I don’t think I ever meant to start smoking, it just kind of happened. As a Millennial, I could have been the first generation of Americans not hooked on nicotine. We had the D.A.R.E program which taught us how to do drugs and I distinctly remember a teacher that assigned us to go home and tell a smoker in our lives that we love them and they should quit. I wonder how many kids went home and badgered a loved one about their choices.
It wasn’t really until the service that it occurred to me that I could smoke, something about the long days and shitty food just made it easier to light up rather than track down chow. Being 18 and the Army choosing you to be a cop made it easier to just go with the flow on other things as well, a Joe offers you a smoke and you don’t want to be rude and then here you are, two years later and you’re budgeting for smokes with your groceries.
Early on you never really think about it, smoking lets you eat less and shit, man, that first smoke of the day before a shift feels fucking great. There’s something primal about it, my caveman brain longing to hold fire in my hands. The ritual and routine of it. I wake up at 0430 on work days, put on my clown suit, and have a smoke or two before driving into work. Sure I could make breakfast but this gets me out the door faster. Isn’t that an important skill even after basic training?
That works great for day to day garrison life, the job that I had deluded myself into thinking that I signed up for. Before 9/11, the Army was actually a pretty easy gig, like any other job with shitty pay and a stupid uniform. Sure we had field exercises before the Afghanistan deployment but those were basically camping trips. What do you pack to go to war? Luckily the Army is great at telling you how to pack. Three uniforms: check, Two pairs of boots: check, Kevlar and vest: check. Then my Staff Sergeant, Sgt Baker had us all checking out equipment again and off handedly goes “Six months of you nicotine of choice. Pack it and enough to barter with when we get there.”
That one threw me off.
Obviously I knew there wouldn’t be a 7/11 in Kabul but I hadn’t thought about it until it hit me, holy shit, this is war, war you hear? And I was just equipment to the Army. I wasn’t any different from another piece of gear. Rucksack: check, Fresh socks: check, helmet: check, dumbass that thought he was getting free college: check.
We still had weeks to go before we left, so I had time to stockpile my weapons of flavor destruction, I went out to the class six for tornados or what have you and after weeks of careful collecting I had more cigs than I could have thought I would smoke in a six month deployment, enough to get me through and enough that I could lose a carton or two trading in case the HVAC went out in my tent or something.
Then the day came, the actual leaving is the easy part of deploying. They had a bid hooah send off and since it was 2003 and we were all still playing “Courtesy of the USA”, it was even worse then I imagine it would normally be. No, the choice has been made at that point, the sleepless nights waking up anxious about what is waiting for you on the other side of the planet and becoming irrationally furious for no reason. Those were just starting. But actually getting on the plane? Easy. You just stand in line.
Several long boring flights later I learned that the Army is great at taking me to places I never knew I didn’t want to go to. They always called the deployment “The Desert ” with capital letters in the pronunciation. Old heads said stupid shit like “In The Desert we always had to keep our heads on a swivel,” what did that even mean?
Afghanistan was snowy and cold in the fall and winter of 2003. I guess I was expecting a desert like Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing”, instead I got a mountain view that would make John Denver cry a single tear and an air temperature that hurt my face when I stood outside.
Unfortunately, a cop at home station is a guard while deployed. We lost all semblance of the law enforcement part of our jobs from the states, no traffic stops or officer’s kids shoplifting from the PX, now we had sectors of fire and shoot, move, communicate. I had, of course, been introduced to these things in basic and AIT but I quickly forgot about them in the safety of the Pacific Northwest. These skills would be sharpened and honed faster than I thought that they would after a year or so of atrophy. Guardmount while deployed was worse than guardmount back home, regardless of where we were in the real world. “Work” started about an hour and a half before we actually had to be at work because of the weapons issue and squad checks on top of the mandatory nicotine infusion before any forced actions from Uncle Sam.
There is a ritual to getting your weapon from a military armourer, I grew up around guns and I never really thought of them as weapons of destruction like the Army did. My dad kept his hunting rifles and handguns loaded in the closet in his bedroom. Need a rifle for four wheeling? Just grab one, maybe bring back a deer. The Army however kept our guns in a damn nuclear vault, except for the handgun that we had on us at all times, we had to turn everything else back in before and after every single shift. A process that took the better part of an hour because:
1. It was every swinging dick on shift at the same time.
2. The fact that the armourer was without fail a dumbass that got a DUI or cussed out the captain, or just the simple fact that they were pretty dumb. Better put the drooling trilobites in charge of the guns.
