down near midtown and saw the familiar entrance, saw the white and gray spill as though trolls had melted the world’s biggest marshmallow, it was hard imagining that tunnel ever working again.

From the bones of the fallen GW, I walked south for 5 minutes until I came to one of our fortified positions, down near the water, forward and downhill from HQ. It was crewed by my unit, but not one from the scouts, conventional infantry. We all had the same challenge and password. I didn’t know this group, but stopped in to chat about the motorboat, ask if they’d seen any other movement. They hadn’t. Didn’t have thermal scopes down here, were worried about night landings and infiltration. I was shocked — I thought frontline positions would have thermals for sure.

“One every 5 positions,” said the duty sergeant. “We rely on them and tracers to figure out what’s happening. Moonlit night like tonight, seems unlikely we’ll see any more action. Especially considering the tide.”

I asked why the tide was significant. Prior to the war I hadn’t spent much time near the ocean.

“Oh, a full moon corresponds with high tide. This particular high tide is what they call a “king tide,” get them in winter and summer,” the sergeant said. “Higher water means a longer distance to cross, and stronger currents. Groups trying to cross in boats would be pulled far upriver or downriver of where they were hoping to cross — maybe even swept out to ocean.”

“You think the fascists know that?”

“Oh, I’m sure of it… they’re mostly country folk, people who know things like the tides, and hunting. No that’s not going to throw them. Sad to say it. That’s the sort of thing our generals would probably fuck up.”

We stood there quietly in awe of the sergeant’s demoralizing statement, one we both felt to be true, the GW’s shredded metal beams and cables clanking and squealing upriver. A rumble of artillery in the distance and flashes of light roused us from our reverie.

“Won’t be much longer. No way they can hold out without reinforcements.”

“How do you know? How do you know they won’t grind the fascists up street by street and block by block?”

The sergeant gestured toward the southern end of Manhattan. “Brother works at one of the fish markets. Buddy of his is a fisherman, solid American and New Yorker, told him he’s been in touch with fishermen out of Newark. Apparently they’re getting pummeled. Never seen the fascists put so much work into destroying a city.”

“You think we should move down, try to help them?”

In response, the sergeant now nodded up at the GW’s ruins. “Not part of the plan. Anyway, we barely know how to hold a defense. Most of the guys here have never fired their rifles, it’s all we can do to point them in the right direction. How are we supposed to move to the attack?”

For this question and all the others, I had no answers. I’d joined the movement, I was a scout, and all I knew was that if the fascists wanted a fight, we ought to give it to them. Even then I sensed that simply to accommodate their desires would be a mistake. I looked out at the river, to where the boat had been earlier. The fighting would get so much worse in the days and months to come, far worse than almost anyone could imagine. But on that day, the thing that I noticed was the water — how high it had come up the pier — how close we were to it, lapping at the moorings and the concrete stairs, closer to our boots than it had ever been. And what terrible creatures teemed beneath its opaque surface!

My year-long run as guest-columnist for The Wrath-Bearing Tree comes to an end this month. I’m not sure if WBT founders Adrian Bonenberger and Mike Carson planned for my stint to last only twelve months, but in my mind it was always the goal. Twelve months, twelve Strike Through the Mask! columns, each with a different subject, obviously, but more personally, each with a different tone or style. My goal was variation within similarity, like a record album of yore: some songs fast, some slow, some mournful, some more upbeat, but all recognizable as the unified work of the creator.

I also welcomed the pressure of a monthly deadline. On my blog Time Now, I publish when I please. But I grew up loving the daily, weekly, and monthly columns of writers I admired in the newspapers and magazines I read—thinkers who wrote lively, interesting columns on a regular schedule. Finally, I realized I could use Strike Through the Mask! to range wider and dive deeper than I typically did in Time Now. Subjects I might not touch in Time Now, such as soldier memoirs and current events, I have explored at length in Strike Through the Mask! Most of all, I wanted to show Time Now readers a little more of the “real me”—my opinions, thoughts, and interests apart from the focus on other peoples’ books and artworks in Time Now.

I couldn’t have asked for better editors than Adrian and Mike. They have allowed me to write almost without suggestion or guidance, for better and for worse, and their infrequent edits and comments have always been on-point and encouraging. The war-writing community is lucky to have such thoughtful and generous leaders.

So what lies ahead? Time Now seems to have run its course, as well. I won’t definitively declare it’s over, but it does seem time for other writers more in-tune with the spirit of the 2020s to carry on its work. But who knows? I’ve read John Milas’s The Militia House and watched The Covenant and I have thoughts…. Navy veteran Jillian Danback-McGhan’s short-story collection Midwatch is on the way. A movie titled Fremont, about Afghan interpreters in America, and Northern Shade, about PTSD, are highly recommended and I look forward to watching them. Entire genres related to war-writing, such as YA and romance, lie mostly untouched, awaiting analysis….

I started Time Now in 2012 when it seemed clear that a vibrant writing-and-publishing scene centered on the work by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was emerging. One precipitating event was the 2010 War, Literature, and the Arts conference at the United States Air Force Academy. I was fortunate to attend and it was there I first met or heard read authors such as Siobhan Fallon, Matt Gallagher, and Benjamin Busch. Another catalyst was the publication in 2012 of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, David Abrams’ Fobbit, and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—novels published by major houses and widely reviewed and largely celebrated. At the time, I was teaching at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where I had already sponsored a reading by Brian Turner. That had been an early-on, isolated event, however, and now I sensed a cohort of vet-writers and affiliated family members and interested authors with no formal military affiliation coalescing. I also intuited that I, an infantry veteran of Afghanistan with a PhD in English Literature, was in a position to document and promote the emerging work.

Scenes need events, outlets, and platforms to thrive. From that first 2011 WLA conference to the next one, in 2018, a number of events and publishing venues, infused by a sense of community, shared endeavor, and a do-it-yourself ethos, made being a vet-writer exciting and fulfilling. Online publishing sites a-plenty were available, and publishers and general readers were reasonably open to vet memoir, fiction, and poetry. Seemingly every large city and college campus was hosting vet-writing workshops and the vet-writer presence at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Program conference (AWP) was robust. I regularly attended AWP between 2014 and 2018, where I hosted several panels and met and mingled with many writers in the scene. And until 2015 I had a position at the United States Military Academy at West Point that allowed me to stage events for vet writers and artists to read and perform for cadets.

That physical sense of community has largely faded, and vet-writers now rely on social media to promote, connect, and opine. That’s OK, but if writers and artists now coming into print feel isolated rather than connected by the digisphere, I remind them that the cohesion of 2010-2018 was largely generated by the initiative of the participants themselves. If recreating that energy seems desirable, then the answer is to stage readings, host events, create platforms, reach out, form alliances, and keep knocking on doors. I’m not a position to help make that happen much anymore, but I love the spirit and energy when I see it.

To end here, I’ll offer some photos of prominent authors in the scene I’ve taken over the years. Some I’ve already published on Time Now, but they’re too good not to be given another airing. Salute to all the writers and their works!

Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet, Phantom Noise, and many others, Red Bank, NJ, 2018

Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone and The Confusion of Languages, West Point, NY, 2018

Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries, Highland Falls, NY, 2014

Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Youngblood, and Empire City, Camden NJ, 2016. (This picture was supposed to be taken in front of Walt Whitman’s house, but what can I say? We screwed up and took the photo a few doors down from the Good Gray Poet’s residence.)

Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition and others, West Point, NY, 2014

Elyse Fenton, author of Clamor, Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark, NJ, 2014

Brian Van Reet, author of Spoils, Austin, TX, 2016

John Renehan, author of The Valley, Arlington, VA, 2018

Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue, Dark at the Crossing, and many others, Middletown, CT, 2019

Adrian Bonenberger, author of Afghan Memoir and The Disappointed Soldier, Branford, CT, 2021

Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk and Disappointment River, among others, New York, NY, 2020

Playwright Jay Moad and fiction author Jesse Goolsby, New York, NY, 2017. Moad and Goolsby were two of the driving forces behind the United States Air Force Academy’s War, Literature, and the Arts journal and conferences.

Roy Scranton and Jacob Seigel, Brooklyn, NY, 2018. Scranton is the author of War Porn and Seigel is the author of the short-story “Smile There Are IEDs Everywhere,” from the seminal vet-writing anthology Fire and Forget edited by Scranton and Matt Gallagher.

Jennifer Orth-Veillon and Benjamin Busch, New Haven, CT, 2018. Orth-Veillon edited the anthology of writing about World War I Beyond The Limits of Their Longing that features a who’s-who of vet and vet-adjacent writers. Busch is the author of the memoir Dust to Dust, as well as a poet, actor, filmmaker, photographer and illustrator.

Surreal Expulsion

PUT—for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Fourteen chairs loiter, emptied, no young bodies
adjusting for the next lesson, hand-raising,
class-clown antic, contemplative talk, pat show
of teen contempt, rhythm beaten with pencil, palm,
bouncing knee, jouncing heal, wise-crack, step
in the impossible problem never to be solved.
Instead, more of the same news, the same vows
taxiing the hellish hallways of feigned intention
but never taking off—the same dazed moments
of the dead. Perhaps their freed spirits now see
through the coal-black tunnel of some eternity
right into the next school’s beehive of victims.
Perhaps they still shadow their three steady mentors
who stood staunch ground in the slow-motion flow
of high-speed ammo. The clip of names shoots holes
clean through law’s callous gut—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCAaron, Helena, and Alex,
Carmen, Peter, Cara, Chris, and Meadow,
PUT_CCCScott, Alaina, Martin, Alyssa, and Nick,
Jamie, Luke, Gina, and “Guac” Joaquin—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCwhose roll call
claims only an absurd third of a minute, while
their totaled lives witnessed nearly 5 thousand
wheels of the moon through some 75 trillion miles.
But unlike the pull of that implacable moon,
the glib fever of ‘prayers and condolences’ can’t
turn the tide of memory’s radiating its fixed
fissures scored by shards of glass and bone.
Here, we’re left to settle the moonscape of Too Late
for those whose expelled footsteps befuddle us.
And lauding immortality soothes no better. We
know we relax at our children’s peril, run rash risk
of shoring up the open/closed-carry-frenzied fight,
take false hope in the bundles of white-washed bills.
Anthony Borges took five bullets to shield twenty
surviving friends, sacrificed his soccer stardom
because somehow he knew what he had to do.
His lacerated back and shattered femur scream
in a language we now must teach across America.

I escaped to America after my fiancé, Farhid, died. He was an officer in the Afghan National Army in Bagarm when he was killed by a roadside bomb. His friend Abdul called and told me the news. He and Farhid had attended school together and had joined the army at the same time. Abdul used to visit us, but I hadn’t seen him in years. When I got off the phone, I felt like still air on a clear day. Nothing stirred. No sound and no one around me. An emptiness engulfed me that was not altogether unpleasant. I was adrift but not grieving. I had never wanted to marry him; it was my father’s wish that I do so. Farhid was my cousin.

His father, my Uncle Gülay, was my father’s brother. Gülay died in a car accident before I was born, and my father took Farhid and his mother into our family. I saw Farhid as an older brother—someone I played hide and seek with as a child—and not as a husband, but my father said he wanted to have grandchildren, especially a grandson. He also thought our marriage would honor Gülay, and he made it clear I didn’t have a choice. I don’t like Farhid, I told my father, not in that way. Oh, you are a big shame, he scolded me. I didn’t ask for your opinion. I decide. I ran to my room. My mother followed and sat beside me as I wept into my pillow. Your father has decided as my father decided for me when I was your age, she said. It will be fine. Your family wouldn’t make a bad decision. Farhid is a good boy. Open your heart and you will see him as your father sees him and learn to love him.

After Farhid died, I mourned the boy I knew but not the man I hadn’t wanted for a husband. I remembered when he stood with me on the second floor of our home in Jalalabad when the Taliban left Afghanistan after the Americans invaded. We watched them drive away, their faces grim, angry. After that, my father allowed me to leave the house without a burqa. Farhid and I would walk to the downtown bazaar, and he’d hold my left hand as he guided us through the crowds. He liked to make puppets, and some mornings I’d wake up and find him crouched at the foot of my bed with socks on his hands imitating sheep and goats. Get up, baaa! Get up, Samira, baaa, he’d say and I’d duck under the sheets giggling as he pinched my toes. These memories made me sad. Farhid—my cousin, my brother—was gone, but I felt a certain lightness too because now I’d never have to marry him. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and saw hill-shaped shadows rise out of the dark and spread across the ceiling and loom over me and I knew it was the spirit of Uncle Gülay, enraged that Farhid’s death had denied him the honor of our marriage.

My father hung a photograph of Farhid in his army uniform in the entrance of our house. I hadn’t seen this picture before. He looked older than I remembered. He had a sharp chin, a firm mouth, and a stern look that gave the impression of someone gazing into their future. He wasn’t the boy with the puppets. Perhaps I could have loved him, I thought, and for the first time I felt despair but it was a distant kind of grief toward someone I had never really known.

After his funeral, my life resumed as if he had never died. I woke up early and attended classes at Jalalabad State University from seven to one. After school, I took a computer course and studied English so that one day I could get a good job with a Western NGO. One of my favorite memories: accessing the internet for the first time and establishing a Yahoo email account.

Those leisurely days didn’t last. Eight weeks after Farhid’s funeral, I began receiving death threats from Taliban supporters. Some of them sent text messages: We know your fiancé fought against the army of Allah. He is dead and you’ll be next. Some mornings, my father would find notes tacked to our front door: Whore! You have betrayed Islam by becoming engaged to an infidel. We will eliminate you and all infidels who betray Allah. Whoever wrote these notes, I believe, set off bombs near our house, too many to count, and sticky bombs on cars belonging to our neighbors. It became normal to hear an explosion and the panicked screams that followed. I became afraid to leave the house and stopped attending school.

My father was a physician. One day he went out with the Afghan National Army to treat sick soldiers when a bomb exploded and shrapnel tore into his left arm and both legs. A neighbor heard the news but didn’t want to alarm my family. He asked for some clothes to take to the hospital treating my father. Why do you need his clothes? my mother asked; but instead of answering her, he rushed off without explanation. Then my cousin Reshaf called from Kabul and asked my mother about the bombing. He had read about it on the internet. It killed ten government soldiers, he said. My mother tried to reach my father but he didn’t answer his phone. Finally, someone from the hospital called and said he had been injured. We rushed to the hospital and wandered halls where injured soldiers lay on gurneys and stared at us with dazed, hollow eyes. My father lay in a bed in a small room with peeling green paint that overlooked a courtyard. Families sat under trees. Roaming dogs snapped at men who chased them away. A white sheet covered my father up to his chin. His blood-stained legs were raised in slings, and his injured arm was wrapped in gauze soaked by iodine. Dozens of cuts ruined his face. He tried to speak but his voice caught in his throat and I looked away as tears rolled down his face.

He recovered but he couldn’t walk without help and often used a wheelchair. Nerve damage in his left hand prevented him from using medical instruments. He spent his days in his small clinic sitting at his desk and offering advice to colleagues. He watched them work, and when he grew bored he scrolled through his computer until he grew tired and rested his chin on his chest and slept.

The threats against my life continued. That summer my father began making inquiries, and through a friend in the Ministry of Interior he secured a visa for me to emigrate to the United States that was given to families who had either fought or worked with Western forces. Her husband was an Afghan soldier, my father told his friend. She can’t stay here. That night while I was in my room preparing to go to bed he called for me. I followed his voice out to our garden where he stood in the light of a full moon. Cats yowled and the distant barking of dogs rose above the noise of car horns and of voices in the shopping centers of Shar-e-Naw. My parents’ bedroom window opened onto the garden and I could hear my mother crying. Without looking at me, my father said I’d fly to the United States in the morning. Arrangements had been made through an NGO to take me to Houston, Texas, where an American aid organization would help me. You will leave us to start a new life, inshallah, my father said.

I ran from the garden to my mother’s room but she had shut the door and wouldn’t let me in. There is nothing I can do for you, she called out to me. I slid to the floor and wept. In my bed that night, I wondered where Texas was in the United States. I thought of Farhid and the resolute look on his face in the photograph above our front door. I decided to have that same kind of determination, and I embraced his image, ignored my fear, and withheld my tears until something inside me retreated to a far corner.

My father and mother took me to Kabul International Airport. I held my mother for a long time, our wet faces touching. A plane carried me to Qatar and then to Washington, D.C. That evening, I flew to El Paso and stayed in a tent in a U.S. Army camp near Fort Bliss. I couldn’t count the number of tents and the number of people filling them. Like a gathering of nomads stretching without end across a white desert. The suffocating summer heat, I thought, was worse than Jalalabad. Sand and dust swirled endlessly. There wasn’t a single second I didn’t hear babies crying, heavy trucks driving past, and announcements over loudspeakers. One morning a soldier took me to a room in a square, concrete building where a man sat alone at a table. He said he was from the Department of Homeland Security. He asked me about Farhid. I told him how we used to play as children. I know nothing about his life as a soldier, I said. But he was your fiancé, the man insisted. My father arranged our marriage, I explained. He asked about my parents and if they had ever traveled outside of Afghanistan. No, I told him, they hadn’t. He thanked me and the soldier returned me to my tent.

I lost my appetite and would sit on the floor of my tent and spend hours rocking back and forth as I had as a child when I was scared.  A nurse told me I suffered from panic attacks, and she gave me medication that put me to sleep. I had dreams of bomb blasts. In one dream, I told my father, Let’s go away from here. You’re in America, he said, don’t worry. Another time, I dreamed my father was in great pain. When I called them, my mother said, Your father’s legs were hurting him. That’s why you had the dream.

Two months later I flew to Houston, where I was met by a man named Yasin from the Texas Institute for Refugee Services. Welcome to Houston, he said, and then he led me out of the airport and into a parking lot. The hot, humid air wrapped around me so tightly that my arms felt stuck to my body. My clothes clung to me like wet paper.

Yasin told me he was my caseworker. What is that? I asked. It means you are my responsibility, he said. He had dark hair and brown eyes and he wore a white shirt with a thin tie and a gray suit. He said he was from the Afghan city of Herat and had worked for an American NGO until he came under threat from the Taliban. He got a U.S. visa like mine and had flown to Houston three years ago. I told him about Farhid. I’m sorry for you, he said. When I think of Afghanistan and everyone I left behind, I shake with fear. His sad look touched me.

He led me to his car, a hybrid, he told me proudly. Turning a knob, he switched on the air conditioning and a chill ran through me as the cold air struck my sweat-dampened clothes. He gave me a bottle of water and told me I could remove my hijab; in America, he explained, women don’t have to cover their heads. I told him I felt more comfortable keeping it on. I wore your shoes once, as the Americans like to say, he said, but don’t be scared. After a while the U.S. won’t feel so strange and you will take off your hijab. He smiled and showed all of his teeth.

We drove to a Social Security office where I signed up for refugee benefits and Medicaid. He said these programs would provide a little bit of money to pay for housing, food, and health care. He took me to a small apartment in a five-story building owned by the institute. A swing hung motionless in an empty playground and large black birds hopped on the ground, and the noise they made flapping their heavy wings reminded me of Jalalabad merchants when they snapped carpets in the air to shake off dust. We took an elevator to a second-floor apartment. It had a sofa and a table with two chairs. A small bed with sheets and a blanket took up most of the bedroom. Blue towels hung from a rack in the bathroom. This will be your new home, Yasin said. I looked out the living room window and saw nothing but the doors of apartments across the way. Through my kitchen window I noticed people sitting on steps leading to the floors above me. Shadows converged over them and I became depressed, and I thought of Farhid’s spirit rising toward paradise—a dark journey toward light—and I decided this was my dark journey and eventually, inshallah, I’d find light and happiness in this my new home.

In the following days, Yasin took me to a job preparation class. The instructor was impressed I knew so much English and I explained I had studied it in Jalalabad. That is a good start, but you don’t know everything, he said. He told me that when I met someone, I should shake their hand and look them in their eyes and say, How do you do? Nice to meet you. I told him in Afghanistan this wouldn’t be possible; a woman would never shake a man’s hand or look at them unless they were their husband or family. You aren’t in Afghanistan, he reminded me. After class, Yasin would always walk ahead of me and when we came to a door he would stop and open it for me. I told him he didn’t have to do this, but he insisted. He was very kind. Slow, slowly, in the evenings in my apartment, I began to think that I might like America. I thought I could love Yasin.

After four weeks, Yasin told me he could no longer see me. Catholic Charities worked with refugees for only one month. He was very matter-of-fact. He told me to stop at a flower shop near his office. It was owned by a friend of his, Shivay. He had spoken to him and Shivay had agreed to hire me. You are fully oriented to the city, he told me, and now you will have a job. You’re set. Go and live your life. He smiled his toothy grin and stuck out his hand to shake mine. I don’t understand, I said. What don’t you understand? he asked. That stillness I felt when Abdul called me about Farhid returned, but this time it was Yasin’s absence I began to feel and I didn’t want him to go. He looked at me without understanding. I resisted the tears I felt brimming in my eyes and took his hand. Thank you, I said, looking at him. It was nice to meet you.

The next morning, I met Shivay. He told me he was born in Houston but his parents are Afghan. They came to the United States after the Russian invasion. I tried to speak to him in Dari as I sometimes had with Yasin, but he shook his head. My parents always spoke English around me, he said. They wanted me to be an American. That is what you should want to be too, Samira. He provided me with a table and a calculator to ring up sales. I inhaled the fragrance of red roses that filled buckets on the shelves by the door as I waited for customers, prompting memories of my childhood in Jalalabad. In those days, Farhid and I helped vendors put roses in pails of water outside their stalls on narrow streets hazy with dust. Orange trees bloomed in the summer and after the fruit had set, Farhid climbed them and dropped oranges down to me. The Kabul River passed behind the bazaar and we dangled our bare feet in its clear water. The frigid winter weather made us shake with cold and we stayed inside under blankets, eager for the comforts of spring. The sun blistered the sky in summer making the days impossibly hot, but no matter the heat we’d be back in the bazaars helping the vendors with their roses, deep red and cool in their buckets.

The flower shop took up a corner lot in a quiet neighborhood near a park where people gathered in the afternoon. I’d see men walk up to women and hug them and after a brief conversation they’d walk away. In Afghanistan, a woman would never hug a man outside of her family. Who were these men, I asked myself? The women wore slim dresses that revealed too much of their bodies, and I wondered how they felt, almost naked in public pressing their bodies against a man, some of whom didn’t wear shirts, and I saw the men’s bare chests and my heart beat fast and I blushed when I caught Shivay watching me. He laughed. Here, there are many men and women who aren’t Muslim, he said. In America, it isn’t shameful to look.

One morning Shivay surprised me with a cup of green tea. My parents always drink green tea, he said. They say it’s an Afghan custom. Is it? I told him it was and from then on he made green tea for me every morning.

At midday, Shivay would buy us lunch and after work he’d walk me to the nearby bus stop, and he’d wait with me until the bus arrived. I told him he didn’t have to do this but he insisted. You are a pretty girl and shouldn’t go out alone at night. When the bus arrived, I’d get on and watch him walk away. I felt warm all over. I thought I could love this man.

Two months later, however, Shivay told me he no longer needed me. He had hired me as a favor to Yasin, he said. That night when he walked me to the bus, he suggested I apply at a nearby Wal-Mart. He promised to give me a good recommendation and then he handed me a half empty box of green tea. I don’t drink it, he said.

Wal-Mart didn’t have any job openings. I applied at other stores, but no one called me. I  called Yasin. He said he’d try to help me, but I was no longer his client. I stayed in my apartment and when I grew bored I drew henna tattoos on my hands and feet, and at night I took the pills that helped me sleep. Then one afternoon, my father called. He said Farhid’s friend Abdul had received a U.S. visa and would be arriving in Houston soon. He has visited your mother and me many times since Farhid died so that we’d know he honors Farhid’s memory, my father told me. He is a nice boy. I have spoken to his family, and we are in agreement that he’d make a good husband for you in Texas.

I didn’t know what to say. After a moment, I hurried outside and took the elevator down to the playground and sat in a swing, gripping my phone in my left hand, and rocked back and forth, thrusting my legs out to gain momentum and stared at the sky through the spare trees. Motionless clouds blocked the sun. Lean shadows cut across the sidewalk. I rose higher and higher, lulled by the rhythmic creaking of the swing. Hello, Samira, are you there? I heard my father shout. No other sound but his voice disturbed the resigned stillness until I was ready to emerge from its quiet consolation. I ceased pumping my legs, let my toes drag against the ground. I slowed to a stop. Yes, Father, I’m here, I said into my phone. I asked him to text me a photograph of Abdul. Seconds later, a young man with a smooth face stared out at me from my phone. He had a distant, moody look that conveyed a seriousness of purpose, of someone who believed he was performing his duty. As would I. Over time, I was sure I could love this man.

Alpert Nelsen had lost a toe. He just didn’t know it yet. Not a big toe. One of the smaller ones. It got infected when he kicked a roll of fencing after his cameraman deleted the interview footage.

“Can’t you disinfect it?” he asked his doctor, a bearded and bespectacled man working out of a family clinic in the Bronx. “You know. Cut it off. Clean it off. Then reattach it?”

His doctor looked at him for a beat. “Sepsis,” he said flatly. “Tell me, Mr. Nelsen, how did you injure your toe?” He wiped Alpert’s arm with an alcohol swab, pinched the skin, and plunged a syringe needle into his muscle for tetanus.

He winced at the sting. As the doctor covered the spot with a bandage, Alpert told him about the desert along the northern Texas border and his interviews with the sheriff. Spools of wire sat scattered across the cracked earth, random and misplaced like aeration plugs on a drought-stricken lawn. Glug glug, the sheriff had joked as he watered a long line of planter boxes under the eaves of the waystation, the sharp tips of yucca leaves spearing the soft bodies of jade. Empty water bottles blew across the road into a ditch, a reservoir of plastic.

“So, you’re telling me you kicked a roll of fencing on the Texas border?” the doctor asked.

“Yeah.”

“You will need to be more careful next time.”

“Yeah, but what about one of those fancy new prosthetics? You know, put that in place of my toe.”

“No,” the doctor said. “If your foot was missing, sure. Or your hand. Or a limb. You could opt for a nerve-spliced prosthetic with synthetic skin, indistinguishable from the real thing. But a missing toe? No, that is just something you will have to get used to.”

“Huh.”

“Not to worry, though. You will get used to it. A slight limp for a few months, regain your balance, and then you’ll be right as rain.”

“Might as well chop off my entire foot. Better to have a prosthetic.”

“Might have to do that if you don’t get started on antibiotics right away. And we need to schedule intake at our sister clinic to have that toe removed,” he said confidently. Then, upon seeing Alpert’s face, he assured him, “It’s a simple procedure, really. They’ll numb the area, no pain, and then snip it off at the joint. You won’t feel a thing. You cannot leave that toe unattended, Mr. Nelsen.”

Mr. Nelsen attended to his apartment instead, limping as he looked for an old Two-Way camera. A Two-Way won’t have a crisis of conscience, he thought as he picked through oil-stained boxes at his workstation. A Two-Way won’t look away. The automated flying recorder would feed his servers footage that he edited into digestible narratives for his followers to share and patronize. Still, his subscriber count had begun to dip.

People quit on him. His cameraman. His girlfriend. Sinkholes appeared in his life without warning, leaving him to scramble around the openings and shovel dirt to bring the ground back to level. Oriana Knowles had left him to help refugees fleeing Texas after other countries airlifted their citizens to safety, or so she had claimed. He remembered her face, a tear-streaked mask of resentment framed by hair the color of sunlight, a Renaissance painting if there ever was one. He held the Two-Way to a pendant light and fiddled with its gyroscope.

A battery pack fell out, tumbled against the workstation, and landed on his bad toe. He shrieked in pain and clutched his foot. Goddamn me, he admonished himself. I shouldn’t have started thinking about her. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Her absence. It wasn’t fair that Oriana had cared more about others, cared more about some strangers in some far-off land that could have been ignored just by going about their lives. Eating penne alla vodka at Guiseppe’s. Strolling through Central Park. Gelatos under the Statue of Liberty. He missed those quiet moments when a pocket of time opened up just for them.

His toe throbbed on the flight back to the Texas border and hurt even more as he baked under the New Mexico sun. The sovereign territory of Texas disappeared over the horizon, flat and dry. Dead earth not worth fighting for. They thought they were free, but the collapse had brought cartels into their cities, and detention camps spread throughout the Texas deserts like cacti bloom after rain.

A man with a cowboy hat, the sheriff, walked toward the waystation, heat mirages and dust distorting him in the distance. The man showed no urgency to join him under the shade, taking his time to adjust his boots or shift something he carried. As he got closer, Alpert recognized the object as a plastic jug, like the water jugs on pallets inside the entrance. Water. He swallowed and felt thirst scrape at his throat. He had forgotten how quickly dehydration came here in the desert, even when standing in the shade.

He eyed the jugs on the pallets. Some were half-empty, bubbles resting in the water, but each had an individual and somewhat peculiar stamp. A blue trident, its lateral prongs curving comically off to the side, or a cartoon devil, its horns making the same exaggerated curve, or an abstract bird with curved wings. He bent down and rubbed his thumb over one of the trident stamps. The ink didn’t smudge as the water jostled inside.

“Traffickers stamp them,” the sheriff said, coming up behind him. “Their way of identifying their stash. I find them and confiscate them.” He placed the jug he had been carrying next to the others.

“Can I have some?” Alpert asked hopefully.

The sheriff nodded. “Knock yourself out.”

Alpert fumbled with the cap on a trident jug and drank, drops splattering against his collared shirt. The water calmed his thirst, for a moment, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough to last for long. He handed the empty jug back to the sheriff.

The sheriff watched him with detached interest. His eyes hid behind wrap-around sunglasses, skin peeling at the edges of his sunburned nose and cheeks, ears pushed down under the brim of his white cowboy hat. The faded insignia of border security rested above the hatband. It showed an old map of the southern states before Texas had seceded, blobs of territory shifting throughout history.

Texas independence, if it could be called that, had come through the judiciary a decade ago, granted by the Chief Justice himself in a 5-to-4 ruling. Texas’s right-wing militias took over most of the territory in the years that followed, like warlords from some distant land, and interstate commerce collapsed. New maps of America showed a cavernous hole where Texas had once proudly stood, cordoned off by fencing and surveillance, an emptiness that felt like a phantom limb.

“What happened to your cameraman?” the sheriff asked.

“Fired him.” They both knew he hadn’t fired his cameraman, Pierre Teeter from Nova Scotia. Pierre had stormed off in a huff after the sheriff had mocked him for the umpteenth time, testing his discomfort. Having a good cameraman was preferable to self-shooting. More accurate reaction shots, whereas the Two-Way pivoted in the air between sounds. “We’ll use my floater to finish our interview and get aerial shots. That work for you?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Alpert considered the sheriff’s repeated phrase of self-harm as he set the camera aloft and decided it was easier to believe that he hadn’t meant it as an expression of violence. Either way, it would be captured on his remote servers to be edited, memed, and shared. A self-described independent journalist, he had attracted a fanbase of anti-refugees after multiple interviews with Texas militia leaders, but really they were just ranchers armed with weapons of war. Most had knocked themselves out with assassinations on rival militias and mass shootings, creating the recent influx of Texas refugees seeking asylum.

After confirming his profile in the viewfinder, Alpert adopted the practiced pose of pensive curiosity as he squinted at the camera. “Sheriff Ward Baptiste is a humble man decorated for years of service protecting our southern border. We are here today to learn about the technology deployed at his border station, an unassuming rambler hidden somewhere secret, a location that even I cannot disclose.”

The sheriff chuckled. “Sure, Alpert. Very secret, very hidden. Illegal aliens are scooped up by our surveillance-detention system and brought back to Texas Detention Centers, or TDCs. Simple as that. We keep it clean-clean as a jellybean. On this side of the border, at least. Can’t speak for the other side.”

Finally, Alpert exclaimed, some good soundbites. Ward Baptiste, sheriff Glug Glug himself, must have been practicing. Absent were his previous one-word answers tinged with distrust. Perhaps he watched some of my other interviews, he thought. “Tell me about the illegal aliens. Who are they, and why do they come here?”

“Well,” the sheriff drawled, seeming to stare off into the distance behind his impenetrable sunglasses.

Alpert feared he had returned to his adversarial persona, like the whiplash of interviewing a politician who delights in switching between faux compliments and verbal abuse. Alpert tightened his jaw as he prepared to prompt him again.

“Well.” Ward pointed toward a distant object in the desert that wavered behind a heat mirage. “Why don’t you ask one yourself?”

It looked like nothing, and it looked like it could be anything. A specter among the many wavering things sitting at the edge of the horizon. Alpert glanced at the footage captured on the Two-Way on his phone, but he couldn’t determine its location near the border station as the camera circled overhead. He pulled at his collar to get air moving over the sweat on his chest, this unexpected and unseen thing ratcheting up his frustration.

“How can you tell?”

“Been around the desert long enough to know when something is out of place. It’s a second skin. Same reflection every day. Any change out there is a mole or a freckle that needs to be looked at. C’mon, boyo, let’s start walking.”

Looking back at the utility vehicle sitting in the shade of the waystation, Alpert hobbled after Ward. Sun blasted him from above as he came out from under the eaves.

“Can’t we take the four-wheeler out there? Looks like a long walk.”

“Naa, I could use your help destroying supply caches. Easier to find them on foot.”

Alpert felt like Ward was torturing him on purpose as he took his time around the rolls of fencing, looking back at Alpert to make sure he was keeping up. The sheriff exercised excruciating exactness overturning rocks and opening bluffs woven out of dried mud and sticks. He unwrapped food hidden in underground stashes, scattered it across the earth, and told Alpert how coyotes and red-tailed hawks gnawed at it and shat it out. “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain,” he quoted and laughed. Upon finding a cache of energy bars in yellow packaging, he unwrapped one and dropped the wrapper. Alpert watched it flutter away like a butterfly in the wind.

“See that shape drawn on the ground over there?” Ward smacked his lips as he talked, his tongue navigating nougat. “Go brush off the dirt and rocks and lift up the panel. Water’s hidden underneath.”

Alpert stared at the ground for evidence of a shape. He looked back at the sheriff’s inscrutable face under the shadow of his cowboy hat. He felt frustration rising again with the heat, sweat dripping down his chest. His inflamed toe pulsed with pain. A mingling of misery that made him impatient and made him long to be back in his climate-controlled apartment. He squatted down, tilted his head, and looked for the thing, anything, hoping to see it from a different angle. No shape appeared.

“What are you seeing?” He shook his head in defeat.

“Right there in front of you. El Cartel del Mar. They mark their stashes with a trident. You gotta look for the curve in the dirt they make with pebbles and rocks. Ya see it now?”

Alpert saw it, finally, couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it to begin with. Like learning to see an optical illusion, the shape was obvious to him now. Looking around the ground, he saw other distinctive curvatures marking hidden stashes. “There are so many of them,” he said in astonishment. He shook his head. Not having Pierre here to capture footage of the markings on the ground, a graveyard of contraband, lessened the impact. The Two-Way hovered lazily nearby, focusing only on him and the sheriff as they spoke.

“Wait.” Alpert knitted his brow above his practiced pensive look. “I can’t believe that the cartels are helping Texas refugees, I mean, illegal aliens. What do the cartels get out of hiding food and water near the border?”

Ward looked at him for a beat, which made him feel like he was back in the doctor’s office asking stupid questions about reattaching toes and prosthetics. No, these are all perfectly reasonable questions, he thought, but conceded that he should have considered his doctor’s advice before rushing back to the border, his toe pulsing with unbearable heat.

“Money,” Ward said flatly. “Moving commodities is a lucrative business, whether it be drugs or aliens.”

The panel pulled up like the top of a trapdoor spider’s hidey-hole, and Alpert lifted out a water jug, thankful no spiders jumped out with it. Only a quarter of water sloshed at the jug’s base. He drank greedily at the spout, water running down his neck and chest. Water. Sweet, delicious water in the heat, even if it left a plastic aftertaste. He placed the empty jug back in the hole and hobbled after the dirt clouds stirred up by the sheriff’s boots.

They walked toward the object that had piqued the sheriff’s interest, still about a hundred yards out or more. Alpert couldn’t determine distances here. In a baseball stadium, sure, he could say they were as close as the 15th row to the pitcher’s mound. Goddamn me, he thought, to be at a Yankees game right about now would be fucking fantastic. He imagined resting his aching foot on the cup holder mounted to the front row seats. The quiet before the crack of the bat against the ball, the roar of the crowd as the ball sailed into the stands. The hitter lazily rounding the bases toward home, crossing himself and gesturing to the sky, sanctified. Oriana sitting beside him, a bright smile every time he turned to tell her he was the luckiest man alive and kiss her soft cheek. Laughter as her hair, hair the color of sunlight, blew across his face, the sweet smells of her shampoo and perfume.

But she had to go all social justice on me. Better to just accept the new reality, or what had she called it? The Balkanization of America. The mirror had been shattered, our national identity strewn across the southern states like broken glass where we couldn’t recognize each other as Americans anymore, even as former US citizens begged for reunification. The Supreme Court had killed that hope, she had complained bitterly. Precedent, originalism, and the constitution be damned, amorphous terms that had never protected civil rights.

Alpert pushed her out of his mind and focused on the thing ahead. He hadn’t noticed that Ward had been talking the entire time about immigration policy and Texas bounty hunters assigned to detention centers. “They nab the aliens before they get close to our borders,” he said. “Collect their reward from a TDC, and we clean up the rest.”

No matter, he thought, the heat making him listless. The Two-Way would have recorded anything important he had missed, and he could edit out any of the parts that didn’t appeal to his fans. The sins of journalistic malpractice—omission, hyperbole, and outrage—didn’t apply to the profession of professional vlogger. Only establishing a narrative that helped his patrons feel better about their own lives. They would certainly feel happy about not having to walk through this godforsaken desert, he thought.

The heat rose off the ground and enveloped him like a blanket. He felt thirst clawing at his throat. He scanned the ground and located the faint outline of a symbol marking a stash. El Cartel del Mar. How good of them to hide life-saving supplies here in the desert, but no, wait. They’re the bad guys. They’re the invaders who traffic humans and guns and drugs. But how very good of them, how very nice of them to leave me water. His mind reeled as he reached for the trapdoor.

Ward pulled him back, a firm hand on his shoulder. “No, boyo, not that one. Don’t touch that.” He studied the ground and pointed toward another trident symbol about a stone’s throw away. “I’ll unearth some water there. You stay put.”

Alpert limped toward the thing instead, a second skin the sheriff had called it, or a boll weevil, or… he couldn’t remember through the pain of his toe. The Two-Way spun off from filming him as it picked up muffled moans coming from the thing, close enough now that he could see it was a human, or a human-shaped thing, trapped inside a net. The net scrunched closer and closer the more it struggled, mesh pressed against the skin. Bending down, he saw that it was a woman, and he recoiled from the smell of urine.

