“Famous at HQ,” said my captain, and telling me that his former North African wife had complained that all this was much more like her part of the world, that particular wartime than all the other wars they were comparing this to. In his look something asking for words looked at the open window and turned to look up at me from what I suddenly understood were these unwanted pieces of something or other, weird as the camera itself, though not more surprising than the war. “You have a fan here, from a Reserve brigade, Wisconsin, likes your approach.” He looked at the open window. Music ongoing but “Stairway to Heaven,” a light in the voice straining to stay alive in the guitars and bass I hadn’t heard before.
I could have shared this with the captain and the only hearsay-news news that Umo had a job with a low-budget guy documenting music mostly Metal that American GIs were into over here, but I knew no more than that the cop had told The Inventor who told Milt who told my sister whom he lusted after. You can be psychically connected to a person like this captain even with almost nothing in common. He answered a phone. I heard him say, “They want heads on a plate.”
Hanging up, he said, “You’ve got some radar.” Well you had to shoot quick, I said. Right, he said; that kid with his mouth open. See three things at once, have faith in your eye, I said, plotting where I was standing, hoping for I didn’t know what. Kut again. Shoulda seen what was going on on the floor. (My sister had needed to know what happened just before this shot — her trademark question. What trade am I putting her in?)
“Those do-rag graybeards arm-wrestling…” said captain.
“Kut; down at—” I started to tell the captain what he thought he knew already. “—Triple Canopy guy—” he said. (Two guys with a bit of someone under the table, then one reaching for my camera.)
“—Kut,” I finished; “well, the security outfit — but he’s got the Special Forces patch — and the other one was a friend of my dad’s, a total coincidence.” “We know him,” the captain said; “Reservist.” “That’s correct, a powerlifter, a salesman — shoulda seen what was going on on the floor,” I said, the photographed, the unphotographed; but what had captain revealed? “Piece work, you get used to,” said the captain. “Who’s we?” I said. “I liked the crane hoisting the billboard into place,” he said, the way people say they liked something and don’t say why.
“Advertising—”
“—honey?”
“Saudi honey,” I said. The captain grinned. (One of three billboard shots where I tried to catch that noose-hole of opportunity, the Occupation said to be over but the privatizers’ “laboratory” with several months to go till we had our Constitution, I told my sister and would tell the Competition Hearings.)
“You enlisted…,” the captain said curiously. An agreement, I said, but to do what? I asked myself again out loud, always somehow knowing it was in my gentleman’s agreement it came to me with Umo. “Let’s have some more tank-and-flag shots,” my captain said, and wondering exactly what he meant I told him for months I had wondered how much friendly fire I survived. Going where I was told, you know. Was I prepared or being?
Onward — like targeting what I couldn’t put my finger on. Days, weeks late my sister had e-mailed love and a misspelling and so glad and sorry of my new friend at Specialist school who had vanished into a building one day we were jogging on the Base but wasn’t their a door left ajar? No, he had appeared to be untraceable, I’d replied, though I gave up at first. Older, a Chaplain training for combat photography who, to his peril, might know more than his calling. Underwater photography he had thought he was headed for but they had other plans. “Maybe he went on a retreat,” my sister thought, maybe because I was at Fort Meade for those few weeks and she recalled that “retreat” was how Dad termed his eight civilian days spent there, when I had mentioned to her this chaplain at Meade who thanked me for a thought that I personally thought had been his, about finding your real job in another one you’d been pushed into. My sister who even if what she sees isn’t yet sees much — that our father once called too much nothing.
I dug up the present.
“Sympathy for the Devil” banging out of someone’s CD near the window, I felt my captain wanted me to speak. That field of cukes and tomatoes in the photo could be anywhere. And landlocked green winter wheat along a seam of a river, the Mesopotamian plain nice but kinda flat for a photo, I said, the checkpoint bridge just outside the frame, two guys lying on the ground I couldn’t take. Right, said captain, you’ve a fan right here in the office, Specialist from Wisconsin. Right, I said, let the chips—” “Something else for you now.” “—fall…”—we nodded, where they may unsaid. “You’ve got to face the music,” the captain said, as if I did have to. “Your father now. He was in Vietnam. Or…?” “No. His friend…” I began.
For why had the captain said it like that, instead of, Anybody in your family in…? Or Was your father in? Or — for it was almost as if — I couldn’t say it in words, as I told this captain a thing or two about my father’s friend who was one of the few guys he would listen to for long. The captain agreed silently. “And he was right,” I said. Captain nodded. This exception an older friend in Wisconsin, with a binder full of plastic-sleeved posed-corpse snaps who hunted whitetail deer with legendary skill owing he said to what he had learned along the Cua Viet River in the early 70s. The stealth needed to survive serving in a so-called Studies and Observation Group, to say nothing of his old M-1951 flak vest in case he was shot at by another numbskull out in the woods — too hot to wear in the jungle in the old days, comfortable in hunting season now: so now he would stalk a doe and buck by wading a stream never lifting his feet out of the water — deer didn’t associate streams and humans, if you wanted to know. On the ground he adopted a high crawl — hands and knees in waist-high cover, in low you went on your belly like deer scraping under a fence.
Knowledge is power, it breeds respect, my father had told me driving home from practice — respect for deer, my father added of this friend with whom he went along once or twice a year but who did not hunt himself though fished for old ironsnout pike just to get them. It was that other war not properly finished that his friend recalled—“that he’s scared now that he wasn’t scared then: understand?” said my father wheeling a practically rightangle turn in front of a ghostly oncoming truck into our street, explaining because what was obvious if you have to ask can’t be explained to you but he was explaining in case—“And that he lost time once, time itself — do you understand, Zach? — ” not understanding, himself, how I loved him for that “time” weirdness—“a dead gook lying face up in the river, minutes on end, he thought, underwater, and so he moved on” the way SOG trained for silently, but the VC must have held his breath, next thing my father’s friend heard something, dived behind a tree, VC winged him, the dead-in-the-water VC up and firing. “With what?” I said—“he stashed his rifle out of the water?” “With what, with what? For God’s sake, Zach, do you understand what I’m saying?” “A sound you said, Dad — what kind of sound?” “What kind of—!” My father was angered by questions he understood as a substitute for something else like silence or…competitive performance, I actually said now to the captain, feeling disloyal. “They were stupid questions but I asked them: Were flak vests designed to stop bullets?” “Stupid?” said the captain. “‘And you went hunting, Dad, even if you say you didn’t really, and I don’t have a big case for the deer if they want to hang around and get shot.’” The captain laughed. I said, “The stupid questions are the right ones sometimes.” “If you keep them to yourself,” the captain said. “Where I overshoot,” I said—“You still do, so watch it,” he said. It was like So long, which shouldn’t have bothered me.