The night shift armourer was Corporal Layman, a pock-faced man-child of at least his mid twenties but you would never have guessed him to be a real adult by talking to him. He would tell you that he was accepted to West Point but signed up to do the greater good for his country right now as an enlisted man. In actuality I’m sure he got his GED from a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and was too dumb to cook the fries at McDonalds. So into the Army he goes, you know, where he wasn’t a danger to the real people. The productive ones that were able to hold down a real job or tie their shoes without someone looking over his shoulder reciting that poem about a rabbit . Layman was bundled up like he was the one prepping to stand out in the cold all night looking at mountains and getting shot at, not standing in his lit and heated armoury all night.
He snorted a huge loogy and swallowed it when I got to the window with my weapon card for my M4. “Your weapon did not get cleaned last shift, Rodriguez.” He snorted around another loogy.
“Sure it did, you just didn’t write it down, smart guy.” It was cold and I was tired before my shift even started, I didn’t have the time to deal with his petty shit today.
“I would not do that. I am sworn to integrity as an Army core value.” He shot back thickly, the glob of mucus rattling in the back of his throat. He threw out the line like he had been practicing it for days just waiting for the right opportunity.
“Sure man, I’ll get it after this shift.” I clipped off hoping that would shut him up enough to give me my weapon and let me get to the next horror of mundanity that was guardmount. Layman’s answer was to roll his eyes behind the eye pro that he was wearing for some reason and hand me my M4, stock first, chamber open, as was regulation.
“Clear,” He snorted.
“Clear. Received.” I deadpanned from muscle memory as was the tradition of our people. I took one step to the left and attached my rifle to the sling on my chest. I probably wouldn’t even need that gun tonight but what’s a war without the trappings?
I crunched across the frozen pallets laid down to keep our boots off the icy mud, a futile attempt against the slush creeping through and pulling off people’s boots. Avoiding the smoke pit since Layman had made me a little late but lighting a smoke regardless. I walked between the tents, where we weren’t supposed to be, but I figured they weren’t going to do anything worse to me than guardmount if I got caught, so it all worked out. The nicotine sang in my veins and I was about as close to comfortable as one could be in this frozen hell hole with the world’s best curated collection of dumbasses. I threw the burnt filter over the eight foot perimeter wall, clearing the concertina wire, my victimless crime was committed without incident.
A few more steps and I was at the guardmount tent. The twice a day meeting where guards were given their post assignments for the day, the weak looking among us were grilled with questions about regulations or Army history, and Captain McDermit got to act like he was better than the others with his briefings and odd mix of flagging authority and attempted stand up. If it wasn’t funny, it was hazing. These meetings often involved some kind of physical training, either squats or pushups or burpees in full kit during the formation of around 50 guards. Rarely was there a particular reason for this training but when the Captain orders us to jump, we jumped.
Separate and distinct from the workouts and singling out weaklings however, were his Powerpoints . McDermit had gone to the state college of micromanagement and he went out of his way to make that all of our problems. Any meeting with the man invariably involved a Powerpoint slide deck with busy pages that he insisted on reading verbatim and no less than three wipes or transition sound effects; the machine gun transition was a perennial favorite.
The heat from the tent slapped at my frozen corneas as I pulled open the tent flap and stepped onto the plastic flooring. The mud and slush from everyone’s boots left boot prints leading from where I was standing at the doorway to the far end of the formation. The other guys standing in rank and file waiting for guardmount and the horror of what position they were stuck in for the night. Everyone hoped for the roving position, a warm track and the freedom to go where you wanted on base. Not that it was very big, maybe two football fields laid end to end, but it was better than being stuck in an open air guard tower waiting to get shot or blown up like the corner positions called “Echo”. The base had spots, one for each corner and they were multi storey wooden towers with some reinforcements where the gunners stood. They had the big guns and acted as look outs for the roving and other guards. We were attacked on a not infrequent basis and the Echo spots were always the first to know it. Smith had caught a piece of wooden shrapnel in the cheek last week, a scarring reminder that we weren’t at church camp and people wanted us dead. One, the Taliban to get out of their country and two, Uncle Sam but that was more from the negligence of not having adequate armour and hopefully not because veterans that make it home were expensive for the country for the rest of their lives.
I felt gross from the artificial heat and my armour was weighing down on me when McDermit marched into the tent. The sergeant caught us all by surprise, called the area to attention and the Captain , after a long pregnant pause where we all forced a captive audience to his silly power trip. A real war time leader if there ever was one.