“Hey there, dearie.” Ward joined Alpert to stand over the cocooned body. “You look a little parched. Glug glug.” A crystalline column of water poured out of the jug, beads of water splintering against her body. “Strands keep them alive for a few hours under the sun, needles injecting saline and a mild sedative. Makes it painful on the hands where all the nerve endings are, but they can’t feel it on the rest of their body, for the most part. By the time I get to them, the saline has run dry. They need a splash before heatstroke sets in.”

Alpert looked for a drone or a machine crawling along the ground that could have deployed the net. “How does the surveillance-detention system work? I don’t see where the net came from.”

The sheriff nodded as he deactivated the net with a key fob. “You’re not supposed to see where it came from. This isn’t some penal colony where you get to see all the secrets behind our technology.” The net slackened and flopped open on the ground. The woman rolled off and tried lifting herself on her hands and knees before collapsing. Her chest heaved as she shielded her eyes from the sun.

The net looked like a spider web. Its silk lines rustled in the wind, breathing in and out. It glittered with beads of water. He watched, mesmerized, and by looking at the net instead of the woman, he didn’t have to acknowledge her existence.

He began to run his hand over the edge of the net before jerking back and cursing. The pressure-sensitive surface jumped up to grab at his hand like some living thing, and it stung like nettles, that ugly plant growing between sidewalk cracks in the Bronx, and god help those who happened to brush a bare calf or ankle against one. Spines barbed to the skin, uneven patches of inflammation, and scratching at the invisible thing ended with no relief.

“Discourages second attempts, doesn’t it,” Ward said as he grinned in satisfaction. “No repeat offenders. Once they’ve gotten tangled up in our nets, big fish, little fish, never coming back.”

“Goddamn me,” he spat at Ward. “That hurt. How is this contraption considered okay, you know, with human rights? It seems unnecessarily cruel.” He stopped, realizing he would lose more of his fans and most of his patrons mentioning human rights. I’ll have to edit this out, he thought, but his frustration rose like nettle rash.

“Illegal aliens don’t get human rights,” the sheriff said confidently. Then, upon seeing Alpert’s face, he assured him, “It’s simple, really. Title 8 and the sovereign territory of Texas authorizes the capture, detainment, and transfer of aliens as soon as they step on American soil.”

Alpert looked at her, finally. Hair the color of sunlight. She didn’t look like an alien. She looked like she belonged in America. Oriana had referred to refugees as future Americans just to tease him. Maybe she had been right.

“Look here.” Ward pointed at the woman’s blistered neck. “That’s a cartel stamp. She’s been trafficked. And look here.” He wrenched the woman’s wrist around to show Alpert her forearm, ignoring her yelp of pain. “That’s a detention center tattoo. That symbol means that she was detained for the murder of an unborn baby, and she has since been sterilized. She’s the property of Texas.”

The woman looked up at them, blue eyes darting between their faces. Her chapped lips sputtered, white spittle crusted on the corners, but no words came out. A Renaissance painting that reminded him of Oriana. The day she had left him came flooding back, a gut punch as he remembered her face. Disappointment. She had cried that day, tears running down her soft cheeks that he had tried to wipe away, but she had swatted at his hand and insisted that he didn’t understand the damage Texas had inflicted on America, the inhumanity of a theocratic wasteland that imprisoned and killed women.

The woman on the ground uttered a word, her first, and Alpert squatted down to hear her, pain shooting up his leg from his toe.

“Water.”

Alpert saw the outline of dried tears over the dirt on her face. He was a fool to not have admitted it earlier. Her absence hurt. He wanted her back. He wanted her safe from wherever she had disappeared to inside Texas, wipe away all those tears, and tell her she was right.

“Ya want water?” Ward asked the woman. “Ha! How does the old saying go? ‘You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her drink,’ or something like that.”

What happened next felt like a memory, like he was watching it happen without control over his body and its actions. The sheriff fell backward, his hat flying off into the wind. The net leapt up to meet him, grab him, and crumple him into a ball. He tried stretching out toward Alpert and yelled invective until the net cinched over his mouth, the sound of sunglasses crunching against his face. He looked like a burrito baking in the sun.

“It’s okay.” Alpert turned to offer the woman his hand. “I’m going to help you.”

She swatted at his hand and scooted back in a panic as the Two-Way pivoted behind him.

“Oh, that? Don’t be scared, that’s just my camera. I’m a journalist. I’m filming a story about the Texas border. Really, you can trust me. I’m going to help you.” It felt good to repeat the words, like the act of saying them out loud absolved his actions. He hadn’t been able to wipe away her tears, but he would wipe away the guilt of letting her disappear.

She looked at him suspiciously before pointing. “Water. I need water.” Her finger pointed at a symbol marked on the ground.

The trident, El Cartel del Mar. He felt sandpaper in his throat as he tried to swallow. Yes, water. How very good of them. How very nice of them.

He limped toward the symbol. “Don’t you worry,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m going to help you.” He brushed off the trident and opened the ground. A net exploded out of the hole like a trapdoor spider capturing its prey. The pain was instantaneous as the net’s needles sank into his skin. He struggled to escape, but the net tightened around his body, hugging him like a second skin.

The woman stood over Alpert and watched. She made no effort to free him. After he stopped moving, she found the sheriff’s plastic jug and drank deeply of what remained. Her neck muscles worked as she dipped her head back, hair moving across her shoulders. She dropped the empty jug between Alpert and the sheriff, and started walking toward the waystation. Toward America. The Two-Way sparkled in the sun above them for a moment until it spun off to record the sound of wind scraping across the border.

There Is No Such Thing as an Unwounded Soldier

Ron Whitehead works in a variety of photographic series:  Eye of the Storm are impressionistic visions of war to give a more dynamic view of combat than a strictly documentary approach.  One work shows a flaming parachutist plunging toward the ground; another shows a jet fighter in a lightning storm; a third shows a helicopter and tank silhouetted by flames;  Looking Back focuses on the impact of the past on the present, specifically the transition from his military experience to civilian life; My Lighthouse was inspired by a song by the Rend Collective and expresses his commitment to the Christian faith and how his commitment can calm the inner storm and offer a sense of healing; Art of Healing expresses the ways that art can be instrumental in the post-war healing process but also that this process is tentative; the images in Fight for It reference the brutal nature of war; American Dream is ironic in that the photographs show more a problematic re-adjustment rather than a return to a perfect life.

Although his oeuvre encompasses a variety of imagery, including some where the camera itself is the subject, Whitehead’s reflexive self-portraits are the predominant images in his work over his career, not in an egocentric way but as an artistic mediation of how he negotiates the past and the present.  The photographs suggest that, post-war, Whitehead is “in pieces,” no longer a unified whole, but also that he is searching for ways to re-establish an integrated self.  The self-portraits negotiate the space between the past of war and the present of job, home, family, community, and the larger society.  His work objectifies the inner conflicts between “the face of war” and “the face of after-war.” The photographs express T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative (1921), in that they represent Whitehead’s emotions, thoughts, and perceptions.  The self-portraits appear in many forms, some literal, some abstract, some surrealistic, some humorous, but each expresses the effect of his return to post-war life and provides the viewer with an insight into these perceptions.  He occasionally blends text to complement the image.  In her discussion of the ways that the arts, particularly poetry, tell us about war, Janis Stout (2005) writes that “literature and other cultural products offer an indispensable means of gaining impressions of war . . . not only are such cultural products ends in themselves, they are also means to the end of gaining insight into how the war was experienced and perceived by specific human beings” (2005).  Whitehead’s self-portraits reveal how his war, and his return, were experienced.

One of the themes that emerges from the self-portraits is that of the split self.  There is a schism between the self that went to war, the pre-war self, and the sense of self after war.  Whitehead began exploring this theme photographing a colleague, Harry Quiroga.   In “Still Serving” (2013), an early work from the Art of Healing series, Whitehead’s photograph of Quiroga’s face is split (the same image appears in “Love a Veteran,” which includes a quote from Welby O’Brien:  “It takes an exceptional person to love a warrior/especially a warrior whose war will never cease”).  In the photograph Quiroga, dressed in a business suit and tie, stares into the camera.  One side of his face is “normal,” representing the apparent seamless transition back into the world of work and formality.  The other side of his face retains the camouflage paint from the war, suggesting that even back in “the world” the soldier retains the indelible “paint” of war.  In another iteration of this image (2013) the photograph is “torn” down the center, with the “now” side in color and the “war” side in black and white.  The idea of the split self appears in a number of other works.  “Smoke and Mirrors” (2014) takes another angle on the split self.  Whitehead’s face is in profile, enveloped by wisps of smoke.  Superimposed on the profile is an image of his smiling younger self in his Army uniform.  The past is never far from the present.  In a 2018 work from My Lighthouse Whitehead is centered in the frame.  On the right-hand side a lighthouse beam brightens half of his face.  On the left, his face is darkened by the smoke of battle in the desert.  The photograph highlights the stress of living in two antithetical worlds.  In “Two Face” (2013) there are mirror images of Whitehead’s face looking at the viewer.  Half of the face on the right is “normal,” while the other half is in camouflage.  The face on the left is again split, with the right side of that face in camouflage; Whitehead adds a twist with his “normal” face in profile on the left side.  “Two Sides” (2017) extends the theme of the split self.  In the photograph there are two identical and connected faces in partial profile looking in opposite directions.  Razor ribbon coils around the faces.  The expression of duality emerges with some variation in such works from the Looking Back series as “Mask,” “Mask 2,” “Façade,” and “Façade Mask” (each 2018).  In these Whitehead places a mask of his face on or near his “real” face.  In “Façade 2” Whitehead is in black and white, while the mask he is putting on and the hand holding it is in color.  In “Façade Mask” Whitehead is looking at the camera while, ambiguously, pulling a mask over his face or, perhaps, removing it.  Is he removing his “face to the world” to reveal his authentic self?  Or is he in the process of pulling down the mask to hide that self?  Superimposed on the image is a scene from Desert Storm with burning oil fields.  Likewise, in “Mask,” oil fields burn in the background while he holds a mask in front of him.  Each of these “Mask” portraits speaks to the tension between the memories of the war which affect the present and the need to forget the war and reintegrate into society.  As the text in “Remembering” (2014) states:  “Remembering Is Easy.  It’s Forgetting That’s Hard.”

Other portraits are more abstract but still reveal the psychic dislocation he felt after his discharge and return to the States.  “Looking Back 2” (2017) borders on the surrealistic.  In this work Whitehead creates a distressing and baffling effect by using horizontal strips to break the image of his face into incongruous components.  Each “strip” is a different part of his face that do not align connoting, again, a sense of psychic disharmony.  The same effect is seen in “Parts” (2017).  In this work the strips, smaller but more numerous, re-arrange his face.  “Torn” (2018) is a variation on the use of the strips.  In this work Whitehead’s face, in black and white, is facing the viewer, superimposed over a desert scene.  However, a strip is “torn” across his eyes, revealing eyes, in color, staring at the viewer.  This creates a contrast not only in the blend of black and white and color, but also an opposition between past and present.  “Ripped” (2018) also uses this motif.  There is a close-up of Whitehead’s face in grainy black and white.  A strip is torn off to reveal his eyes, in a horizontal panel, in color.  This smaller panel is superimposed on the desert scene of burning oil wells.  He is looking out from the war, and that only the war provides any color.  (In “Rear View” [2015] the point of view is from a driver looking out of the car’s windshield.  The road ahead and the surroundings are in black and white; in the rear-view mirror is a group of Whitehead’s fellow soldiers, in color).  “Bullets” (2017) is another variation on the use of the strips.  In this case the strips are bullets, and his facial features are on the shell casings.   “Broken 1,” “Broken 2,” and “Explode” (each 2018) use the same image of his face.  In “1,” part of his face is shattered, looking like exploding shards of glass.  In “2,” the image of the exploding face is superimposed over a tank.  In “Explode” the impact of the war is more explicit.  Whitehead’s face is on the right side of the frame; the exploding shards are smaller, and as the image gives a sense of movement from right to left the shards blend with the smoke and flames of burning oil wells.

RW 1

“Picking Up the Pieces” (and the related numbers “2” and “3,” each 2018) are similar to the portraits using the strips.  In each of these Whitehead’s face becomes a jigsaw puzzle with pieces detached from his face, making his appearance enigmatic and fragmentary.  In the first work part of Whitehead’s face in black and white is dimly seen behind other parts that are in color.  Two jigsaw pieces of his eyes, in color, are where his eyes should be.  But are they to be placed into the puzzle of the face, to make the face whole?  In “2” Whitehead, holding a hand in front of his face, stares at the viewer through eyes that are jigsaw pieces.  There are empty spaces in parts of face where the pieces are missing, revealing blue sky and clouds in the background (“Hands 6” [2018] is a variation on the motif).  “3” references the war more directly.  Whitehead stares at the camera and reaches toward the viewer with a jigsaw piece, on which are an eye and a scene of battle.   Other pieces have desert scenes, with a burning desert in the background.  By handing the puzzle piece to the viewer Whitehead may be trying to bring the war out of his consciousness and share his experience.  “3” is an attempt to put all the pieces of his life back together and to represent in these photographs Lois Lowry’s words that are embedded in another photograph, “Sacrifice” (2014):  “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain.  It’s the loneliness of it.  Memories need to be shared.”  Art is a way of sharing painful memories, a cathartic process.  By offering the viewer the puzzle piece Whitehead shares his memories.

RW 2

“Just Another Day” (2018), from American Dream, is a portrait that reveals by what is not shown.  There is a figure in a medium shot, dressed in a suit and tie, representing the “uniform” of the civilian world of work.  However, in place of the head is a white cloud (perhaps smoke from a battle).  The headless figure “wears” a tanker’s camouflage helmet on which is perched dark goggles, symbolizing the military world.  The title suggests both the repetition of the civilian world of the “daily grind” and also that the memories of war uneasily co-exist with the civilian world.  The absence of the face, replaced by the smoke, suggests that these two disparate worlds somehow neutralize one’s identity.  Whitehead was an infantryman in the 1^st Armored Division and became a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) driver in Desert Storm, and a particular vehicle, nicknamed “Terminator,” is pictured in some photographs, like “Driver’s Eye” and “Globe 2” (both 2018).

RW 4

There is a humorous undertone in some photographs with Whitehead in the pose of Clark Kent ready to take off his civilian clothes to reveal his real identity.  In “Still Serving Office” (2018) Whitehead is dressed in suit and tie (with tie “blowing in the wind”), with a city scene of office buildings in the background; opening his suit jacket reveals an image of his smiling teenage self in his army uniform.  SM_BDU (2018) uses the same image of Whitehead in suit and tie, but the background is a lightning-flecked American flag.  He opens his suit jacket to show his army uniform.  Whitehead is conveying the idea that the formal dress is a type of camouflage; underneath the suit and tie, hidden from the view of the civilian world, is the most meaningful self.  On a more serious note, Whitehead in suit and tie also appears in one of the works in My Lighthouse.  An image of a lighthouse is revealed on his chest when he opens his jacket.  Whitehead is superimposed on a battle scene with a map of Kuwait.  The lighthouse represents the delicate balance of hope and stability while the war still rages in his mind.

RW 5

Eyes and hands are an important part of Whitehead’s self-portraits.  In a number of photographs eyes and hands are disembodied, existing on their own.  In “Hands” and “Hands 4” (both 2018) two hands with open palms are centered in the frame.  The skin and lines on the hands have been replaced by images of Whitehead’s fellow soldiers from Desert Storm.  Behind the hands is the familiar desert scene with smoke and flames from the burning oil wells.  Similarly, in “Hands 2” (2018) his hands are crossed, and on the palms is an image of a tank in battle; the background is a desert scene resembling a maelstrom or a tornado.  The memories of the war are literally imprinted on the soldier’s body.  The flesh, the “reality” of the hands, is erased; the memories and perceptions take over.  In “Hourglass” (2018) two hands hold an hourglass.  The sand in the top bulb creates an image of a tank in a burning desert.  The sand passes through the neck into the lower bulb; in this bulb an image of Whitehead’s face is gradually formed by the sand.  The war “sand” creates Whitehead; the two bulbs are symmetrical, each connected to the other.  The war is being poured into Whitehead.  In “Contain” (2018) Whitehead grips a glass globe in his two hands.  (On his left wrist he wears a bracelet he made from his Combat Infantryman’s Badge).  Inside the globe is desert scene of war.  The photograph suggests that Whitehead is attempting to “contain” or control the forces of war in which he participated.  “Hand in Mirror” and “Mirror” (both 2015) are similar.  In the former, Whitehead stands at a bathroom mirror and extends his hand toward it.  However, his image is not reflected; the image in the mirror is a scene of war, and part of his hand seems to disappear into the mirror image, again suggesting that memories and perceptions of one’s war experiences are inescapable, and that there is a desire to reach back into that experience.  In the latter, he stands at the same mirror.  This time, the reflected image is Whitehead . . . as a teenager dressed in fatigues, seeking perhaps an impossible connection between past and present.  Whitehead follows this search for connection in two untitled 2022 works.  In one, he stands in front of a brick wall with an image of a war scene, as if on the other side of the wall.  He is reaching through the wall toward the scene.  Utilizing a similar image (without the wall), a crucifix is suspended over the war scene.  He is reaching toward the cross.  Taken together, the two photographs reveal the tension between the desire to reconnect to the war experience and the desire for peace which the cross evokes. Can the two desires portrayed in the images co-exist?

RW 6

The eye as a subject in itself becomes an important part of the self-portrait, as the eye both looks out while at the same time takes in.  Like a photograph, the eye records, and this visual document can be permanent.  “Paper Eye” (2018) shows a scene of a desert aflame with burning oil wells.  A strip torn from the image reveals an eye staring back at the viewer.  “Eye” (2018) shows an extreme close up of an eye.  Superimposed on the pupil is a tank, and smoke and flames blow through the sclera.  In “Looking Back Flame Eye” (2017) the pupil emits a large flame.  Within the flame is a disabled tank.  A similar image is in “Looking Back Flames” (2018).  In this work the pupil is engulfed in flames while an invasion map of Kuwait emerges from the flames.  In “Pop Out” (2018) there is a close-up of an eye in profile superimposed on a burning desert.  The eye explodes outward in fragment that resembles a map of Iraq.  Imprinted on this fragment is an image of the teenage Whitehead in his Army uniform.  “Eye Lens” (n.d.) is a variation.  Again, there is a close-up of an eye with a scene of a burning desert.  But in a twist, the pupil is a camera lens, suggesting that the images of war become permanent photographs in the mind.  “Broke” (2018) shows a close-up of a pupil shattered like glass; inside the pupil is a tank.  Surrounding the broken pupil is a length of barbed wire. In “Camera” (2018) there is a close-up of a Canon Eos.  In the camera’s lens there is a human eye with images of captured enemy soldiers.  The scene of death is so powerful that even the camera lens explodes, sending pieces of glass toward the viewer.  The uneasy relationship between war and post-war lives emerges in a work in the My Lighthouse series.  On the right side of the frame a cross is superimposed on a close-up of an eyeball; on the left is a lighthouse casting a beam of light on the eye.  The lighthouse rises from a war scene in the desert.

RW 7

It might be unusual to consider a skull as a form of self-portrait but this image appears occasionally in Whitehead’s work.  “Skull” (2017) is one of his more disturbing, yet more powerful, self-portraits.  Whitehead is in medium shot framed against the background of burning oil wells.  However, most of his face is a skull with a vacant eye socket and clenched teeth; superimposed over his neck and part of the face is an American flag.  There is an uneasy relationship between life and death.  For the combat soldier the line between life and death, living flesh and the fleshless skull, shifts by the minute, by the second, by feet and inches.  The skull also figures in three untitled works from 2023.  Two of the photographs use similar imagery.  Whitehead, in jeans and t-shirt and carrying a backpack, is on a highway, moving toward a skull in the distance, set in a desert of smoke and flames.  Is this a rendezvous with death even after thirty years?  In another untitled photograph a skull is in profile with its top and lower jaw missing.  A burning desert is superimposed.  The empty skull holds a dozen small paintbrushes.  Whitehead suggests that death and war could be transformed by, and into, art.

RW 8

Some recent untitled work takes a different approach to the self-portrait.  Three photographs from 2021 show him facing the camera or in profile, and what looks to be a primal scream emanates from him.  The smoke and flames of a burning desert are superimposed around his face.  In two photographs Whitehead seems to be on fire.  In another close-up the screaming face, with a reddish tinge, is speckled with black flecks, giving the appearance of ashes.  In another work he stands in the desert like a colossus.  In one work from 2022 Whitehead looks up at a sky of smoke and flame; in two others his body is partly composed of Polaroid One Step 60-second snapshots, creating an ambiguity of who is the “real” figure and who is a disembodied group of snapshots (another photograph shows the camera printing a photograph of his younger self in the Army).  In a more surrealistic work his head is tilted forward over a desert scene.  His face is not flesh but comprised of the browns and greens of camouflage, which drips into a sinkhole in the sand.  It is as if Whitehead’s identity is melting into the sand.

RW 9

A 2021 untitled photograph shows Whitehead, with a philosophical, thoughtful expression, against a backdrop of a Desert Storm scene.  The text embedded on the left side of the frame reads, as if Whitehead is pondering the message, “You Live Life Looking Forward/You Understand Life Looking Backward.”  This phrase reflects one of the major concerns of Whitehead’s work.  The bulk of his photographs explore the interaction of past and present, and seek, through the artistic image, an understanding of the past, especially war, and its continuing impact on his life today.  It is an on-going search for unity and coherence.  His art is a type of bulwark against chaos, and attempts to recapture memories and make sense of the past as it impacts the present, and to commemorate that past, although painful in certain aspects, to make permanent the evanescent, and to reconcile opposites in that search for unity.

Ron Whitehead joined the Army right out of high school, serving for four years as an infantryman.  He was initially stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana and then to Bamberg, Germany.   He deployed to Iraq in 1990 and fought in Desert Storm with the 1^st Armored Division.  After discharge he joined the Maryland National Guard and entered Messiah College in Pennsylvania.  He has an undergraduate degree in Art Education and a Master’s degree in Instructional Technology from Western Connecticut State University.  He has been teaching high school art in Ossining, New York, for almost thirty years.  He continues to work with veterans whenever he can.  One of his passionate endeavors is to bring students to the VA hospital in New Haven, CT.  The students listen to the stories of vets and turn those stories into art as a way to honor the veteran.

A selection of Whitehead’s work can be viewed here:  https://sites.google.com/view/ron-whiteheads-portfolio/home

Eliot, T.S.  “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood,1921.  “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.  https://www.academia.edu/796652/Hamlet_and_his_problems, p. 4

Stout, Janis.  Coming Out of War.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama:  The University of Alabama Press, 2005, p. xiv.

In collaboration with So Say We All‘s Veterans Writing Division, founder Justin Hudnall and The Wrath-Bearing Tree‘s Andria Williams had the privilege of serving 21 veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and veteran family members over 2023 by providing four masterclasses followed by an intensive creative writing workshop.

We would like to thank our masterclass teachers, Abby Murray, Halle Shilling, Peter Molin, and Andria Williams for their inspired presentations on the aspects of craft; all of our wonderful participants; and California Humanities for supporting veterans in the arts.

So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree are proud to showcase a portion of our cohort below. We look forward to reading much more from them in the coming years.

***

***

Connie Kinsey: “The Letters”

In the old gray shoe box with the tattered red lid is four years’ worth of letters.  Most of them are addressed to my mother, but some are addressed to me. Many are written on onionskin and sealed in the familiar FPO airmail envelopes brightly colored red, white and blue. They crinkle and crackle when you touch them. My dad wrote these letters during his four tours of Vietnam–the first in 1966 and the final one in 1972.  

Those years he was away were hard on us all, but of course he took the brunt of it.  He left everything behind.  We missed him.  

He missed everything.

Those letters have been around the world, carted from base to base, and stored in one closet or another since the 1960s.  I have not read all of them yet.  I have not read most of them.

My mother gave me the letters with a warning.  To use her words, there are some pornographic parts. I imagine there might be. He was a young man away from the woman that almost sixty years later he would refer to as the love of his life. 

That’s not the reason I can’t bring myself to read them. I think I’m prepared to see my dad as a fully human male with a healthy sex drive. That might have been difficult when I was a teenager, but in all of those letters he is younger than I am now. Much younger.  The men he led much younger yet.

What I’m not prepared for are the spaces between the words -the things he doesn’t write about — the booby traps, the snipers, the dead bodies, the leeches, the cold c-rations straight from the can. At least, I don’t think he wrote about them.  But I don’t know.  Not yet.

I know of these abominations because I hang out in Vietnam veterans’ groups on Facebook. I never post. I just read. It’s research. The guys know I’m lurking there – I asked permission. I want to know what my dad, what they, went through, but I also don’t want to know. It’s like watching a horror movie while peeking through fingers.

My father, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey, always said the Marine Corps took him as a poor boy and turned him into an officer and a gentleman.  I’m quite sure there was nothing gentlemanly about Vietnam.  But he survived when so many didn’t. 

I adored my father. Most folks did. He was the officer and gentleman he wanted to be since seeing his first Marine in dress blues as a poor 9-year-old boy in Michigan. He had fulfilled a dream and took his oath seriously.

My dad was a commanding officer who lost thirteen of his men in a horrific battle on May 10, 1968, at Ngok Tavak near Chu Lai.  It was Mother’s Day.  They weren’t able to retrieve the bodies. That battle haunted him. Gave him nightmares.  Landed him in a psychiatric ward decades later.

A group of the survivors formed and held reunions every five years in Branson, Missouri. My father finally attended when a group of forensic anthropologists went to Vietnam and retrieved the bodies of his men.  Until they came home, he just couldn’t go. 

After his death, I was invited to attend what turned out to be the last reunion. It was held six months after his funeral.

I ended up drinking too much with a group of men who thought my father a fine gentleman and referred to him as their best commanding officer ever. I cried a lot, but I laughed a lot too.  I have a photograph of four of us – me and three older men, though not older by all that much, our arms around one another’s shoulders, broad smiles on our faces. 

They were able to say to me what they’d never said to their commanding officer.  I was able to ask them questions I’d never been able to ask my dad.  

We bonded that night.  I’m still in touch with some of them. 

It was an important weekend in my life and my grief.  Talking to those men helped me heal from my dad’s death. It had seemed as if the whole world just went on when mine was collapsing.  But those men that night – they remembered, and we remembered the man, the Marine, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey had been.

He’s been gone seven years now. His death was sudden and unexpected though his wounds never healed. He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder.  His experiences branded his heart, brain, and body.  Vietnam, Ngok Tavak and the thirteen who didn’t come home, especially, affected every experience he would have until the Sunday evening we found him dead. 

I’m writing a book of my experiences and his during the Vietnam war. I was young and having an idyllic childhood in Hawaii and then moody teen years in North Carolina. He was doing four tours in hell. Incorporating his letters into this book is important. I must read them.

I must.

*

Author’s note:

The 50th anniversary of the official end of that terrible terrible war is coming up soon – May 7, 2025.  It will be three days short of the 57th anniversary of the battle that broke my father. 

It’s time for me to begin. I can handle my dad’s sexuality, but I am not sure I can handle the unwritten words that became his post-traumatic stress disorder.  

I once had someone dear to me and eight years older say, “Vietnam was not a factor in my life.”  He said it as if tired of hearing my stories, tired of hearing my dad’s stories, bored by us both. I was stunned. He was the right age to serve but had a lucky draft number.  What privilege to have lived through such an era without it leaving a mark. How insolent and insular. 

Vietnam was a heavy load for my family – my father so much more than the rest of us, but we were scarred too. I cry when I open that box of letters. I will cry when I read the letters.  I hope to smile too.  To hear his voice as I read.  But the unknown of what’s in that box haunts me and I’m afraid to begin.

But…Semper fi, Daddy, Semper fi.  You rest in peace now.

– Connie Kinsey

***

George Warchol, “Service in the Middle”

Some inspire movies and books,
and others wind up in the news.
But for defenders with wrenches or keyboards in racks,
publicity wrecks our Service in Quietude.

And somewhere between the snipers and spies
are the middling faithful and true.
But no one tells stories about the comms guys,
they’re complex and they’re boring too.

Such as “Italy Went Dark” and the “Smurf Attack”
And “The Air Traffic Control System in Afghanistan is Down Again” too.
But the clever fixes among cables, and packets, and stacks…
They’re cool! But they would not interest you.

They say “All gave some, and some gave all”
and that’s true In Arms, sisters, and brothers.
But the defining phrase for answering the call, is
“Less than some; More than others”

Shep’rding the Team and The Job carried out,
that’s full time, and full effort, and much of what Service to Nation is all about.
But the pow’rs demand our grind and our continual waiting hurry,
“Waste yourself in OUR Way of Attainment! Or Be FOREVER Unworthy!”

“Climb the ladder, collect and achieve,
Stripes and baubles and slash up the sleeve!”
“Fill the reports with heroic deeds!”
“Promote!” “Promote!” MAKE them believe!

And like promotes like and after evil doth enter,
the Teeth of the Grinder do harden and render
Honesty’s kernel as powder in blender,
seeking to crush and to force The Surrender.

But instead, I’m finding my place in creative belong,
buoyed among words and not stripes.
And I’m finding my voice in verse and in song,
and in my choices towards effort, and living, and life.

And coming to terms with all that’s gone past,
I at last come to seek My Own Peace.
My Terms. My Service. My Sorrows. My Joys.
My ways to meet my own Needs.

I’ve done things you can not,
and you’ve done things I could never.
But the greatest of treasures, of gifts to be caught,
Is finding ourselves…and keeping ourselves together.

*

George Warchol, “Give and Get”

Give it up.
Give it up and get going.
Let it go,
and get on your way.

Listen up
and teach yourself freedom.
Write down your story,
you’ve got so much to say.

Lift your head.
Don’t abandon yourself.
Find your starting ground,
and don’t you retreat.
Just hang on.
I promise I’ll be there,
I’ll catch you.
Just try to stay on your feet.

Put it down.
It’s too much to carry.
Talk it out.

Don’t bury it deep.
Begin to trust
and be
just
a little less wary.
Let us help you begin to see.

To see something different
from all that you’ve known.
To perceive there is more
than your bearing alone.

See that we,

that we want you with us.

You have done so much good.
You are worthy of trust.

Just get up.
Get up and get going.
Begin to move.
Please, just shuffle your feet.
There’s still light ahead.
And there’s still movement showing.
And there’s still a good chance
for some kind of peace.

Everyone suffers.
But not all the time.
Not forever. Not always…

But always for some of the time.

And If redemption be needed,
then know that suffering need not be without value.
Grind the growth from it.
Squeeze it for purpose.
If nothing else,
it shapes us for something more.
Perhaps to fit us for more acts of tomorrow.

From the middle I can only tell you of what I see.
But from in front of it,
I can look back,
and tell something,
of what it means
against the background
of former,
forged ideas,
and
old,
cold,
hard,
sharpened facts.

Get in front of it.
We must put this behind.
Get in front of it.
We must stop wasting time.
Get in front of it.
We are not going alone.
Get in front of it,
and tell it to push you home.

You can watch George’s beautiful reading of his work here.

*

***

Mariah Smith — No One Left Behind

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” – Voltaire

I’d already been awake for a day and half when the bombs went off.  Physically, I was in a hotel room in the Willard Intercontinental in Washington DC, but mentally, I was outside the gates of the Kabul International Airport, in the crush of scared and desperate people, trying to guide a number of Afghan families through the mob that surrounded it. My friend Dee, an Afghan American, who I had served with in Khost Province in 2007, was doing the same for her cousins and aunts and uncles. She was the one who texted me first, the instant after the explosion at the airport gate, and moments later the pictures started flooding in. The images were live-streamed into my brain, becoming indelible memories, through the phone screen my eyes had been glued to since August 15th 2021, the day the Taliban entered the city. The pictures showed people running holding their children, covered in dirt and soot from the blast, torn and bloodied clothing littering the streets. A thousand dropped and crushed water bottles. Dee called me on WhatsApp a few minutes later as we tried to get accountability of the Afghans we had been communicating with. In the end all we could do was cry wordlessly together at the futility and the anger we felt.

Hanging up the phone, I closed my eyes in exhaustion for a few minutes and let the despair wash over me. There had been very little sleep the past 9 days. The King sized bed in the quiet hotel room threatened to swallow me. The same hotel room where I had put on a dress and good earrings the previous day, pinned my hair up, and walked into a meeting where I asked for, and received $250,000 from Boeing’s veterans group to help fund our evacuation efforts. Until a week ago, I had never done any fundraising before and now we were asking for six figures at a time. Instead of sleeping I got up, walked into the marble bathroom, brushed my teeth, splashed water on my tear streaked face, put on a ball cap to cover my unwashed hair and went downstairs to the conference room where the others were. There was more work to be done. 

The first interpreter I ever worked with was named Joseph, or that was the name he used when he was with our unit. He joined our platoon of MPs a few days into the Iraq War in March of 2003. He recalled being a teenager when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990/1991 and the US kicked off Desert Storm. When the US returned again 12 years later, he immediately volunteered to help. One night, all of us lieutenants were called to the bombed out building on Tallil Air Base that we were using as a temporary command post to meet our interpreters. The first one wouldn’t shake my hand, informing me of his religious restrictions against touching women. I was the only female officer in the company. Joseph stepped forward and shook my hand warmly, his kind smile and direct eye contact dispelling the embarrassment and irritation I had felt the moment before. War was new to all of us at that time. We were excited – we felt like we were going on a big adventure. None of us knew it would dominate and sometimes consume the next almost 20 years of our lives. 

I don’t know what we would have done without Joseph. It wasn’t just that he could speak the language and we couldn’t. He showed a group of inexperienced Soldiers what a war is like for the people whose home is where it is being fought. What was at stake. What to do when you encounter children on the battlefield, the elderly, the injured citizens. All the realities none of us had lived before but would live many times over in the years to come.

In the years that followed there were more deployments including three tours to Afghanistan. And right around the time I was done with the Army, America had decided it was long past done with Afghanistan, we started negotiating with the Taliban and set a timeline to leave. I will never forget the sadness on General Miller’s face in one of the last televised interviews of units pulling out. He sat on a concrete perimeter barrier and talked to the reporter, no inflection in his voice, only fatigue, perhaps hiding the regret and disagreement he felt with the decision. One of the younger Soldiers who was interviewed said she hadn’t even been born yet when the Towers fell on 9/11. 

Downstairs in the conference room of the Willard, 18 years after that first meeting with an interpreter, I was trying to make things right. A dozen other grim, exhausted people, most of them fellow veterans, sat in a horseshoe formation of tables behind laptops. Many were from other non-profits like ours, No One Left Behind. The tables were littered with Redbulls and spitters. Messages continued to pour in from people who were working inside the airport grounds, those on the streets where the bombs went off, and other veterans from all over the country trying to find and help their interpreters. A congressional committee staffer who was also an Army 82nd Airborne veteran like me, texted: “Hey – are you hearing that the Kabul airport is shutting down? The gates are all being closed and nobody else is being allowed in?”

We had been talking and sharing information all week. Those of us in that conference room had a direct connection to US troops on the ground inside the airport. I had just heard that the Marines were bulldozing shut the gate that had been bombed, welding them closed behind earthworks. After the bombs, no one else was getting in. 

“Yep, it’s true.” I confirmed. 

“WTF?! Blinken and Hicks told Senators this afternoon on their call that ops would continue at least until the 31st.”

“We are struggling to even get American Citizens on the airfield right now.” I told him about the earthen berms being erected to block access to the airport, all while American citizens waved their passports and Afghan interpreters desperately waved their visa paperwork outside the razor wire. “Everything I have seen is indicating we are done evacuating. They lied.” I set my phone down, disgusted at the way we were leaving our allies. Not even the Senate Intelligence Committee was getting straight answers.

A few hours later I watched in furious disbelief as the President addressed the country from the Oval office, a row of American flags behind him. He praised the bravery of the orderly withdrawal and reiterated the rightness of ending the War in Afghanistan. The group of us volunteers stood in front of the TV with our arms crossed, numbly watching the canned and false message being peddled. It was a pathetic attempt to try and spin the gigantic cluster fuck we had watched unfold over the past ten days into something resembling a strategic plan. I couldn’t believe anyone would buy his empty statements. Did they even care about the scale of suffering that was happening on the ground in Afghanistan? The senior leaders at the State Department sure didn’t seem to. As the US prepared to abandon the embassy in Kabul some US employees in the visa office burnt all of the Afghan passports and documents they had custody of. These were the golden tickets for the Afghans who had earned a Special Immigrant Visa to the US through their work with the American military or government. Although the burning was ‘standard procedure’ for preparing to abandon an embassy, in this case to the enemy, this action further sealed the fate of those who were so close to making it out yet still trapped.

Someone switched off the TV, and we walked to Old Ebbits Grill, a Washington DC institution. We ordered some much-needed alcohol. One of the other volunteers arrived a few minutes after the first wave of us, spotted my Old Fashioned on the table, asked if he could taste it, and knocked it back in one swallow, cherry and all, before his ass even landed in his chair. The table shrieked with hysteria tainted laughter. We were all a little unhinged from the horror of the past several days. 

For almost two years, I’ve tried to think of a coherent way to talk about those two weeks in August 2021 and the months that followed. It was both the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed and some of the most moving work I’ve ever been a part of.  

In April and May of 2023 No One Left Behind was contacted by a team from Japanese public TV. They wanted to do a story on our organization along with the Afghan women who had been part of the female tactical platoon (FTPs, they were called in short). This consumed my life for a month but ended up being very cathartic. One of the themes of their show was moral injury among veterans. “The Japanese people do not have the experience with this. The generation that fought in WWII never spoke of it and there have not been conflicts since. We also do not want them to forget what is happening to the Afghan people.” At the time of this writing I am still waiting for the documentary to be released. I don’t know what angle they will take the story. Although I came to trust the production team, both women close in age to me, I have to recognize that they are from a different country and I don’t know how they will paint the United States and our involvement in Afghanistan. I still hold a security clearance for work, and I held this in my mind every time they interviewed me. Although I was mostly open with them, I was not able to fully share the depth of the doubt and anger I was feeling at my own country’s clumsy and sometimes arrogant involvement in a 20 year war that we lost. It was hard to even put it in writing for this essay. In a way it feels like treason. 

“Tell us the story of the skinny, scared woman again.” The Japanese camera woman zoomed her lens towards me. They must have asked me half a dozen times, referring to a story I had told them about searching Afghan women on a compound that Special Forces raided along with our ANA partners. My job was to search the women on the compound and this particular young woman was likely in her 20s as I was. As I searched her for weapons, in her own home, that I had invaded I was struck by how malnourished and frail she felt under my hands. Although I was gentle, I stood behind her with my boot between her two sandled feet and felt the fragility and lightness of her body, ashamed of my own camouflaged and armored presence restricting her movement and how easily I could have hurt her if that had been my intent. 

I think they liked this story because it drew a stark contrast between the American soldiers and the Afghan people whose country they were occupying. But that was the opposite of the Afghans in the military and government we had worked with. We were working collectively for a better future. And then that was snatched away from all of us. I say snatched, but it was years of poor strategy, a rotational plan that didn’t work, a lack of focus, and a misunderstanding of the durability of the Taliban. When we lost and were cut off from our friends in the most chaotic, traumatizing way possible, all we wanted was to be able to be with our friends again and help them live safely. It wasn’t about the differences, it was about our common humanity. 

