Not pictured: Charlotte, in a royal-blue armchair near the window, dressed only in a white cotton shirt that was unbuttoned at the top. Sleeves gently rolled, her tan legs tucked under her on the wide chair cushion. I lay on the motel bed, naked except for dog tags. The windows were open, the transparent curtains billowed. She said we should look forward to being married when I got back. I did.
THEY dragged rank prisoners down the dirt road beside camp, like a slave march. They had stains on their pant asses and dust in their mustaches, and they begged us for the chewing gum and the salt packets from our MREs. Who knows where they went? Rumor was that they were nobodies, just a bunch of haji towelhead farmers, and we had better forget about them and get focused for the ground assault.
There was nothing happening. It was all outside the compound walls, staggering by, exploding in the distance.
MY grandmother wrote a letter in scrabbled blue ink. It was the first she had written since World War II, when my grandfather had done tours both in Europe and the Pacific. I do not know why she didn’t send word to my father, in Vietnam.
When I was very young, going through a drawer I found an old black-and-white centerfold. Opening the trifolded paper, I was floored by this first glorious vision of sex. So much so that I did not recognize the subject. My mother walked in and caught me ogling, then nervously explained that she’d had her face superimposed on the body as a joke for my father when he was in combat.
Every day, every war, everybody waits for mail call.
AT some point, reborn from a psych eval down in Riyadh, I came to realize that war was more about dividends than killing. I needed a product. I started to make wine.
This old Choctaw cook had deep gulleys in his cheeks and when he spoke he emitted a soft whistle over the letter s: sholdier, bishcuit, misshile. He gave me a few packets of yeast, and taught me how to make applejack. Soon after, I was trading liters of it, alongside grapejack, orange-juice-jack and whatever-fruit-juice-I-could-get-jack, for fresh chicken and near-beer and battery-powered speakers.
One morning, a couple of French troops appeared. Not because they’d heard of my work as vintner, but because they needed a translator, and because one of the mechanics suspected that I might know a little French, being a college faggot and all. I cannot remember what the Frenchmen officially sought, but the next morning, in exchange for five gallons of my two-week-old applejack, an entire pallet of French rations was delivered to our tent. Tetley was angry. I told him to get ready for the Perrier.
The French meals came in tins, not brown plastic sacks. You didn’t heat them by dropping floppy packets into warm water, you set the entire tin on Tetley’s propane flame, then let the food baste in its own juices and herbs. Instead of dehydrated pork patty, this was lapin avec haricots verts.
“No shit, Tetley. It’s rabbit, man. Bunny.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. And we got tons of bunny, man. Half yours too. You can bitch-bath in Perrier if you want.”
This was, indeed, a moment. A fine moment. Cluster bombs, tracer rounds, intestinal parasites—avec haricots verts.
A five-gallon jug of bad wine was only worth a pallet of rabbit. The Perrier was traded for information about the location of the female sleeping quarters, when and where to cross over the berm, whether the women drank, if they were easy, etc. My French was better than I thought, and my answers worth an ocean of bubbling water.
The next morning we were ordered to a meeting with our CO. He informed us that a bunch of drunk Frogs had spent the night in the women’s tent. He said this was a war, not an orgy. Guard duty was redoubled. I was again ordered to latrine detail.
CHARLOTTE wrote that she was pregnant, that we were. Then she never wrote again. I burned shit in the desert and watched A-10s rip the sky.
The battalion colonel briefed us by saying that Intel had lost an Iraqi Special Forces unit in our area — So stay sharp, dogs. That night, I left my guard post, climbed over the berm and walked into the void. The red lens cover was on my flashlight; I aimed it forward and followed the circle. Day-bursts of missiles hit just up the road, briefly illuminating the blackness. I prayed for someone to fire on me as I neared the front. Nobody did. Darkness swallowed me, though the rocks and sand in the red circle of the flashlight vibrated with the missile strikes. I lay on the ground for a while to feel this, then put my ear against a large rock to listen to the sound. I got up and wandered for an hour or so, scouring that landscape. At some point I found a cluster of three tiny white flowers — the only living nature I’d seen for weeks. I yanked them, then went back to the tent and wrote Charlotte for the last time. I asked her to remember no matter what. To please make a list of details about me from back home, from before the war. I put the flowers in the envelope and was done.
ONE sunset, some general helicoptered in, gave us a ten-minute speech about victory, then left. He had a slight gut but strong posture, and he walked back and forth in his beige cammies as the red sun melted down behind him. We never saw him again, but he made clear that we would lead the invasion, would spearhead a 155-mile thrust into Baghdad, “crushing any rag-wrapped cunt” who got in our way.
Every vehicle was armored. We sandbagged the Deuce-and-a-Half truck beds; we welded metal plates on the dozers and dumps. We jury-rigged a.50-cal mount on a pickup cab and pretended to know how to use it.
They said, Go.
For a mute instant there was no gender. We charged north, trucks and guns, past missile craters, charred vehicles and burned trash. It was apocalyptic and eerie, abandoned, but we scanned the desert eagerly, looking back and forth to find the enemy at last.
We located a collection of goatskin-covered foxholes, and exited the trucks. Our rifles set on three-round semiautomatic burst, we stalked up with gun stocks to our cheeks. The holes were empty save for Arab pinups and empty water bottles and cigarette butts. The airplanes had done all the killing. We pushed on, north, so very much in search of death.
The convoy drove for hours on the same scab of earth, no enemy in sight, our own tracks disappearing behind us in sand drift. At some point the combat-support vehicles just stopped.
They radioed us and said to turn around. The war was over.
We got out of the trucks in the middle of Iraq and took our helmets off. We yelled and unloaded our rifles, ejaculating brass casings all over the desert. Yet the silence was unbreakable.
THE next day, Tetley and I were ordered to make a supply run and find a victory feast. We cruised the desert highway, a crisp gray seam of asphalt through the beige landscape. Out of nowhere, an enormous cloud of sand rose ahead of us. Tetley drove us straight toward it, an oncoming, massive armament convoy. Flitting strips of red, white and blue nylon tied to tank antennae against the grainy Arabian sky.
On the shoulder to our right I saw a camel. She sat there, buckled down on all fours, groaning. To our left, soldiers stood up in the beds of transport trucks, whooping and dancing and grabbing their crotches. Pop music blared, brakes squealed. The convoy trucks were sluggish and clumped together, billowing the enormous sand cloud. Armed Forces Radio announced total victory; President Bush declared an end to the Vietnam era.
A thin film of sand coated the camel’s black eyes and crusted her eyelashes. The troops, many shirtless, their silver dog tags wagging, yelled and waved, and danced, the exhaust stacks spewing and horns blaring, the music cranked from boom boxes. All of it, us, charging east-west in a horde along an unmarked two-lane in the desert.