“At ease, troops.” He barked as he strode to the CRT TV in front of the formation, blinking it to life and connecting the powerpoint that we all knew was coming. He began, “Intel has come down about an attack tonight. This comes from Kabul so I need to believe it’s more credible than the normal stuff we get.” A multi-color map came up on the screen with a canned tinny eagle screech sound. If I died tonight this would be one of the last things that I was subjected to, a waste of my mortal coil. With each click of the keyboard a new star popped up on the map showing each of the Echo positions as well as the other static guard spots along the perimeter and the roving tracks inside the digital base. This one slide, once it was complete, was the entire defensive position of our tiny forward operating base. I was pretty sure that would have made it classified but I doubt that McDermit had even noticed that and would have had a toe curling series of thoughts if he was actually aware that he had made a secret document.
“Corporal Clark, are you comprehending? The dire nature of our position tonight?” The captain’s private school vocabulary pulled me out of my thoughts.
“Yessir, we’re fucked. Again.” I acknowledged in front of the 49 other troops that this guy was about to send out to be attacked while he sat in his heated office. He would probably end up getting a full night’s sleep, attack or no. He wasn’t the one out there, he just made the after actions on Powerpoint.
“Thats fucking it, Clark! All of you on your faces. On the sergeants count.” in full kit, front and back plates, weapons and ammo, all 50 of us assumed the push up position. Groans or outright “fuck you man”’s came from within the formation. We’d been attacked several times by now but we’d never gotten a warning from intel before. If this was going to happen then it might be big and we hadn’t really seen anything big yet.
The sergeant tried to go easy on us with quick down and up calls, trying to mitigate the dumb punishment as much as he could. We’d all probably end up as bullet points on the captain’s slides anyway, nothing but a notch in the ‘loss’ column of command. Probably listed as ‘Clark’ and maybe a monetary value of how much my training cost the Army, maybe even how much food I’d eaten while we were out here. A quick canned letter to my mom and they’d have me replaced by the end of the week. Maybe calling it out like that counted as me trying to get some points on the board. The crushing machine of the military might eat me but I’d be flipping the bird the whole time it did. Sweat pooled on the canvas flooring under my face as we completed the set and the crowd all groaned as we stood back up at attention.
“If there aren’t any more snide remarks on your basic duties,” the captain’s gaze leveled on me for emphasis, “you’re all dismissed to your posts. With one minor correction, Clark you’re now lead on Echo 3, Smith you’re now roving with Staff Sergeant Rodriguez.”
The last minute act of spite on the captain’s part put me on the north tower without the mountains at our back and facing the plains. On a clear day you could see the far side of the “Bagram Bowl”, the mountain range that isolated and protected the larger Bagram Air Field but left our little FOC out in the cold. Literally. If we were going to take indirect fire or worse yet, a ground assault, it would come from the north corner of the base. I sure hoped the captain slept well that night.
On a normal day I actually loved the guard tower, it was easy to feel like you were above all the problems of the world up there. In the real world it wouldn’t be all that tall but out here it commanded the air that it sat in defiantly. Driving up in the rundown Toyota that we used to get around the base, the first thing you could see was the heft of that tower. Like an old castle spire, it wasn’t exactly trying to hide. Taylor and I loaded up and high fived the day team going down the stairs as we went up. The equipment that I lugged around the world and carefully inventoried before every shift got hauled up the five flights of cranky wooden stairs with me. I climbed up the ladder at the end of it and came up the hole in the floorboards. The tower shift was indeed one of my normal favorites, first you had the maw deuce, the 0.50 caliber machine gun ready to vaporize and liquify anything that approached, but then you had the night sky. Back home in Oklahoma the sky was never this nice. Home was all light pollution off the clouds from Wendy’s parking lots and movie theatre spotlights, progress that throws off the stars and actual sky. I never thought that you could see nebulae with your naked eye, but on clear nights, if you looked up through the cloud of your breath you could see the colors of and dust from thousands of years ago shining through all those light years just to hit my retina.
We settled into our spots for the night and prepped for what was definitely going to be a long night. At best, I was in a six square foot treehouse with Taylor, who for some reason always seemed to be writing or even worse, making videos for his family back home. I wonder if the Vietnam guys had to deal with this shit? The fucking guy over there talking to himself into a microphone camera set up on the awning of the tower just whirring away on the tape as he told these poor bastards about our lives deployed. It’s not all that interesting, bro. Everyday is Monday, the weekend is dead and sometimes we get shot at. Hardly worth the Dan Rather special he was trying to make a documentary about. I’m sure the old guys at the VFW will hate it when he gets out and makes people watch these videos for the rest of his life.