“Tell us about your PAIN and the GUILT” the camerawoman and interviewer would say. Emphasis on these sad words. Each interview led to a request for another, often revisiting the same topic 6 or 8 times. They wanted to hear more about my deployments in Afghanistan, hoping for a good shoot ’em up story I regretted and I think they were a little disappointed in the relative calmness of my deployments. Although they wanted the Japanese people to know the Afghans stuck under Taliban rule were still suffering, with few options, we didn’t talk much about the withdrawal itself. 

I met Efat when we interviewed her for the Japanese public TV show. She had been a female police woman, a job she loved. Now she was trapped at home. During our interview she cried helplessly and the feeling of watching a strong woman in such despair was gut wrenching. How do you help someone keep hope alive in these circumstances? I felt very helpless and grateful for the friends that have been able to leave. What does Efat have to look forward to? She was the one who made me confront, most clearly the reality for women left there. When I interviewed her, her surroundings looked like a mud walled compound with little furniture inside and a small assortment of basic kitchen implements. She told us they had sold a majority of their possessions in order to live. She was dressed in a loose black robe with a black scarf ready to wind over her hair if she stepped outside. The way she sobbed softly tore at my heart. There was nothing I could do or say to help or that made anything better in any way. How terrible to be trapped so completely in your own country, after having lived a different life of relative freedom as a young adult.

No One Left Behind continues to evacuate people out of Afghanistan, mainly through funding their travel to Pakistan while they wait to finish processing at the US embassy in Pakistan. We set a goal to help 1000 leave in 2023 and we met that goal on 30th of June. We set a new goal of 2000 and we made that goal also in late October. There are still so many people trying to help, but it will really take a change in US and international policy to allow everyone who needs to leave Afghanistan to make it to safety.  The overwhelming need makes our efforts feel like a drop in the bucket. 

It was almost nine months after the evacuation when Latifa and har family arrived at Dulles airport in May of 2022. They had been waiting in Iceland for the past 4 months while their US visa was finished. Latifa was the primary applicant, which was less common for the woman to be the primary applicant, less than 10% . After having NOLB consume my life for almost a year, and to be overwhelmed by the amount of people reaching out that we couldn’t yet help evacuate, I realized it became important for me to help one person, one family, and to see what the experience was actually like for a new family arriving. This felt like it was as much for my redemption and well-being as it was for theirs. They came to live with me, making progress in starting their new lives though they still feel the wounds of the country they left and the life they lost that is now no longer possible in their native land.

The night after I left the Williard back in August of 2021, the night after the last US plane left the airfield in Afghanistan, I was at a black tie event in Virginia horse country where I live now. It felt surreal, rich horse people in the most beautiful part of Virginia and that night I felt very removed from it, like a disoriented witness. I was still fully immersed in the violence and tragedy of what I had seen.  I felt like I had been deployed, even though I hadn’t left DC. At one point I started to tear up, overwhelmed, and my date walked me out to the large balcony where we watched the guests dancing, brightly lit through the plate glass windows, while we were shadowed in the summer night, the music from inside competing with the sounds of frogs and crickets. Teenage girls in their homecoming and prom dresses, jumped about joyfully on the dance floor in small groups or with their parents. The stark contrast between their safety and inhibition and what girls their own age had just gone through and what their lives in Afghanistan would be like now. 

This is the story I wish I wasn’t telling. I wish our war had ended differently. After investing all that time and lost lives and lives forever changed, our country’s leaders had us walk away in the most humiliating way possible and leave our friends behind in a near hopeless situation. However, our work with No One Left Behind continues. While we are still helping people depart Afghanistan on the Special Immigrant Visa program we are also very focused on helping them restart their lives here in America. And this is where my faith in my fellow citizens remains strong. The kindness and generosity by regular people we have seen extended to these newly arrived Afghan refugees is incredible to witness. Restarting a life and a career in a new country is exceptionally challenging and so many Americans have stepped up to help in a thousand different ways. For a period of time after the withdrawal I was hyper focused on the horror and unfairness of what had happened to so many Afghans and how it affected the veteran community. But now my focus has shifted more to the good we are able to be part of.

***

Reinetta Vaneendenberg — A.O.R.

Letter from Hotel California 1 epistolary
The Hall of Valor 3 prose
Vet Killed by Granby ST Hit/Run 4 newspaper reportage
Obituaries 5 newspaper reportage
Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities 6 scratch-out poem
Crossing Granby Street 8 poem encased by fragments
++++++++++

28/8/2017 Hotel California haha (same as before)

Dear Liz,
A volunteer is typing this for me since my hands are bandaged. His name is Jonathan and
he’s here allot getting new legs and his gut fixed. Sometimes we play backgammon like you and
I did that year in the sandbox. I move pieces with my good finger.
It was great talking to you last night. I’ve been thinking about you allot today. You—in a
good place now, with a room of your own at the veteran house. It’s ok to accept the room and the food and the clothes. You’re a vet and all that is for vets. Not everyone can be lucky like me and spend a year at Hotel John Hopkins in lovely Baltimore.

Last night when we talked you were mad again about the AOR crap but we couldn’t do
anything. It’s over and done with and over and done. Listen hear, you and I aren’t responsible for the 10,000 dead from 9/11 and its wars,
so you need to let that go.

Take those five fuckin “Xs” off your fuckin hat. Sailors don’t count our kills or anyone
else’s. Shake your red hair free. We did the best we could with the crappy equipment and
leadership. Like Nam, man: who’s the enemy? Our interpreter, Fahad? A kid? A fruit vendor? Congress sucks! How can they tell us who’s a threat? When we can or can’t shoot? They’re a million miles away. In fuckin DC.

I must a got all stirred up after our call because I had that same dream again last night, the one with you standing in your battle dress, head down and walking, not watching where you’re going and I’m yelling “Liz! Look out! LIZ!” But you keep walking. I keep yelling. I wake up sweating, crying. You always had rotten situational awareness. I guess that’s why we made it as battle buddies.

We had good war-fighting skills. The rules of engagement said when we could shoot. The
area of responsibility—the lines for bullets, bodies and bags were clearly drawn on maps,
directives, messages for Afghanistan, Iraq. I don’t know why we were sent where we oughtn’t to of been. Boundaries are boundaries.

You’re right it was a set up because there was no way we could have guessed that little
girl had a bomb in her dolly basket.

Have you heard about the lieutenant? Someone came by saying the Navy was not
promoting her because of the explosion. I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that w

I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to be’ and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that we were setup because Fahad didn’t go with us and he always wanted to be with us everywhere.

The sandbox is a strange place for sailors. Don’t you think so? How can our Navy not
promote a young officer who is eating the same crap we had to and live like we had to and the Elephants keep changing the AOR and ROE? At least she didn’t get hurt. She got home in one piece to her wife and kids.

Jonathan’s nice, a handsome dude. Maybe you could have coffee with him when you
visit. I know you come from blue blood but not all guys are like those
Our families are so fucked up. Mine tries but they don’t understand, even my dad who
did Vietnam. They returned to disdain and us as heroes but are forgotten a month after returning anyway. None of it is anyone’s responsibility. Hope you get this litter at your new address before our next call.

The docs say I’m doing ok and can see you whenever you come up from Norfolk. I’m
sorry for the mix up last time. I had the dates wrong. And here you rode the bus all day. Sorry.

Time is jumbled between surgeries and meds. You know what I mean—you have allot of meds to. I was in OR for reconstructing surgery the day you came. I don’t see much that they can do— nine fingers got blown off and all the operations won’t bring them back—but those doctors go figure they always have an idea how to make a bad thing better. Next operation is to make the whole in my gut better.

The only good things in my life are you and Jonathan as friends. The rest is crap. Look
forward to your weekly call. Same time same station.

So, now I really have to go because Jonathan has to go to PT. Remember when that
meant physical training, a chance to burn off some steam? Now it’s pain and torture.
I asked him to sign this for me so you’d know it was really from me but he laughed.

Just believe it’s from me,
your battle buddy,
Mary

The Hall of Valor
lists all
6906
U.S. military who have died during the Global War on Terror
in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn.
This Hall of Valor is a searchable database
by name, operation, month and year. It can also sort
by death date, oldest to newest or newest to oldest.

Viewed 3DEC2017: thefallen.militarytimes.com

VET KILLED BY GRANBY ST. HIT/RUN
NORFOLK
Dispatch reported an anonymous call 2:12 p.m.,
28 August 2017, about a hit-and-run at Granby Street and Thole Street
intersection in the Suburban Acres area of Norfolk. The caller said a
person was hit by a compact brown car. An emergency crew was on
scene within 4 minutes of the call, followed by an ambulance 3
minutes later.

There were no identifying documents found on the victim. She was
pronounced DOA at DePaul Hospital.

Police found no witnesses.
The victim has been identified as Elizabeth C. Stanton, 37, a U.S.
Navy veteran. Burial services pending.
Anyone with information about this accident is asked to call Norfolk Police Investigations.

obituaries
Elizabeth C. Stanton
NORFOLK – 37, Funeral
service: 8 a.m. Monday, on
Sept. 11, 2017, Virginia State
Veterans Cemetery, Suffolk.

Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities

Area of Responsibility inside outside
the enemy outside inside
ordersdogtagsdufflebagI.D.cellphonesmokes
Iraq on the Way Back
Domino Theory
burqa door-to-door
An improvised explosive device I.E.D.
is a hidden bomb Blows up patrol
convoy missing body parts Balad
Bagram Air Base Afghanistan
we don’t know where the leg is Politicians
make up rules of engagement R.O.E.
tasty fish eggs grow into the child as I.E.D. who will lead us
hightechhighbodycount out-foxed
push meds push to keep/up with them
Ramstein Air Force Base Germany
VA Hospital amputations prosthetics thumb
Hand Calf Legs Charles C. Carter Center for Mortuary
Affairs, Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Warmonger body armor/MadeinChina/budget hearings
re-take, re-deploy, re-calibrate
Fall of Berlin,Hanoi,Fallujah.
HailMaryFullofGrace
It has been 16 years

Senator, Is the 22-Veterans-Per-Day Suicide Rate Data Reliable?
Do you have stats for correlation with
Homelessness? Alcoholism? Drug abuse?
VA Failure rates? CPTSD? TBI ? 

See: the Latin cida, killer
S u i cide me
Fr a t ri cide us
G e n o cide them
CNN reports an increased rate of blue-on-blue violence as military kill their own
By the book By the book
6 Bythebook
6 Bythebookbythebook t hebookCP
9 By book T
0 ook S
2 ok D
nobook
Allah M.C.
Mission Co
Com
Comp

black body bagsbagbags

Black
Hawk

W
a
r

She charged the crosswalk as if rushing the landing zone,
right arm propelled red pony-tailed floppy head.
Hot wash rose from swampy beach traffic.
I saw her as a unit, an interruption across my line of sight.
The uniform of a street person, I presumed, with time to
look during the long light. I turned up the AC.
Flicked the auto-lock.
Black wool beret, with five white Xs pinned on it.
Hawaiian shirt, glaring blue, green, yellow
Camouflage pants, too big or her now too small.
Black mocs like clown shoes, pale heels peeking out,
as if her feet had lost the mass for boots.
She was closing on the sidewalk, focused on the mark—
When the light turned, I shifted the Vette into first
just as horns blasted.

Reinetta Van explores identity and historical perspective issues in hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in The War Horse  and anthologies Sisters in Arms: Lessons We’ve Learned and Things We Carry Still: Poems and Micro-Stories About Military Gear. Van (captainvanusnavy@gmail.com) scribbled A.O.R.’s first draft June 12, 2017, and hopes to express someday why this piece sticks in her craw. You can hear her read from her work here.

***

Tom Keating – REMF

Richie handed me a bandolier.

“Another fucking waste of twelve hours,” he said. The green cloth pockets each held a magazine filled with eighteen rounds for the M16 battle rifle slung on my shoulder. It was almost 1800 hours, and we were going on perimeter guard duty till 0600 hrs. the next morning. Ninety-eight degrees, and our jungle fatigues were soaked with sweat.

We loaded up the truck in the company area for perimeter guard duty, which we were assigned to do every couple of weeks. Twelve hours sitting in a hot, wet, smelly sandbagged bunker on our sector of the Army base perimeter. Twelve hours of boredom.

“I’d rather be typing the fucking monthly fuel consumption report,” I replied. “This sucks, again.”

“Can it, you two, and get on the truck,” yelled Sergeant Hollis, the sergeant of the guard for this shift.

The twelve of us climbed on the open truck, wearing helmets and heavy, sweaty flak vests, our rifles slung on our shoulders. The truck drove out to the perimeter along the dirt road behind the tall, barbed-war fence of our base. Two small Vietnamese villages were just four hundred meters from the fence, and the locals who lived there would come into the main gate each day, get checked by MPs, and then go to work on our base as cooks, laundry workers, and housemaids.

The combat troops called us REMFs, rear echelon motherfuckers; support troops that made the war possible with our typing, driving, computer programming and other work skills needed in a modern Army. We do the paperwork that feeds the war with everything from body bags to bullets. Our base and living quarters the grunts (infantry) call luxury. We had beds, daily hot chow, plenty of water and in some cases, air-conditioned offices.

Most of the soldiers assigned to this logistics base were trained to be Army administrative types. Some, like me, who were trained for infantry, were assigned as clerks or typists when we arrived. The Army marches on paper. I knew I lucked out with this assignment, instead of being in combat.

Every couple of weeks we were pulled from our offices, trucks and repair shops and thrown together for bunker guard duty, strangers to each other. The truck arrived at our bunker’s situated on large earthen berms on the perimeter near one of the gates into our base. The truck stopped, and Sergeant Hollis got out, walked to the rear, and said,

“Kearney, Philips, Richie and Denton, you four here, in bunker number one.”

We hopped off the truck. Someone handed us our weapons, flares, ammunition for the M60 machine gun, extra canteens, and a box of C-rations. Richie carried two rolls of toilet paper. The truck drove down to the next bunker. We waited while Philips picked up a stone and threw it into our bunker.

“Hope ole snaky aint in there today.”

Cobras loved our bunkers; they provided shade for the cold-blooded reptiles, who also enjoy the rats that live there, too. We threw stones in the bunker to let Snaky know we’re coming in. Sure enough, he slithered out, an eight-foot-long cobra. The snake turned and retreated into the brush near the barbed wire. Philips threw in another rock and waited. Nothing. We carefully entered the bunker, our home for the next twelve hours. There were no bushes or tall grass around our bunker. Defoliant sprayed every week made sure of that.

I set the machine gun on its bipod, positioned it out the center bunker port. We took off our helmets and flak vests, and settled in. The heat and stink inside the bunker was unbearable. Richie and Denton went outside behind the bunker to smoke some weed. Philips and I took the guard position, looking out at the villages.

Philips said he was a truck mechanic for the 350th TC (Transportation Company). A short, stocky fellow, he speaks with a hillbilly accent. “Kearney, where you from?”

Before I could reply Richie came back in. Richie was tall and lanky. He shoved his glasses up higher on his large nose and announced, “Put on your gear, the sergeant is coming to check, and he’s got the ELL-TEE with him.”

We put on our helmets, shirts and vests and waited. Sergeant Hollis called us together outside the bunker. Lieutenant Nack, the officer of the guard this shift, stood behind the sergeant. Nack’s tailored fatigue was dark with sweat. Hollis was an experienced soldier who had fought in Korea. He gave us our instructions.

“Okay, you guys know the drill. Two on two off, two hours. Kearney, I want you on the machine gun. Richie, check the commo line. You are Reno 4. Do it now.”

Richie picked up the field phone handset, pressed the key and said, “Bravo One, Reno 4 commo check.” Richie put the receiver down. “We’re good to go, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hollis replied, “Okay. Do that at least once an hour. Me and the lieutenant will do another check later tonight and bring more water. Anything else, Lieutenant?”

Nack stepped forward. He wore the custom fit new model body armor jacket that zipped up the front. “Stay alert, men. Keep your eyes open tonight, Intel says we are sure to get hit by Charlie.” He stepped back. Nack worked in the finance office, probably hadn’t fired a weapon since Basic Training or whatever reserve officers went through. They turned and got back in the Jeep and left.

Philips asked as he took off his gear, “Kearney, you think the EL-TEE was just bullshitting about an attack?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “It is the big Chinese New Year festival, I would expect them all to be celebrating, not fighting.” We settled in, looking for movement in front of us.

Denton and Richie relieved us two hours later. The sun was almost gone, so Phillips and I went outside, where it was cool, the air fresh. Trucks and Jeeps kept coming and going out of the gate near our bunker. Philips used the piss tube alongside the bunker, and I sipped warm water from my canteen. Just then the field phone chirped. Richie picked it up.

“Reno 4.” His eyes got large, and he looked over at me.

“Roger, yellow alert. Reno 4.”

Yellow alert meant some shit was going down. We hustled back into the bunker. I drew back the cocking lever of the M 60 and put my shoulder against the stock. I looked out the port. Richie and Denton picked up their rifles. Denton looked confused. He didn’t know what to do with the rifle. I looked over and said,

“Denton, put the magazine into the rifle, then pull the charging handle. Put your selector switch off safety to fire. Richie, give him a hand.” These guys were clerks and typists, not infantry. Finally, their rifles were locked and loaded. We waited. I saw the gate being closed; Vietnamese workers on the post being hustled out of the gate as it closed. A Military Police Jeep pulled up to the gate, with an M60 machine gun mounted and manned. Damn!

“We have to check the claymores to be sure the wires are okay. Who wants to go with me?” Philips nodded his head. “Okay. Denton and Richie, eyes front. If you see anything move, shoot it. We’ll be right back.”

The two of us exited the bunker and found the claymore wires leading from the bunker. We followed along in the fading light all the way to the mines which were thirty feet in front of the bunker. Everything looked okay, the wires attached to the blasting caps, positioned “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.” We ran back to the bunker. I heard a rumble, like thunder. The phone chirped again. Richie answered,

“Understand. Red alert. Reno 4.” Richie hung up and relayed the news. “The VC are attacking Bien Hoa Air Base, and we may be next! Holy Shit!” We were jacked up with adrenaline and fear. The booms were louder, closer. The stutters of a machine gun could be heard. The field phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4,” I said into the handset.

“Reno 4, stand by. Victor Charlie spotted in the village 400 meters your front. TAC air on the way. Get low in your bunker.”

“Reno 4.”

“Get down,” I shouted, “TAC Air!” Everyone crouched down below the sandbag wall of the bunker. We heard the roar of an F4 Phantom jet, and two large explosions. The F4 Phantom roared away. I cautiously looked over the sandbag port. The villages were gone, just smoke and fire. Nothing was moving in front of us. I looked over to the gate, the MP Jeep was gone, replaced by an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC). Before I could process this, we heard more firing and some small explosions, grenades most likely. Then it got quiet. The firing stopped. Nothing moved. The phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4.”

“Reno 4, stand down from Red alert. Alert status now yellow. alert status yellow.” The sergeant arrived shortly after we relaxed. ELL-TEE wasn’t with him. I told him our situation.

“Sergeant, we went on red alert,” I looked at my watch, “60 minutes ago, just got word to stand down to yellow. TAC Air blew up the villages to our front. All weapons locked and loaded.”

“Okay, Kearney. Stay alert. This may go on all night.” Hollis drove over to the next bunker.

I turned to the guys. “Let’s get back to the guard schedule: two on two off, two hours. Stay alert. If you think you are gonna fall asleep, move around, take deep breaths. Me and Philips will take the first watch.”

Philips and I looked out the bunker towards the destroyed village. Damn! the jet just blew it away! There were people there earlier. I hope they got out before the bombs. Jeesus! No movement at all. We could hear the chatter of machine gun fire and explosions far down the perimeter on our left. The APC roared away towards the fighting. We were alone in the darkness.

“Kearney, I’m scared.” Said Philips.

“Me, too,” I replied. The lights at the gate cast some in front of our bunker. Richie and Denton were napping outside. The sounds of battle diminished. We started to relax. After forty minutes I was fighting the urge to close my eyes and sleep when Philips whispered to me.

“Kearney, I see somebody moving!”

“Where?” I jerked alert.

“Over to the left, see it?”

I slowly turned left, and yes; someone was slowly crawling towards bunker two on our left. A sapper! I turned to my right and saw someone else crawling towards us. Two sappers! They got through the wire somehow and were about forty feet away.

“Philips, ” I whispered, “you fire right, I fire left. Go!”

I fired my M16 four times at the guy. Bunker 2 must have seen the sapper too and fired their M60 machine gun. The red tracer rounds bounced off the ground in front of the crawlers. The sapper on the right got up on his knees to fire a B40 rocket at our bunker, just as Philips hit him. He fell back, and the rocket went sailing over our position and exploded behind us. Denton and Richie were now wide awake.

“Jee-sus! You got them,” shouted Denton.

“Keep looking,” I said. “There may be more.” My heart was pumping fast. My vision had sharpened. I scanned in front and on both sides, even looked behind us. But there wasn’t anyone else.

My infantry training told me to go out and check the bodies. I ran, crouched, to the first body. He was deformed by the rounds he took from me and the M60 from bunker two. His right arm was missing. Picked up his rifle and slung it on my shoulder. I checked him for papers, found some.

The B40 rocket guy was twenty feet away. Philips’ shot had blown his head apart. I wanted to throw up, but I held it in. I picked up his launcher and the rockets he carried. No papers on him. I ran in a crouch back to the bunker. I threw up outside the bunker entrance, then went in and picked up the phone.

“Bravo One, Reno 4.”

“Reno 4.”

“Weapons fired. Two enemy Kilos. No Whiskeys, (Army code for dead and wounded), two weapons recovered.”

“Roger, Reno 4. Continue alert.” We could hear some explosions and rapid firing along the perimeter, but it was quiet near us. Philips looked at me, his eyes were wet.

“I shot deer and squirrels back home,” he said. “But these were men! Jeesus! I don’t want to do that again, Kearney.”

“I know,” I said. “It is fucking awful, but they were going to kill you and me and Denton an’ Richie. We didn’t have a choice.”

“Shit,” said Denton, “I wanna get outta this fucking bunker and this fucking country.”

“Shut the fuck up, Denton, you just got here,” said Richie. “You aint going anywhere for a year. Kearney’s right, it was us or them.”

Philips went outside, still upset. Denton and Richie took over the guard. I stayed in the bunker. I was suddenly hungry, feeling lightheaded as the adrenaline left me. I could not relax, though.

Time passed, and we heard no more shooting. When the sun came up, smoke was rising from the village. The two enemy bodies were still there in front of our bunkers, flies feasting on them. We heard no battle noise, just a few random rifle shots somewhere down the line. Sergeant Hollis and Lieutenant Nack were coming down the access road in the jeep. Hollis stopped the Jeep, and I went out to meet him and Nack. I nodded at Nack. No saluting officers near the wire.

Sergeant Hollis said, “Situation, Kearney.”

“Sergeant, all quiet. No further attack on this section since 2300 hrs. Two dead sappers out front, I policed their weapons and some papers taken from their bodies.” I pointed at the two weapons and the papers tucked in the corner.

Nack looked startled. He scowled at me, “Specialist, who told you to take the weapons and papers?” Hollis rolled his eyes, very slightly.

“Sir,” I said, “that’s SOP, disarm the enemy dead and check for any intel. They told us that at Fort Jackson.”

“Oh, you were infantry,” he snarled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, You should have left the weapons there and notified me.” He wanted credit for the weapons capture. It would look good on his record, and maybe a medal. He took a small note pad from his breast pocket and a pen.

“I need your name and your unit and commanding officer.”

“Sir, Specialist 4th Class Kearney, I am an administrative aide to General Stark at headquarters supply, fuel division.” Nack looked surprised. That brought him up. He didn’t want to fuck with one of the general’s boys. He put the notepad back in his pocket.

“Okay. Sergeant, take charge of the weapons and documents, and contact the engineers to remove the bodies.”

“Yes sir.” He went into the bunker and retrieved the weapons. “Kearney, I’ll make sure you get credit for the captured weapons.” Nack threw an angry look at the Sergeant as Hollis put them in the back of the Jeep and climbed behind the wheel.

“Thanks, Sergeant,” I replied.

“Good job, men. Your relief is on its way.” The Lieutenant said as he hopped back in the Jeep. Hollis drove away as the field phone chirped. I picked it up.

“Reno 4, Alert status Yellow.”  I turned to the guys, who were tired, dirty, and still jacked up on adrenaline.

“Alert Yellow, we can relax.” Then we heard the truck coming to bring us our relief. It was 07:00hrs. I took off my flak vest and sucked my canteen dry. Phillips had recovered somewhat and smiled at me. I could hardly wait to get back to those fucking fuel consumption reports.

Tom Keating is a Vietnam Veteran who kept a journal during the war in Vietnam, which enabled him to publish his memoir, Yesterday’s Soldier: A Passage from Prayer to the Vietnam War. He has also published in The Veteran, the Military Writers Society of America’s Dispatches, The Vietnam Memorial 40th Anniversary Tribute, 0-Dark-Thirty from the Veterans Writing Project, the Microlit Almanac from Birch Bark Editing, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. He lives west of Boston with his wife Kathleen. You can hear him read from his work here.

***

Nancy Stroer – What Do You Expect?

The Rooster’s nose was his most salient feature, curved and sharp as he strutted and preened in front of formation. It was an act, but the Rooster snapped his barnyard into submission without apology.

He told me, “Ma’am, I need you to take all the females to the clinic.”

There’d been a rash of pregnancies in the barracks. Okay, maybe two in as many months, but this was the Rooster nipping his birds into line.

“It’s like we’re running agot-damn brothel on the female floor,” he said after he’d dismissed the soldiers. Other company leaders remarked, variously:

“These females got to learn how to keep their legs closed.”

“Put males and females together and what do you expect?”

What did I expect? I expected to get along as a woman in a man’s world. I knew how things worked and I expected I’d do fine with that, having grown up with three brothers, playing sports, all of this occurring in the broader context of a world run by men. I didn’t think about any of this in so many words back then. I didn’t know that I was a Guys’ Girl, a term my young adult daughters use now with a curl in the corner of their mouths.

Back in the olden days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (unless it’s super-juicy), the NCOs were ranting the same old litany to a sexual but sex-free god, repeated in NCO meetings and formations and ad hoc conversations near the filing cabinets. Sex was a given, a right, for some, and a loaded weapon for others. Male soldiers wanted to have sex, were going to have sex. The women had to expect to receive that attention whether they wanted it or not. And they should expect it, but not want it. If they wanted it, they must appear not to; otherwise they’d get a reputation in the Barracks Bicycle. Those were the expectations.

No one expected birth control talks for the male soldiers. Two of the guys were walking around, looking kind of sheepish at times, kind of proud at others. There was much slapping of shoulders and good-natured cussing.

I processed information differently in those days. I was so young, still surfacing from the dreamworld of adolescence to find myself drowning in the patriarchy, except I thought I was swimming just fine. The only other female officer to process it was pregnant herself but married and therefore did not count on the Tally of Concern. Maybe her PT game was a little weak, but she managed to get her hair done. She was decorative but ran the supply warehouse with confidence and competence. She was a Black woman, with a team of mostly non-white soldiers. Her operation was a bit intimidating to me, and maybe secretly to the Rooster, too, because his beak was out of her business. And sure, the commander was a woman but she was an androgynous little elf and we left her alone because to engage with her in conversation was to invite a deluge of unwanted information about her irritable bowel syndrome.

There was righteous sex (guys going to the Red Light district), and sex that was out of control (women daring to have sex in their barracks rooms). The NCOs moralized about the need for guys to get laid and the impact of single women getting pregnant on The Mission. Everyone laughed at the idea of the unsexy having sex. I recognized the double and triple standards, but still bought all the tangled lines.

Maybe these young female soldiers don’t know about birth control, I thought. They couldn’t all be the dirtbags the sergeants said they were, just getting pregnant to get out of the barracks and straight to the head of the line for military housing and priority spots at the child development center. Maybe they were just waking up as humans, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find the women gathered in the clinic lobby not looking contrite or curious but sullen and angry. I didn’t quite get their mood. “Don’t you want to be in charge of when you get pregnant?” I asked them. Surely they’d joined up to be all they could be. Capricious childbearing would shoot their career trajectories out of the sky.

Standing next to me, Johnson swung her swollen belly to face me. She was small and quiet. Curls framed her brown face. “Cute” is a diminutive way to describe her, but she was diminutive. She was objectively cute. I didn’t know her, since she worked in the supply warehouse where women made up about a quarter of the workforce, in contrast to my operation across the parking lot with the mechanics, where the air was heavy with secondhand smoke, AC/DC, the ping of wrenches and tool boxes across concrete floors. All the women watched each other, though, and my general impression of the ones in the supply warehouse was that they were as quietly competent as the pregnant female officer who ran their show. They were organized, and a little disparaging of the men who worked there because they clowned around too much. A bit dismissive of me as too rough and ready. Too accommodating of the Rooster and his ilk. Maybe they found us too white, and therefore suspect. This insight is a late add. I’m sure I didn’t think too much of the racial dynamics at play in those days but my memories are fully colorized now.

So cute little Johnson rounded on me and said through clenched teeth, “I’ll have as many children as I got-damn well want,” and I had no response. It was an astounding, revelatory moment. Of course she was right. Of course she was outraged at the Rooster’s overreach. A woman of any marital status can have as many children as she got-damn wants. A Black woman might justifiably feel more ferocious about this than anyone. Johnson’s withering stare — those soft cheeks pulled into a parentheses of disdain — was an emotional heart round.

In a flash I melted into a puddle of shame, remembering how my father made me return a pair of cargo pants when I was fifteen because they were “too revealing.” The second pair was so baggy I had to take them in at the waist which, in my newly self-conscious opinion, made my butt look even bigger. This was the first time I’d been told explicitly to hide my assets. I did not wear my new cargo pants and, among other things, I stopped volunteering to go to the board in health class, no longer wishing to show my work. Or anything else.

Might as well disappear my whole body, starve it into its preadolescent shape. Or maybe to eat and drink to keep up with the boys. Or go on whack diets to have something to talk about with the girls. Or to do all the sports and sweat and swear and carry the mortar plate on ruck marches and be considered just another one of the guys.

Didn’t matter. I wasn’t one of them. The male soldiers still vied to run behind me in formation. Let me hitch myself to that ride, they’d say.

They left me notes under my car wiper blades and lewd sculptures on my desk. They backed me into the corners of quiet offices. They turned up at my house at odd hours. It was easiest to laugh them off, to call them the assholes they were, to put them all in their proper places, and keep my business to myself.

I had expected Army men to misunderstand me. My religious father with his Master of Fine Arts, who had enlisted as a medic in the days of the draft so he could control his fate, told me as much when I was insisting that I’d be able to control my fate, too. “It’s different now,” I said, “and I’ll be an officer.” But there are lots of ways to kill a person without firing a shot and on my very first day in my very first unit, my very first platoon sergeant took one look at my left hand and said, “We got to get you married, ma’am. An unmarried officer is going to cause trouble.” I hadn’t expected a welcome like that at all.

And here was Johnson with her soft round cheeks and her rounder belly, unashamed of the truth of the matter: that even she, this actual cherub of a woman, had had sex and now she was having a got damn baby and she didn’t give a flying fuck what I or Rooster or anyone thought about her marital status or any of her choices. Johnson’s comment was a two-by-four up the side of my head, and it woke me all the way up, right there, even though I still didn’t know what to do with the information.

I’ve heard many white veterans say that they got to know, and become friends with, people of color for the first time when they were in the military. But did we really get to know each other? Did we just laugh with them at company picnics or did we allow ourselves to be slugged, as I was by Johnson’s verbal pugil stick, into the bleacher seats? It was a risk for her to say what she said to me, and a gift. I can only think that she was so angry she couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. Which at the time made me stop caring what the men thought, and to crave insight into what the Black women, the enlisted women, the queer women — all the ones operating outside of the narrow parameters of an acceptable life for a female soldier — were thinking behind their shuttered mouths. When someone rounds you on the convulsive truth, it’s hard to hear but it is a gift, and Johnson taught me to grab with both hands.

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. Her work has appeared in Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press. Her debut novel, Playing Army, is forthcoming from Koehler Books in 2024. She reads from her work here.

***

It was such an honor and a pleasure to work with these talented writers. Thank you for supporting So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

Founded in 2009, So Say We All is a 501c3 literary and performing arts non-profit organization whose mission is to create opportunities for individuals to tell their stories, and tell them better, through three core priorities: publishing, performance, and education.

In addition to the programs made available to the public, SSWA offers education outreach programs specifically targeting communities who have been talked about disproportionately more than heard from in mainstream media. Creative writing and storytelling courses are offered in partnership with social service organizations such as The Braille Institute, Veteran Writers Group – San Diego, PEN USA, Southern California American Indian Resource Center (SCAIR), the homeless residents of Father Joe’s Village and Toussaint Academy, San Diego Public and County Library branches, and more.

The biggest hurdle for someone with a story that needs to be told is knowing where to begin. So Say We All’s purpose is to answer that need, to be a resource that listens to all facets of its community regardless of the volume at which they speak.

–

Justin Hudnall received his BFA in playwriting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He currently serves as the co-founder and Executive Director of So Say We All, a San Diego-based literary arts and education non-profit. In a prior career, he served with the United Nations in South Sudan as an emergency response officer. He is a recipient of the San Diego Foundation’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship and Rising Arts Leader award, SD Citybeat’s “Best Person” award of 2016, and is an alumni of the Vermont Studio Center. He produces and hosts the PRX public radio series, Incoming.

30 questions; let’s see who knows their stuff. Answers below.

27-30 Correct: Expert

23-26: Sharpshooter

19-22: Marksman

Less than 19: Bolo

Ready, go!

1.  “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” This is the opening line to what 2012 novel by an Army veteran about two buddies deployed to Iraq?

2. “We shot dogs.” This is the opening line to what 2014 short-story by a former Marine?

3. The author of the 2011 short-story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone is ______.

4. In 2012, this novel about an Army Iraq veterans attending a Dallas Cowboys football game was a finalist for the National Book Award.

5. Match the author with the title of his or her story in the 2013 short-story anthology Fire and Forget:

Jacob Siegal                      “The Train

Brian Van Reet                “Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek”

Mariette Kalinowski       “Smile, There are IEDs Everywhere”

6. What are the names of the Iraq Army veteran and Afghanistan Navy veteran who started the NYC non-profit war-writing organization Words After War?

7. This 2012 novel set in Afghanistan drew inspiration from the Greek classic “Antigone.”

8. Match the title and author name of these GWOT war novels written by civilian women:

Roxana Robinson                We All Come Home

Helen Benedict                    Carthage

Joyce Carol Oates               Sand Queen

Katey Schultz                      Be Safe I Love You

Cara Hoffman                       Sparta

9. Name the titles of the two graphic novels written by Maximillian Uriarte, one set in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan.

10. This novel by Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman takes its title from a phrase used to describe American casualties suffered at the hand of their Afghanistan allied partners.

11. Match the author and title of these novels written in the early years of the GWOT veteran-writing boom:

Benjamin Buchholz         The Sandbox

David Zimmerman          Last One In

Nicholas Kulish              One Hundred and One Nights

12. Match the names and titles of these novels and short-story collections written by male civilian authors:

Luke Mogelson            A Big Enough Lie

Eric Bennett                These Heroic, Happy Dead

Jonathan Chopra         The Good Lieutenant

Aaron Gwyn                 Veteran Crisis Hotline

Whitney Terrell           Wynne’s War

13. The name of Marine veteran Atticus Lish’s novel about a former Marine adrift in New York City is ____.

14. Match the names of the Iraqi authors with their works:

Sinan Antoon            The Corpse Exhibition

Hassan Blasim           Frankenstein in Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi        The Corpse Washer

15. Match the name of the war-writing collective/seminar/journal and its founder:

The Wrath-Bearing  Tree           Lovella Calica

Veterans Writing Project            Adrian Bonenberger

Voices from War                         Travis Martin

Military Experience and the Arts           Kara Krauze

Warrior Writers                           Ron Capps

16. Which military academy sponsored the War, Literature, and the Arts conferences in 2011 and 2018?

17. In what branch did vet-writers Brian Castner, Jesse Goolsby, Eric Chandler, and J.A. Moad serve?

18. In what year did Phil Klay’s short-story collection Redeployment win the National Book Award?

19. This Navy veteran’s short story “Kattekoppen” first appeared in The New Yorker in 2013 and then in the author’s short-story collection Bring Out the Dog in 2018.

20. The proprietors of MilSpeak Foundation and Middle West Press are ______ and ______, respectively.

21. The title of this poem by Brian Turner was later used as the title for an Academy Award-winning movie. What is the title?

22. What are the names of the memoirs written by the following veterans:

Brian Turner ____

Benjamin Busch ____

Ron Capps ____

Kayla Williams ____

23. Match the author with a volume of poetry they have written:

Colin Halloran              Sand Opera

Hugh Martin                Lines Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

Kevin Powers               The Stick Soldiers

Phillip Metres              Shortly Thereafter

24. Match the author with a volume of poetry they have written:

Lisa Stice                   The Iraqi Nights

Jehanne Dubrow      Clamor

Elyse Fenton.             Stateside

Dunya Mikhail           Forces

25. The Army veteran author of the novels Fobbit and Brave Deeds is _______.

26. The two novels set in Afghanistan written by Pakistani-British author Nadeem Aslam are ______ and _____.

27. “The Trauma Hero” is a concept associated with which Army veteran writer? ______

28. What are the names of the war-writers portrayed in this photo accompanying a 2014 Vanity Fair article titled “The Words of War”?