Around three hours into our shift and it was about 11 o’clock, full dark and I was starting to think about midnight chow, the best meal of the day when you could get the fresh breakfast but also the leftovers from the previous day. When the dead silence of the cold night was broken by the radio in our tower. Through garbled static came our position call sign, “Echo 3, perimeter check north of your position. Four figures carrying unknown equipment, without uniforms, weapon is a tube like structure, possible RPG. Confirm visual.” My heart sank in my chest as my breathing became quick and reedy, BDOC was calling about something that they had seen on the cameras but we hadn’t seen from our elevated position. Taylor turned pale as he stopped narrating our lives and stuck his head out of the open air window, peering down the wooden walls of the tower.
Leaning out of the relative cover of our treehouse he screamed, “I can’t see shit!” as he hauled himself back in to grab his night vision, a single tube that clipped onto his helmet and lit up the night in 1000s of shades of green in one eye. A cost saving measure as we were assured that both eyes open would give us full night vision, it was not the best in stereo optics. In practice we could barely see anything and it all just came out a green blur with any kind of motion. Taylor fumbled with the clasp on his helmet as I flipped my one tube down over my eye and exactly where BDOC said they were four human shaped green shadows huddled together around something that I couldn’t make out.
“Confirmed. Four people at heading 11.5 almost directly in front of us. Request permission to fire.” As I charged the maw deuce waiting to be authorized to unleash freedom.
“Orders are to wait, Echo 3. You are NOT clear to fire.” Came through the radio as I looked over the iron sights of the vehicle sized weapon.
“Well fuck.” I breathed out in a cloud of condensation without keying the mic. The back office bitches knew it even if I didn’t put it on the net. These shapes and I just looked at each other in the dead of the night, breathing at each other 100 meters away.
One shape pulled out the tube that BDOC had mentioned and leveled it on their shoulder. I keyed my mic, “BDOC, I’m looking at hostile action. Need that permission to fire.” I was answered with several seconds of static as they were probably yelling at each other in the BDOC office. Hopefully they weren’t just waiting for something bad to happen.
Taylor evidently got his nods to work and appeared over my shoulder, almost breathing in my ear, his frightened breath hot and vaporous cloud around my ear. His breath hitched as the radio squealed again. “Echo 3, cleared hot. You are cleared to engage.” At least that is what BDOC sent, I didn’t hear anything past ‘cleared hot’ before I opened up the 0.50 cal. The bullets were the size of my hand from the base to the tip on my pinky, so big and the barrel got so hot that you can only shoot in three second bursts before the barrel overheats. In AIT they told us to say “die motherfucker” in our head when you pull the trigger.
The ground exploded around the figures downrange as I walked the rounds up to their location. Each three second burst sending hell to them, the deadening concussive sound filling the tiny area of our tower. After five bursts my fillings were damn near rattled out of my head and the only thing I could see of our combatants was smoke and dust falling back down to Earth through my nods.
I got on the radio, “BDOC, Echo 3, good hit. End TIC.” Taylor let out a whoop that pierced through the squealing octave of my ears ringing from the maw deuce. I let myself relax, felt my shoulders slump over the firing controls.
[transition to later after the fire fight]
“Hey man, BDOC just called. I’ll get the chow run if you’re good here.” Taylor called as he was already beginning his way down the ladder to leave the tower.
“Nah, I’m good. You have fun.” I told the empty air where he was just seconds earlier and let the weight of my helmet pull my head skyward.
His boots clunked on the rungs of the ladder on his way down until they dissipated and all I had was the silence of the desert: my breath condensing as I exhaled toward the stars. I don’t know how long it went on like that, me totally ignoring my gun and lost in the colors of the night sky. The stars flexed and moved the longer I watched them. I know that it’s just the waver of the atmosphere that makes them wink like that but there in the mountains as old as time itself, it was easy to see how ancient humans could try to explain these skies with gods and heroes. Shit, we still do today, I thought, be all you can be and such. I pulled my chin down to see the mountains again and pulled out a smoke. I had long since run out of the American ones that I brought, these were Hadji ones I had talked the interpreter into buying off base for me. They burned too quickly and they tasted like wet ass but they made my hands quit shaking. Holding primeval fire in my hand I took a long drag, letting it sit in the bottom of my lungs. The night was cold enough for the snot to freeze on my nose hairs but intel said no more attacks were probable tonight and I still felt pretty amped up after the shoot out, plus Taylor would be back with chow soon enough. As the nicotine flooded my system I looked up again and saw the same stars that cavemen must have seen and I thought it was going to be a good night.
I finished the smoke and thought about a second one but the taste was still sitting heavy in the back of my throat when someone pushed up behind me. I figured it was Taylor back with the deployment staple food of mystery meat and gravy. I relaxed my shoulders and the thought of food had my stomach moving on its own. Instead of Taylor in his modern BDU uniform, someone I didn’t recognize was standing with me in the watchtower and before I could pull my side arm and stand up, the man was already on his feet.
“Hey buddy, can I bum one of those smokes? It’s gonna be a long night.” He drawled through a mustache so out of regulation that I wondered how he made it through guardmount. In fact his entire look was wrong. OG green uniform, not even camouflage, we had made the switch from the uniform after that one before I was even in high school. Where did this guy get those? He has an American accent from somewhere in the Midwest if I had to guess. He sounded like he would make a dirty joke at Thanksgiving dinner, not be standing guard in the middle of nowhere in a uniform and hair that was decades out of fashion, let alone what was allowed in this man’s Army. I must have been staring at him mouth agape because he patiently waited for me to collect myself before he continued.
“Look son, I get it. I don’t look like the Army today but you just wait around long enough and you’ll be in my spot. We all end up like this eventually.”
I stammered and reached for my pocket to get the smokes. As he reached for my pack I couldn’t help but notice that he pulled my lucky stick. The one that I flipped around as I packed a new pack of smokes, turned it upside down so the tobacco was showing rather than the filter. The smoke that I always saved for last, the smoke I saved for my memory of Mickey Campbell who died in a car crash in high school. Why would the stranger take my superstitious smoke that I saved for a dead friend?
“Much obliged,” the man mouthed under his handlebar mustache. “A good smoke was hard to come by in my unit. Except we used to have to roll them ourselves.” He trailed off, almost chuckling.
I didn’t notice any rank on him which also seemed odd. Rank was how we could tell each other apart and know at a glance who was more important than you. This guy that took a dead man’s smokes, waxed his mustache, and must have snuck up here to the guard tower did not have any. For a second I thought about hitting the panic button on my radio and bringing every single person on shift here to help me bring this guy down but he had just shown up and acted as natural as you please. He must be someone important to have free reign of the base to include guard stations and be out of uniform. Maybe he was some big wig or a USO performer that got lost, those guys usually have a whole entourage though. This guy was also comfortable here, none of the shaking or waivering that new guys get in a legit combat zone. This guy had been here or places like this before.
I lit a cigarette for myself and met the older man’s gaze. “Where do you come from, sir? I don’t think I’ve seen you at guardmount, or even around the base for that matter.” This was my post and BDOC surely would have let us know if someone important was on the way. Would have given us time to go over our post brief and rub the sleep from our eyes. No, this stranger was here for something else. “The cowboys used to roll their smokes, you a cowboy?”
“Nope, just an old soldier.” He wasn’t as curt as he was tired. Looking at him, he seemed exhausted. The kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch. His skin was so pale it looked clear, almost translucent.
We sat in silence for some time, letting the smokes burn down and both of us looking at the stars. After a comfortable silence the old soldier spoke up again, drawing the kind of breath where you know they’re going to talk before they say anything. “How many more of those do you have? I’m going to have some friends coming.” He states flatly.
I curved an eyebrow under my helmet, “None of them have smokes either?”
He chuckled, “Something like that.”
I decided to let him sit with his cryptic statements and went back to stargazing, the cold air stinging along my nose and eyes, like my tears were freezing in place but neither of us had anything more to say. No idea who these guys are trying to get into my guard station but after this long on deployment I could use the new faces.
Almost on cue there were more boot steps on the ladder. Instead of a helmet rising from the floor however, this one did wear a cowboy hat, almost like a joke. This cowboy pulled himself up from below us. Our new compatriot snapped out of his stargazing trance.
“Glad you could make it. Any idea who else is here yet?” The cowboy wore wool pants and a blouse that looked out of place and heavy compared to my poly-blend BDUs. His high collar in the uniform coat was pulled up against the cold. He raised to his full height and looked at the maw deuce longer than was comfortable. He wore heeled boots and a satchel that seemed like real leather, creaking and solid in the cold air. Probably the thing that led me to think of him as a cowboy was the hat but it didn’t look right compared to the 10 gallon hats in Texas. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“Don’t know yet, partner. You two are the first I’ve seen.” His accent and voice did not match the image that he cut. High pitched and almost sing-songy against the vision of the Marlboro man dressed in blue. The difference in image threw me off for a second. Plus how did these guys know each other? If they were contractors playing dress up, they were convincing. I still could not explain to myself why I had allowed them up in the tower without announcing themselves, like they appeared here out of the air.
The mustache in fatigues[1] clasped the cowboy on the shoulder, “I’m sure they’ll show up. It’s the first night in a while.” He turned to me, “Come on man, don’t be rude. The man needs his breathing treatment.”