(Vanity Fair photograph by Jonas Karlsson)

29. What are the names of the authors featured in this 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) panel?

30. What are the names of these war-writing luminaries, taken at a reading at The Strand Bookstore in NYC in 2014?:

BONUS (2 points): Benjamin Busch wrote the introductions to one of the following anthologies and Ron Capps wrote the other. Match the author with the anthology:

Retire the Colors

Incoming

Answers:

1: Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

2: Phil Klay, “Redeployment”

3: Siobhan Fallon

4: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

5: Jacob Siegal: “Smile, IEDs Are Everwhere.” Brian Van Reet: “Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek.” Mariette Kalinowski: “The Train”

6: Matt Gallagher and Brandon Willetts, respectively

7: Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch

8: Roxana Robinson: Sparta. Helen Benedict: Sand Queen. Joyce Carol Oates: Carthage. Katey Schultz: We All Come Home. Cara Hoffman: Be Safe I Love You

9: The White Donkey (Iraq), Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli (Afghanistan)

10: Green on Blue

11: Benjamin Buchholz, One Hundred and One Nights; David Zimmerman, The Sandbox; Nicholas Kulish, One Hundred and One Nights

12: Luke Mogelson, These Heroic, Happy Dead; Eric Bennett, A Big Enough Lie. Jonathan Chopra, Veteran Crisis Hotline; Aaron Gwyn, Wynne’s War; Whitney Terrell, The Good Lieutenant

13: Preparation for the Next Life

14: Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer; Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition; Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

15:  The Wrath-Bearing Tree: Adrian Bonenberger; Veterans Writing Project: Ron Capps; Voices from War: Kara Krauze; Military Experience and the Arts; Travis Martin; Warrior Writers: Lovella Calica

16: The United States Air Force Academy

17: United States Air Force

18: 2014

19: Will Mackin

20: Tracy Crow and Randy Brown (Charlie Sherpa)

21: Brian Turner’s The Hurt Locker

22: Brian Turner, My Life as a Foreign Country; Benjamin Busch, Dust to Dust; Ron Capps, Seriously Not All Right; Kayla Williams, Loved My Weapon More Than You (or, Plenty of Time When We Get Home)

23: Colin Halloran, Shortly Thereafter; Hugh Martin, The Stick Soldiers; Kevin Powers, Lines Composed During a Lull in the Fighting; Philip Metres, Sand Opera

24: Lisa Stice, Forces; Jehanne Dubrow, Stateside; Elyse Fenton, Clamor; Dunya Mikhail, The Iraqi Nights

25: David Abrams

26: The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden

27: Roy Scranton

28: Left to right: Maurice Decaul, Phil Klay, Elliot Ackerman, Kevin Powers, Brandon Willetts, Matt Gallagher

29: Left to right: Brian Turner, Katey Shultz, Siobhan Fallon, Benjamin Busch, Phil Klay

30: Left to right: Adrian Bonenberger, Roxana Robinson, David Abrams, Matt Gallagher

BONUS: Retire the Colors: Ron Capps; Standing Down: Benjamin Busch

“Fire in the belly!” “Be all you can be!” “Get fired up!”  Slogans to incite, ignite, excite and encourage living on the edge—the thrill of defying death on the pages of peril. “Fire in the hole!” The acrid tang of sulfur and gun powder odor, the tympanic thrum in my ears.  “Drive on!” “Hoorah!” Be honorable—I wanted that. “God! Duty! Country!” Be a part of something greater than yourself; ask what you can do for your country.  “Lockdown, lockdown—fires take your position!” Words seared into my adrenalin. The Pavlovian response to leap from the warm comfort of my bed to draping myself with combat gear, bare feet to boots, racing to a foxhole.

Each time my Sgt. copped a quick feel, each time I screamed “Cover me!” the soft and good and kind parts of me fragmented and fell away making me sharper, more linear, more chiseled. Each leer and lip lock, each lock and load inventoried in perpetuity in my brain—tiny registers of offense, stacking up sandbags of resistance, numbness, defenses inside me precariously high—get ready, keep vigilant—always on the alert. Balance, balance—those sandbags teeter and threaten to topple unceasingly.

“Ruck up!” (time to move out). “Tits up!” (dead person ahead). “All one big Charlie Foxtrot,” (cluster fuck).  Sing along with the cadence, “We’re gonna rape, kill, pillage and burn!”  and the stack gets higher, sleep gets leaner, readiness gets sharper and the air gets thinner. Tight rope walking on concertina wire.  It’s all about being one of the boys, only I’m not. It’s all about embracing the aggression and dismissing the vile, only I don’t and I can’t. It’s going all in…only I don’t belong “in.”

Silverfish in shower drains, rats and rodents running rampant in streets where school children play crawling on warheads, where raw sewage seeps into rice fields. It’s hookworms in the topsoil, cockroaches in the quarters, abandoned Amerasians, beggars, parasites and prostitutes—too much to keep up with.  Jackhammering at my privilege, burrowing into my core, nicking away tiny shards of me. Increasing the pounding percussion in my ears, behind my eyes, throughout my head.  Grinding my teeth unconsciously, knowing the expectations roll like an unstoppable boulder: higher, faster, smarter, more than, stronger, better, first place, tight group until yeah, that edge is now a razor; my nerves electric current, my heart in a chronic race with my respiration. The alert sirens and flashing lights of gray matter pinwheeling wildly, working their way into a tornado-like funnel of frantic preparedness.  Ever vigilant, ever ready, every day, every second.

“So get fired up Kid—get that fire in the belly!” with a yuk yuk solid slap on the back. Aspirations of the American Way. But more of me keeps dying. Splintering off, bleeding out, disfiguring like a Picasso.  Bits of me swept up and away like smoke off a moth’s wing; dust motes of shoulds and oughts with nowhere to go. A wail chafes my throat, “God! Help me!” But god is a hologram bubble here; visible one second, then evaporates and is gone. What would there be to help anyway? All that fire leaves–is ash.

Every work day morning at 8 o’clock sharp, me, Juan, Marcus, and Willard stand at attention with hands over our hearts while the national anthem plays on the loud speaker at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, San Diego, California. While the music plays, resident supervisor, Captain C. T. Wallace, in his Navy Reserve uniform, runs the flag up the pole, ties off the rope, salutes, and goes into his office.

I’m Mike. I  ride herd on the crew renovating gravesites here at this place of rest for American vets. It ain’t easy work. I speak un poco Espanol, and my crew is mostly Mexican. My rule is when they conversate with each other they can talk Swahili for all I care, but they have to speak English to me.

These guys work hard in full sun most every day, at prevailing wage. I really have three crews, the one working today, the one that leaves every two, three  months, and one in training. Something that intrigues almost everyone is the ashes of cremated vets. Yesterday, the whole crew gathered around so I knew something was up.

Marcus said, “Look at this, Boss. Someone forgot to put a body back where it came from.” He handed me an pickle jar filled with what I quickly saw was ground up charcoal and crushed pasta shells. That’s not what cremains look like, but I kept quiet.

“How can we get this back where it belongs? There’s no name on it?”

“Hell, that’s no problem.” I fished out a piece of broken pasta and popped it my mouth. “We’ll just eat it. No one will ever know.”

The crew burst out laughing. Marcos grins. “You’re un bastardo inteligente.” With this bunch, one minute I’m a mean-ass drill instructor, the next a friend.

Every morning, after the Anthem, a gray Kia Rio drives past. The driver, a young blonde wearing a blue pants suit, low-heeled black shoes, and a white blouse, opens the car’s trunk, grabs a green and white folding chair, a yellow umbrella, and a flower, and carries these like birthday presents to her usual spot near the rose bushes.

She sets up her chair, opens the umbrella, then goes to the columbarium, where ashes of cremated bodies are kept, unlocks a niche door, takes out an urn, about the size of a half-gallon of milk-remains of the person she’s mourning-holds it a minute, puts it back, stretches to remove yesterday’s white geranium from its holder, replaces it with the new flower and goes to her chair.

Often, on the blue San Diego bay below like an art gallery painting, a submarine, or aircraft carrier glides out to sea, past the Point Loma light house, with sea gulls circling and the sun turning the ocean silver and gold.

The young woman fits her i-Phone buds into her ears, opens a book, and reads, wetting her finger with a pink tongue to turn a page. She’s still there at noon when we come up to eat lunch in the shade of the coral tree.

Juan says, “She’s here every day, for who? Husband? Brother?” He waves a tattooed hand in the air. “Every fuckin’ day, rain, or shine.”

Willard asks, “How do ya know ever day? Ya work weekends?”

Juan says, “I bet if the park’s open, she’s here. A husband probably. Not likely her daddy. She needs a man. Like me.”

Juan was paroled from Donovan State Pen last January. His first few days he was edgy as hell when the Star-Spangled Banner played. “Part of our job is respect for the deceased,” I said. That seemed to work. He’s first on the truck every morning and follows directions. That’s all I can ask from any worker.

Marcus asks, “Think the lady plays music on her phone?”

Marcus and Juan are kin, second cousins, I think, or maybe they married sisters. Anyway, they ride together in Marcus’ Ford Bronco and eat the same thing at lunch. Marcus is broad as sliding door, has a shaggy grey moustache and wears the same green pants and long-sleeve blue shirt every day.

Willard says, “Classy girl like her? Probably religious shit.”

He’s tall with long blonde hair. Always has a red and blue wool beanie pulled low over his blue eyes. He sits on the ground in the shade of the truck to eat lunch and has more ‘tats than an NBA player. He’s done no hard time if his application is correct.

Marcus says, “Classy? You mean assy? She wants something hard. Carne dulce. I’m her man.”

I ignore this and spray paint the grass orange where we’re to dig.

*

One noon, we’ve finished our tortas. Marcus grabs the weed whacker we use to barber the grass around markers, lopes across the road and begins to edge the sidewalk next to the blonde woman’s chair. What the hell!

I run up. Her blue eyes go big, her face white.

“Pardon us, Ma’am. My man’s trimming grass that maintenance missed.”

“Yeah,” Marcus says, “Make it perfect. For you.” His eyes scorch her from jeans to tennis shoes..

Her voice sweet as a phoebe’s call, but a bit shrill, she says. “How nice.”

*

Back at the truck, me and Marcus have a go. “Dude,” I say. “What the hell?”

“Wanted her to see a real man.”

“That was pretty stupid.”

“Oh, yeah? She was all smiles. Liked it.”

“Really? Truth is, you scared her shitless. Pull that trick again, I’ll write you up.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. Count on it.”

“Un hombre tiene que hacer lo que un hombre tiene que hacer?”

“Not on my watch, hombre.”

At two o’clock every day, the blonde stows her gear and drives off in her gray Kia, going slow as a hearse.

*

Soil contracts at night and expands by day. Rain and irrigation water wash away dirt leaving ruts and holes. Gophers and rats dig tunnels. All this causes head stones to tilt or fall over. Sometimes, a casket splits open, showing rags and brass buttons, bones grey as gun powder, some no longer than a chicken leg.

Often, we have to renovate a whole section. We spread caskets and markers on the grass, name side up so we know what goes where when we’re ready to close the graves. When this happens, cemetery visitors swarm like yellow jackets around us, push past our yellow tape, take selfies next to the caskets, kick clods into the trenches, pepper us with questions. “Whatcha doing?”

I answer, “Heroes deserve a beautiful and peaceful resting place. We’re repairing their graves.”

“Every casket has a body?”

“Absolutely. We’re careful to see each grave is correctly marked.” That’s the company spiel. It’s a lie. Stones mark where a body used to be, but tree roots squeeze caskets, they  disintegrate and flesh rots. When we work, we dig the markers out by hand before the backhoe rips a trench, then we lower a metal box into the ground and pour in reinforced concrete. When the cement is dry enough you can’t write your name in it, we re-set the headstone, a man on each side, careful not to leave any footprints, and sink the marker five inches deep, tamp sand and pea gravel around it and replant the sod. That sucker will stand straight as a soldier for years.

It takes sweat and know-how to cut away stubble with a sharp shooter and pry out weeds  with a rough-neck bar or square up a trench with a spade, but it  gives me time to think. I screwed things up with booze so bad that eight years ago, as part of my rehab, the VA sent me to culinary school. I had custody of my kids then. I got a job at a restaurant, doing food prep, but the pay was so lousy, I couldn’t pay my rent, much less keep two growing boys and a young lady in clothes, so I hired on here. Me and the kid’s momma have joint custody. I make $12.38 an hour, $18.56 overtime, with an extra twenty-five a week for being crew supervisor.  I try to save a little each time the eagle shits so I can open a restaurant someday. Weekends. Reservations-only seating.

I trim the grass around a stone with the weed whipper while my crew digs on a new section. Saturday night Cinda’s coming for dinner. If she can find a sitter. She lives in that double-wide across the street and two trailers down at Clariton Estates Mobile Home Park. She has full, red lips, tons of dark curls and dancing eyes. When she smiles, my throat goes tight.

I’ll start with an amuse-bouche, say a celery-infused beef puree. For the primo, Bibb lettuce and endive, with a little arugula and radicchio for bitterness, tossed with quinoa and mushrooms, topped off with honey-roasted walnuts and organic plum tomatoes and a nice lemon garlic dressing.

What secondo will she want? Fish or chicken? I’ll drop by her trailer tonight after her kids are down, say 8:30 or so, and ask her. If fish, it’ll be sea bass grilled in lemon butter and almond paste. If chicken, I’ll wrap it in foil and smother it under charcoal with parsley, onions, and green peppers.

The dulce? Double chocolate cake. I’ll bake it Friday, after work.

This week, my mind wonders from Cinda and Saturday night’s plans. The blonde in the beach chair by the columbarium? Who’s she thinking about?

*

Willard and Marcus are having a lover’s spat. They team up on most projects. If Marcus made a sharp turn, Willard would break his nose.

“What ’ya mean, rules for dying? Silliest thing I ever heard.” Williard tosses his shovel away and picks up a hoe.

Marcus says, “There’s five of ‘em, man. When my nephew was offed, the social worker told us about ‘em.” He grabs a hoe, too.

Williard doesn’t go for this. “Tonterias.”

“No bullshit. She named ‘em. One by one.” Marcus turns to me. “Tell him, Boss.”

“You mean the stages of grief? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance?” Marcus nods. Surprised I guess. I learned these when my AA sponsor’s Dad died last year. He made certain he touched every base, but other sober drunks told me you’ll live with those five mind states forever.

“Yeah. That’s what I meant.”

Willard  still has doubts. “When my Old Man took out that eucalyptus with his motorcycle, we knew he was dead. There was nothing to deny. Tore his bike all to shit. Him, too.” His face is red, and not just from work. This is the most I’ve ever heard him talk.

I nod. “Ever play over and over in your head how you could have kept the accident from happening? Feel sad when you think about it?”

“Everybody does, right? That’s normal, ain’t it.”

“I think Marcus’ point is our mind goes through various stages when someone close to us kicks off. Thinking how you could have changed things? That’s bargaining. Feeling shitty. That’s depression.”

Willard slices a lizard in half with his shovel. “Hell, I don’t drive the street where he bought it anymore. Ain’t that the shits?” He shakes his head as if to change the memory..

Juan says, “What staget, how you say, stage, is our Little Darlin’ goin’ through?”

“The blonde? Beats me.”

“Is there a dickin’ stage? That’s what she needs. A good jugando.”

*

A week or so later we’re waiting for the backhoe to trench a site. Marcus says, “Boss, I dropped my gloves at lunch. I’ll go get ‘em.”

“Like hell you will. The other crew sees you, they’ll say you’re diddling around, and I’ll have paper work to complete for weeks. I get the big bucks. I’ll go.”

Marcus clenches and un-clenches his fist.

I ignore this. “Double check our measurements before the ‘hoe starts, okay? I won’t be long.”

Me and the crew eat lunch across from the columbarium because the benches there are in the shade, the rest rooms clean and easy to get to. I go to where Marcus sat. No gloves. Where they on the ground and someone tossed ‘em in the trash? Negative. I stoop to look under the bench.

A girl’s voice interrupts. “Looking for these?”

It’s the blonde in the Kia. She’s not blonde any more. Her hair is pink and blue. She different somehow. She waves Marcus’ gloves.

“That wild-eyed guy. The grass trimmer. He dropped ‘em. I was taking ‘em to Lost and Found. You’re the boss, right?”

I nod. “Thanks.”

The small gold necklace around her throat says Misty.

“Misty, you’re here every day. What do you  read?”

“Stuff Tate liked.” She holds up a book. “This is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” She smiles. “I finished Harry Potter. The whole series.” She waves her red and gold phone. “I’m getting damn good at Grand Theft Auto, too.”

“I’m impressed. Tate was your husband?”

Her face pales. “Yeah. He was Army. An IED exploded near him in Afghanistan. They shipped his body home. I never saw it. We were married one year, eight months and four days. At his funeral, as a testimony to his service, I vowed to visit his grave 609 days straight.” She smiles. “Seventy-three more to go. You familiar with the Five Stages of Grief?”

The second time in two days this has come up. “Some. Why?”

She takes off her sun glasses. Big blue eyes. “I’m past denial but I’m still angry. If I could, I’d kill every fucking politician in D.C.” Black streaks run down her cheeks. “My support group says we never fully recover, just learn to survive.” She tries to smile through the tears.

“Got a job. Waitress at a bowling alley café. To pass the time. Part of  survival my group says.” She smiles. “I’m nuts, I guess. I talk with my dead husband. And he answers.” A half smile. “He says it’s okay to date. But I can’t. Not yet.” She puts a finger to her lips. “Quiet, Misty. Tate says these grounds are sacred. Respect the dead. Don’t talk so much.”  She smiles. “You agree?’

I nod.

She turns and walks to her chair, without looking back. A small blonde woman living a tortured life.

*

I’m Navy, myself. The only one in my crew who served, but my bunch turns over so often, next week I might have four. I was stationed at Subic Bay in the Philippines for 2 years. Me and this Filipino girl, Baby Ruth, shacked up. I fell in love. Not with her, but the sex. I was raised Southern Baptist, taught to  love Jesus more than life. My first liberty I had a Manhattan. After that, there was little room for Jesus. An old salt said church is good place to find women. I went with him. Met Baby Ruth. She was short and pretty, with skin the color of coffee with cream. Sex came natural to her. When my tour ended I felt guilty leaving her there. Stateside, my pastor said I could send for her. I did. We got married. She was a real Jesus freak. I was mostly just confused. I didn’t love her, but loved our sex. I hated our kids, but loved being a dad. Booze and nose candy made everything better.

Four years later, two squalling kids running around, my wife preaching Jesus to me, my head splitting, hands shaking, desperate as a convict on death row, I’d swear every morning I’d had my last drink. One night wasted on booze and drugs, I wrecked my truck on the 805. It took the doctors at the Veteran’s Affairs hospital 42 days to put me back together again. I joined AA. Three years later I got straight. Lost my job as a heavy equipment mechanic and tried small engine repairs but the drugs made my hands shake and the detail work gave me a head ache. The VA said they’d send me to culinary school. They did. I finished a 3-month course.

I visit AA rooms most weekends. Last night, the speaker talked about the 3rd Step, where you make a decision to turn your will and your life over to God. Six  years ago, I told my sponsor I’d like to do that. He asked, “If two bull frogs sit on a lily pad and one of them decides to jump, how many bull frogs are on the lily pad?”

“One,” I answered.

“No, dummy. Two. Decidin’ to jump ain’t the same as jumpin’.”

So, I jumped. Did all the fuckin’ steps. The whole nine yards. That’s why I’m sober today.

*

Getting ready for Cinda’s visit tonight, I clean the kitchen, wash my DAV Thrift Shop dishware, shine both settings of silverware, spread a red and yellow beach towel on the table and put Martinelli’s in the frig. I’ll buy a cake since I didn’t bake last night. I clean the bathroom and change sheets. Mrs. Chase from the single-wide next door- I call her Mrs. Scuttlebutt-bangs on my door.

“Isn’t it romantic? Cinda’s husband brought her the prettiest bouquet. Spend the night. He wants them to try and make a go of their marriage again.”

Suddenly I’m tired, really tired. It’ll be chicken for lunch this week.

*

Sunday morning. I wake up empty. Haven’t seen Misty or her Kia this week. What gives?” I slam a Nine Inch Nails CD intomy truck’s player, grab a 5-Hour Energy and drive to Fort Rosecrans.

What the fuck? Willard’s beat up pickup’s in the parking lot. Why? Not what I expected. Misty’s next to the roses as usual. Williard’s headed toward her. I run across the grass toward him.

He sees me. “Stay out of this, Boss!”

“Where ya goin’?”

“Juan says she wants a man. That’s me.”

I feel his body heat. The smell of bourbon. Sweat. He needs a shave. His beanie hides blood shot eyes.

“You can’t just grab her.”

“You didn’t say shit when Marcus bragged what he’d like to do to her.”

“No, but I should have. Think it through, man. Don’t do something today you’ll regret tomorrow.” Talking Program to adrunk is a waste of time, I know. Get ‘em when they’re sober. And shaky, the Big Book says.

Willard’s breathing hard. Sweat glues his shirt to his back.

“I could take ya,” he says, squaring up in front of me, fists doubled.

“I know.” He’s one tall dude.

I’m breathing fast. I don’t want to fight. “Walk away, my friend, and it’s over.”

He sways like a weeds in the wind. “Fuck you.”

He steps toward me. I don’t move. “We gonna fight?”

“If we have to.”

“What if I walk?”

“That’s the smart thing.”

“You gonna fire me?”

“I have to. Don’t come in Monday. HR will send what you’re owed.”

“Fuck.” He doubles his fists again. “I could beat the shit out of you.”

“I know. All that would prove is you’re tough. You’re a smart guy. Go sleep it off. You’ll be glad you did tomorrow.”

He glares at me, takes a deep breath, turns, and weaves off toward his pickup.

*

“That looked pretty intense.”

It’s Misty.

“Nah. Work stuff. No big deal.” I force a smile. “Didn’t see you this last week. Where you been?”

“I won’t be here as often as before.” It’s her turn to force a smile. “I met someone. It’s not serious, but my support group says it’s time I moved on. I’ll try.” The smile works this time.

I nod. “ I understand.” Maybe it’s time I move on, too.

Misty sticks out her hand. “Thanks for being my friend.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.” I come to attention and salute. She laughs and walks toward her car, ready to meet life on life’s terms.

Monday morning after the Anthem, a black Nissan drives slowly by and parks. A man in a dark suit takes two chairs from the trunk and carries them to a fresh-dug grave under a tarp. He goes back to the car and escorts a small lady wearing a black hijab to the chairs. They sit.

On the San Diego bay below, sea gulls circle and the sun turns the ocean silver and gold, like an art gallery painting. An aircraft carrier glides past Point Loma Light House, going off to war.

So, Abe, the pleasant guy who buzzes you in every week at the bubbled-roof tennis facility, takes your thick wad of cash (he appreciates exact change) and makes the usual small talk: weather, recent professional tennis matches, how he’s doing fixing up the fixer-upper he just bought in Queens, etc.

Lately, you’ve also been discussing updates on when the tennis club is scheduled to permanently close. The date keeps shifting, but it’s imminent.

He’ll lose his job. You’ll lose your precious hour of weekly tennis.

Today, you notice for the first time a large swelling at Abe’s neck. Behind the plexiglass, you suppress a gasp and try not to gawk. You glimpse. It’s protruding like an Adam’s apple, but halfway down his neck and on the side.

Is it new? Is it painful?

Should you tell him?

Is he blithely unaware?

Or is he fully aware and ignoring it?

Or is he aware and already undergoing medical treatment to deal with it, to keep it from growing, to keep it from consuming all of his neck and possibly his friendly, dark-eyebrowed face and even his shaved head?

Your long-time tennis partner would know what to do, and whether you should bring it up with Abe. She was raised down south and has impeccable manners.

But she’s in Egypt for a climate change conference and to see the pyramids. Or so she says. You imagine she is a perfect spy or a radical activist. She is tiny, nondescript, unassuming, and so soft-spoken no one has a clue what she is saying. She is traveling despite all the warnings and articulated dangers associated with travel for someone her age during what is hoped to be a waning phase of the pandemic.

If you wait for your tennis partner to return (in a few weeks) to consult on how to handle Abe’s situation, it may be too late for Abe. And it will be solely on you if Abe dies before her return from her high-risk trip because you neglected to mention the large swelling attacking his neck.

Abe is functioning fine. He’s busy juggling multiple phone lines, multiple demands for coveted weekend court time. Not knowing what to do, you wave at him through the plexiglass, he smiles back, and you wander to your court, fully masked for action.

You and your tennis partner have been playing with face masks on for several months now; they fog up eyeglasses, pinch behind ears, cut visual perspective horizontally and vertically, and muffle attempts at conversation. On the other hand, there is the possibility that wearing masks while exerting and running could improve lung capacity.

After ten minutes on the court with the young local pro, you are huffing and exhausted. So much for lung capacity. Fifty more minutes to go. During the expensive lesson, you want to make every costly minute count. But you are distracted. You hit the ball wide or long or inaccurately into the sloping net.

Is the distraction due to concerns about your partner’s long, potentially dangerous trip? The amount of extra money you have to pay for a lesson while she’s away?

Or is it all due to thoughts of Abe’s neck growth? To wondering if it will intensify or expand to the size of a yellow tennis ball, while you are selfishly hitting one instead of helping him? What will Abe’s neck look like when your lesson is over?

Will the growth turn yellow? Will that mean it is full of pus?

Why aren’t you racing off the court to beg Abe for the love of God to go immediately to an urgent care center (there’s one only a few blocks away) to address his neck issue?

***

You are unaccustomed to the steady onslaught of briskly and accurately placed balls the pro provides. He plucks the balls nonstop from a jam-packed grocery cart and smacks them at you.

You are accustomed to a sluggish weekly pace with your tennis partner, filled with rambling delays between points as she collects loose balls and places them in odd arrangements at the back of the court. You imagine she is plotting to overthrow a government on a continent oceans away, beyond this smooth, immovable, and bright blue deco surface. You impatiently pace, wait, and sometimes perform jumping jacks until she is finally ready to successfully hit her serve with the intensity of ten thousand suns. Or she hits it directly into the net.

From his side of the court, the agile-legged pro speaks liltingly about flow. “Where is your flow?” he asks. “Don’t rush your shots. Get your arm back early. Get it! I like that one. Pivot! Run up to the net. Keep your wrist steady.”

You have heard these commands, especially about wrist and flow, nearly every time you take a lesson when your tennis partner is unavailable and your back-up options (a sturdy friend from college, a hard-hitting former work colleague) don’t pan out.

Your wrist is the size of a pencil, so what’s a woman to do? It doesn’t wobble on return of serve since you have time to prepare. But impromptu, at the net, it dips. Some might say it collapses. You start mumbling your “Grip!” mantra to yourself under your multiple masks. It helps you focus and slightly improves the wrist flailing.

As for flow, some days you have it and some days you don’t. But honestly, how can you flow when a young man’s neck might now be the size of a Buick while you, a masked idiot, gambol all over your side of the court and contend with an unreliable wrist?

You associate the word “flow” with menstruation, something you have not had to worry about for quite some time. Years ago, at a Long Island party where everyone discussed furniture, you were introduced to a much older, wizened man. Over the course of your very brief conversation, he chose for some reason to confide in you that he only dated women who still “flowed.”

At the time, you silently wondered:

• Who invited this guy to the party and why? And who uses the word flow in this manner, much less in party patter with a stranger?
• How does he screen for flow status upfront, before dating anyone? Does he require a doctor’s note? Does he check out bathroom cabinets? Does he ask women directly? Do they punch him in the nose as he deserves and as the woebegone look of his nose implies?
• Has he incorrectly assumed you no longer flowed, or God forbid that you were interested in dating him?
• You have a gorgeous and smart friend, a mother of twins, who went through early menopause in her thirties. If he had met her “post-flow” would this presumed Viagra user find her lacking? Chopped liver?

Now you wonder why couldn’t that guy have a tennis ball affixed to the side of his creased neck instead of poor, young Abe? Abe, who hasn’t even finished fixing up his house.

In fury, you use your two-handed backhand to nail a deep, perfect shot down the line past your lilting-voiced pro. He’s unable to return it. He smiles broadly at you and says, “Nice!”

Flow or no flow, for a moment, you’ve still got it. And it feels so good to hit something.

Maybe Abe just needs some drainage.

Maybe your tennis partner will return safely and virus-free from Egypt.

Maybe the tennis club will stay open.

All unlikely.

But, maybe, and it’s a long shot, a very long shot, maybe you will learn finally to go with the flow.

But, then again, why start now?

Walter Cronkite left footprints
in the gravel of Saigon
but he didn’t tell you their names
didn’t show you the morning commute
of an accountant in Hanoi

they televise bedsheets
replacing blown out glass
in homes of blown out people
but not the Arab Renaissance Bookshop
which opened its doors in 1966

fire hoses are used
to extinguish human spirit
courage licks the veins like flame
and the only parts of war
they can’t powerwash away
are the bloody crevices
under their own fingernails.

Patrick Hicks: Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and taught English in South Korea for a year before he joined the United States Army. He served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division and, when he was deployed to Iraq, he became an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. His first collection of poetry, Here, Bullet, won the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pen Center USA “Best in the West Award”, and it was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection. His second collection, Phantom Noise, received equally strong attention and it was shortlisted for the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize in England. His memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, has been praised for both its clear-eyed perception of what it means to go to war, as well as it’s narrative structure, which is fragmented vignettes that examine the many wars that America has been involved in. Turner nudges us to think about the long after-burn of war and how one generation influences the next.

His work has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and many others. He received an NEA Literature Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Turner gives readings all over the world and he has made appearances on NPR, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS, and RTÉ in Ireland. When not writing or touring, he is a faculty member in the MFA Program at the University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. Although soft spoken and humble, his readings at book festivals and universities are deeply thoughtful and moving explorations about literature, global politics, and our responsibilities to each other.

Turner has three new collections coming out with Alice James Books, and we sat down to talk about the first in the series: The Wild Delight of Wild Things.

Patrick Hicks: Let’s start with the title, which comes from a line of poetry that your wife, Ilyse Kusnetz, wrote. In fact, the very first poem in The Wild Delight of Wild Things isn’t your work, it’s hers. It’s as if we have to read through her work in order to get at your own. And perhaps not surprisingly, she infuses the entire collection. She passed away of cancer in 2016 and, as I read this new collection, it felt like a restoring of her presence or an act of determined memory to be in conversation with her. Could you talk about Ilyse’s place in this collection and how she continues to influence you?

Brian Turner: Our home in Orlando, Florida, has a small entryway that leads to the living room. I’ve never told anyone this, but whenever I’m about to leave the house and whenever I return home, there’s a very brief ritual I do that reminds me of Ilyse. It’s one of the many ways I try to be alive with her in my life. To be present. To be in the presence of. To be in conversation with. And I think this practice mirrors, in some ways, the construction of this book—as her voice both begins and ends the meditation.

It’s also a chance for me to share her voice with others, which is a way of saying it’s a chance for more people to fall in love with her. And on that note—I dare anyone to read that first poem of hers and not fall at least a little bit in love with her.

PH: One of the first poems in The Wild Delight of Wild Things is “The Immortals.” It’s about jellyfish that seem to resurrect themselves from the dead and become young again. It’s a denial of death, and it’s rooted in nature. You write, “They have learned to reinvent themselves in defiance/ of the body’s undoing. They rise from their own deaths./ They rise from the bottom of the sea.” For a poet who has been lauded, rightfully so, for your work about the Iraq War, there are many references about nature woven throughout Wild Delight. Was it liberating to focus on things other than the Iraq War? In many ways, this collection feels like it comes from Brian, and not from Sergeant Turner.

BT: You know, this is something I’ve thought about quite a bit—not only for myself, but it’s a dynamic that I recognize in many writers and artists. When I lead writing workshops for veterans, for example, I often mention that my intention isn’t to simply give them writing tools and meditative approaches that might help them to explore and navigate their experiences while in uniform. I tell them that my larger hope is to offer tools that might help them to write their way into the rest of their lives.

And here I am, doing that very thing. You know? Becoming Brian, more and more with each passing day.

PH: “The Salton Sea” starts off with a rumination of the crew of Enola Gay practicing bombing runs as they drop huge barrels of concrete onto a target that would eventually become Hiroshima. And then the poem switches to the Cold War. You mention how twenty-four million gallons of jet fuel spilled “into the water that Albuquerque rests on.” Ilyse grew up in Albuquerque and died of cancer. It’s entirely possible, as you write, that she is “one of many unrecorded deaths on the home front.” In the poem, you talk about a reluctance for some people to think that she could have been a victim of the Cold War. Could you talk about what prompted this poem?

BT: This poem is watermarked with so many conversations Ilyse and I had after her diagnosis. And the anger welling up near the end—that’s her anger, blended with my own. There’s research involved in this poem, too, sure, but the basic argument and the emotional structure of the poem were drafted by her one conversation at a time with me as its first audience.

If we take a bird’s-eye-view of this… I’ve long been fascinated by the boundaries drawn between what some call the home-front and what we might think of as a conflict zone. There’s a kind of psychic disconnect there, I think. While it’s a very practical and seemingly logical thing to associate conflict zones with places where pain and trauma and death and violence occur, it does a disservice to the complexity of experience when we untether the home-front from the battlefield.

It’s similar to the experience of looking at an oak tree—how easy it is sometimes to forget that the root structure below can grow as much as three times larger than the canopy above.

PH: Maybe we could stay on this line of thinking for a moment. In the poem immediately following “The Salton Sea” you write about Cuvier’s Beaked Whales beaching themselves—and dying—due to the “acoustic blasts of active sonar” in submarines. Just as the military inadvertently poisoned the water of Albuquerque, the Navy is doing collateral damage to whales. In both poems, you question the long-term hidden effects of war. Do you notice such things, perhaps, due to your experiences as a soldier? You have spoken at book festivals about the grave and lasting harm that has been caused to children caught in war.

BT: It’s impossible for me to know whether I might have written this poem if I’d never worn the uniform. But I’m moved and troubled by these losses when I hear of them. Collateral damage. I recently visited the battlefield in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and walked some of the Union lines. As I considered the landscape, I searched for stands of red cedar and live oaks. I was looking for survivors—for ancient trees with stories to tell. Eastern red cedar, for example, can live up to 900 years. And I wondered if some still held minie balls or grapeshot within them, or if trees sometimes weep bullets the way the human body can sometimes weep shards of glass or metal fragments long after an initial injury.

PH: In “The Jurassic Coast” you have a lengthy stanza that lists off the animals that will likely go extinct before the century is out. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard of many of them, which is precisely the point I think you’re trying to make. What are we inadvertently killing? Why don’t we care? You end the poem with a powerful stanza about the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Just as you celebrate the wild delight of wild things in this collection, there is also an undercurrent of lament and despair.

BT: I wonder sometimes if the vast scale of it all is simply too overwhelming for the mind to grasp. I know that’s true for me. While this book holds an intimate conversation with Ilyse at its center, that conversation is mirrored, in some ways, with a meditation on climate change and what it means to live in the Anthropocene. Elegy is at the heart of this, I’m sure. A way of praising and lamenting and grieving and offering comfort all at once. My hope is that it’s clear-eyed in its compassion.

PH: Very much so. And even though I just mentioned an undercurrent of despair running through this collection a few seconds ago, it is equally true there is profound awe and fascination for the world around you. Some of these poems span lengths of geological time that our minds simply cannot fathom. It’s clear that a great deal of research went into these poems. Can you talk about your research process and how you threaded that information into these poems?

BT: Long before this book truly discovered its form, I began an earlier version as a kind of challenge: I would write 100 brief lyric essays on nature, and in each piece, I would learn something about the world and I’d also in some way be in conversation with Ilyse and our relationship. It didn’t work as a book, though—and that was a hard thing to accept at first. I had to sit with that fact for some time before rolling up my sleeves and weighing what was necessary and what had not earned its place on the page.

One of the beautiful things I learned in this entire process is that scientists and researchers are incredibly kind and helpful and clear and generous. Only once or twice did I not receive a response to a query. The opposite was true of the vast majority of folks I reached out to for their expertise. I have a standing invitation now, for example, to visit cave sites in India and to see first-hand the cupules I’ve written about in “The Auditorium Cave.” And I can’t wait to go!

PH: One of the most powerful poems in this collection is “Ashes, Ashes.” You start by saying “California is on fire” and then mention how trees and plants have been turned into particulate that rides the air as ash. You also bring our attention to the longest burning fire anywhere on Earth—an underground coal seam in Australia that has been raging for some 6,000 years. The third part of this poem focuses on your father’s body being broken down by the intense flames of a crematoria oven, and you write about it in great detail. Lastly, there is the haunting image of you cradling Ilyse’s ashes the night you brought her urn home. Could you talk about the writing process for this poem? How long did it take to write “Ashes, Ashes”? It’s one of your longest poems in the collection, and I sense that it took a while to piece together.

BT: “Ashes, Ashes” took several years to write, though the bulk of the writing was done in three phases. The first half of the poem was written after my father’s death, in 2015, and Ilyse was still alive. We didn’t talk about Marshall’s death. It was something I pushed down inside of myself emotionally. And yet, I wrote this meditation during the autumn after his death. Ilyse read everything I wrote and this meditation was no exception—as she was its first editor. And so, in a sense, we talked about this grief through the page as she suggested edits and choices in language, but the conversation stayed there and I didn’t talk about his loss outside of that.

What I couldn’t see then—or had blocked from my own imagination—was that this meditation would later include the second half that you mention. A version was published in The Georgia Review (Fall 2017), and that was later scaled down into the much more streamlined version that’s here in the book.

I’m continually reminded that there are things I want to write, and there are things I need to write. It’s a rare thing for a poem to contain both of these things at once.

PH: A difficult question, and I want to ask it delicately. In “The End of the World” you write, “I wanted the ruin. I’d be lying if I said otherwise./ I wanted the hurricane to destroy what was left of my life./ […] if that hurricane simply crushed me to death/ and then splintered the home around me into an unspeakable/ puzzle of what was once our favorite place on Earth—so be it.” Ilyse passed way in 2016 and you have also lost your best friend, Brian Voight, as well as your step-father, Marshall. Grief has been your companion for a long time now. How have music and words sustained you?

BT: Now that some time has passed—it’s been almost seven years—I can see a bit more clearly. I can see that writing helped me to find my way forward. I had a lot of anger for quite some time, and it’s been difficult for the body to metabolize that and then slough it away. Part of what helped was the research I did into the natural world. In some ways that attention to the details of this amazing planet helped me to fall in love with it once more. And yes, I had fallen out of love with it. When I realized that art offered some ways back into memory, and into conversations with the dead I love—that began a series of creative meditations both on the page and with sound that have sustained me to this day. Ilyse and Brian both died far too young. Both were artists that had so much to give to this world, to all of us. Part of my work now, as an artist, and as a human being, is to find ways to collaborate with them so that others might have a chance to meet those I love.

I’ve found that the sorrow that lives within the body remains, at least for now, with a kind of ebb and flow to it. It’s something I’m learning to live with. We each grieve in our own way, and the signature of love and loss is unique to the heart that carries it.

A friend in Colorado has shared with me some of the trees up in the mountains that are a part of his life. Lightning trees, as he calls them. You can trace the smooth skin of the trunk where lighting has discharged through the tree with such intensity that the bark has been blown off. They are mapped with scars from the ground to the sky. They are survivors. They radiate a quiet wisdom. And I can’t explain what it is or how it happens, but when I place my palms on the trunks of those trees, a sense of calm washes through me, something timeless and transcendent, and I open my eyes, and I breathe, and then I walk back into the days of my life.

PH: There is a definite, and yet subtle, soundscape to this collection. Waves appear in many of the poems. So do birds, clouds, fire, and the fall of rain. You’ve done something unique for this collection because you have literally created a soundscape that can be accessed by a QR code. Once a reader finishes The Wild Delight of Wild Things you invite them to listen to a thirty-minute song called “Clouds,” which in many ways is an auditory meditation on the entire collection as a whole. I can hear the sounds that hold these poems together and there is also film of clouds taken at 30,000 feet. I’m not aware of seeing—or hearing—anything quite like this before. Could you talk about how the idea, and the song, came together?