“Actually friend, if you have a pinch of snuff. I could use some of that.” The cowboy grumbled as he sat down on the ply-wood bench. That one took me back, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard of anyone who used snuff this millennium. Now both of the guys are out of regs with these ancient uniforms, was this some kind of prank that the others were playing on me? Was I getting Punk’d?
“My grandma used to use snuff,” I quipped “Are you a little old lady?”
The cowboy looked at me like he couldn’t take a joke. His cloth hat bobbed as he spoke, “your grandmother must have been the belle of the ball, corporal.” Both the cowboy and the mustache exploded in laughter, it was good to see that playful jibes are still a thing with these old guys as well. Although looking at them they didn’t look old, both of them seemed exhausted and worn thin but they were both strong in the arms and chest. Military guys tend to get the same kind of look after a while and these contractors definitely kept the look. Even into, what I would have guessed was their civilian lives. It’s not unusual, guys do a tour or two, get out and end up missing the lifestyle. Maybe it’s because I’m still in it but I can’t see how anyone would miss living like this. The orders and micromanagement get old after a while.
“So where are you two out of?” I chime up, “I haven’t really seen either of you around base and it’s not a big place.” The FOB was not very big and you tend to see everyone stationed here throughout one shift. Having never seen someone is a little odd since new people are only rotated in once a month when the PERSCO guys came passing through to in-process new people.
Mustache took this one, “Oh we’re not exactly new. We’ve never been here before but we’ve always been around. Kind of on the sidelines, you know?”
Maybe it was the vague answer or the paternal bullshity way he said it to me but I finally seemed to remember that I was on guard and these two guys had just shown up, materialized out of nowhere and I had barely asked them any questions let alone challenged how they where there or what they were doing here.
“No, for real. Where do you guys work? I need to see your common access cards.” I continue, “this is an active sentry post and you gentlemen don’t seem to be here for a post report.”
At that they both dropped their happy demeanor, the cheery camaraderie that we had built with the smoke had burned away. They didn’t seem outright hostile, but like a tired grandpa that has had to explain things too many times.
This time it was the cowboy that spoke, “They teach you kids any of your history in basic training? I mean, I never really got a basic training, that didn’t start until this whipper snapper’s time, but you know what I mean.”
I did not.
“Explain it to me.” I reported flatly, standing up with my hand reaching for my beretta. If these guys had wanted me dead they could have already done that and just stolen my smokes, no they were after something else, but we just seemed to be sitting here talking. Was it a ploy to get me to tell secrets? I was a nobody sitting on a gate. I’m not exactly James Bond here.
“Now don’t be getting all upset.” Mustache started, “we’re just here to pal around. You’re gonna get to know us pretty well during your stay so we might as well make friends.” He brought his palms up in a sign of sympathy if not exactly surrendering. “I’m just saying you need to chill.”
“I’m plenty chill and article 143 of the UCMJ states that as an on duty sentry I must be burdened with the safety of the base. Gentleman, I am asking again what you are doing here.” It felt silly getting all official but that was basically the line we’re trained to say. I could bust out the original variation of it in my sleep because it was so deeply carved into my psyche during AIT.
“Just trying to get some smokes and talk to the new guy.” The cowboy turned away from me to look out at the frozen sky. My hands still shook with the adrenaline of the fire fight earlier and the nicotine coursing through me. That or the thought of having to draw my side arm on these, seemingly American guys that found my tower with a few extra bullet holes from when I started my shift. I thumbed the cover on my holster and rested my left hand, palm down, on the hard knurling of the grip and tang.
Neither man moved at my obviously hostile actions. They both sat in their seats in the tiny guard shack almost like I wasn’t worth the attention now that they had their smokes. I’m about to draw on them and they are cool as cucumbers in the frozen wasteland. In the space of a few breaths I went from tough guy Army dude, fresh off of enemy contact to a stammering mess. I wasn’t expecting them to completely ignore my challenge, like they had seen it a million times, like it could not hurt them. I couldn’t figure out how to save face so I sheepishly brought the cover back over my holster and leaned against the railing like nothing had happened.
The cold of the night air was biting at the back of my neck and I suddenly felt exhausted as the adrenaline left my body. Mush mouthed and dumb after my attempt at actually being a guard fell flat on its face.
The cowboy looked at me from his contemplation of his smoke, “You done? We ain’t like that, son.”
His grandfatherly tone continued to grate on me, or maybe it was the dismissive ‘son’ but it was everything in me not to roll my eyes at this unwelcome guest. “Then what are you guys like, sir?” I injected.
Mustache blew air out his nose, “We’re like you. Not much better than equipment that the Army feeds and most of the time even pays.”
The cowboy cut back in cheerily, “I used to get paid a dime a day and a bonus for every buffalo skull.” He winked at me like that would be something that I would have enjoyed or wanted to do. Then it occurred to me that buffalo aren’t exactly plentiful. In fact I knew damn well that they had been almost endangered when I was a kid and only recently had been building their numbers back due to conservation efforts. I had even written a report on it in high school.
I continued to stammer, I wish I could say I handled this with my military bearing intact, that I had smirked at the old man with a “yeah sure, how’d you carry all those skulls home to base, big guy?” or at least something cutting in the normal military style, but I did not. Instead I weakly said “the bison have been endangered for decades. Who would pay you to kill them?”
My answer didn’t come right away. There was a pregnant pause as both men drug on their smokes and stared into the middle distance. It took so long that I pulled out a smoke for myself and watched my breath mingled with the exhaled smoke in the guard shacks’ open, un-covered windows.
No. Only my breath mingled. They smoked and they both exhaled, their cigarettes never ashed though. They really only seemed to breathe while they were smoking now that I was paying attention. There was no condensation to their breath even in this cold. Six thousand feet up in the Hindu Kush mountain and it must have been two in the morning, the cold was bone shattering. I had thermal layers and an overcoat on but the cold still ate away at me. These two were in no cold weather gear and seemed just fine. In fact, the mustache guy was in jungle fatigues. What was going on here?
Old soldiers are largely the same, go into any VFW and see the guy chatting it up swapping war stories and tall tales. No one was ever the cook or the finance guy sitting at the desk in these stories, every single one of them was a Navy SEAL badass killer and every single one of them had medals and stations that were ‘classified’ and that couldn’t tell you about it. Don’t ask who kept the lights on because it wasn’t them. They were all on secret missions on submarines with Chuck Norris. Other than the lies, the other throughline is the nostalgia of it. Do they miss war or do they miss themselves at 18? Who knows, but there is a cheer in their eyes telling these stories.
My companions in the freezing guard shack that night did not have that look in their eyes. They were not the happy grandpa talking about old war buddies, they had something deeper and more nostalgic in their eyes. I knew it from a mile away even if I didn’t know about the weight of it yet, grief.
They shared a look like they had come to a decision and the cowboy took a breath as if to speak but was interrupted by the sound of boots on the ladder rungs.Slow and methodical, I knew it could not be Taylor with the chow, coming up here to tell me that I was hallucinating these long dead soldiers visiting like the ghosts of Christmas. That would be too easy. Instead of a modern helmet draped in desert camo, a huge ACH helmet poked up from the ladder hold and revealed the first person that I could recognize as a soldier at least. His uniform was not modern by my current standard but it was a kit that I had seen in my lifetime. Gear I had seen on my dad in pictures of his time, his turn, in Iraq . Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice and I can’t get fooled again. I knew the routine by now and held out the nasty local smokes for the new guy to bum. His desert camo was in bright contrast to the darker tones that everyone else was wearing. The hodgepodge of Cowboy’s, the mono-green of Mustache’s, and the woodland hunter green of my BDUs. He was a glaring bright spot in the freezing dark that the three of us had been.
Our 90s-era looking friend accepted a smoke and lit it cupped in his hand like an old noir detective. If any of them had actually meant me harm it would seem, they would have already done it. Something about this newcomer called to me. I had never met any of them before but he seemed familiar. Not relaxing like coming home, or the thrilling excitement of Christmas morning when I was a kid, this was something different, something more frustrating. Like someone recognizing you in the commissary and you cannot remember where you know them from so you have to play the whole game, ‘well I went to basic in Bragg and from there…’ The anxiety of knowing them without knowing where or how. A ghost on the fringe of my recognition.
We continued to sit in silence as the new guy puffed on his cigarette. Fire flaring at the tips of the cigarettes as someone dragged and the sound of the burning ditch tobacco were the only sensation in the cold. Comfortable even if it wasn’t exciting.
The 90s guy turned to me and chimed in, “So, how did they get you?” with a spark in his eye like he was peering into my soul, holding eye contact longer that I would have thought socially acceptable. His eyes bored into me.
“Get me?” I blabbered.
Mustache spoke up, “They get all of us, man. One way or another, they get all of us.” He dramatically put his leg up on the bench like Captain Morgan as he recited a speech that seemed practiced if not a little too memorized. “I was sitting on the parents couch watching the news and my number came up on the draft.” he paused and looked down at his boots. “How fucked up is that? They put that shit on TV, on the goddamn 11 o’clock news like it was the easiest thing goddamn ever.”