BT: I didn’t realize I was creating this when I began it. In Chennai, I sat under a sacred tree and recorded the birds above. I then had the honor of speaking with over 100 students of traditional dance and song in a nearby classroom—and so I asked if they might follow my lead and sing a wave-like meditative pattern with me, which I recorded on a hand-held recorder that I often carry with me. Likewise, while living in Ireland as the inaugural John Montague International Poetry Fellow for the city of Cork, in 2018, I was lucky enough to have a full choir bussed in from an outlying town to record in a gorgeous chapel. The waves themselves were recorded late one night on Anna Marie Island as Ilyse and I sat on the beach to watch the Perseids rain down.

And so, this meditation in sound arose organically as I began to learn how to live in the word after. Now that it’s done, I hope that “Clouds” might help the reader to process their own thoughts and feelings and experiences once they’re finished with the book. But in a larger sense, I hope this meditation stands on its own—and that it might prove meaningful and helpful for others in ways that I can only imagine.

*
The Wild Delight of Wild Things will be published by Alice James Books in August 2023. To hear a sample from “Clouds,” click here.

Memoirs written by soldiers and Marines who fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq and the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan portray many events that caused their authors anguish. Below I describe three particularly wrenching episodes. More than narratives of harrowing combat action, they illustrate the emotional strife wrought by war.

The first two episodes are from Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight. McPadden served as a US Army platoon leader in 1-32 Infantry, 10^th Mountain Division, on a 15-month deployment to the Korengal and then on a subsequent redeployment there with the 2^nd Battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment.

The third episode is from Alexander Saxby’s Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. Saxby, a rifleman in 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines, recounts his participation in the house-by-house fighting in Fallujah in November 2004.

As you read my summaries of the events, consider what would you have done if you were in the authors’ boots and how would you feel about the events now.

The Powerless Lieutenant

Late in McPadden’s first tour in the Korengal, he and his platoon are visited by their battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel) and command sergeant major (the senior enlisted soldier in the battalion). McPadden and his men have been in the field throughout their deployment, seeing much fighting and also engaging extensively with local nationals on more peaceable terms. They have endured a long, cold winter without many amenities, and as McPadden puts it, “climbed every mountain in Kunar twice.” McPadden and his men clean-up as best they can for the visit, for they sense it is as much an inspection as a friendly chance to thank the platoon for a long, hard job well-done. Throughout We March at Midnight, McPadden recounts a love/hate relationship with his chain-of-command. On one hand, he idealizes his company commander and battalion commander as soldier-warriors he hopes to impress. However, he also often finds them out-of-touch with the actual circumstances he and his men face and prone to issuing orders that are impossible to fulfill.

The visit begins well, but then goes horribly wrong. A soldier in McPadden’s platoon attempts a funny retort to a question from the sergeant major and the sergeant major, a by-the-book stickler for order-and-discipline, is not amused. He rips the soldier a new one, and then orders the soldier to pack his bags; the soldier is unceremoniously being removed from the platoon. By the sergeant major’s book, an insubordinate wise-ass given to pop-off answers has no place in the unit, no matter how good a fighter he has been or how entrenched he is in the platoon family. The platoon, already short-handed as a result of combat death and injury, must now endure the last few weeks of deployment without one of their beloved members and a trusted fighter.

The soldier is crushed, and McPadden stands there dumbfounded. He appeals to the battalion commander, but the colonel is anything but sympathetic. “It’s decided,” he retorts, “Trust me, we are doing you a favor,” as if he too believed the soldier was a cancer that needed excising for the good health of the platoon. McPadden, suddenly aware how powerless he is and how capricious is his chain-of-command, stands paralyzed as the soldier packs his gear and stows it in one of the colonel’s trucks. McPadden writes:

Minutes later the colonel’s convoy departs with [the soldier] crying in the back seat of the second Humvee. I cannot stop thinking about this little warrior, crying at being removed from his platoon and squad, destroyed at being forced off the battlefield.

Former Friend, Now a Foe

Toward the end of his tour in the Korengal with 1-32 Infantry, McPadden befriends a local policeman named Abdul, who then becomes McPadden’s partner in several military, infrastructure, and governance projects. McPadden and his men are invited into Abdul’s home for meetings and meals, where they meet his family and are always extended hospitality. All good, but two years later McPadden returns to the Korengal as part of a Ranger strike-force charged with killing-or-capturing Taliban leaders. As one mission unfolds, McPadden finds himself and his Rangers lined up outside Abdul’s residence. An Afghan male emerges from the compound and is shot dead by the Rangers. McPadden makes a funny quip about the man’s death rattle, but upon inspecting the body recognizes the man as Abdul’s father. The Rangers then raid the residence and McPadden follows his men inside. There, he sees Abdul lined up against the wall with the other detainees. McPadden writes:

His aquiline nose I will never forget. If this were a movie, at this point, we would lock eye and one of would say something with tremendous gravity. In reality I freeze, then spin away and duck out of the house, fearing Abdul has seen my face. I do not know what he would say to me, whether he’d insist this is a mistake and plea for release or maybe admit to being bad. Perhaps he will blame me for everything that afflicts his homeland: poverty, lack of social mobility, decades of civil war, scarce natural resources, corruption, economic instability, and religious fanaticism. I don’t really know. I do know that when we shot Abdul’s dad, I mimicked his death sound perhaps to convince myself that I didn’t care about these people. In any case, I decide the worst thing would be Abdul failing to remember me at all.

Death in a Minaret

A week into the Second Battle of Fallujah, on Alexander Saxby’s birthday, a good friend of Saxby’s is killed. Saxby’s unit fights on, and later they assault a mosque from which they are taking fire. They return fire and then enter the mosque and climb to the top of the minaret. At the top, they discover the now-dead bodies of two insurgents who are obviously not Iraqi nationals. Confirming the presence of foreign fighters is a high priority information request from Saxby’s higher headquarters and also of interest to two New York Times journalists embedded with Saxby’s platoon.

A few hours later, Saxby describes to the two journalists the foreign fighters lying dead in the minaret. The journalists want to see the bodies for themselves, and the fighting calm for the moment, they convince Saxby’s platoon leader to assign a squad to escort them back to the mosque for photographic documentation. Saxby doesn’t go, but another of his good friends, Bill Miller, is part of the journalists’ escort. Unbeknownst to the patrol, the mosque has now been reoccupied by insurgent fighters. As Miller leads the journalists to the top of the minaret, he is shot and killed.

That evening, Saxby and one of the journalists are on the roof of a house the Americans have occupied. Saxby writes:

The New York Times reporter was sitting near us, trying to get a signal to send out his stories. He looked at me and asked what I had gotten for my birthday. I didn’t even look at him when I said, “Two dead friends.” I knew it would be many years before I celebrated my birthday again, assuming I made it past the next few weeks.

I have described the scenarios starkly and solely from the point-of-view of the authors. McPadden’s colonel and sergeant major may have seen more troubling signs than McPadden realized. Abdul, as McPadden notes, may have been a Taliban or Taliban sympathizer all along. The two journalists in Saxby’s account actually do have their say in later pieces (links below).

That’s all fair, and the confluence of perspectives have potential to change the thrust of the stories I have described. But that’s not work I will do here, and would probably be of little use to McPadden and Saxby. In the moment, and for years after, events occur on the battlefield that forever impress themselves on the participants without easy or satisfactory resolution. The average ordinary circumstances of deployment and combat are challenging enough, but sometimes an extra-added quirk or fillip of circumstance elevates the average and ordinary into the overwhelming and unfair. Soldiers rely on training, their mission orders, their instincts, and their sense of what their rank-and-duty role entails to see them through, but nothing prepares McPadden and Saxby for the events described above. Power, or powerlessness, is at the heart of the issue in each vignette, but not simply in the form of being subject to the cruelty of rank. The vignettes speak to the powerlessness of soldiers in the face of circumstances they couldn’t have seen coming and whose unintended consequences place undue demands on their ability to make sense of them.

****

The New York Times reporter in Saxby’s vignette is Dexter Filkins, the author The Forever Wars, an excellent journalistic account of the Global War on Terror campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. With Filkins is photographer Ashley Gilbertson. They offer their version of Bill Miller’s death in a recent PBS Frontline interview titled “Once Upon a Time in Fallujah”:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/once-upon-a-time-in-iraq-fallujah/transcript/

In 2008, Filkins wrote at length about the event in a New York Times article titled “My Long War.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24filkins-t.html

Ray McPadden, We March at Midnight. Blackstone, 2021.

Alexander Saxby, Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. 2021.

For all Strike Through the Mask! columns and especially this one, thanks to Wrath-Bearing Tree editor Michael Carson for suggestions and inspiration.

It was a typical Thursday night at the Taj Tiki Bar, tucked away off the Jalalabad – Kabul road in the hamlet of Bagrami just outside of the Jbad city limits. The Tiki Bar at the Taj had been established by a UN road building crew from Australia in 2003 and was the only bar in Eastern Afghanistan. The Taj itself was a three building world-class guesthouse that also featured a custom swimming pool that the Aussies built that we filled with sand filtered, freezing cold well water. This being Afghanistan, Afghans were not allowed in the Tiki bar and because the pool was frequented by western NGO women it was surrounded by a 40 foot bamboo screen. Bikini wearing women cavorting in a pool with men is haram in Afghanistan and best kept out of public view.

During the summer of 2008 the Tiki Bar had never been busier during weekly Thursday night happy hour. The UN had pulled out the year before, so the Taj was now home to the Synergy Strike Force, an MIT FabLab, and the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club. My USAID funded Community Development Program (CDP) was also based there.  Jalalabad and San Diego are sister cities which was why the Rotarians were actively funding projects to refurbish schools, build dormitories at Nangarhar University and purchase modern equipment for the Nangarhar University Teaching Hospital.

The Synergy Strike Force (SSF) was a San Diego based collection of high-end tech gurus who were there to “save the willing” by accessing unlimited funding from DARPA to fine tune their crowd sourcing software. To get the internet out to the people the founder of the Synergy Strike Force, a dual MD/PhD named Bob, conned the National Science Foundation into funding the deployment of an MIT Fabrication Laboratory to the Taj Guesthouse that came with two Grad students to set it up.

The Tiki Bar had become so busy that I brought my son Patrick, who had just graduated from High School, over to run the bar allowing me to focus on supply. Buying beer was no problem but getting it past the National Directorate of Security (NDS) checkpoint in the Kabul Gorge could be a real problem. I had already lost 2 sets of body armor and 5 bottles of booze to them, but they headed home early every Thursday clearing the run back from Camp Warehouse long before the sun set.

There was a giant clay fireplace across from the bar for cold weather operations and the patio area between the main house, bar, and pool deck was filled with the usual suspects. NGO workers from the American aid giants DAI and Chemonics, two women from Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale, the attaché from the Pakistan consulate who had the hots for one of the German ladies, four agriculture specialists from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the ever lovely and vivacious Ms. Mimi from Agence Française de Développement. Mimi had a male colleague who insisted on wearing a speedo bathing suit in the pool area, but we let it slide because Mimi was a most attractive and agreeable guest who often stayed the night and spent Friday’s pool side.

A Blackwater crew from the Border Police training academy were there as usual as was the brigade Human Terrain Team from FOB Fenty. There were two Air Force officers from the Nangarhar Provincial Reconstruction Team (technically in a UA status). One of them, an intelligence officer, was dating my Aussie running mate Rory which was a lot of risk for marginal gain in my opinion, but I’m a retired Marine Corps grunt on the other side of 50 so I might have been jealous, I was never sure.

The SSF crew were spending their last night in country before heading back to the USA for the annual Burning Man festival and they were in rare form, as were the Rotarians from the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club who were reinforced by some Rotarians from Perth Australia because it turns out Perth too is a sister city of San Diego and Jalalabad. The Twins were the MIT grad students sent to start up the FabLab. They were from The Center for Bits and Atoms and were both TS (SCI) cleared engineers. They were from New Jersey, both had long jet black hair, both smiled so much it made me uncomfortable; one was Chinese American the other Indian American. They were seated at the bar with The Skipper – an EOD trainer who remained outside the wire living with his Afghan trainees in a compound near the Jalalabad Teaching Hospital. The Skipper was my nickname for a retired navy Senior Chief EOD specialist who looked just like Alan Hale from the 1960’s era TV Show Gilligan’s Island. He had laid out a bunch of triggering switches he had collected from disabled IED’s and was taking notes as the Twins examined each with magnifying glasses. The Twins had the uncanny ability to recognize countries of origin and fabrication anomalies in the circuit work.

The Twins were trouble from the start because they proved themselves to be indispensable. We expected computer geeks from MIT, not engineers who could fix or build anything without apparent effort. They rebuilt the Tiki Bar because they found the original construction faulty, they built shelving from wood scrapes that were so impressive they looked like museum pieces. They got bored one day and started working on the War Pig, our up armored Toyota Hi Lux, fabricating a turbo charger and, with the help of our house manager Mehrab and a local diesel mechanic, super charged the engine and lifted the suspension 3 inches so the new tires they “found” would fit the truck. Once done they surmised the War Pig it would run hot and fast on the hairpin turns which were a feature of the Kabul – Jalalabad highway and they frequently jetted out of the front gate to drive like maniacs on the mountain roads when unsupervised.

The Skipper was a regular at the Tiki Bar Happy Hour every Thursday evening where he drank exactly two beers regardless of how long he stayed. The Skipper was superstitious, he insisted on driving himself, like I did, but he was the slowest, most cautious driver I ever saw in Afghanistan. He also never missed church on Sundays. After getting his engineering reports sorted he told the Twins he’d be heading into Khogyani district in the morning to blow some dud ordnance at the Border Police Training Academy. Friday being a weekend day in Islamic lands it should be quiet enough for them to tag along.

I agreed to join them to provide an extra hand if things went pear shaped so as dawn broke across the Nangarhar Valley on a scorching hot Friday I was poking along in The Skippers armored SUV with the twins. I was wearing body armor, with my 1911 pistol mounted in a chest holster, and I had my Bushmaster flame stick with its 10.5 inch barrel and Noveske vortex pig snout flash suppressor. We had discovered regular bird cage flash suppressors kicked too much gas and noise back into a vehicle if you were firing while mounted but the pig snout kicked it all out the end of the barrel which resulted in a little additional muzzle flip but no gas blowing back in your eyes.

The Twins carried Glock 19’s with two extra mags in kydex holsters and they both sported WWII era M3 .45 caliber Grease Guns. There were hundreds of old M3 submachineguns and 1911 pistols floating around Afghanistan at the beginning of the War, and we had obtained more than our fair share somehow. The M3 was the only weapon that could be fired out of the muzzle port in the windshield of the War Pig. The poorly designed add-on armor from South Africa featured a V shaped windshield with a firing port on the passenger’s side. But the angle of the bullet proof windscreen was so steep the only weapon we could fire out of it was an M3 subgun held upside down with the bottom of the magazine facing the roof.  But the Twins liked them because it was easy to modulate the trigger and control them when firing on full auto.

We were poking along the hardball road leading into the foothills near Tora Bora when The Skipper stopped dead in his tracks. His Afghan EOD team driving behind him must have anticipated this because they stopped on a dime too. “You smell that” he asked as he opened his door letting in an overpowering smell of cut hay and shredded leaves. His Afghans were out of their truck looking up and down the road, The Skipper looked over at me and said “IED”. That perked the Twins up as the Skipper explained we should be seeing a carpet of leaves covering the road ahead.

The road doglegged to the right crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair-sized stream under the asphalt paved road. The road was covered in a several inch carpet of leaves but there was no blast signature I could detect. We got out of the trucks and started looking around, trying to figure out what had happened when a patrol from the Afghan National Army (ANA) pulled up with a bunch of villagers in the back of their pickups. The villagers told us there is a bomb in the culvert we’re standing on. The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up and an elder pointed downstream and said, ‘the man who put the bomb in the culvert.”

The Skipper got one those fisheye mirrors used for vehicle searches out of the back of his truck along with a powerful surefire flashlight and gave them to his EOD techs. One of the EOD techs laid on his belly and held the mirror in front of the drainage pipe while one of the other EOD men shined the flashlight into the culvert pipe. They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and the Twins look and see it too; a pressure cooker on vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap inserted into a hole in the lid and wire running out of the drainage pipe heading downstream.

The Skipper called back to FOB Fenty at the Jalalabad airfield to tell the brigade what he found, and they instructed us to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to lead the EOD team out of Fenty to recover the IED. The Skipper acknowledged them but we both knew waiting for the army was a non-starter. They would take at least 8 hours to roll out of the gate and another two to get to us; there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long. He looked at the Twins and said, “let’s blow this bitch up”. They broke into radiant smiles and immediately started organizing a work area in rear area of the truck.

The Skipper got four bricks of C4 out and gave them to the Twins who taped them tightly together while he unspooled some det cord. The Twins then wrapped the bricks tightly with the det cord and handed them to the Afghan EOD techs. They along with the ANA troops glued the charge to a piece of cardboard and then tape the cardboard to a five-gallon water jug they had some local kids take down the creek and top off.

The Twins conned The Skipper into giving up his blasting caps so they could prime the charge, the Afghan EOD men attached about 10 feet of shock tube to the charge and using 550 cord lowered the water jug over the mouth of the culvert. A few of the ANA troops and some local teenagers had stopped up the downstream end of the pipe that was now filling with water. The other ANA troops were with the EOD techs in the stream bed making a big show of lining up the shot correctly. Once the shot was perfectly lined up, they threw a yellow smoke grenade into the pipe and scrambled up the stream bank.

When the smoke was flowing out of the pipe the senior Afghan EOD tech looked at the Skipper who nodded his head while putting on set of high-end hearing protectors. The Twins and I had foam ear plugs which we fished out of our pockets before sitting on folding beach chairs the Skipper carries around for just such an occasion.  With the smoke billowing out, the techs and ANA soldiers yelled ‘fire in the hole’ three times (in English) and the senior EOD man shot the charge.

The C4 went off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow burning explosive so it doesn’t evaporate the water, it pushes it down the pipe at around 26,000 feet per second, the kinetic energy takes out the IED and the water renders the explosive components safe. A giant gush of yellow tinted water erupted out of the downstream end of the culvert pipe arcing over the creek bed for about 100 feet before slamming into the trees like a wave. The water then exploded up into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors that hung suspended in the air for a good 45 seconds.

There were dozens of local people from the near-by villages and the stalled traffic watching us and they erupted in cheering and laughing and shouting. Their kids were dancing around in excitement laughing and clapping; local men came up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team. The Skipper looked over with a big wide smile and said to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit”? I could not, nor could the Twins who were self-funded volunteers and not making a dime during their time in the Stan but still happy to be here with us.

The Skipper lost his dream gig in 2011 when the position was eliminated, and he moved onto the big box FOB on Bagram. His company felt it was no longer safe for him to free range outside the wire and they were probably right. Somebody up in Nuristan had taken a shot at the Skipper that missed due to a low order detonation from incompetent poor waterproofing so despite his willingness to stay it was time for him to go.  For the three years he roamed around N2KL (Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman provinces) ‘removing the boom’ from local towns and villages while making one hell of an impression on the Afghans. They loved him and he, in return, poised for hundreds of pictures, while patiently fielding complaints about ISAF, the Afghan government and various American administrations from local elders. The Skipper had balls the size of grapefruit and he never hesitated to go into Indian Country with just his Afghan EOD crew when called.

The Skipper, like every heavily armed humanitarian I knew, made it home safe and sound after staying in Afghanistan (on FOB’s) until 2015. His never talked about his free-range past because none of the people he worked with believed his stories. That was a common among us outside the wire contractors in Afghanistan. There were only a few of us who invested the time it took to learn the language and put their skin in the game. Those that did, like the Skipper, were rewarded with a veil of protection by the local people. That may have been a minor accomplishment in the big scheme of things, but it was a worthy one that came with no small amount of pride. We were able to go places and do things that would have gotten us killed ten times over had we still been in uniform. And that little bit of special pride is borne in silence by us these days because nobody believes that we lived outside the wire with the Afghans, for years and enjoyed every minute of it.

From his notebook, illustrated with a picture of a four-eyed flower:

We live in a bungalow in Pasadena, California, where my father is a professor of physics at Cal Tech, and my mother is a plein air watercolorist. My mother taught me how to read, and at the age of seven, I was assigned two books per week or eight per month. Later the number went up. You may have already guessed I was homeschooled and that was the case. It was a utopian life, unmarred by peer pressure and the stresses of competitive education. I am now twenty-nine years old and understand the world of “common consent.” Except I can’t take it anymore.

***

It was Tuesday afternoon and Bartholomew was tutoring English to a ninth grader from San Marino High School. His parents, Anthony and Barbara, quietly slipped out the kitchen door so as not to disturb the lesson. They had been walking for several blocks around the leafy neighborhood.

“He needs a degree,” Barbara announced.

“We’ve talked about this before,” said Anthony. “College isn’t for everyone. Barth is what they call a creative.”

“Who says that?”

“It’s a designation.”

“Whose?”

Anthony laughed. “Never mind.”

“He needs a good job—a career,” she said. “We thought he would find his own way. Fat chance.”

“I thought you were being serious.”

“I am.”

“He likes living with us,” said Anthony. “He doesn’t see a logical reason to leave home.”

“Then it’s time for him to move out,” she said.

“He’s broke.”

“Give him his college fund.”

“And push him out to sea,” said Anthony.

“If you’re going to the Athenaeum for lunch, I thought I would join you.”

“I’m having lunch with the department head.”

“Oh, well then—” she said.

“Don’t look so glum.”

***

It was the beginning of April and unseasonably hot. They walked around Lacy Park and down Orlando, past the big houses that Anthony referred to as palaces. Barbara was the first to notice a broken sprinkler flooding the lawn of a Spanish revival. Ducks from Huntington Gardens had discovered it.

“We’re in a drought,” she said. “I’ll go up.”

She rang the doorbell—and rang it again. A big dog started barking, and Barbara told the dog to shut up. This made the dog snarl and scratch at the door demonically.

“Shut up,” yelled Anthony from the driveway.

“Shut the fuck up,” chimed Barbara.

They were cutting across the lawn when another sprinkler went off, and they had to run through the duck pond to get away.

***

At lunch at Cal Tech’s Athenaeum, they discussed the pros and cons of giving Bartholomew his college fund, which had grown substantially.

“You’re right. Barth needs a job where he can meet new people,” said Anthony.

“Like single women,” said Barbara.

“What do you think he would do with two hundred fifty thousand dollars?” wondered Anthony.

***

Bartholomew didn’t have a driver’s license, but he didn’t mind walking to Barnes & Noble three miles away. When he arrived at the store, his shirt was sticking to his back under his corduroy sport coat. The store manager gave him an application and directed him to a table at the bookstore café.

“Let’s see. Bartholomew? Like the apostle?” asked the manager.

“That’s right,” said Barth.

“What’s your experience working in retail?”

“None in retail,” he said. “I’ve been tutoring for the last several years.”

“I see. How many hours a week?”

“Two.”

“I see,” said the manager evenly. “Are you living at home?”

“Yes.”

“And no college?”

“No college but I am quite well read.”

“Everybody who works here reads. We like to hire people who are bibliophiles. Do you know the word?”

Bartholomew nodded. “I’m a bibliolater.”

“That’s a word I don’t know,” said the manager.

“I have an extravagant interest in books.”

“I like how you say that, Bartholomew. Can you estimate how many books you’ve read?”

“Over four thousand. My parents kept a log.”

“Excellent. May I ask how—”

“Five books a week—twenty a month.”

The manager returned to Barth’s application. “That’s the advantage of a homeschool education, I guess. We have an opening in customer service. This package has all the information—the benefits and raises. We pay eighteen-seventy-nine an hour to start. You don’t need to wear a sport coat to work. Some people wear T-shirts, but we prefer a shirt with a collar. Can you start tomorrow?”

“I’d like that very much.”

***

It had been three days, and he still hadn’t run into the manager. Instinctively he knew what to do. There were books in carts to put away, books on the floor, books and magazines on tables in the store café. The scene was similar to the disarray at the public library. He arranged errant books alphabetically and put the magazines back on the rack after reverse rolling them to make them lie flat. At the end of the day, a young woman named Nadja introduced herself to him.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“A customer?” Barth ventured.

“I’m Nadja, your boss. I’m taking over Carmen’s job.”

“Nice to meet you, Nadja,” Barth said.

She appeared to be his age and had a nice figure—although it was hard to tell under her wrinkled khaki jumpsuit.

“I like how you’re organizing the fiction section,” she said.

“It was a big mess. What happened to Carmen?” he asked.

“Carmen quit.” She stood up on her toes to stretch her calf muscles. “He quit the day he hired you. He said he can’t stand customers who never buy anything.”

“You mean the homeless?” Barth said.

“Oh, they have homes,” she said oddly. She looked at him suspiciously. “Carmen thought you were homeless.”

“I was hot from walking.”

“I do like your corduroy coat. Why don’t you wear it for work?”

***

They were in the children’s section on the second floor. Nadja took a seat in a tiny chair at the table. There were several books out, including one turned over with a broken spine. She picked it up like it was a bird and bent it backward to restore its shape. “Nothing can be done for it,” she said.

Barth was surprised at how different she looked. Her blond hair was clean, brushed, and tied back in a ponytail. She wore slacks with a gray blouse studded with military buttons. She wanted to know about the books he had read.

He said: “Well, just about everything we have in fiction.”

“How about non?”

Bartholomew was too tall for the table and his legs were cramping. He tried to keep them down, which made one of them vibrate. At the bookstore café he had noticed a lot of people with the condition—usually vibrating one leg at a time. It was something to look into.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He blushed.

“We have something in common,” she said.

“Were you homeschooled?” he asked.

“I never went to school. I had a studio teacher. Actually he was my dialogue coach. I played an English boy, and it got harder for me to do as I grew up.”

“You never went to school?”

“Not a single day. I played against type. Do you know what that means?”

“Reversed?”

“Yes, reversed,” she laughed. “My coach wanted me to try different dialects. It confused me. Sometimes I was a posh boy and sometimes sort of cockney. I wasn’t a good actress. ‘Hello, chappy.’ See, I can’t do it anymore.”

“Hello, chappy,” repeated Barth.

He noticed how she had outlined her left eye with makeup but not her right. “Did you have friends your own age?”

“Adults mainly.”

“I had neighborhood friends,” he said. “They’re not the same as school friends.”

She was paged: “They need me at the register.”

***

He had been thinking about Nadja all week. He loved watching her go up and down on the escalator in the pink pastel sweater she now wore every day. He thought of her as a pink cloud that floated up—diagonally. A routine had developed between them. She would surprise him when he was replenishing the stacks. When he was engrossed she would whisper something in his ear. Once she asked: “Does it frighten you to go upside down?”

He thought he understood the question. He identified it as a reference to St. Bartholomew, his namesake, the patron saint of plasterers and bookbinders. For his zealotry the saint was flayed and crucified upside down. Bartholomew had always been frightened by the story. One day Nadja said: “Has your heart ever been higher than your head?”

***

In May Bartholomew saw Nadja standing in front of Tiffany & Co. on Colorado Boulevard. She looked hypnotized by the window display and didn’t seem to recognize him at first.

“I’m shopping for a birthstone ring,” she said in a voice that sounded distant.

“Let me guess—” said Bartholomew.

A pretty little girl in a sundress ran up to Nadja. She asked her something Barth couldn’t hear. “Yes, puppet, the diamonds are real, but the emeralds are made of celery,” she said.

The little girl laughed and ran away.

“I know your birthstone,” said Barth. “You’re moonstone!”

“Bingo!” said Nadja.

“Let’s grab a drink at the 35er. We can walk there!”

At the bar the bartender seemed to know her. Bartholomew ordered a Bloody Mary, and Nadja asked for change for the jukebox. She dropped quarters into the slot without pausing to read the selections. After a minute “I Am, I Said” by Neil Diamond came on. The next song was called “The Dolphin on Wheels.” She tapped her foot against the barstool but was a beat off. A man approached them at the bar and asked her if she was working. She smiled at him and said: “Is that you, Charlie Chaplin?”

***

Nadja’s apartment was in a condo converted to an extended stay suite. It was a furnished one-bedroom unit with a gas fireplace and refrigerator with bottles of Perrier and Laughing Cow cheese. The light was low and Bartholomew sat across from her in a red leather chair. He liked that she had colored her hair black, and it was cut short with bangs.

“Did you just move in?” he asked, looking around.

“Not just.”

“Where are your books?”

“At the store. Oh, you mean…” She laughed.

Nadja sat with her hands folded in her lap. He sat with his knees touching hers, and they shared a long moment when neither had anything to say. Barth didn’t mind, he didn’t need to talk. She was such a strange bird—the bird is the word—and she made him feel easy because she was like him. Of course she wasn’t just one person. That was obvious. Why was she wearing her watch with the face turned backward on her wrist? As he considered this, the name of the book he had been trying to remember came to him. It was a book by André Breton, the charismatic leader of the early surrealist movement in Paris. Barth read it when he was thirteen and had not thought about it since. The book was called Nadja!

Nadja laughed. “I forgot you were coming over.”

“Did I come on the wrong night?”

“I was playing no-argument solitaire,” she said.

“How do you play that?”

“No kings or jacks.”

“How about jokers?”

“They’re anarchists, you know.”

Bartholomew laughed.

“We haven’t seen each other for a long time.”

“Not since you quit at work,” he said.

“How long ago was that?”

“Two weeks.”

Nadja removed the back cushions from the sofa and threw them over the side. “Take off your sandals. I want to see your feet. Oh, too wide.” She laughed.

As she leaned over he could see the teardrop shape of her breast. He remembered more details of the story. Nadja had been the lover of Max Ernst, who said she was the only natural surrealist in Paris. Bartholomew kissed her and felt an electric disturbance that ran through his body and coiled around his tongue. He remembered this feeling from a dream, and it was accompanied by paralysis, where he found himself hanging upside down with blood rushing to his head and arrows in his chest. It was at this moment that he moved up the plain of her long legs to where they forked and revealed a small yellow bird’s nest.

He started gently and she cried: “Oh Charlie, oh Charlie.” This was her reanimated meme, and it made him angry and so he teased her slowly, exploring with his tongue, until the dam swelled, trembled, and broke—and then he pulled her up by the waist, and they climaxed together in beauty and convulsive beauty like wild horses.

Afterward Nadja drove him home in her car. There was condensation on the windshield, and Nadja turned it into a blank slate and started to write a message with her finger. She licked it and said: “They say you aren’t supposed to lick your finger. It makes the writing smear.”

The word she wrote was HELLO. It ran and only HELL was left.

Bartholomew felt his heart beating too fast.

“What is it, dear friend?” she asked.

“I know how this story ends,” he said solemnly.

“How does it end, André?”

***

Anthony and Barbara were playing Word Exchange on the dining room table. “Barth has a new girlfriend,” said Barbara.

“He told me about her,” said Anthony.

“I’m not sure she’s right for him.”

“Who is?” asked Anthony.

“Nadja was his manager and then something happened.”

“He told me.”

“Did he show you the book?” asked Barbara.

Anthony nodded: “He believes he knew her in a previous life.”

Barbara fell deep in thought—her breathing changed and she started to sob. “We both thought it was the way to go. He’s not normal, is he?”

“Unfortunately, he’s not,” said Anthony.

“What happened?”

“It’s just the way he came, Barbara.”

Strip

On my computer screen terror
Attacks and kills and shifts into
What comes after
This strip of neighborhoods or
Houses a hospital hit
Like carved out carcasses of
Dust and dead bodies bloody
And gray bloated flesh
An eyelid stuck a skull cracked
Open
The close weave of a sweater
Knit into the charred skin
Of a child of a child of a child
How this happens
Again and again and again
Arms and legs twisted back
Or out of socket
How this cannot be unraveled
Because war wears
A crown of laurels made out of
Eye lashes tiny teeth
Dead lips a corsage of
Brain matter soft and shot point
Blank or bombed this
Bombardment
Of matter
What should matter but doesn’t.

Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons. Poems by Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis. Trumansburg, NY:  Out of Step Press, 2021.

Midnight Cargo:  Stories and Poems.  Kevin Basl.  Trumansburg, NY: Illuminated Press, 2023.

Corn, Coal & Yellow Ribbons is a chapbook of 11 poems, a collaboration between Kevin Basl and Nathan Lewis, who seek to answer the question “why did you join the military?”  Although the question pertains to them and to their unique individual circumstances, the question also has a broader resonance.  Basl, from rural Western Pennsylvania, joined the Army in 2003, first went to Iraq as a mobile radar operator in 2005, and then was stop-lossed, returning in 2007.  Lewis is from upstate New York.  He joined the Army at 18 and deployed on an MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) Artillery crew to Iraq in 2003, just in time for the invasion.

“Corn” and “Coal” represent not only the specifics of family background but also the regions that the poets hail from.  “Yellow Ribbons,” of course, is the near ubiquitous symbol of freedom during the Iran hostage crisis and continuing to the first Gulf War

In the introduction, they try to, if not fully answer the question of “why” a young person joins the military, at least present the conditions that lead to enlistment.  They take a different approach, “an oblique perspective,” to the “why”:  “More often overlooked are the cultural and economic conditions that push kids toward military service, an experience that will fundamentally change them, sometimes in tragic ways.”  The genesis of the book was a workshop that involved discussions with veterans from rural areas, and although the poems are written for vets they make aspects of the military experience accessible to the civilian.

The poems alternate between Basl and Lewis (except for two consecutive by Basl) and often complement  each other.  The poems, part reminiscence and part search for understanding about the past, use finely-tuned details to show the impact of that past on the present.

“Rust Belt Fed” by Lewis makes the connection between the socioeconomics of a hardscrabble region which “seems to grow only feed corn and soldiers” with military recruiting; ironically, the ground is fertile for the production of generations of soldiers.   Recruiters in essence prey upon the vulnerable youth of the area who are precluded from exploring more expansive options:

The combine strips the corn from the fields,

the recruiter’s van strips the youth

from our schools, churches

Like metal scrappers pulling wires and pipes

from a foreclosed home

The image suggests that the recruiting process has virtually a criminal motive, with the only purpose being to “feed” the war machine with “kids with computer skills . . . /To be made into precise cyber warriors” and “Athletic kids dense enough to be/turned into blunt weapons, . . . .”

Basl’s poem “Mouth of the Abyss” echoes some of the imagery of “Rust Belt Fed.”  The poem begins with the destruction of a farm, “clawed away for stripping,” by “Whitener Brothers Coal Incorporated.”  A way of life is expendable; nature and the human residents are beholden to the forces of despoilation.  Coal mining destroys a way of life in the same way the recruitment process destroys the young.  The mining strips the land; the military strips the young.

The speaker, a seven-year old boy, is able to watch the mining “canyon” expand, and one day goes to the “mouth of the abyss” with his father, who warns him of the potentially-fatal dangers of the crater.  As the poem ends the boy wonders if it is possible “to witness man’s work/and live to talk about it.”  The same could be said of war.

Lewis’s “First Ambush Mission” and Basl’s “Resume Builder” both connect a youthful event to later Army experiences.  In the former, Lewis recalls the “Ragweed insurgencies, nightly raccoon attrition” that plagued his parents’ corn field.  He and his twin brother decide to lie in wait through the night with their shotguns:

Pulling triggers interested me more than pulling weeds

Out back in a kid-built shack called “The Fort”

Twin brother and I on an ambush mission

Raccoons standing in for guerillas

After their unsuccessful foray—one shot at “Something moving in the shadows”– they return from the fort in the morning and unload their shells on the kitchen table.  As the poem ends there is a correlation between the events of the night and his military future:

My wet sneakers squeaking on linoleum—

Had my ears not been ringing

I would have heard

Desert Army Boots crunching gravel

It is as if his soldiering was preordained; he was one of the young men “stripped” from home by the “metal scrappers.”

The idea of a preordained military future is echoed in Basl’s ironically-titled “Resume Builder.”  In this poem the speaker recalls Mr. Floyd, a somewhat notable member of the community (“Lifetime member of the Hallton Rod and Gun Club./Two-time winner of the American Legion turkey raffle”) and a long-time high school gym teacher.  He has little tolerance for students with “zero athletic aspirations” and despises “Phish-phans, Juggalos, skaters, and scummies.”  The ending of the poem reveals Floyd’s recognition that the military may be the only option for those with a foreclosed future:

Counselor of numbskulls when he tells them

there may be a place for you yet

faraway at basic training

Bastard prophet, when you realize, damn, how he nailed that last one.

Although Floyd, whose own life is mundane, is an object of ridicule to the students, he is also that “bastard prophet” who knows that his students’ lives will basically go in one direction.

Overall, the 11 poems in the book show a side of the military that is far from the heroic ideal.  The authors note that the “book’s cover was handmade from pulped U.S. military uniforms” (with the cover image by Christopher Wolf of a tank plowing through a cornfield), showing that as swords can be made into plowshares uniforms can be made into art.

Each author’s post-military life has shown that commitment to the arts. Basl holds a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Temple University.  He has worked with Warrior Writers and Frontline Arts to conduct art workshops and is an accomplished paper-maker and musician.  He was featured in Talia Lugacy’s 2021 film This Is Not a War Story.  He has written numerous essays and articles about various aspects of the veteran experience.  Lewis, Like Basl, has conducted writing and papermaking workshops for veterans since 2009. His artwork has been shown in many galleries across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum. He appeared in the film The Green Zone (2010) and This Is Not a War Story. He is one of the founders of Out of Step Press. The name of the press is an ironic twist on the precision of military marching along with a connotation of non-conformity

Midnight Cargo is a collection of three stories and eighteen poems, many of which derive from specific events during Basl’s deployment.  Although trained to be a radar operator (14J) Basl was re-classed, at various times, as a cavalry scout, security escort driver, laborer guard, and, less excitingly, deliverer of trash to a burn pit. The book’s title references another one of his jobs in Iraq, that of the nighttime loading of the remains of deceased service members onto C-130 cargo planes. The poem “Sacrifice” is most closely aligned with the meaning of the book’s title. He describes the loading of “those long metal boxes” for the final journey home. However, the loading and imminent departure is unsettling, as the reality of death breaks through the impersonality of the task. The plane itself is like a coffin, “exhibiting the skeletal hull/wires and nets/vining the walls —”; it is “an inglorious vessel,” lacking the solemnity that the occasion requires,

set to carry home

the cold weight

of a friend’s absence

the cold weight

of a mother’s depression

housed in a coffin

wrapped in a flag.

The loading of the bodies occurs at night, which reflects the secretive nature of the event, as if there can be no acknowledgement of death.

The first poem in the book, “The Red Keffiyeh,” and the following story, “Occupations,” pivot on the object and symbol of the keffiyeh. In the poem, the keffiyeh was a gift from a boy in Iraq whom the speaker became close to, and which now represents the memories of his tour, especially his interactions with Iraqi civilian workers at Camp Anaconda. The keffiyeh “now lives in an unfinished hardwood case,” unopened for years “till last night.” As he tries on the scarf he notices that the “checkered fabric had frayed,” analogous to the fraying of his memories of Iraq.  There is a sense of loss and regret in the poem’s final lines:

[I] gazed in the mirror at my weary face

and, still gazing, went on to consider sadly

its beauty and how old the boy would now be . . .

“Occupations,” which can be seen as a companion work to the poem, details the narrator’s interactions with Iraqi laborers employed for “hootch fortification.” The story is told in third-person, but focuses on a Sergeant Adams, who develops a relationship with a boy, the teen-age Gabir, whose brother and father were laborers. As section 2 of the story opens, Adams asks Gabir to buy him a keffiyeh for his wife’s birthday. His wife is a musician and he feels that she could wear the keffiyeh while she played cello and sang: “The perfect gift.  Their marriage might survive this deployment after all.”  He gives Gabir money for the purchase.  Gabir agrees, but in the ensuing days is elusive about the scarf, and one day Gabir and his family fail to appear at the camp. Two weeks later, though, a new laborer shows up at the camp and gives Adams the keffiyeh. Adams attempts to get information on Gabir and his family from some Iraqi workers but they are reticent to offer any specifics, only saying that the family “went north.” He gives the men a message of thanks to Gabir, but the men are noncommittal.  As the story ends Adams, still deployed, receives a photo of his wife wearing the scarf. However, after he returns home, he “never saw her wear it—on stage or anywhere.” And a year later, after they divorce, “he found the keffiyeh buried in a box of clothes and jewelry she returned to him.”

Both the poem and the story are linked through the kaffiyeh; the story also illustrates that what is meaningful to one person is simply a disposable object to someone else.

Two poems that use the cleave structure are “Art Therapy” and “The Agency’s Mark.” The lines can be read down the left column, the right column, or across, giving a sense of three poems. The juxtapositions are similar to stream of consciousness, with new meanings revealed depending on how the lines are combined by the reader. “Art Therapy” was inspired by George Bush’s Portraits of Courage paintings, and a note explains the Right to Heal Initiative that the poem also references. The left column alludes to Bush’s paintings, while the right column begins:

Cops march into position

protestors in pepper spray goggles

unfurling a hand-painted banner

We Demand the Right to Heal!

Similarly, “The Agency’s Mark” interweaves two parallel experiences. The left-hand column limns a painting by Haeq Fasan entitled Horse Dance, while the right-hand column critiques the CIA’s secret funding of art that would “counter the Soviet’s promotion/of ‘socialist realism’—” by providing money and venues for art that would reflect American values.  In a note to the poem Basl cites an article from Newsweek in 2017:  “The CIA weaponized art as a form of ‘benevolent propaganda,’ intending to show the world that capitalism, not communism, produced better—and more—work.”

Another poem with an interesting structure is “God Mode.” The lines are relatively short, separated by backslashes and white space, giving a sense of a computer or machine spitting out phrases. There is also the suggestion of an omniscient, impersonal armed drone operator watching his dehumanized potential victims on a screen: “your body of pixels/     is the target of my wrath/                  your heat/is a death signature/     your name/     is irrelevant/ . . . ” War becomes a computer game, albeit with human lives at stake.

Where “God Mode” shows the impersonal aspect of war conducted from a cubicle, “Rules of Engagement” focuses more on the individual in a situation where violence saturates one’s daily existence; the potential, and almost need, for violent readiness is everywhere. The phrase “‘Deadly force authorized,’” visible in every camp, becomes part of “your foretold madness. . . . Your rifle will become a phantom limb.” The poem ends, though, with a question apparently addressing his fellow soldiers, positing that the individual has lost agency and any sense of choice:

You ought to question, hero, before the rounds go flying

Whose hand really does the authorizing?

The ramifications of this “foretold madness” takes a chilling turn in the poem “Terror,” which describes the psychic dislocation engendered by “Deadly force authorized.” The terror becomes what is internalized from this environment:

Someone you think you know

Free falls through darkness . . .

In the greasy smoke

a mirror to greet him

fractured

opaque

two eyes not his own:

the violence he has sown

now feeds on his days.

The story “The Bugler” has echoes of the black humor and absurdism of, among others, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, and David Abrams. The story concerns Specialist Jenkins who, although unable to play the bugle, is called upon to be the bugler to play “Taps” at a funeral ceremony for a World War II veteran. Jenkins is issued “a special bugle . . . ‘It has a little speaker inside’ . . . You push a button and “Taps” plays.’” Much of the story then concerns the bumbling attempts at a rehearsal for the ceremony.  On the day of the funeral the preacher gives the standard encomiums about the deceased, the 21-gun salute was “coordinated and crisp.” After the volley Jenkins takes center stage, raises the bugle to his lips, presses the button, and a “tinny, nasally . . . lifeless” “Taps” issues forth. He is “embarrassed for the family . . . sad and embarrassed for himself.” The widow, however, to Jenkins’ chagrin, praises his playing. As the story ends, Dave, a Vietnam vet, apparently an acquaintance of the deceased, asks to see the bugle. He removes the speaker and plays a few notes.  He hands the instrument back to Jenkins and urges him to play. Surprisingly, after a feeble attempt, Jenkins does blow a “satisfying” note. As the story ends, Dave calls an elderly couple (who had a wreath with a yellow ribbon attached) over “to come see what the noise was about, to come learn the truth for themselves.”

What is the “truth” to be learned? Is it that the ceremony was part sham? Is it that belief, expressed by the preacher and the yellow ribbon, is hollow? Or that belief is more important than truth? There is a note of irresolution about what constitutes the “truth.”

The work in Midnight Cargo was inspired by a range of subjects, from the writer’s memories, experiences and observations of war broadly defined and his time in Iraq, to his return to the States and feelings of discord, to post-war endeavors like making paper from cut up uniforms, to cultural events, like the 2023 Rose Procession in Chicago. Overall, through this prismatic lens, Basl emerges, as he writes in the poem “Presence,” as “the person who is here now.”

For further background:

Outofsteppress.com

Kevinbasl.com

Illuminatedpress.org

In my blog Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature I rarely reviewed memoir and non-fiction. I also tried to promote stories about war other than those by infantrymen and stories about war that encompassed more than the battlefield.

In Strike Through the Mask! I’ve expanded my reach to address memoir, non-fiction, and actual events. In some columns, including this one, I have also begun exploring stories of fighting men and women in combat.

Two locations dominate the Iraq and Afghanistan “booksphere.” In both cases, the locations were scenes of intense fighting. In Iraq, it’s Fallujah, particularly the Second Battle of Fallujah, which was fought in 2004. For Afghanistan, it’s the Korengal—the river valley and surrounding mountains in Kunar province that featured some of the biggest battles of Operation Enduring Freedom and arguably the longest, most sustained effort by Americans to fight the Taliban.

The Second Battle of Fallujah saw a large combined-arms force, led by Marines, fight insurgent house-by-house through a city known for its many beautiful mosques. In the Korengal, US forces, led by the Army, strove to rid a remote, mountainous region of Taliban fighters and Taliban influence on the local populace.

Fallujah and the Korengal each generated a large number of memoirs, non-fiction accounts, and in the case of the Korengal, movies. Judging by the numbers they seem to be the places where the fighting that mattered most in the Global War on Terror took place. What do I mean by “matter”? Here I’m not thinking about strategic importance or overall mission success-or-failure, but in terms of geographically-centered experiences that seems to have deeply impressed themselves on veterans, interested commentators, and reading audiences. By this point, the very names Fallujah and Korengal inspire a certain reverence, as if any story told about them is sure to be momentous.

On my bookshelf, I have the following books about the Second Battle of Fallujah: Bing West’s non-fiction account No True Glory, Nathaniel Helm’s biography My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story, David Bellavia’s memoir House to House, and Alexander Saxby’s memoir Fallujah Memoirs. Elliot Ackerman’s Places and Names also describes the author’s experience fighting in Fallujah, where he won a Silver Star as a Marine platoon commander. Interestingly, I don’t know of a novel that portrays Marines and soldiers fighting in Fallujah. And though there are several documentary movies about Fallujah, it has not yet been portrayed by Hollywood, as far as I know. A movie based on No True Glory starring Harrison Ford was once announced, but seems to have never been made. Still, the opening lines of Saxby’s memoir illustrate the allure of Fallujah:

I’ve been told you never forget your first time. Your first kiss, your first love, your first car. My first time overseas was an experience that I will never forget. I experienced something that many people only read about in history books. The Second Battle of Fallujah is a watershed moment in my life. It serves as a frame of reference for many memories; before Fallujah and afterward.

Regarding the Korengal, for non-fiction I’ve read Sebastian Junger’s War, Wesley Morgan’s The Hardest Place, and Jake Tapper’s The Outpost. I’ve watched the movie based on The Outpost, as well as Junger’s Restrepo. I’ve read Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight, and also Medal of Honor winner Dakota Meyer’s memoir Into the Fire. This list might be expanded by inclusion of books such as Lone Survivor about special operations in Kunar in the early years of Operation Enduring Freedom. The novels And the Whole Mountain Burned by the aforementioned Ray McPadden and The Valley by John Renehan are coy about actually mentioning the Korengal, but it seems clear both are either set in or inspired by the Korengal. The dust-jacket blurb for The Valley reads:

Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. 

Scholars tell us that such places of lore and implication are tightly bound up with their geographical and physical setting. The idea is that the significant events were fated to take place on sites that lay waiting through the centuries for historical amplification. However that may be, the sense of the material look of Fallujah and the Korengal greatly impressed themselves on the participants who fought there as the right-proper backdrop for the events that subsequently unfolded. This heightened sense of possibility is reflected in the prose written by combatants.

Elliot Ackerman, in Places and Names, writes of Fallujah: We are four kilometers outside of Fallujah, the city of mosques: a forest of minarets rising from kaleidoscopic facades, all mosaicked in bursting hexagonal patterns of turquoise, crimson and cobalt.

Roy McPadden, in We March at Midnight, describes his first encounter with the Korengal: A six-hour voyage brings us to the maw of the Korengal Valley, a gateway of rock into more rock. Slicing out of the mountains here is a protean stream of the same name, which in spring and early summer is a ribbon of whitewater fed by a massif of twelve-thousand-foot peaks. By summer’s end, the peaks are naked of snow, and the stream slows to a dribble. I am no lover of rivers, only a field commander who has to cross them. 

Later, McPadden writes: Of all the provinces, I shudder at the word Kunar, for its black heart is the Korengal Valley. I harbor secret thoughts of a collision with it and confess that in this interlude of life, the valley has grown into a phantom of gigantic proportions.

As the quotes suggest, the upshot of this author-and-audience interest in Fallujah and the Korengal is that both places now resonate with higher orders of meaning. Through what one scholar calls “the complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” books and films about Fallujah and the Korengal participate in a “collaborative process of creating significant places by means of story.” In other words, there are the things that actually happened in Fallujah and the Korengal, and the “textualizing” of spaces by which they have assumed prominence in veteran and public memory. The geographic “spaces” of Fallujah and the Korengal have become hallowed “places” that dominate and even define the two separate theaters. As a result, other places and other narratives struggle to command attention.

I know this is true in regard to Afghanistan. My own deployment to Afghanistan taught me that the Khost-Paktika-Paktia region was home to much fighting and many events central to the American story in Afghanistan. Those who fought in Kandahar might say much the same thing. But Khost and Kandahar do not loom large in American thinking about Afghanistan, and other provinces where Americans deployed such as Herat and Zabul even less so. Stories about those places just plain don’t excite readers as much as do those set in the Korengal. They fight uphill to assert their importance.

Taken together, books and movies about Fallujah and the Korengal accrue a momentum and logic of their own. To have fought in those places is one thing, to tell a story about them is another, and to read about them is another. The relation of stories to actual events and stories to other stories are both dynamic and reifying, with the underlying themes and structures of the events and narratives reverberating in odd correspondences. Events and description of events are related by layers of meaning that transcend simplicity. An event casually mentioned in one narrative become central in another; some events are examined in prismatic detail in multiple accounts. One story begets another, and though individual narratives may differ, together they constitute a distinctive collective memory and pattern of thinking about their subjects. To participate in the story-telling flow either as a writer or a reader is to further instantiate their legendary status. Doing so implicates the author and reader in the enterprise not so much of truth-telling as myth-making.

The objection, or fear, is that the men and women who fought in either Fallujah or the Korengal have accrued a superior wisdom predicated on what’s been termed “combat-gnosticism”: their participation in events gives them wisdom not available to the rest of us. If anything, though, each new narrative about Fallujah or the Korengal now has trouble transcending conventional themes and takes, adding only the idiosyncrasies of personal experience. As a quote from a reader of one of the books mentioned above puts it on Amazon: “30 different people, 30 different stories.” Some of the narratives emit a self-important aura, or verge on romanticizing death and carnage. But it is also true that each new story-telling variant piques the interest. And why not? The textual hegemony of Fallujah and the Korengal is not salutary in all aspects, but it is by now very real. I know there will be more books about these places, and I know I’ll read most of them. If conditions ever permit, I would like to visit Fallujah and the Korengal in the company of veterans who fought there, or the journalists and historians who have written about them, and listen to their stories on the ground they took place.

***

The quotes from academic sources came from the following scholarly studies of links connecting geographic places, historical events, and narrative memory:

Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (2012): “booksphere” “textualizing space”

Virginia Reinburg, Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (2019): “complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” “the collaborative process of creating significant places by means of a story”

Hulya Tafli Duzgun, Text and Territories: Historicized Fiction and Fictionalized History in Medieval England and Beyond (2018) was also consulted.

James Campbell, in “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry” (1999) argues that critics buy too readily into the idea that literature about war reflects “a separate order of wisdom.”

“You must really like mango.”

The girl lifts them, one, two, three, and puts them in the paper bag, but it’s me she is looking at. Sort of. One eye fixes on me and the other eye wanders off to the side as she faces me across La Florcita’s counter from behind jars of sticky Mexican sweets.

“Who doesn’t like mango?”

“I’d rather have flan.”

“I hate flan. Kools hardpack, please.”

She rings up the cash register and then glances at the debit card. “Ten dollars. Sonora… Vayo. Qué lindo.”

Shudder. Everyone but my mother calls me Sunny.

All dramatic, she turns and points to the wall behind her, covered with business cards, calendars, and head shots of Becky G and Khaldoun Younes because, güey, estamos en Hollywood. Next to an autographed 1990s J-Lo is a poster of two boxers facing off: “LUJAN vs. VAYO.”

“Are you related to this Vayo?”

“Ay, que feo. Jamás.”

“No, not the bald one. The one with the curls!” she calls after me as I stroll out the jingling door into the evening. Over the sound system of passing Explorer roars Sekreto, I hear hoots, laughter, and someone hollering over the bass line, “MARICÓN!”

No, not even close. And if you are screaming that at me, you are lucky you’re moving at forty miles per hour.

When I get home, I toss a mango at my sister Ana Belen, stretched out on the yellow living room sofa, grinding at her laptop, and make my way into the kitchen, sweeping aside fronds of a hanging fern I want to rip down and throw in the trash. A couple of plants are nice, but Ma has a jungle in here. She adds a stalk of windowsill fennel to frying pork chops as I wash a mango and ask, “Want some?”

La Doña Esperanza Pinel Molina is smaller than any of us, but out of all of our family, she’s the one you really would not want to fight.

“We eat in a little while. Save it for dessert.”

“I can’t wait.” I slice my mango, salt it, light up a Kool, and head out to the garage. My nephew Javier stretches out on the lounger playing Fortnite, and in shorts, shoes, and sweat, Felipe works his speed bag. All I see is a blur as his fists punish the Everlast.

“Can I have some?” asks Javier.

“Get outta here with that smoke,” orders Felipe.

“Ay, the one with the curls!” I simper and then slouch in a raggedy lawn chair by the back steps, enjoying my cigarette and letting Javier finish the mango as I check notifications on my phone.

I have the same profile pic from high school, back when I had just one eyebrow piercing and long, black hair. I looked like a total digit. Jeannie Morales is having her third baby, dammit, and Nita Cartagena has been accepted into the accounting program at UC Northridge. Then I notice a “friend request” from some Milagros Toboso. Her profile pic is not even full frontal; it actually is a profile. I realize who it is and burst out laughing.

“FelipeSonoraJavier, come and eat!”

2

“Sonora, hi!”

Suddenly I am seeing this girl everywhere. Here she comes around the corner of MLK and Normandie, trailing alongside me like we are friends.

“Soy Milagros de la bodega.”

“Hey.”

“Did you get my friend request?”

“Quit calling me Sonora. I answer to Sunny. And I have hundreds of friend requests, so it will take a couple weeks to get to you.”

She looks at me steadily, blankly, like a cow, staring me down with her one good eye and her off-kilter vibe. “Okay, Sunny. Tell Felipe I said hi,” she calls and, I swear, almost skips away.

“Yeah. See you around.”

The 757 bus pulls up, and it is packed. I’m jammed up against a fat guy in a Lakers jersey, a woman gripping two Jons grocery bags, and four chavas with fierce eyebrows and more piercings than me, then I transfer to a westbound 2 that lumbers from Barrio Aztlan to Thailandia through Little Armenia to Waspworld, I get off at the Sunset Five Theatre on Crescent Heights, and I nod to Mikela and Garrett on my way to the ladies’ room.

Changed into my red Sunset Five uniform, I step out of the stall to face the mirror. In my stance, I jab advance, jab retreat, rocking a rhythm and breaking it up like Felipe is always talking about, mixing high hits to the skull with low blows to the solar plexus. Some lady enters, sees me, and quickly backs out, slamming the door behind her.

Milk white with forehead zits and spiky, green hair; two left and one right eyebrow stud; ear gauges, a septum ring; and two full sleeve spiderweb, tarantula, and skull tattoos that made Ma cry, the poster child for “Don’t Fuck with Me” glares from the mirror. Crush that. Time to go bland and corporate, to fade away to nothing but a voice repeating: “I Want It All, theater seven on your right. Enjoy your film.”

3

Ana Belen waits for me in her Toyota Tercel at one a.m.

“You look tragic.” Blue circles ring her big, brown eyes.

“Thanks. Four hours O.T.”

“Why can’t Felipe pick me up?”

“You know why. Date with Elena.”

“Getting banged again? He has a match in two weeks. Fighters are supposed to save it for the ring.”

“The only one thinking about a ring is Elena. The one she wants on her finger.”

We unlock the back door quietly to not wake Ma and Javier. Foraging in the fridge and checking my phone, I see yet another “friend request” from esa mema. Alright, you asked for it.

She replies almost instantly: Hey!

Wassup

Good. How are u?

Just got off work. U r persistent. Something on ur mind?

Just want to say hi 2 u & 2 ur brother

u seem so interested in him

No response.

He always talks 2 me about girls if I know a lil bit more bout u I could drop ur name

Thats so nice I was born in Torreon

face 2 face Can I come over?

now?

yes

its late

do u want to meet him or not

A half-hour later, I’m waiting on the threadbare carpet outside her apartment as she undoes at least eight locks to open the door. Her hair storms above her flowered nightie.

“Mi tía, she’s at work, but you can’t stay long. Just an hour, OK?” I nod solemnly. “Let me get you some flan!”

“I don’t really… Sí, gracias.”

We squeeze past a worn, white dresser into a tiny room that could belong to a twelve-year-old girl. A quilted, yellow blanket sprigged with flowers covers a twin bed; a zebra, lion, and mint green rabbit sit on the pillows, and family photos cover the walls. Jesus in soft focus with long, blond curls and a perfect goatee presides over it all.

After settling on her bed, I taste the flan. Warm vanilla and velvety rum fill my mouth, and I actually moan. Milagros grins and nods. “Do you know what this reminds me of?”

I’m so busy savoring another spoonful I don’t even answer.

“A kiss.”

“You’ve had a kiss.” It isn’t a question, just a mocking statement.

For the first time, I see something close to anger in her eyes.

“Yes, I’ve had kisses.”

“And who did you kiss?”

“A boy I knew in school.”

“A boy? How old are you?”

“I’m nineteen. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one. Felipe’s twenty-three. And he ain’t no boy.”

There is a lost look on her face.

“You can tell me anything. I’m his sister. And I can tell you what he likes. When he comes home from a date, who do you think he talks to?” We scrape our empty saucers with our spoons.

“So, what does he like?”

“Why should I tell you? You know all about it, right?”

“I just want to be sure.”

“He hates it when girls kiss with their mouths wide open, like some big, dead bacalao at the fish market.”

She laughs, but I say, “Serious. He likes a nice, tight kiss. With just a little bit of tongue. Like this.”

I lean in, take her square jaw in my hand, and pull her mouth to mine. She freezes a moment then squirms.

“Ey. I’m twying to show yooo.” I suck on her lower lip until her mouth slowly opens. After a long moment, she backs into the stuffed animals, one eye staring at me, the other eye taking in family photos, her palms outstretched, pushing air.

A stack of The Daily Word sits on her night stand. I pick one up and leaf through it. Her cheeks mottled, she stares down at her folded hands.

“He likes that?”

“Yeah. If you can do it right. And…”

“What?”

“You have a really nice body, but you need to…”

“What? I need to what?!”

“I don’t know… The way you dress… Get up.” She faces me, shoulders hunched, feet splayed.

“Don’t you have anything sexy?”

“I’m not ‘sposed to. I’m born again.”

“Well, he’s into sexy. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

We peer into her closet at elastic-waist skirts, t-shirts, and mom jeans. I shrug and say, “You better work on that kiss.”

5

“Mi tesoro…” A marine glares at us from a picture frame. Milagros’ nightie is hiked up, and her panties wrap around her ankles. My jeans are wadded up on the floor, and my sweatshirt shields the innocent eyes of her stuffed animals. “Sí, sí, mi amor, sí…” she shudders and sighs. Her eyes flutter open, the right, dull and aimless, the left, dark yet bright, and gleaming at me. She curls into a ball and whispers, “Tell me a secret, and I’ll tell you a secret.”

“What kind of secret?”

“A secret about Felipe.”

“He snores like a pig.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, that’s the truth. OK, my turn.”

“What does he look like when he’s sleeping?”

“Like everybody else when they sleep! He sleeps on his back with his mouth wide open and drool running down his chin. That’s why he snores so bad.”

“What does he dream?”

“The last dream he told me about was an earthquake. He’s terrified of them. If we get hit by some little 3.5, he’s a basket case for a week. My turn.”

“My uncle dropped me,” she says.

“Huh?”

“My uncle was carrying me. He dropped me, hurt my eye. By the time they realized something was wrong, it was infected.”

“I’m sorry…Was this your first time?”

Her eyes flicker shut as she burrows down in the blankets. “My aunt will be home soon…”

I step outside under a lavender sky. It is still too dark to see my shadow. Pulling my trucker brim low, I look up at the windows but can’t tell which one is hers.

6

Tonight, Felipe is idling his ’98 Corvette in front of Sunset Five.

“Look who’s here. Lover boy.”

“Hey, I need a night off. She’s wearing me out.”

“Ay, pobrecito.”

Felipe swings left, away from Sunset’s colossal billboards and late-night traffic. “You been a little busy too. Where you been going at two, three in the morning?”

Shrug.

“I know you think you’re muy chingón, but you’re asking for trouble wandering around all hours of the night. Can’t you hang out at more civilized hours?”

“I work.”

“Then party on your days off. En serio. If we get some call about you from the emergency room, Ma will have a heart attack–”

“Lay off me.”

We ride down Western in silence until: “You ready for the fight?”

“What? The one with you?”

“Commerce Casino, güey.”

“Yeah, I’m ready. Bobby Cole, a kid from Dallas. Twenty-two years old, just moved up to welterweight.”

“You seen him fight?”

“’Course. Me and Jorge saw him beat Luis Aragon at Quiet Canyon, and we been watching his tapes. Jorge knows his trainer, Sammy Wilkins. Says Sammy’s pushing him too fast. You hanging out tonight?”

“Simón. Take a left here.”

Felipe drops me off at Milagros’ building, sighing as I get out and head up the walk.

“Just because you look scary don’t mean you are scary. Cuidado.”

7

“Could you bring me a picture? A picture of him from when he was little?”

“Milagros…”

We snuggle under her comforter and sip chocolate by the glow of her crucifix nightlight. I feel like I have gone back in time to the third-grade sleepovers with my best friend, Cassandra Murphy, until I was banished from her home for giving her a kiss.

“One picture. He must have been an adorable bebé.”

“He was a creep. My nephew Javier is cuter than he ever was.”

“Brother, mother, sister, nephew. You make me jealous.”

“Of what? Look at all the family you have.”

“Just pictures on a wall. I haven’t seen them in years. Only Fulvia cares. Never mind. I’m going to have my own family. A boy and two girls. We’ll name the girls Carina and Alicia.”

The crucifix nightlight fades to black, and Milagros rolls over, tumbling from the bed into free fall. She’s falling so fast that galaxies speed past her. Mr. Krantz, my senior year astronomy teacher, strolls over to me. “Vayo, what’s on the left?”

“A red dwarf star.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s brighter than a nightlight.”

“Thank you, Vayo. Extra butter with that popcorn.”

I roll over in bed, and sunlight tickles my eyelids. Beside me, Milagros is babbling, “¡Dios mío! Get up!”

We leap out of bed, fumbling for clothes and stumbling over each other.

At the front door, she turns to me. “Sonorita, I read in La Opinión Felipe has a fight coming up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Next Friday. We could go together.”

“He wouldn’t like that. It’s too violent.”

“Ask him, beg him. Don’t forget.”

I open the door to a key held in mid-air by a stocky, gray-haired woman who hops back and nearly screams.

“Tía Fulvia! Sonora, this is my aunt Fulvia—”

“Sonora. Mucho…gusto…” says Fulvia. She edges past me, hangs up her jacket, and sits down wearily in the Lazyboy, pulling off her shoes. “Your friend is here at this hour?”

“We’re going to church. Early service.”

Fulvia reassesses me. “Muy bien. But you can’t go dressed like that, mija. I have a faldita you can wear.” She grimaces at my Timberlands. “And maybe you can fit my shoes.”

8

“Thanks be to God for the gift of love. Love as varied as the flowers in a garden, as seashells on a beach…”

In Target Mary Janes, a long sleeve blouse, a head scarf, and a skirt, I hunch in a folding chair, hoping nobody recognizes me. The pastor, short, pink-faced, perspiring slightly, smiles at the handful of women, one old man, and kids scattered in the half-empty rows.

“The love of your friends, your brothers and sisters, your father, and God knows, your mother…” the pastor drones, and I can instantly feel Ma and Pop sitting a few rows behind me. The last time I attended church was my confirmation at Holy Family, and when I finally got out of there, I turned cartwheels in my white dress in front of the cathedral steps. Ma found out that Pop cut me a deal that if I got through confirmation, I wouldn’t have to go to church anymore, and she didn’t speak to either one of us for a week.

“Love is His greatest gift, and we glorify Him by giving and accepting it…” For a second, I think it’s me he’s looking at, but no, he’s beaming at Milagros, who is snuffling and heaving sighs. His sermon, like every sermon I’ve ever heard, is half right. Aren’t we supposed to give love equally? I always loved Pop best.

June two years ago, not long after I got fired from Target, I came home to an empty house and decided to celebrate with a blunt in the backyard. I had barely lit up when Don Juan Luis Vayo Gomez rounded the corner. In his orange dockworker vest, the mustard hardhat in one hand, he sat down next to me and started in on: what do you think you are doing, why are you wasting all your potential, you are so smart, you are so talented, you are throwing it all away, that stuff ruins the brain, it messes up your memory—

I was so annoyed and bored that I just dropped: “Did you know I’m a lesbian?”

He said, “Yeah, I guess I knew that” and went right back to Just Say No, then finally eased up and started telling his old time L.A. stories: Helter Skelter, Ruben Salazar, The Clash at the Hollywood Palladium, growing up with his brothers and sisters and his cousin Esme, who he said I kind of favor.

By August, he was gone. An accident on his way to work.

If they could see me in church dressed like this, Ma would give one of her little smirks, and Pop would laugh his ass off.

Kids yell and run, and their mothers fold up chairs and stack them against the wall as the fluorescent lights go dark. Milagros says, “Let’s say hi to Pastor Gil.”

He is greeting worshipers at the door and blushes when he takes her hand. “Milagros! So good to see you.” He gives my hand a soft squeeze. “Welcome. We hope you come again.”

We head up Denker Avenue, and I look back to see Pastor Gil staring after us, confused and hungry, until a cantaloupe-shaped woman shakes his arm, demanding his attention.

9

“Padre celestial, venimos a ti…”

In a Commerce Casino dressing room, we hold hands as Ma prays, her eyes closed behind her glasses. She wears her violet dress and silver lucky star pin.

Elena’s eyes are also closed. My eyes travel from the stiletto sandals on her flawless feet, up her slim, caramel legs, to her shimmering, orange minidress. I hate her. Ana Belen and Ma don’t like her either. They always give her identical, fake smiles.

“Thank you for blessing Felipe with talent and discipline, Señor. Guard him and guide him…”

Ma and Ana Belen hold Felipe’s hands. They haven’t been taped yet. Thick, short-fingered, with gleaming, half-moon nails and heavy wrists, they are formed from the same molten bronze as his abdominals and biceps. Ana Belen cut his hair and trimmed his goatee. He looks handsome and somber. Ready to go to work.

Jorge gives my hand a squeeze. I like Jorge. He won the IBF middleweight title in 1996. His hair has gone silver, and a huge scar forks from his scalp through his right eyebrow, but he’s still got that rugged fighter’s body.

Together we intone, “Amen.” Elena shrink-wraps Felipe until he peels her off to speak with Ma and Ana Belen. Jorge leans toward me.

“What’s up, killer?”

“Same ole same ole.”

“You’re wasting time, Sunny. You could go places.”

“I am going places.”

His gold tooth winks at me. “‘Same ole same ole’ ain’t going nowhere. You got it, mija. You got that power, ese ánimo–”

“What are you two whispering about?” asks Ma.

“How lovely you look tonight, Esperanza.”

“I see right through you, Jorge,” Ma snaps.

Felipe shows me his fists. “See this? This is scary.”

I roundhouse him in the bicep, he slugs me back, and we file out to let him get ready.

“Ohmygod, what a crowd,” says Elena, flipping her hair and swiveling in her seat to see who is scanning her. “Mrs. Pinel, you are so brave to watch Felipe fight.”

“I’ve just come to see my son win,” Ma says coolly.

“And what’s so brave about that?” Ana Belen seconds, crossing her long legs to give Elena a better view of her three-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choo slingbacks.

The announcer, from center ring and from two enormous, overhead screens, calls, “In this corner, in the green trunks, weighing in at 162 pounds, from Dallas, Texas, is Bobby ‘Cold Cash’ Coooooooooooooole!”

Café with a little leche and baby-faced, Bobby Cole salutes the crowd. A chorus of boos rises, and behind us, a woman shrieks, “Pinche MARICÓN – you FUCKER!” In triplicate, Cole shrugs and strolls to his corner.

The camera pans back to the announcer. “And in this corner, in the black trunks, weighing in at 168 pounds, from Los Angeles, California”–The crowd roars–“is Felipe ‘El Verdugo’ Vayoooooooooooo!”

On the big screens, Felipe’s heartbreaker smile crossfades to the titles: “SUNNY’S MESSED UP LOVE LIFE — MÁS PENDEJADAS POR SUNNY,” accompanied by a soundtrack: “Sí… sí, mi amor…”

Felipe and Bobby Cole smack gloves and back off, crouching behind their fists. “Así… así… Cuando tú me tocas así … si suave… por favor…” whimpers Milagros. Felipe opens up with a high and low jab. Cole dodges, jabs, and sends a low, lead hook that bounces off Felipe’s forearm block. But up on the screens, there I am, on my knees, between her thighs, contemplated by the serene gaze of Jesus. “Me vuelves loca…” The neat, textbook moves have stopped, and Felipe and Cole thrash each other until they stumble into a clinch. The referee pulls them apart.

“Sí, FELIPE!” screams Elena. “Ay, Felipe…” moans Milagros. Suddenly I’m on my feet, trembling.

“Don’t ever call me that again.”

Felipe throws a jabjab and a high cross that Cole evades and answers with a lead shovel to the gut. Milagros looks up, dazed, her eyes more unfocused than usual. A high hook drills Cole in the ear so hard I feel the pain. We are all on our feet, hoarsely screaming. A man roars, “MÁTALO!” Kill him.

Cole staggers then drops behind a shell, his head and upper body barricaded by his forearms.

I imitate her whimper of “FelipeFelipeFelipe!” and then: “Felipe doesn’t even know who the hell you are.”

He backs Cole from ring center with a jab-feint-cross-shovel-hook. Cole does a Sugar Ray sidestep, and then slams back with a brutal, low, rear hook to the ribs.

Milagros struggles up from the tangled sheets, her right eye drifting further right and the left one blazing at me. “He loves me. And I’m going to see him at that fight.”

“You can’t do that.”

“You’re going to stop me?”

“Mami, there’s nothing there! Forget it!”

“¡Puta marimacha!” I grab my jeans as she spits curses. “¡Sí, que se vaya, chingada!”

“Oh no,” breathes Ana Belen.

On two screens and in center ring, Felipe reels, blood pouring down his face. I didn’t see what hit him, and apparently, neither did he. Ma’s hands clutch the armrests, but her face is almost as expressionless as Bobby Cole’s as she watches Felipe topple to the ground. Everyone says my brother gets his hígado from Pop, but Pop was a softie. That rock hard core comes from Ma.

I am yanking my sweatshirt over my head when Milagros tackles me, sobbing, “I’m sorry, por favor, perdóname, Sonora, Sunny…” I shove her away and straighten my clothes. I can still hear her calling, “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean…” when I shut the door.

10

I show up at Eddie Romero’s at 5:30 sharp. The converted warehouse is painted sea green, and walking inside is like diving into a vast aquarium. Dior Sauvage, sweat, and Lysol float in the air. The evening crowd jumps rope, crunches sit-ups, pounds bags. A blue-haired chava curling free weights slides me an icy glance. Jorge is watching Felipe and some guy I don’t know sparring in one of the rings.

“Mucho mejor. I’m seeing some focus now. Tomorrow, same place, same time.”

Felipe turns and stares. I’m in shorts and a tank top, carrying a head guard, chest protector, and gloves, and my eyebrow piercings are gone.

“I’m going to be working with Sunny,” says Jorge. “She wants to get serious.”

Felipe gives me a hard look. “Yeah…? Mind if I watch?”

“Go ahead.”

Walking home later that evening, we cross MLK, chugging ginseng sodas. I wait for the lecture, but all he says is, “What took you so long?”

“I thought you’d be pissed.”

“Me? It’s your life. Since when do you care what I think?”

“Ma won’t be happy.”

“Yeah, Ma’s another story.”

“You think you could tell her?”

Felipe starts laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“I wanted you to tell her I’m moving to Jorge’s ranch in Eastvale.”

“Where? Why?”

“Middle of nowhere. That fight was a disaster. I need to focus, and I can do that better at Jorge’s.”

“Esperanza Pinel Molina is going to lose her mind.”

As we round the corner, we see Ma, Ana Belen, and Javier in our driveway. Felipe lets out a low whistle. Milagros is draped over the hood of his Cherry Lifesaver ’98 Corvette.

She is candy too: Strawberry Jolly Ranchers, Red Vines, Atomic Fireballs, Red Hots. Her breasts peek over the crimson neckline of her cheap, silk dress, and she wears a black eye patch. A china platter of flan rests on one crossed thigh. Felipe frowns at her.

“Mami, what are you doing on my car?”

A Dodge Charger swerves around the corner and blasts past us. A chorus bellows, “Aaaaayyyy SEXY! VEN R-R-R-RICA! WAAAAAH!” Milagros tosses her head, and a black flag unfurls.

“Look, get off my car. You’re going to scratch the paint.”

“I brought you flan. You like flan?” she purrs.

“Yeah. Please get off my car.”

Milagros plunges a finger into the creamy, golden pyramid, draws it out, and sucks it clean. Felipe watches with a crooked grin. I am dissolving like a half-eaten Tootsie Pop.

11

Around the table chime sighs and cries of pleasure. “¡Qué bueno!” “¡Sabroso!” “This is so good…”

Milagros gestures toward the eye patch and whispers, “Do you like it?”

“Uh yeah I yeah–”

“Muy sexy, mami.” Felipe gives Milagros a smoldering wink. Her cheeks flame as a fist clenches my heart.

“I know not everyone likes to share recipes,” ventures Ma.

Milagros blushes like a virgin on a botánica candle. “I would love to give you my recipe. I have so many. I love to cook.”

“You are lucky,” says Ana Belen, licking her spoon. “I can’t cook to save my life.”

“But she can cook to end a life,” cracks Felipe.

“Mom, tell her about the time you started the kitchen on fire!” Javier guffaws, and they join him.

“Cállate,” snaps Ana Belen. Javier does quiet down as he studies the eye patch, and then blurts, “That’s so cool. Where’d you get that?”

“Don’t be rude,” warns Ma.

“No, it’s OK … Did you hear about the big, 2016 earthquake in Mexico?”

The left eye gleams, turns heavenward, lowers, and drops a tear. Her hands press to her heart and flutter around a story of martyrdom: her rescue of an infant cousin in a collapsed building, a falling beam knocking her unconscious, the injury of her eye. She lifts her hands in a benediction, and I almost expect to see stigmata.

“Tía Fulvia says I am Milagros de verdad.” They all chuckle.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I order.

“Oh, this is so nice. Let’s just have more flan.” She doesn’t even look at me.

“I’ll go with you,” says Felipe, and Milagros bounces out of her chair. She glows, I burn, and Felipe is his usual cool, calm self as we step into the night. Palm trees line our street of faded apartment buildings and Sweet-Tart colored bungalows. Kids race past on scooters.

“Isn’t it a beautiful night?” sighs Milagros. I could choke her.

Bad Bunny rumbles from Felipe’s pocket, and he reaches for his phone. Scanning the text, he pulls his face into a mask of woe. “I’ve got to run. Previous engagement. Ladies, I’m going to ask for a rain check. Nice meeting you, mami.”

Milagros stands on tiptoe, leaning after the disappearing Corvette like it pulls her with an invisible cord.

“We could walk to Café Tropical, get some coffee.”

She glances at me with that one miraculous eye. I could be a stranger telling her the time.

“It’s late. I better get home. I’ll check you tomorrow. ‘Night, Sunny.”

She sashays off, head high, hem fluttering, stilettos clikclikcliking away from me. Halfway down the block, she passes the Nieves brothers playing dominoes on their porch. They wolf whistle and “Aaaaaaayyy…” At the corner, she turns left and disappears.

What else can I do? Like any lovesick pendejo, I follow her.

A review of Kimberly K. Dougherty’s Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015

One of war’s most pernicious myths is that new technology will not only hasten its outcome but lessen its brutality. Paul Fussell describes this delusion in the first pages of his text Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, where he recounts American propaganda images from the 1940s showing “the newly invented jeep, an elegant, slim-barreled 37mm gun in tow, leaping over a hillock.” Such “agility and delicacy,” Fussell contends, conveyed the impression that “quickness, dexterity, and style, a certain skill in feinting and dodging, would suffice to defeat pure force” (1). Subsequently, as World War II began, “everyone hoped, and many believed, that the war would be fast-moving, mechanized, remote-controlled, and perhaps even rather easy” (1). The muck, grime, and hellish attrition of Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the Hurtgen Forest, and Anzio testify to the contrary.

This myth is not merely restricted to land. Although the airplane has been deployed since the Great War, the enduring fable is that technology has advanced to such a degree that new airframes, because of their sophistication and speed and precision, will end wars quickly, cleanly, and with minimal loss. Such conceits show surprising longevity, being as old as the military use of the airplane itself, and have massive implications for aircrews, the bombed, and especially our beliefs about how modern wars are fought. In her text Airpower in Literature: Interrogating the Clean War, 1915-2015, Kimberly K. Dougherty takes these beliefs to task. Her central aim is to contrast these beliefs with various portrayals of the so-called “clean air war” in war literature. In doing so, she puts forward a compelling argument that airpower is an enterprise that is not only slow, messy, and deadly, but has even greater unseen costs, and is spoken about in such ways that the true price of its deployment remains always cloaked in euphemism.

Ironically, Dougherty’s “interrogation” is effective for its precision. She makes many keen observations about these unseen costs, noting that during war, for example, the bodies of air crews are often “hidden” from view by virtue of their manner of death, being incinerated or blown out of the sky, rendering their remains unrecoverable. Sometimes, these same air crews are presented as “becoming one” with their aircraft, such that what flies are not aviators but a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that is half man, half machine. Another insight is that in the numerical tally of an air war’s casualties, it is the number of aircraft shot down that seem to be given primacy over human casualties. She notes the long history of airpower’s description by military planners and strategists as being “above” the earth, in the domain of the sky, giving it a kind of omnipresence, and where it also gains omniscience, as aircraft can purportedly observe battlefields in ways unavailable to the mere mortals constrained to the ground. All these mythologies, says Dougherty, conspire together to present aerial warfare as “clean,” powerful, godlike, and unencumbered by the grotesque violence and terrain of traditional warfare.

Dougherty also makes much of “discursive distancing,” which originally refers to a kind of Foucauldian rhetorical analysis that assesses how subjects are allegedly dissociated from hegemonic social systems through discourse, despite ostensibly being benefactors of those same systems. Basically, her point is that the discourse surrounding the use of airpower contributes to its reckless mismanagement. Key to her exploration are two texts, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, which both provide “stunning portraits” of helicopters, “the machine perhaps most associated with the Vietnam War” (145). She notes that the helicopter enjoyed special intimacy with the troops they ferried, being close to the ground and slow, and as such “this intimacy, perhaps, makes it all the more important to separate human from machine, as the borderlines becoming increasingly blurred” (145), and as such they merit a special kind of profile about how the rhetoric of airpower contributes to its inevitable misuse.

But it is Douhgerty’s concern over this melding together of man and machine that is, in my opinion, the apex of the book, as it leads her to surmise that the rhetoric surrounding the deployment of airpower lends itself to certain beliefs about technology and its use in war. As Dougherty so capably demonstrates, the infatuation with “clean” airpower is naturally sourced in its innovativeness. The trajectory of this infatuation is an alleged “technological war prosecuted solely by machines, with no threat to one’s own population” (145), where the human cost of war will have been supposedly entirely eliminated. This reflection becomes especially prescient when one considers the ongoing war in Ukraine, or the 2021 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where the use of lethal drones have been notably effective. Additionally, so-called “drone swarms,” theoretically composed of thousands of remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles, so designed to overwhelm enemy air defenses, have gained currency in the thought of future military planners, both in the West and with our foreign adversaries. While it is not hard to see how Dougherty’s bone-chilling vision will manifest, given recent evidence, it is also not hard to see how her description of “clean” airpower’s trajectory—that is, its culmination into a supposedly bloodless “technological war,” fought primarily with machines—will be anything but another fable in the sprawling compendium of historical fables that have always surrounded how “the next war” will be fought. Propaganda will continue to assert the next war’s supposed “cleanliness,” highlighting how new technological innovations eliminate the need for the pointless suffering of those archaic and barbaric wars of decades past, only for the “on-the-ground” reality to offer different evidence—that is, the evidence of tens of thousands of mangled corpses of 18, 19, and 20 year-old kids.

All being said, a natural rejoinder to this—which I admittedly found myself asking as I read this text—is “so what?” Is Dougherty’s counterargument really that we should not substitute machine for man, given the capability? Or that Dresden or Tokyo should not have been bombed because the Allies unfairly privileged the lives of its own service members over unarmed civilians? Should a future defensive war fought by the United States not privilege its own service members over the unarmed civilians of belligerents, given such a tragic choice? It seems ludicrous to demand that wars only be fought by one side unilaterally leveraging itself into a potential disadvantage. The Second World War in particular was an existential struggle between mutually exclusive and competing visions for the world, the role of the state, societal organization, and how natural resources should be utilized to serve those ends. It’s not hard to see how Dougherty’s musings feel like a luxury good given this environment.

But I suspect such a rejoinder misses the point. Dougherty’s point isn’t to say such things are right or wrong merely—it’s that wars are fought with elaborately constructed mythologies about the use of technology (such as airpower), and that military planners and service-members alike not only believe these mythologies, but sometimes even believe them despite knowing they are myths. The cost of believing in such myths is unimaginable brutality and the loss of life to millions of people, as various truths are obscured or unable to be recognized because of the political nature of the war. The geopolitical environment of the Second World War, for example, not only made realities like the humanity of the enemy impossible to recognize, but exaggerated their costs and contributed to immense suffering both among the bombed and the bombers. Such calamity is worth recognizing.

On the more pedantic side, I sometimes found Dougherty’s emphases and language distracting, if anything because she too strongly relies on the kind of intersectional analysis and related academic jargon that dominates contemporary humanities publications. In one section, she also provides a summary of the causes contributing to the Spanish Civil War that are laughably uncritical and overly generous to the Republicans and the Popular Front, which made me suspicious of her framing of other historical events. But these are rather nitpicky when her broader contributions are taken into consideration. Dougherty has ultimately produced a razor-sharp text that attacks the fictions we all too easily attach to the role of technology in warfare. In uncovering beliefs about airpower’s “cleanliness,” she has produced something worth celebrating.

The opening of this month’s column repeats much of a Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature post I wrote in 2018. The rest updates and expands upon that post by reflecting on two recent Afghanistan memoirs by veterans who served in the same area of Afghanistan as I did in 2008-2009. Reader, read on!

***

My tour in Afghanistan as an advisor to the Afghan National Army was not over when I returned to the States in November 2009. Many things have happened since that have extended its reach deep into my post-deployment life. The list includes:

-the infiltration bombing of Camp Chapman in Khost Province in December 2009, a FOB I often visited before leaving Khost in July 2009.

-the awarding of the Medal of Honor to a fellow US Army advisor I knew from our train-up together at Fort Riley.

-a long article in a major weekly profiling the commander of the advisor unit two or it that referenced many people and places I knew well.

-the WikiLeaks release of classified combat reports, several of which recounted by the advisor team I led.

-a visit from Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) telling me that they had detained a Russian-born jihadist who had attacked us in Khost in June 2009, killing one of the members of my team, who was the gunner in a truck in which I was a passenger. (The last I time I checked, the jihadist was still in jail in America.)

-a visit from another CID agent doing a background check on one of my linguists who was now translating for an American one-star general—this after emigrating to the United States, serving a tour in our Army, earning an Associate’s degree, and gaining his citizenship.

-a visit from two lawyers on Bowe Bergdahl’s defense team, because my name figures in the Army investigation report of the severe wounding of one of the soldiers involved in the search for Bergdahl.

-a profile in a major media venue of an Afghan National Army officer whom I knew in Khost who has since emigrated to the United States.

-the chance to offer comments at the dedication of the Chicopee, Massachusetts, War on Terror Monument, a chance that arose because one of the six men honored by name on the Monument had been a member of my advisor team.

-efforts in August 2021 to secure the evacuation from Afghanistan of Afghans with whom I had served, efforts that largely failed but which continue today.

Now, within the last two years, I’ve become aware of memoirs written by two veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom in the Paktika-Paktia-Khost (“2PK” in military-speak) region at the same time I was there. One is by an Army sergeant who was a member of my Embedded Transition Team (ETT) in Khost province: Sergeant Major (retired) Chad Rickard’s Mayhem 337: Memoir of a Combat Advisor in Afghanistan. The other is by an Air Force lieutenant who served on the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Paktia province where I served out the last five months of my tour on a nearby FOB: Lauren Kay Johnson’s The Fine Art of Camouflage. Together, Rickard and Johnson superbly describe the two spheres of activity that concerned me most: fighting the Taliban and supporting Afghan governance.

I offered glimpses of my day-to-day activities in Afghanistan in my first blog 15-Month Adventure: Advisor Service in Eastern Afghanistan. But those blog posts were written in the heat-of-the-moment and suffer from lack of detail and insight on the events I experienced. Further, I seem to lack the instinct—or the courage—for memoir, and I’ve never since tried to deepen and thicken the narrative of my own deployment or link the many separate episodes into a cohesive whole. Both Mayhem 337 and The Fine Art of Camouflage do that for their authors in ways that bring my own memories rushing back and help me understand them better. Rickard and Johnson recount many events of which I was aware and sometimes those in which I also participated. Each does a great job establishing the overall ambiance of the mission and the physical characteristics of the operating environment. Both authors write perceptively about the factors that made success in Afghanistan difficult (and ultimately doomed it), while conveying a welcome lack of self-righteousness and self-aggrandizement in the face of the challenges we encountered.

Sergeant First Class Rickard (as I knew him then) impressed me from the minute we met in my first week as advisor team chief on Camp Clark in Khost in 2008. A rawboned former college football player who was now a member of the California National Guard, Rickard exuded competence and a quiet can-do spirit. He was an infantry veteran of two tours in Iraq, and my team lacked both infantry grit and combat experience. We were all willing, but I knew the coming months would be tense. Rickard immediately volunteered for our toughest mission—serving on a much smaller very remote combat outpost on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—and as the next few months transpired, I learned to ensure he was in the thick of whatever fighting was to be had throughout our sector. It was an unfair burden for Rickard to shoulder, but my thought was that our operations stood little chance of success without his presence. And as Mayhem 337 recounts, Rickard eagerly embraced these challenges, with little thought at the time of the consequences on him and his family in the years afterwards, which Mayhem 337 also documents.

Speaking frankly, and perhaps enviously, Rickard had the kind of tour most infantryman could only dream of. Duty on Spera Combat Outpost brought near-daily engagement with the Taliban enemy, and Rickard’s account of working alongside Brigade Combat Team soldiers, Special Forces units, and most of all the Afghan National Army are both riveting and highly instructional for any infantryman who might face similar circumstances in the future. Many episodes stand out, but for me most illuminating were accounts of in-battle coordination with Air Force jet pilots and Army attack helicopters, along with Army artillery, to bring American firepower to bear upon wily and determined foes. While in Khost, I often sat by the radio tracking Spera COP battles, feeling mostly helpless and anxious—reports of small Army outposts being overrun elsewhere in Afghanistan were never far from my mind. As I monitored radio reports, I was aware of how crucial air and artillery support were for saving Rickard and his men from death, but Mayhem 337 reinforces the point that for those in action their lives depended on allies in the sky. But don’t take my word for it, here’s Rickard’s account from his Acknowledgement:

I want to personally thank each and every pilot and aircrew member who flew in support of combat operations I was involved in throughout my time in Afghanistan. I would not be here today if were not for the daring courage of the pilots who supported our ground combat operations.

And here’s an excerpt illustrating that support in action:

Soon after the departure of the Kiowa’s, two F-15 fighter jets reached our location. The pilots conducted their fighter check-in as soon as they arrived. They let us know their call signs, what planes they flew and what weapons they had available. They also told us how long they could stay and help. This team flew a pair of F-15s; their call-signs were Dude 1-1 and 2-1. Dude 2-1 was actually a female fighter pilot, not a “dude” per se; she operated as the flight lead that night… We confirmed that all US and Afghan forces were within the [infrared] glowing perimeters on the mountaintops. After confirmation we said “Roger Dude 2-1, you are cleared to engage.” And engage she did. She dropped a 500 pound [Guided Bomb Unit] and scored a direct hit on that group of enemy fighters….

Lieutenant Lauren Johnson was Air Force, too, though by her own account anything but a hot-shot fighter pilot. Rather, she served as the “information operations” staff officer on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktia province. I make small cameos in Mayhem 337 (Sergeant Rickard thankfully goes easy on me), and though I’m not in The Fine Art of Camouflage, I may well have been in the same meetings as Johnson at many points. Provincial Reconstruction Teams were composed of military and civilian specialists charged with governance and infrastructure projects meant to enhance the “legitimate government of Afghanistan.” During my last few months in Afghanistan, I was one FOB over from Johnson and largely involved in much the same business. Specifically, our time in 2PK was marked by the run-up to the 2009 Presidential election. We all worked hard and worried endlessly about ensuring the elections were safe and fair, even as we strove to let Afghans “take the lead” as a measure of our faith in their capability and independence. That didn’t happen, unfortunately, and the disappointments and vexations associated with the endeavor foreshadowed the complete collapse of western-style Afghan governance in 2021. They also proved personally devastating to Johnson. The projects she was in charge of came to naught, and several experiences destroyed her idealistic attitude toward the overall mission and general faith in the competence and integrity of the military.

Among its other virtues, The Fine Art of Camouflage nails descriptions of the FOB, FOB daily life, and the stultifying and claustrophobic nature of staff work within Army headquarters. Johnson ventured off the FOB occasionally, sometimes for good, sometimes for worse, but the majority of her tour was spent in front of a computer generating the same reports she had filed the day before and in meetings with the same people she sat in meetings with every other day of the week. That business was my business, too, to a large extent. As a middle-aged middling rank officer, I did it all as well as I could and understood, kind of, its necessity. For an idealistic junior officer eager to lead troops and make things happen, such existence was spirit-killing. Though I was more senior to Johnson by far, I identified at many points with her recounting of staff-work trials-and-tribulations, and in particular the disconnected experience of trying to serve a Brigade Command Team whose commander—whom I also served—barely knew of her existence. A key episode in The Fine Art of Camouflage describes how a project of Johnson’s on which she worked for weeks goes to shit, and how on the nightly radio staff meeting, the Brigade Commander professes to not even knowing about it. For Johnson, being chewed out would have been better than the bemused nonchalance with which the colonel dismisses not just the project’s failure, but its worth and all her hard work:

The commander admonished the room to do a better job supporting the others and coordinating on missions, and then dismissed me with a brusque, “Lesson learned. These things happen.”

To my mid-ranks career-officer self, I kind of get where the colonel is coming from—he’s trying to be nice and not publicly crush a very junior office—but I also understand how condescending and demoralizing the experience must have felt for Johnson. Johnson also has a larger point to make, about how dysfunctional and uncoordinated was almost everything the military tried to accomplish in Afghanistan:

…how had the brigade commander been so unaware? The directive had come from brigade in the first place, and the plans had been in my report for a month, all the BUBS and CUBS and SITREPS and daily/bi-daily/weekly updates. As an official brigade tasking, the training had been monitored on …[the] PRT operations tracker too. I’d worked with the Department of State representative and with Army contacts at each of Paktia’s five combat outposts to finalize the attended list. I’d coordinated with pay agents, air transport, security, intelligence, convoy operations, and the mission commanders…. the crossed lines of communication were worse than the tangle of network wires winding through my office….

As the leader of a small element operating in support of the same large brigade, I also often felt marginalized and only intermittently supported. My remote perch led me to observe the internal machinations of the brigade with wry detachment that sometimes flared into frustrated outrage. My own dealings with the brigade commander were also characterized by paternalistic indifference on his part (though in all fairness, an episode toward the end of my tour in Khost rendered a more favorable impression). Along with Johnson, for me it was and is impossible not to think that our own travails mirrored in miniature the uncoordinated and un-sustained American effort throughout and over-time in Afghanistan.

There is much more to be said about each book and both books in tandem. While in some ways the two memoirs are juxtaposed—one a combat narrative by an infantry sergeant, one a story of nation-building staff-work by an Air Force officer with an eye on how tours in Afghanistan were experienced by women—there is also much that connects them. Each book, for example, situates the author’s story in the context of their personal and family histories before and after deployment; both works suggest that one reason it takes so long for memoirs to gestate is that their authors need time to measure the reverberations of their actions across the range of their closest social relationships. Also, I appreciate the authors’ even-handed depictions of the Afghans with whom they partnered. Neither Rickard nor Johnson had idealistic expectations nor perfect experiences, but neither were they reduced to sputtering contempt by their Afghan partners’ lack of military discipline, their potentially suspect loyalty, or their personal habits grounded in off-putting cultural and religious convictions. Finally, I’ve only touched on how emotionally debilitating their tours were for both Rickard and Johnson in their own long years after deployment.

There is also much more to be said about the overlaps between my own experiences and Rickard and Johnson’s descriptions of places, people, and events and my own. For readers interested in my own experience of combat, the 15-Month Adventure post titled “Gun Run” describes a mission in which I too relied on life-saving air support. I describe the staff-work misery I experienced and observed in a Wrath-Bearing Tree story titled “The Brigade Storyboard Artist.” Reflecting on the genre of memoir, I’ve always been hesitant to criticize the “self-writing” of fellow men-and-women in uniform. Every story is important, and who am I to judge?

Here though, I’ll say that though I’m sorry that the authors had to live through the hells they experienced, I’m glad Rickard and Johnson have written the books they have. They will long sit on my bookshelf as narratives that describe in familiar terms an intense period in my own life. Especially since I know (somewhat) both authors, I am happy that they have written such good books and that by their report writing them has helped them make sense of their own time in Afghanistan. Further, the appearance of the two memoirs makes me wonder how two such fine writers came to serve within my ken during my own deployment. It was obviously coincidence, but it seems like fate. The appearance of their memoirs now reminds me that my year in Afghanistan will never really be completely behind me.

Chad Rickard, Mayhem 337: Memoir of a Combat Advisor in Afghanistan. 2019.

Lauren Kay Johnson, The Fine Art of Camouflage. MilSpeak Foundation, 2023.

https://petermolin.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/gun-run/

https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2020/01/fiction-from-peter-molin-the-brigade-storyboard-artist/

to forget or not maybe

to forget or not maybe
to fight for memory or not
i’m here i’m she
lying on my back underneath me
blue cherries of bruises ten backs
all pierced by bullets all riddled
no one seems to cry here this defenseless death is unshared with any and all
i look around at people all around still people these old trees outside what a spring so wildly
blooms and dies with a scream
i rise from my knees or maybe just
think that i rise i was a teacher
what remains of the school now
walls shrubs suckle blood from the soil
i taught them to never
kill people and now
i’m face to face
with the killers of children hands and face changed the maples turned perfectly crimson too soon
broke my
spine and soul i would tell them if i still taught never kill anyone
i rise from my knees call out to god
god i accept everything i
understand the end of life
i accept it i am desecrated
why do you punish me
with this life
after death

Grasping the Sky

Inside us: a piece of
sky, blue and rusty,
smelling of winter and
gunpowder.
Who will see us as we crawl, chasing
the shadows of the clouds?
She reanimates the land.

The bombs, and bullets, and bodies took
its breath away and send it straight into cardiac arrest.
The scars of war are on her palms and tongue,
but she keeps going because without the land,
her heart will stop, too.

Land—земля—zemlia: a greenplace, a birthgiver, our bread.
She puts her hands around it and tries to close off
the wounds of horror and destruction and
deathdeathdeathdeath
that the inhumans opened with their hungry teeth.
Sometimes, when the blood stops rushing through her ears
or between her fingers,
she hears the echo of “brotherly nations,” “local misunderstanding,”
“child actors.”
The land moans under the weight of
countless bones.

We carry no
prophecies under our skin.

The silent sky
floods our mouths.
Who will hear us climb up
the lifeless mushrooms?

He rebuilds the house.
A new foundation in place of his ancestors’
home built with tears. The missile took
the walls, but the kitchen table is still
standing in the middle.

House—будинок—budynok: a warm place, a safehold, our nest.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table.
One year anniversary,
he feels the explosions
reverberating through his ribs.
His daughter would have turned three.
His wife would have put a pot of
lilacs by her crib.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table of a murdered house.
It’s hot and bitter, and for a minute, he forgets
a new future of new houses with
no one inside.

Everything we wanted
was in the sound
of the sky without
the stench of corpses.
Who will remember us if
the task ahead will take a generation?

They reconstruct their homeland.
Too many questions, too little time: where
do they fit between now and then;
how do they embezzle millions yet fight corruption
as never before; what are dignity and justice and fairness
if the debris of a shelled hospital hide
the broken pieces of mothers and newborns.

Homeland—Батьківщина—Bat’kivschyna: a free place, a seeing glass, our hope.
They won’t live to see it without blood and tears
soaking its black ground. How do they repair machine-gunned hearts?
How do they rebuild a cracked-open sky?
They reconstruct their homeland as the bombs
try to bring them to their knees. Too many
questions, too little time. But the question,
“Will we live?” is not one of them.
Millions of hands breaking the chains
shout the answer louder than
air raid sirens.

Inside us: a whisper
of summer, when sunflowers
grow from the ash.
Who will catch the birds
pecking out a path between
the sky and wheat fields?

No one. Our wings hold the glory of freedom.

airless embrace

i miss you like i miss the sky
cold so painfully blue
angels must have
dripped blueberry juice
from the clouds
i want to tether myself
to the sky-whispers
embrace them bury my
face into their warmth
but it doesn’t make you here
i stalk the shore scooping
up birds beaks
black with blood
you used your skirt
to wipe off the
red from their feathers
why did you
let go
the earth drinks soot
i’m thirsty for
the sound of
your smile
under the winter sun
on the shore
i pick the nightingales
curl my toes to find
the damper sand
the soft homes of crabs below
i hold the memory
of your hair
between my fingers
i miss you
until i fly out of
the soil’s arms
and the sky
catches me
in its thousand
blue hands

Humanity in Afghanistan

For the average American G.I. who served in Afghanistan, the country was of a different world. Most understood Afghans had relatively little in common with us, its would-be Western custodians. For starters, its population spoke obscure Indo-Iranian languages like Pashto and Dari, which had no share with our West Germanic-based English. It was universally Muslim, which while monotheist, had a variety of practices we found puzzling, or even less charitably, threatening, at least when viewed through the vaguely jingoistic shadow of 9/11. The day-to-day life of Afghans seemed to revolve around the dull monotony of subsistence agriculture, and moved at an unhurried, slow, perhaps even complacent, pace. Their households were multi-generational, with sometimes four or even five generations living under the “roof” of the same qalat. Whether in the bazaar or the fields, Afghans seemed to us frozen in amber, living a way of life that we ascribed to ancient times. Our assessment was that they were illiterate, poor, simple, and locked behind barriers of social custom and theology we could never hope to penetrate.

Much of this analysis is clearly retrograde and patronizing, but it was far more motivated by youthful hubris and ignorance than some sort of loitering colonial mindset. The average American G.I. in Afghanistan was not college educated. The extent of our education on Afghanistan had been delivered in a vulgar milieu of VH1, Comedy Central, cable news, and only the most remotely accurate Hollywood renditions. Most of us didn’t even own passports. In fact, for many American service members, their deployment was their first time abroad. One’s ability to empathize, or to even understand the Afghan way of life, was also limited by the task at-hand, which much of the time was unambiguously dangerous. Life experience and cross-cultural barriers only accentuated this divide. To put it bluntly, as has been true for the membership of all armies throughout history, we were really just kids, and therefore had an appropriately teenage level of understanding. It is hard to assign an “imperialist” mindset to what Robert Kotlowitz terms “adolescent fervor.”

Much of what we learned of Afghanistan has therefore come since our deployments, as a way to help make sense of what we observed. J. Malcolm Garcia’s Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful is one such continuation of this project, describing the innards of a world many of us only observed from a distance, despite being immersed in it. Garcia is a freelance journalist who appears to have a niche for war-torn or impoverished regions: his website reports he has also worked in Chad, Sierra Leone, and Haiti. The text in question is a collection of short stories that Garcia has compiled from his time in Afghanistan, all of them non-fiction.

As a writer, Garcia seems to be something of a Studs Terkel disciple, and the text is relentless in its centering of Afghans and capturing the raison d’être of social history: “history from below,” as it’s termed. In fact, we learn relatively little of Garcia himself, except for a tender chapter where he adopts and ships home an orphaned cat he names “Whistle.” At least, I interpret this to be Garcia, although it may not be, as he refers to the anonymous protagonist only as “the reporter,” and I can’t tell if this is Garcia’s effort at rhetorical humility or his description of a third party. Elsewhere, the text is mostly page after page of Afghans in their own voice, articulating their own feelings, history, and sentiment.

It seems notable that I cannot recall a similar literary project—one which centers the experience of the average civilian Afghan or Iraqi—sourced from any of our recent foreign entanglements. It is loosely represented in other journalistic media, like occasional pieces one may have encountered in The New York Times or The Atlantic, but these are news reports, not short stories collected into a single volume. Likewise, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is historical fiction, not documentary non-fiction. Garcia’s project seems unique in this regard. To be sure, Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful’s genre—which I classify as oral war history—was pioneered some 40 years ago in Terkel’s The Good War. But texts like these, especially when written by Americans, have primarily relayed the perspective of war veterans, not civilians in warzones. This underrepresentation of the noncombatant civilian is a tremendous disservice, especially considering the horrific suffering they often endured. That Garcia’s text makes this glaringly obvious is perhaps its most important contribution.

The stories shared by Garcia are wide-ranging. “Mother’s House,” the longest and most compelling in the book, tells of a recovery center in Kabul for narcotics addicts, likely the first of its kind, ran by a woman appropriately nicknamed “Mother.” “Feral Children” gives voice to the destitute children of Kabul, who are subject to collecting cans or polishing shoes. Garcia makes observations of Afghan society throughout these stories, noting, for example, the marked contrast these youths have with their Westernized counterparts, whose libertine style of dress and flamboyant mannerisms are nearly indistinguishable from an American teenager in, say, Atlanta or Houston. And while Garcia seems to gravitate around Kabul, commentary like this—and his occasional bravery in venturing out to rural areas, such as when he is confronted by what appear to be Taliban supporters while at “a graveyard for Arab fighters” in “In Those Days”—speaks to the unfathomable chasm that existed in Afghanistan between Kabul, where the decided minority of families who benefitted from NATO occupation usually resided, and the destitute rural poor, who did not share in those benefits. Garcia attempts to give voice to both, showcasing the country’s complexity and tremendous contradictions—ethnic, moral, economic, social, and otherwise—and how they defined both its people and the war writ-large.

In tandem with the text’s keen insights is the steady drumbeat of this book, which is poverty and relentless suffering. To be sure, the stories are varied and unique, but my sense is they begin to blend. They are stories of human suffering which manifest into clambering, scrabbling, and scavenging; people using what meager resources they have just to survive, whether from the war, disease, or hunger. But the themes become so common and consistent that I felt myself having the reaction ones does when they are exposed to homelessness or panhandling in a major city—“I’m not numb to your suffering, but this appears so ubiquitous that I don’t know how to help you address it, or if I even should, or if I even can.” I felt a sort of self-protective compassion fatigue while reading this text, or worse, that I had become a sadistic voyeur engaging in slum tourism. Perhaps this is Garcia’s intention, or perhaps it speaks to sneaking deficits in my own character as I continue to process my—and our—involvement in that country and our two-decade-long war. Regardless, Garcia has produced here a fine addition to this continued exploration, and gives us an exposure to the humanity of Afghans that we would do well to absorb.

For Sallie.

By Picture Day in November, Sophie had perfected the downward stab and counting to twenty. She clenched her soft fingers around her rainbow pony pencil, raised her fist high, and then smashed it down on the practice balloons, barely wincing when they popped, scolding when they escaped. The other children rallied to bounce stray balloons back to her desk. She got thirteen, fourteen at last, and from there it was an obstacle-free trip to twenty with her peers chanting along. She hadn’t yet mastered our Go protocol for intruders, but neither had a handful of the general education students. However, Caleb could shout Go instantly and often got to the Rubber Man first, tackling its knees to disable the joints. Jazzmyn was the most formidable of all the students; when the Rubber Man dropped from the ceiling, she’d grab my scissors on the way and disembowel it in two slashes.

Picture Day is tense for second-graders, with the boys trussed up in buttoned shirts, the girls eyeing each other’s frilly dresses, and the lunch cart loaded with chocolate pudding and meatballs with marinara. Caleb endlessly adjusted his bowtie and Jazzmyn fretted over a smudge on her yellow pantsuit. But Sophie was thrilled with her rustling crinoline and the biggest blue bow that anyone had ever seen. When they lined up for their scheduled foray to the library for pictures, she sashayed to the end of the line, tossing her cascade of red curls and humming softly, off-key. Todd was the only one left at his desk, digging out torn pages and broken pencils—looking for one of the pocket treasures I pretended not to notice, his tiny plastic dinosaurs.  Sophie called out, “Todd, we go now!” and jabbed her finger at the spot in line behind her, right beneath our Superstar of the Week bulletin board where a large-as-life photo of Sophie scowled at flashcards, surrounded by an array of exploding stars.

Todd pretended not to hear her. They used to be the best of friends, building tiny dinosaur colonies in the sandbox and sharing their turns to feed our guinea pig, but then his mother met Sophie at the Food Culture Festival last week, and he had ignored her ever since.

“Come on, Todd!”

He turned from his desk at last and jostled into the line in front of Sophie, muttering something that I didn’t catch.

It must have been bad, because Jazzmyn decked him. Fist to his cheekbone, she sprawled him right out on the floor, then loomed over him with her fists on her hips, her face resplendent with fury. “We don’t use that word in this class,” she shouted. “We don’t use that word ever!”

“Jazzmyn!” I swooped in to inspect the damage. No nosebleed, and his eye was intact.

Jazzmyn burst into tears when she saw my expression, then collected herself enough to run to the sink and wet a paper towel for Todd’s swelling face. Ms. Jackson, my morning aide, logged into our classroom portal to open an incident ticket.

By this time, Sophie had flung herself to the floor beside him in a swirl of yellow and white skirts. “Todd, you okay? You okay?”

Todd finally caught enough breath to begin howling.

“He’ll be fine,” I told her. “Go with Ms. Jackson so I can take care of him.”

Ms. Jackson gathered up Sophie and guided the children down to the library for the scheduled pictures, and then I buzzed the office for security clearance to walk Todd to the nurse. He still whimpered and clutched the towel to his eye. Jazzmyn came, too—she’d be wanted at the principal’s office.

We escorted Todd to the clinic, and then I steered her toward the main office. She stopped me outside Melkan’s door with a hand on my sleeve. “I had to do it,” she said between sobbing breaths, and then leaned in to whisper, “He called Sophie a tard.”

That word, in all its forms, is banned in my classroom.

“Jazzie,” I said. “You can’t hit another student, ever. Not even when they say something horrible. It’s your job to protect each other.”

Jazzmyn nodded once, quickly, her lips pressed together. My policy is to not have favorites, but I loved Jazzmyn for the meticulous care she took of everything: wiping the crumbs from her bento boxes with a paper towel, coloring every millimeter of the day’s vocabulary coloring page with crayons–even the bubble letters and the background spaces–and persisting with practice drills until her form was perfect.

“Will they call the cops?” she asked, almost keeping the quaver out of her voice.

“No.” She may be Black, but she’s only seven years old.

“Will I get suspended?”

If Todd’s mother raised hell, Jazzmyn could get expelled, but I didn’t tell her that. “Let me talk to Mr. Melkan first,” I said.

“If I get suspended,” said Jazzmyn, “I will never get into Wellesley.”

Melkan buzzed me in then, so I was spared the need to answer. I entered his lair while Jazzmyn perched in the center of a chair in the reception area, fists tucked together in her lap.

Melkan liked to carry gallon-sized promotional mugs from gas stations. That day he stirred half a dozen scoops of protein powder into his 64 ounces of coffee while I explained the situation.

“She’s out,” he said.

“Please,” I said. “Todd used a slur against Sophie, and Jazzmyn responded instinctively. She won’t do it again, now she knows what she’s capable of. Review the surveillance tape. Her aim was perfect. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We shouldn’t give her the chance to do it again,” said Melkan, but he was already clicking through the surveillance queue, intrigued. The walls of his small office were lined with large-screened monitors, barely leaving room for his collection of ultra-marathon numbers, the plaque declaring Stoney Creek Elementary last year’s Hardened Target Regional Winner, and the AR-15 hanging over his office door.

“Plus, her first quarter grades are off the charts. We need her here next week for standards testing,” I said.

“You need a genius around to offset Sophie Clark. That child can’t even count to ten. You chose her for your class. You worry about the test scores.”

I kept quiet and let him watch the video. He winced when the punch, replayed in slow motion, sent Todd flying in a smooth arc to land on the floor, where he bounced gently—one, two, three times. Melkan looped the video and leaned in closer.

At last he turned back to me. “Her aim is flawless.”

“They’re the best group I’ve had. Jazzmyn is so good—have you looked at the Rubber Man logs? They took him out in 12 seconds last week.”

He looked impressed, then doubtful. “That’s impossible. Just number two pencils?”

“Jazzmyn had my scissors. She punctured all the vital pockets single-handedly.”

“You started second graders on teacher scissors?”

“Just the ones who can handle it, if they want to stay in from recess to work. Just Jazzmyn and Caleb.”

He swiped through the logs, comparing our performance to the other second grade classrooms. We were leagues ahead of the others.

“Sure you aren’t inflating the reports a bit?”

“No, sir. You know it’s automated.”

Melkan leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and nodded to himself. I hated it when he looked thoughtful. Hated it. Something new, something ill-considered, something downright stupid was likely to result. With lots of fanfare.

But he just buzzed the nurse and asked her, “You examined the Lawrence boy?”

“He’s here now, sir.”

“His eye okay?”

“No permanent damage.”

He rang off. “We’re done here, Campbell. Send Jazzmyn in. I’ll talk to her. No recess for the rest of the quarter, but keep training her on the scissors.”

It was much better than I expected.

“But if the Lawrence boy’s mother complains…” he warned.

“I know. But I hope we can avoid a suspension. It would break her heart.”

“We’ll see.”

He actually smiled as he waved me out. I almost felt neutral about him as I left the office and gave Jazzmyn a departing pat on the shoulder, but then I remembered what he said about the test scores, and Sophie.

Sophie, short, round, and wise-eyed, had established herself as the small Mayor of Stoney Creek Elementary by the end of first grade, high-fiving everyone all the way down the hallway with her soft hands. However, she was in danger of becoming a mascot. She’d been pushed out of her class for longer portions of the day as the year went by, and by the end of the year was brought out of the resource room only for feel-good forays into the mainstream classroom. Melkan gave her a nominal placement in my class, but insisted she would do better spending most of second grade “in a more supported environment,” especially given the rigors of the new programming. I argued that there was no better support for her than the examples of her own peers. Her parents agreed, and they had a lawyer.

She became, as I hoped, the heart of our class; she would applaud when we finished with the subtraction workbook activity for the day, and the rest of the class got into the habit, too. They also caught on to her victory dance each time they vanquished the Rubber Man, with lots of stomping and fierce whoops and high-fives. The children competed for the chance to help her with her counting bears and sight words, and sharpened their own reflexes as we drilled again and again with her, Danger, Danger, Go!

Parents, however, were thrown off by Sophie. Inclusion was still new. When we were growing up, the special kids were always kept in a special room, ketchup counted as a vegetable, and anyone could walk right through the front doors of the school.

The week before Picture Day, two mothers took me aside at the Food Culture Festival, each to whisper that her son called Sophie his best friend, but she hadn’t realized until just tonight who Sophie was. “I mean, Leroy hadn’t said anything about how she was different,” said the first, over her Crock-pot of Mac ‘n Weenies.

I could see the story writing itself behind Leroy’s mother’s shining eyes, how her son had befriended a little Downs girl, and wasn’t he such a big-hearted hero?

“It’s such a good thing for Leroy that Sophie took him under her wing, isn’t it? He’s too timid for almost eight. She’s really helped him to break out of his shell.” And it was true.  I explained how Sophie coaxed him to scale the peak of the climbing structure in our reinforced play yard. I doubted that Leroy even ranked in Sophie’s top five friends, but I was glad she made him feel at home. “She’s quite socially advanced,” I said.

But Todd’s mother, one of the West Coast refugees, reeled me in over her quinoa tabbouleh (labeled free of gluten, genetic modification, dairy, and cruelty) and asked me to encourage her son to play with different children: “It’s sweet that she likes him, and I’m glad he doesn’t mind playing with a girl, but now I see that she’s not the best playmate for him. You know we don’t want to stunt his social development while he’s adjusting to his new life. He needs strong children he can look up to.”

I wound up to give her six different pieces of my mind, but by the time I had organized and prioritized them, she had already pulled Todd out of the circle of kids gathered around Sophie for an impromptu Danger, Danger, Go! drill and was steering him over to Caleb’s parents to arrange an advantageous playdate.

Maybe Todd’s mom wasn’t always like that. I heard she escaped the Siege of San Francisco in a pontoon boat, in the bloody days after the Repeal Riots, telling Todd they were going on a picnic. I heard her husband didn’t make it out, and she told Todd they got a divorce. You hear a lot of rumors these days. It’s hard to know what’s true.

After the Food Culture Festival, Todd stopped playing with Sophie or even high-fiving her. He took the long way around the room to get to his desk each morning. Her eyes followed him, but she didn’t say anything.

When I rejoined my class at the library, picture-taking was almost over. The students were making faces at the photographer, well over the initial wariness they have of strangers in the school. We often remind them that people with visitor’s badges have been screened for safety, but then we tell them they need to be alert to the behavior of every adult, even the trusted ones, because madness has no method.

Sophie clambered up onto the photographer’s stool, but instead of giving her signature crooked-toothed grin for the camera, she just stared. Her face was still bloated from crying.

“Come on down, Sophie,” I said, and let her initiate a hug so that I could wrap my arms around her. “Now what is it?”

“Miss Campbell,” she snuffled, “Todd okay? Todd hurt bad?” She rubbed her snot-nose on my sweater.

“He’ll be okay,” I said. “The nurse is taking good care of him.”

I had her wipe her eyes and nose and convinced her to try one more smile for the photo—then told the photographer we would hold out for the make-up day. When the line of students entered the hallway to our classroom, Sophie waved and took off in the opposite direction, towards the clinic.

“I go see Todd,” she said.

“No, Sophie. You don’t have safety clearance. Time to go back to class.” I took her arm.

She narrowed her eyes and shrugged away from me. I hadn’t seen that look before. Sophie’s first grade teacher had complained to me that she was unmanageable, “a real handful,” a dropper. I’d never had trouble; I got to know Sophie, so I knew what she needed: warnings about transitions, a clear routine, and as much praise as the other children. Sophie had never dropped to the floor to resist my suggestions, but now, watching her stubborn face, I had an inkling of how that might happen.

“Miss Campbell, I really need to go see Todd.” A nine word construction. I’d tell Speech later.

I got clearance for an unscheduled trip down the hall, and Ms. Jackson took the class to Bathroom Access to prepare for lunch.

Sophie greeted the nurse with her usual high-five, then tiptoed to peer around the curtain that divided Todd’s cot from the rest of the room. “Todd, you okay?”

I followed her. Todd was sitting up, holding a cold pack to his eye. He looked at Sophie, opened his mouth, closed it, and then rolled over to face the wall, drawing up his knees in a fetal position. I would talk to him about what he called Sophie later. That wasn’t the Todd I knew. I loved how Todd chatted all through the morning gathering with Sophie, and giggled over his pocket treasures and armpit farts with her, and how he remembered to check the guinea pig’s water every morning—until this week. Avoiding Sophie had made him downright sullen.

Sophie confronted the nurse. “Where’s Todd mom? He need his mom.”

“Can she come for him?” I asked.

“I left a message. He’ll be fine. No lasting damage, but that eye might not be back to normal for awhile.”

“Make-up day for photos is Monday.”

“His face is going to be a lot of interesting colors by then.”

Todd’s mom would love that.

“Well, send him back to class if he gets bored,” I said. “Or if you need space.”

“It’s quiet so far. But rumor has it Melkan’s bringing in a gator this afternoon. I might need to clear the beds.”

“So early in the year? Are the fourth-graders ready?”

“Maybe just a rumor.”

Sophie just gazed at Todd’s forlorn back. She didn’t care about the gator, maybe didn’t even know what the Gator Drill was. This is what Sophie cared about: The colony of salvaged pencil stubs in the back of her desk. Being ready to dance when the music started. Salisbury Steak day. Laughing at Todd’s fart jokes.

“Time to go, Sophie,” I said, and buzzed for clearance to enter the hallway.

She bent over the cot and tucked something orange into the fold of Todd’s pinstriped elbow. “Todd, come back soon.”

“He okay,” she told me confidently, watching for the green light above the door.

Todd peered around the curtain at her, but she didn’t notice.

Jazzmyn returned in time to be kept in from recess, and Caleb opted to stay in for practice. She drew me aside while he practiced switching grips on the teacher scissors, and whispered accusingly, “You said they wouldn’t suspend me!”

“I didn’t know.” Todd’s mom must have called at last. “How long?”

“Two whole days. Mom was supposed to pick me up right away, but she couldn’t because there’s no one to watch Grandma, and Mr. Melkan said he was busy this afternoon, and his assistant said she couldn’t have me crying in her office all afternoon and they sent me back here. Without even a safety escort.”

If I would have had the chance, I would have explained to her how lightly she’d gotten off, and how Mr. Melkan and I were impressed with her work and doing our best for her. She was a rational child, and that could have been the end of it for her, but I didn’t have the chance, because the nurse buzzed Todd into our room. Apparently, Mrs. Lawrence could give Melkan an earful about Jazzmyn, but didn’t want to pick up her son off schedule.

Jazzmyn had the grace to look embarrassed at his entrance, as did he. Then she shrugged. He made a half-hearted fart sound with his armpit.

“Come on, Todd,” said Caleb, hailing him over to my desk.

“Okay,” said Todd, and pulled out his newest treasure to show Caleb. “Check this out! An orange pachycephalosaurus!”

Caleb gave an appreciative dinosaur roar, Todd made T-rex hands, Caleb made his own, and they sparred ineffectually with their shortened arms. Then Todd asked, “Whatcha doing in here?”

“We’re gonna practice with the teacher scissors.” Caleb swiped them from my desk and demonstrated a slash hold. “Ms. Campbell, can Todd do it, too?”

“Why not?” I said. “I think you’re ready, Todd.” He had made astonishing progress in his few months at our school. This would give him something to feel good about. I would pull him aside later to talk about Sophie. “Now, remember, these stay on my desk at all times, except—”

“I know,” said Todd, reaching for them.

“Start with the downward stab,” I said. “Just like you do with your number two pencil, but you hold it like this.” Caleb helped him adjust his fingers.

Jazzmyn stared at us for a moment, then slouched over to her desk.

“Do you want to help, Jazzie?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she hissed at me, then put her head down on her desk.

She was still glowering that afternoon after story time, when we took a break to practice Go reflexes, my own innovation on the usual training. In case of an event, I wanted each one to be confident enough to shout “Go!” Jazzmyn is usually the first one to shout “Danger!” when I pull a colored ball out of the practice basket, but she watched stonily as I lifted the green one into sight.

“Danger!” shouted Adam.

“Danger!” chorused a dozen other voices in response. Not Jazzmyn’s.

The children held their breaths, ready.

I threw the green ball to Leroy. “Go!” he shouted, before it even touched his fingers.

“Excellent response time!” I surveyed the class, looking each student in the eyes in turn. “That’s what I want from each one of you. Remember, if you are the one closest to the threat, everyone else will get ready, but they will wait for your signal. We’ll lose precious seconds if you aren’t ready to yell ‘Go!’ Remember Peoria.”

I pulled out a purple ball. “Danger!” they all shouted, then giggled when there was no answering call.

Natasha recovered first. “Danger!”

Most of them hovered over their seats, their hands eager to catch the ball. Sophie, in the front row, was bouncing up and down. I dropped the ball on her desk. Sophie loved to holler a good, clear, “Go!” Still, it took her about five seconds to register that this ball had landed on her desk, to wind up, grab it, thrust it into the air, and shout “Go!”

The other children clapped politely, because they loved Sophie, but we all knew we would have been dead by now in the case of an event.

“I’ll come back to you in a few minutes, Sophie,” I said. “Be ready.”

I turned to the rest of the class. “You’ve seen the news. We all believe that we’ll be the lucky ones, that it can’t happen here. Well, it can. And if bad luck comes our way, it’s up to us to make good luck. Good reflexes make good luck.”

I passed the orange ball to Todd.

Blue to Casey.

Pink to Jazzmyn, who couldn’t help but catch it and shout “Go!” Her reflexes are too good to sulk.

I pulled out the yellow one.

“Danger!”

“Danger!”

I slammed it down on Sophie’s desk. Her eyes went wide, and after barely a beat, she shouted, “Go!”

The room erupted in cheers. Even Todd joined in. “Go, go, go!” Sophie chanted, for good measure, waving the yellow ball above her head.

“Okay, balls away! That’s enough for today.” I passed the ball basket. “Check your pencils, and make sure they’re sharp. The Rubber Man hasn’t dropped today, and you never know when you’ll need to be ready.”

“Or where he’ll fall,” added Caleb, testing his pencil point.

“That’s right,” I said. “He might fall right next to you. We’ll be depending on you to shout Go!”

Half a dozen children glanced apprehensively up at the ceiling, then lined up at the pencil sharpener. Jazzmyn stalked to the end of the line. “Miss Campbell?” she snapped, raising her hand.

“Yes?”

“When will we get to have a real intruder?”

“Never, I hope, but if you’re prepared, you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Will they have a gun?” asked Todd.

“They don’t have to. They just have to pose a danger. That’s why you have to look. That’s why you have to agree as a group that they are dangerous.”

“But most of them have guns. All of them I’ve seen on the news,” Todd persisted.

“Why can’t we have guns?” Caleb asked.

“Guns are for grown-ups,” I explained.

“Who decides that?” asked Jazzmyn, resharpening her pencil until the tip gleamed. “Oh, right. Grown-ups.”

“Yeah,” said Todd. “Why can’t we just get rid of guns?”

I said, per my contract: “People want to be able to choose to have their guns, children. It’s what we call a fundamental right.”

Jazzmyn turned from the pencil sharpener to stare at me calmly. “Grown-ups are the real danger. All of them.” She pointed straight at me. “Danger!”

Like a kid in a pool, answering “Polo” to her “Marco”, Caleb sang out a confirmation, “Danger!” and reached into his desk.

The children balanced at the edge of their seats, gripping their school supplies, unsure. I was standing right next to Sophie’s desk. She took it all in, looked at me, almost past me, and then her eyes widened and she shouted with glee, with pure delight, “Go! Go, go, go, go, go!”

And the children swarmed, pencils raised.

It was a gator. It took me far too long to realize that Melkan had deactivated the locks in our classroom door and ushered in a gator behind me. Gators are primeval and scaly and horrible, and they do not belong in a second-grade classroom. There’s a reason that they’re the only large animal approved for child defense drills. No one feels sorry for them. As it twined past my desk and then, when the wave of children broke upon it, scrabbled across the carpet in a desperate bid to escape, I just stood and watched. In my defense, they didn’t train second-grade teachers for the gator drill at the time. It wasn’t expected. By the time I remembered that I should be using my greater body weight to incapacitate its thrashing midsection, the children had neutralized it. It wasn’t dead yet, but pinned and winded, and twitching as the children caught the rhythm of the stabbing. Sophie finally found her own sharp stub of a pencil and stood at the periphery, pencil raised, looking for an opening. Jazzmyn darted in and out between the other children, stabbing, testing methodically for weak spots. McKenzie anchored the end of its nose. Caleb, pinning the gator down at the base of the tail, shouted, “Someone go for the eyes! Go deep! Get the teacher scissors!” Todd had already snagged them from my desk and was gouging the gator’s flank.

“Get the eyes! Get the eyes!” the other children hollered at Todd, making way at the head. With the lateral thrust we had just practiced at recess, Todd blinded the gator in one eye.

Sophie shrieked and applauded. “Go, Todd! Go, go, go!”

Todd turned, grinning, to see her teetering at the edge of the melee, the only child without something to do, and waved her in. “Get in here, Sophie!” he shouted, and wrapped her fist around the teacher scissors.

“How?”

“Down, like your pencil, right at the eye.” The other kids leaned further away from the head. A broad stain of blood was spreading across the carpet, and the gator was barely twitching anymore. “Sophie! Sophie!” shouted the children as she raised the teacher scissors.

Her first blow bounced off the bony socket and tore down the gator’s cheek, but she was already raising the scissors and got it square in the eye on the second blow. She kept going.

“Sophie! Sophie! Sophie!”

Eventually it dawned on them that the gator was dead, and they fell easily into the Rubber Man victory dance, stomping and whooping. Sophie flung the scissors up in victory, and the wicked points of them lodged in the ceiling tiles, where they stayed, and she slapped Todd so hard on the back that he stumbled across the gator’s body.

The children giggled and shouted, giddy with victory. Everyone high-fived Sophie. Sophie high-fived everyone. But one by one they fell silent, looking at what was left of the gator. Not much, really. “I thought it was bigger,” said Caleb. I had, too. It looked shrunken, there in the spreading pool of blood, its scales torn. The only formidable thing about it was the stench of blood and feces. With its clipped claws and the duct-tape muzzle around its jaws, it had never been much of a threat. Hardly six feet long, it couldn’t have weighed much more than I did.

“Did it hurt?” asked Todd, finally.

I found it hard to answer.

Jazzmyn said, “It was going to die anyway. It was a nuisance and was going to be culled. My sister is in fifth grade, and she says they give the gators drugs so they don’t feel pain.” She wiped her bloody hands on the lapels of her yellow jacket. The hems of her pants had soaked up four inches of red, and the rest of the suit was splattered with gore.

Bruce from maintenance buzzed in to clear up the remains, and I ushered the class down the hall to Bathroom Access, where they took turns silently signing in to wash their hands. There was nothing to be done about their Picture Day clothes, hanging in bloody tatters of khaki and tulle. The nurse came by to apply butterfly strips to the deepest scratches. And then the children gathered around me in the authorized holding area to hear what I had to say about the drill. Our stats: 3:07 from release to probable death, twelve broken pencils, four cuts requiring bandaging, one pencil puncture wound.

For a second there, when Sophie gave the signal, I actually thought—no, I won’t say it. It was a foolish thought. The children would never. At least, not to me. What we were doing was a good thing. They knew it. We were giving them a way to protect themselves. A chance to fight back.

When I was sure my voice wouldn’t shake, I congratulated them. “Pretty good work. That gator bled out in under three minutes. But you’ll have to do better. If it had an AR-15, at least fourteen of you would be dead by now.”

They nodded soberly, but in the back Jazzmyn whispered, “My big sister’s class finished the Gator Drill in five minutes, and they were best in the school.”

I made myself smile then. I would wait until later to remind them that they could have flipped the gator over to quickly access its vitals. “You’re right, Jazzie. This class is good. This class is the best. I am going to have that gator made into a purse.”

And I did, although there wasn’t enough skin left on the gator to make a purse bigger than this little coin clutch. I keep it in my pocket still, and in it, right here, is the stub of a rainbow pony pencil that Sophie gave me the day she was promoted up to the middle school, ecstatic and resplendent in another blue bow.

“For luck, Ms. Campbell,” she said, patting my cheek with one soft, gentle hand.

“We make our own luck, Sophie,” I said. “You of all people should know that.”

You see how sharp it is?

“My father’s work takes you to the edge of the abyss and invites you to look.”   -Son of Rothko

Dateline South Florida, October, 1962: It was Monday 2:00pm EST when Sister Linus began to slap the living shit out of Louie V. The original offense was, along with Richard L., “jumping like a puppet into line behind the ring-leader”, that would be one Brian B. Except to exist, Brian had done nothing in the new school year. Richard was unpretentious, almost unconscious at times, naturally refined, and not a person even the most obtuse teacher would strike. But Louie was scrawny-strong, head rising on his neck like a bird about to eat something amazingly large; him one could smack, especially when he would not stop laughing. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Today this would be so viral. The nuns were not always wrong; Louie later went to prison, Richard became a junkie, Brian escaped to the West Coast and a long underground life as a political satirist. The three members of the puppet gang were given notes directing their parents to a meeting on Wednesday.

Up the coast in D.C. on that same date a bit after 8:00pm EST Secretary All Hail MacGeorge was shown U2 photos of possible missile launch sites on the cold war enemy-client island “ninety miles away”, and at midnight he informed Secretary Mac the K, and they decided to let J Fucking K sleep, because he might be needing same.

Parental or legal guardian conference would not be a big deal, another adolescent pain in the ass. Tuesday after school they were down at the back-to-back paddleball court off Dixie Highway, south end of town, in time for the surprise appearance over by the concrete wall of Louie’s father. Not exactly homeless, he lived by the good grace of an east coast Italian American network that did not include the nearby well-kept house of Louie’s aunt; from which he was likely on stay-away remittance agreement that he was likely in violation of by showing up in the park. Worse for the gang: in his hand were their packs of cigs taken from their designated concrete cubby-holes, and he was doing a thing all kids hate; keeping them in the dark. Fairly soon they understood that Louie’s father would be giving back the herbs, but of course he proceeded to fuck with them. Too bad they couldn’t bring him to the schoolhouse meeting, but here’s the way that worked: Louie’s aunt ran a prosperous mid-size I/A grocery store, and Richard’s father was a necktie manager with a wife who kept plastic covers on the living room furniture. From both of those families to the church the money flowed, actual appearance not required; for the Brian family, reverse that.

In the western-style democratic nation-state capital that morning J F-ing K had been informed of the photos, and later at the meeting with the Macs, the Brother (RFK), the “Birds” and others, options were discussed. Do nothing, as the threat of thermo-n annihilation was already completely and firmly in place, and new spots on the island, though psychologically and politically spooky, were window dressing. Another option: apply boiler-plate diplomatic pressure. Or: back-door a choice to the Bearded Man of Island Truth: split with your angel or we bring T fucking R back to life for San Juan Hill II. Maybe we can without further adieu just do that. Or at least an air-strike on the sites. (This last plea from General LeMay-I, hawk of hawks, always ready to bomb the East Wing and ask questions later – in fact all the joint big birds were doing that thing with their wings.) Finally, there was the Harvard Yard son of a whiskey runner way: set up a blockade, call it a quarantine. Peaceful co-existence as we know it on hold.

The female parent of Brian got home from her Nurse’s Aid night shift Wednesday morning and they went to school. (Da was out pushing a hack.) Brian was fairly quiet, appropriate for a celebrity in reverse, owing to a somewhat screwball-ish exit from parochial school into the public system, out of that into juvie home, then back into the arms of holy mother, all in one family-on-the-skids year; after that a year off for all concerned, and now a lecture was being delivered hard upon the kid’s denial, he was about to turn thirteen, how much is he supposed to be able to explain, but they all knew that something was up and so they treated him like Al Capone. Brian later in life learned that both parents had folded in a fair amount of boozing to make it through more or less undetected. Of the three friends, his was the only in-person meeting.

The flyboys were getting better and ID’d another site on the island that same day. The transgressor-sponsor nation was like the Brian family, with barely three hundred “Little Boys”, while the Big Dog had three thousand that they were admitting to, so it was the player with the smaller arsenal who had to issue forth the official denial that any missile sites existed on the proxy island. In J Big Dog K’s top desk drawer was a recon photo of something in a clump of palm trees.

At age twelve members of the criminal syndicate weren’t ready for the girls they had begun to notice, except for Richard. He was not loud or dangerous or great looking or especially witty, though like his friends he faked some version of all those things. He’d learned to carry himself in a way that was beyond his age, and had a natural sweet spot for girls that they responded to, including Susan S., queen of the grade level, who had a good personality and was developing nicely. Richard, Susan and Brian hung out briefly, significantly, Thursday after school till Susan was picked up, and Richard and Brian headed home in the other direction. Louie was not present because the aunt clan had him on close watch working at the store while gypsy dad was around. Richard and Brian decided that on Saturday morning they had to get the hell out of town.

DOOMSDAY UPDATE: OPERATION DOMINIC, JOHNSTON ISLAND, CENTRAL PACIFIC, WAS THE SITE EARLIER IN THE DAY OF AIRDROP TEST CHAMA, (PHOTO OF WHICH IS A ROTHKO); RESULTS WERE “THOROUGHLY SUCCESSFUL” WHILE THE YIELD WAS REPORTED TO BE BELOW THE PREDICTED VALUE.

The friends did a version of the Three Musketeers sword thing on the playground on Friday afternoon and headed off separately, Louie to the well-stocked Italian American store which had great food that was beyond the Brian family budget. Richard was picked up by his creepy stuck-up mother in their creepy Buick. Richard had learned to communicate succinctly, with a word or slight turn of head. Brian hit the sidewalk feeling that the week had been a seasonal hump and getting over it was an accomplishment. The school, Little Flower, on U.S 1, was too damn small, it got inside you. In the compact perfectly square back half of a duplex mini-compound of the Brian clan he had a place by the bedroom window, fan blowing in his face, to read every forgettable book in the Little Weed mini-library. Maybe he loved Friday more than the weekend it promised. On this particular one he looked out through the fading light and had a thought: I’m having a thought.

Up the road the photo-op boys were getting their meeting legs. Affairs of mutually assured destruction are best settled in the heat of the moment, within a few days the first best option was declared to be the thirty-knot ocean-going blockade, though if the other guy was rushed to get in and complete set-up operations, one might later have to deal with hot targets, thank you, Brother LeMay-I. 

Richard’s already gone brothers were twelve and fifteen years older, one of the curiosities of that mausoleum house was an untouchable double stack of Playboys on a corner hallway table, which entitled Richard to be unassuming. Brian was more familiar with the world of sidewalks than need be admitted. They were Saturday kids trying to not look like kids on tour down around 1^st Street in Miami before 9:30 am, having bused from Young Circle in Hollywood; they hit a few elevators, people were starting to look at them, self-appointed cop-types, they escaped across the street to Bayfront Park, where a certain amount of laughter ensued, the natives, the Cubans, the queers, everyone was funny; across the water was Arthur Godfrey Beach on the spit of land known as the Gold Coast. At certain ages one can complete an adventure by 1:30 in the afternoon. They trudged back to their respective homesteads. Richard’s house of sophisticated moral relativism had powerful A/C. At his de facto duplex Brian laid down on the terrazzo floor next to his bed where it was cooler. Richard was probably on the phone with Susan S.

DOOMSDAY RECORD CONTINUED  In the world of insanely significant meetings beware of what may follow a day when “nothing happens” except the discovery of other sites. Earlier on this particular date ninety vertical miles from a particular faraway atoll there was A SECOND SUCCESSFUL OPERATION FISHBOWL EVENT, ESSENTIALLY ABOVE THE ATMOSPHERE, SO NO LUMINOUS FIREBALL WAS FORMED; AT THE MOMENT OF DETONATION OBSERVERS IMAGINED A GREEN AND BLUE CIRCULAR REGION SURROUNDED BY A BLOOD RED RING GONE IN LESS THAN A MINUTE, AND BLUE-GREEN STREAMERS AND PINK STRIATIONS THAT LASTED HALF AN HOUR. Who knew about THE DEVELOPMENTAL EXPERIMENT, SAME DAY, IN THE IMMEDIATE ATMOSPHERE OF DISTANT SEMIPALATINSK, ABOVE THE FAR STEPPE IN NORTHEAST KAZAKHSTAN?

Sunday was traditionally the most dangerous day in Brian’s life, and more than twice he had been hauled in on the afternoon of the day of too much rest for normal types, and too much exposure for the new generation of under-financed freaks. After casing the church parking lot for cigs, he spent some time over in a half demolished, half interrupted construction area of a certain block where it felt “bombed out” and was interesting to be in. Get out of there, yelled a passing parishioner; Brian interpreted this as a warning from the small gods he’d learned to respect.

On that holy day up on the porch the Big Dog determined to continue the discussion of the future of the existence of the human race on the high seas where at least there was literary precedence for wit and wile.

Louie was installed Monday at the front of the line, the rightful place of Brian who was in the middle, and Richard was at the very end; in a barely covert manner they were all laughing because being famous is funny. Louie had a certain extra-nutty look in his over the shoulder eye and on the playground later with the dynamic diction that would later win third place (crowd favorite) in the speech contest,  confessed immortal inspiration for a caper; his neighbor across the street was gone for two weeks and Louie had a key to water the plants and turn on the hose in the yard; in this domain was much cool shit, and likely in an old world hiding spot, cash; on Thursday night the whole street would be gone to a big Knights of Columbus event, and yes he would be the obvious suspect, which was the perfect alibi! Louie had missed out on the weekend adventure, and anyway they had a rep to live up to.

On this date in the evening J Fucking K made a Big Dog dinner time TV speech revealing that their boats were steaming this way and our boats would be cutting them off because evil hardware will not be tolerated so near the Gold Coast even if it meant putting everything on the line. The TV store crowd chewed on that and it tasted like an opinion the populations of all nations are used to concealing.

Same date doomsday check-in:  AT 6:10 IN THE PARTICULAR TIME ZONE, TOP OF A VERTICAL ARCHIPELAGO JUST NORTH OF MOST OF THE MODERATE PART OF THE SOVIET, ABOVE CAPE DRY NOSE, ON AN ISLAND OF RED AND BLACK SHALE WITH STEEP CLIFFS FAMOUS AMONG LOONS, A THERMO-NUCLEAR POP QUIZ.

On Tuesday after school Louie had a fight with Patrick K, a stocky individual normally of no interest to the three immortals. At first it was even but at a certain point Louie’s strikes ceased to have effect so he picked up a piece of thin piping and delivered a whack across the shoulders and back, mainly an indication of true craziness. But Patrick was stocky of mind and body and barely blinked, and after that things wound down, and they even shook hands, not that any invitations to join any elite groups would be forthcoming.

Cargo was in the water and the whole world was chattering. N fucking K the Red Dog sent an unpleasant telegram. The secretaries and the Bootleg Heir continued discussion of the options as the cabinet-level brother played pocket-pool and LeMay-I danced up the wall and along the ceiling. There were further reconnaissance revelations and “states” lined up. Adlai the Intellectual Dog (and bald icon of loss at Brian’s) was working the U.N.

Louie didn’t make it to school on Wednesday and Sister Slappy made the mistake of advising stone-faced Richard and Brian to distance themselves from their friend with the crazy disposition. You’ll never learn, she said, and that’s when she predicted they would all wind up in the big house, which so nearly came true. Later Brian would not remember any practice ducking under the desk that week. Did the parochial world not get the memo from a fellow-travelling power-earthling who was the first Catholic in that high office? That day Richard and Brian were allowed to hang a bit, and it was noted that it might be OK if the following night’s somewhat screwy b&e caper were called off.

Out on the briny the boats came near the other boats and a holding pattern ensued. It was poop time in the meeting rooms; invade the former gambling and good music mecca and Arthur Godfrey was probably fucked. One more thing, said Mac the data genius of the automotive business who’d been installed in the cabinet to lend horn-rimmed credibility, the incoming vessels with the barely camouflaged decks are shadowed by a sub. Che Fucking G, Island Beard #2, said bring it on; said the yankee didn’t know or didn’t want to know that they would lose.

The foolish three, imagining that Thursday was a new day at school, gravitated along the lines of attraction, and so were taken to their assigned punishment places, Louie by the ear, Brian by the sleeve, and Richard, whose clothes, a version of the blue and white, one did not touch, by the little finger, whatever that was supposed to mean. In semi-covert caper-conference at recess it was decided that they would look at stuff but only take that which was irresistible. At an early hour of the night the three holy bums were spotted on the approach by a neighbor and had to veer off from the target house. They screwed around in the paddleball park for a while, waiting for the coast to clear, and then re-scheduled for Saturday daytime when walking around was not as conspicuous.

At the U.N Adlai the Man of Loss, an intellectual vivant who kept a social apartment on the premises, had big pictures and a pointing device, and the other guy, per a flyer in the original charter, refused to respond to direct or indirect questions. About that time a ship slipped red rover and made a run for the island. All right, they were warned, we know that’s not a serious tub, but don’t let it happen again or else. We and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which we and you have tied the knot, wrote one world leader to another. N Fucking K who had pounded the international table with his shoe, might be cracking but on-site construction continued, and the Bearded One demanded the big pushback if they were invaded, for which eventuality he correctly guessed the BD was in preparation. Someone came into one of the smallest meeting rooms with word that a U2, whose existence the BD denied, had been shot down out of the other motherland’s airspace, pilot probably dead. Life at the top can be embarrassing.

After school that Friday Brian reported to the back of the nun station wagon to be delivered for an hour and a half of weed-pulling originally scheduled for Saturday. He had toyed with the idea of trying to make it on the coming weekend day from the convent straight to the break-in, but nah. Louie was attuned to craziness, Richard was untouchable, but Brian was the slightly and essentially seasoned criminal. When Brian got home he received for his birthday a small money tree to which was attached eight one-dollar bills and one fiver on top. He thought of bringing his wad on the caper and pretending to find it. He didn’t exactly know why, the whole thing did not bear a lot of thinking, but he was feeling lucky.

Brother R Fucking K met secretly with one of the opposition’s Brothers Fucking K straight out of Dostoevsky, who put the parallel missiles of Turkey on the table with the one’s on the Island. The highly competitive presidential sibling left the room to make a phone call.

Doomsday Progress Report   EARLIER, JUST AS THE DAY HAD ARRIVED, AT AN ALTITUDE OF 31 MILES, 19 MILES S-S/W OF JOHNSTON ISLAND A SLIGHTLY DISTORTED BRIGHT MOON-LIKE SPHERE WAS SEEN, YELLOW AT FIRST, THEN GRADUALLY SHOWING GREEN, PINK AND VIOLET HUES. BLUE-PURPLE STREAMERS WERE FORMED AND TWO OBSERVERS WITHOUT GOGGLES IN PLACE SUFFERED RETINAL DAMAGE.

The first thing the juveniles did was get tired of watching the fresh white mouse cower in the corner of the cage of Louie’s pet snake. They took a circuitous route to the paddleball court that offered the broadest operational perspective. Damn if that same neighbor wasn’t about, but in a more oblivious mode. At the right moment they crossed over and entered the back part of the back yard. The grass was of a type too nice to walk on. Tom Sawyer and the two Huck Finns traversed the immaculate lawn in preparation of entry through a window left open and through which one could be boosted and then open the door from the inside. Why just use a key when one could ruin the end of a good story? In fact, at the last minute there was the sound of crunching gravel on the street, which was the residents returning a week early from vacation just because the world might blow up. Louie covered the retreat by turning the hose on the fantastic lawn. Brian spent some of his roll on fresh packs of cigarettes and soda and by the time they got back to Louie’s Mr. Mouse was barely a lump in the long throat of Mr. Snake.

It was Black Saturday, LeMay-I and his ilk of the various persuasions were bouncing off the walls and N Fucking K officially blinked, the hardware would be off the island and J Fucking K secretly blinked, the Turkey items would be removed without announcement, most boats turned back. A sub shadowing the flotilla in question was out of communication and came close to launching the first final torpedo. Apparently three guys down there argued it out correctly.

From the Journal of Doom  WITHIN THE DURATION OF THIS PARTICULAR ROTATION OF THE EARTH, NEAR THE USUAL ATOLL THE CALAMITY DOMINIC MUSHROOM CLOUD REACHED THE HINDU HEIGHT OF SIXTY-THREE THOUSAND FEET.

Brian determined to save his bread for a non-white shirt for the upcoming social season, a new concept, and so had a Sunday afternoon to fill somewhere besides the pinball arcade, without his friends. After eighth grade graduation the three went to separate schools and thereafter saw each other around town now and then. Louie developed a knack for hanging with an older crowd, making himself useful, and followed them into the county jail, where one time he dropped acid. Brian would rather die ten thousand deaths. Then Louie topped himself; after getting out on bail he went back on visiting day with a bag of weed down his pants to smuggle in, and on that particular Lord’s Day he disappeared into the correctional system. Same thing almost happened to Brian for a bogus pot bust, the judge fucked with him and then let him go to California, where one night at Barney’s Beanery he sat in a booth with visiting Richard, who was out on bail, and there is nothing like waiting for a court date. Richard had gravitated upwards, which is possible when money and a little finesse are involved, to a small group of rich kids who became practiced hedonists chasing after excellent junk in two-seater sports cars. Brian arrived at the little local deconstruction site thinking spot to find that a passing idiot had taken a dump in one of the half-finished rooms. He took a step back towards the street, and spotted just in time the front end of a patrol vehicle emerging to the left; his reflexes were sharp but he was still living too close to the line. The arcade was safe, and he could just watch.

N Fucking K was never the same, there was the old familiar low buzz in the politburo. J Fucking K had one year to live, but this Sunday was a good day; K Brother met with Brother K to finalized the deal and have some Chinese. Someone came up with the idea of exchanging phone numbers; the Man of the Moment had an exit line out of advertising: if one invades when the same result could have come through negotiation, then you don’t have a very good war.

Doomsday Nightly Sign-off   AT THE END OF THE KAZAKHSTAN STEPPE HARD BY THE SPOT CALLED SEMIPALATINSK ON THIS PARTICULAR DATE IN A BUSY YEAR, ONE COULD HAVE HARDLY HELPED BEING AWARE OF YET ANOTHER BEATIFICATION OF DUST.

The vet read that the hero’s burial ceremony in Arlington Cemetery was taking place the following Tuesday. As it happened, the vet was going to be in Arlington, the county in Virginia, that day and he had known the hero. They had taught together at West Point, and thought the vet was senior to the hero and they didn’t socialize outside of department functions, a couple of episodes had offered closer looks at him. Among other things, the hero was on the softball team coached by the vet in their last summer together.

The hero played left field, an important position in softball. The leftfielder has to catch the long drives hit by the opposing team’s best right-handed hitters. That summer, the hero chased down those towering shots, or circled under them, until he reared them in. It never seemed like a sure thing, honestly, but the hero almost always got them. The hero was fast, too, so he batted lead-off or second in the line-up. He was not a home-run hitter, but could easily turn a single into a double if the opposing team did not field the ball cleanly or hesitated for a moment.

But the hero was not a hero for his softball ability. Early in the post-9/11 wars he had protested the interrogation tactics used by members of his platoon when they questioned detainees in Afghanistan. Brutality, let’s just say torture, was forbidden by policy and regulation, but now appeared to be a tolerated standard practice. The hero sought clarification first from his chain-of-command and then from the highest governmental levels in Washington. He then took his concerns to a human-rights watchdog group in New York. The hero had been celebrated for doing so by many and was even been named a “Man of the Year” by Time magazine. Others, however, considered him a troublemaker. Couldn’t he have addressed the problem other than by writing politicians and advocacy groups? The vet wondered how he might have handled the same situation.

At West Point, the vet had seen the hero lead a philosophy workshop. He was laser focused, deeply logical, and profoundly aware of competing factors and viewpoints, which he would unpack in detail in front of the workshop attendees. As he spoke, he paced back and forth like a caged tiger. The furious physical expenditure of mental energy was endearing. The vet had read comments by the hero’s former students and it was clear the hero’s students had been in awe of him. In the workshop, watching him give birth to the intricacies of an argument, it was easy to see why. The vet also understood why a woman, a colleague, loved the hero and eventually married him.

At the end of his tour at West Point, the hero left the Army after 15 years on active duty. He said he had enough of the military and now wanted to study philosophy as a civilian.

But the years after the Army did not go well. First gradually, then quickly, the hero’s life disintegrated. In the beginning, he excelled in graduate school, but then his work grew erratic and unsubtle. He picked fights with other scholars and his marriage fell apart. Eventually the hero lost his apartment and was several times detained by the police for public outbursts of craziness. He was hospitalized more than once, but because he had left the Army before retiring, and it was not clear that his present maladies were service-related, the VA was slow to assume care for him. Subject to the vagrancies of state-provided mental care, he was in-and-out of institutions.

Friends from the military tried to help. So did childhood friends and distinguished professors who had been impressed by the hero’s early work and potential. The decline continued, however, and as so often happens, the hero resisted efforts by others to help him. Toward the end, his grip on what Poe once called “the precincts of reality” was tenuous. In 2021, he was found dead in his room at a mental hospital. The exact cause of his death remains unclear. Was it too much or the wrong kind of medication? Was it suicide? Did his mind and body just give out?

Now the vet sat in his car alongside other cars lined up outside the burial office at Arlington Cemetery. He knew how these interments happened, because the previous summer he had been in attendance for the interment of a childhood friend’s mother alongside her husband, a Korean War-era vet, who had died years earlier. The vet had known his friend’s father well and knew how much his Army service meant to him, along with the prospect of burial at Arlington. He also knew the interment process to be an orderly and dignified one that respected the deceased and his or her family members. Still, that interment had been a markedly casual event, with little ceremony or eulogizing of the departed. The vet had enjoyed the company of his friend and his two children, who were now adults and whom he had not seen in decades. The cemetery official was a retired Army paratrooper, and the vet, who had also been a paratrooper, bandied with the official about their airborne days. Only when the cemetery official opened the columbarium “niche,” as the square burial vaults are called, where the ashes of his friend’s father lay waiting for his wife to join him, did the vet feel the momentousness of the event.

On cue, the procession of cars began to snake through the cemetery to the burial location. The hero was also to be interred in a columbarium niche, but there would be a service before the interment. A tent was set up among the gravestones to provide shade for the hero’s immediate family, along with chairs for them to sit in. Others in attendance, about fifty, stood in the sun, though for a summer day in Virginia it was neither hot nor humid. Off in the distance, the vet could see the Pentagon, which seemed ironically appropriate. An Army chaplain, a woman, stood waiting, along with a small detail of uniformed soldiers poised to fold the flag covering the hero’s burial urn. About 100 yards away stood a platoon-sized honor guard and a military band. Also present was a firing squad and bugler. The vet recognized a couple of teachers from West Point with whom he and the hero had taught, but not anyone else he knew. The attendees seemed composed equally of family and friends who looked like they might have either served with the hero or been his students. Only a couple of attendees were in uniform—none especially high-ranking.

The chaplain called the service to order. She said kind words about the hero without shying away from the controversies that marked his service and his sad final days. She read from Romans 8:28: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  When she finished, the detail folded the flag and presented it to the hero’s father. The bugler played Taps and the firing squad fired a three-round salute. Then the chaplain asked for a volunteer to carry the urn containing hero’s ashes to the columbarium. At first no one volunteered, and the vet wondered if it was appropriate if he stepped forward. Then the hero’s father said that he would carry his son’s remains.

The vet had read that the hero’s father was a former Marine Corps machine-gunner and a Vietnam veteran. He had also read that the father hated the military and had been a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He was the only male at the ceremony not formally dressed or in military attire. Confined to a wheelchair, wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt, the hero’s father exuded determination that his son’s life was worthy of military honor.

As the procession walked to the columbarium, the band played a song that sounded like the Elvis Presley classic “Love Me Tender.” It’s a sweet song, but the vet wondered at the selection. Only later did he learn that the melody belonged first to a song called “Army Blue” that predated “Love Me Tender” and was long associated with West Point.

The columbarium at Arlington Cemetery has its own kind of dignity, but it’s narrow for the purposes of a ceremonial gathering. The previous summer, at the vet’s friend’s mother’s interment, there was only the cemetery official, the friend, and the friend’s son and daughter. Now the attendees squeezed into the row between the walls of burial niches or looked on from the ends of the rows. More words were said, but from the vet’s position it was hard to hear them. After final remarks were completed, attendees filed past the niche and paid their last respects.

The vet had so far viewed the day’s events abstractly, almost without emotion or consolidated articulation of his thoughts about the hero. But when his turn came to stand before the urn in its dark square final resting place, tears welled up and the vet suddenly found himself both short of breath and short of words. Conscious that others were waiting in line behind him, he stammered under his breath, “Good job man, good job” and moved on.

Following the ceremony, the vet spoke with his friends from West Point and a couple of others present. Someone pointed out former students of the hero’s. Another pointed out the childhood friend who had gone to the most length to organize help for the hero in his troubled final days. No ready opportunity to speak with the hero’s family presented itself, and the vet was hesitant to force the issue. A reception was announced, but the vet didn’t get the location and had already decided he would not attend.

An official announced it was time to for the procession to depart and the attendees in their cars drove slowly toward the cemetery gates.

On the way out of the cemetery, the vet saw signs directing traffic to the Marine Corps War Memorial. It had been a long time since he had visited the memorial, so he followed the signs to the parking lot. He walked around the grounds, read the signage, and contemplated the magnificent statue of the six soldiers raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. The crowd was sparse: a few casually-attired tourists and some vet old-timers wearing ball-caps adorned with patches and pins representing military units. Unexpectedly, a wedding party, dressed in their finest, strolled by from a site farther off from the statue where they had gathered for pictures.

After taking it all in for a while, the vet walked back to his car.

****

Biographical details about the life of Ian Fishback not recounted from memory were obtained from C.J. Chivers, “Ian Fishback’s American Nightmare.” New York Times, February 21, 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/magazine/ian-fishback.html

Desperate Need of Help

Luis-Rosa-image

So, This is My Career?

Ecstatic to deploy, I qualify on 9MM handguns—

Battle ready Air Force lawyer to defend both Iraqi and Enduring Freedom

Engineers advance to the front lines:

spend billions, move like lightning, build tents, site trailers,

provide food, water, and air conditioning. Our soldiers’ beddown

enables our fight for Oil

Sign off on this funds request, the Engineers demand

What is our mission? I ask

Make the Afghans modern, the Department of Defense

replies. We will build 200 police stations, use a US blueprint

 to cut costs. The villagers can reign in their warlords

What do the Afghans want? I ask

The US Generals look blank and confused

the second-floor bathrooms flood—the

Afghan soldiers’ Islamic practice of making wudu requires them

to wash their feet in waist-high sinks before praying salah

I fly in a contractor’s Russian MI-12V-5 helicopter to inspect one remote station

for future construction claims. Are there any? I ask

We bribe the local warlord—to keep the peace, the Lieutenant says in a whisper