Desert Storm took the talking stick back. “They said that we were going to free the Kurds. Said they were being gassed and slaughtered, what they didn’t say, of course, is what you fill in with your imagination.” He let out a sigh. “You think you’re gonna come in there like a savior, like fucking Luke Skywalker and save people from the empire. It’s not until you get there that you realize you are the stormtrooper and you’re actually in the empire.” He let out the smoke that he had been holding in his lungs. A cloud of nothingness left his mouth, like had intended to let out the smoke but the only that came out was a sound and the face that he made while smoking. A mix of relief and pain but without the necessary equipment it looked pained and awkward.
For a heartbeat that comfortable silence filled the cold air around us again. Our new friend fit in nicely with his anti-imperialist talk. He certainly wasn’t wrong, after 9/11 hit and the smoke cleared America fired up her propaganda to 11. Shit, they were able to start making an ‘Iron Man’ movie so a big strong superhero comes from the sky to save us. Not even other real people but a superhero, might as well be Mickey Mouse so long as we’re making wishes.
My dad had joined in the ‘Be All You Can Be” era, trying to do more before nine in the morning than most people do all day. That was a peacetime talking point and this was war now. Country music seemed to have been coopted from the Johnny Cash era outlaws to uber patriotic bootlicking. TV commercials where guys fast rope out of helicopters and you think that someone somewhere is buying a minivan. Poking a hole in some fragile masculinity. After the shoot out we had tonight I wouldn’t mind buying a minivan. Something to get the stink and crying out of my mind.
Mustache perked up, like he was reading my mind.
“The best Vietnam songs were about protest, man.” He put the cigarette like it was bouncing on his lip. “Letting them know that you can make me go to war but you can’t make me like it, you know?” He asked the group who all seemed to nod in agreement but not add their own two cents like they had heard it 1000 times before and Mustache was rehashing a tired trope. Cowboy took the baton and drawled “We was heading out West to seek fame and fortune. All that land was now America and we were gonna go tame it, hell or high water. The Indians were just in the way, stopping progress.”He took off his hat and became sullen, “I never thought about them as anything but in the way until years, shit decades later. Who were we to do all that?”
This got agreeable grunts from the group but I stood in shock. He could not have meant centuries like, as in 100 years kind of centuries, maybe he was mistaken. No one lived that long and even with his sunburnt and leathered face, he could not have been more than his middle forties.
“You have that much time under your belt, old timer?” I quipped. Busting his balls for doing the soldier thing and exaggerating to the point of making shit up whole cloth. His gaze shifted to my eyes, his hat still off showing his long hair pulled back around the nape of his neck, it almost could have been in regs if it was pulled back tighter and you looked at him straight on.
“Yes. I do.” He deadpanned.
I chuckled, that kind of snort that you do when you see something funny but not enough for a full laugh. I was the only one, however, none of the other soldiers laughed. Mustache looked at me intensely, leveling his killer gaze straight at me. Our 90s friend looked at me with the kind of pity that I would imagine the kid had on his face in ‘Old Yeller’, the kind of look that your dad has on his face before he beats you while he’s sober. That ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’ kind of look. All the camaraderie and jokes had been sucked out of the tiny guard tower. It suddenly felt colder than it had earlier, biting at my eyes and nose. Freezing the air in my lungs, stealing the humor and jokes out of me. “How…how is that? How could I have?” I stammered like a child. Desert Storm looked at me, sad that I had to figure this out on my own but that broken look on his face revealed that we had all been here before.
“You guys aren’t in some kind of costume are you?” I asked dumbly.
They all seemed to share a look, Mustache to Cowboy to Desert Storm, they all were in on whatever this was and I just had to catch up.
The cold slowed my thinking. Three guys randomly show up in my guard tower after a firefight, they knew exactly how to get up here, unphased that I was about to draw a weapon on them. All of us seem to share some common military experiences, finance screwing up pay, long hours, cruel stupid leadership. Could this all be some basic experience of the military? Where were they doing dressed like that ? You would have had to pack these costumes and lug them around in every bag drag over the three continents to end up in this godforsaken desert. Guarding this nothing valley, shit let the Taliban have it, what did it matter in the grand scheme of things. I still have to get home in a few months and then everything will be back to normal. Naively, I shared this thought with the other men while they looked at me like I was the dunce in study group. Sad and disappointed, and something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, acceptance maybe?
Acceptance of the situation, acceptance that I wasn’t different than they were. None of us actually looked all that old. Soldiers rarely do because war is a young man’s game. Cowboy looked the oldest with his flowing silver locks and he still couldn’t have been 45. My mind took in all of this even in its slow crawl of mentation and they still stared at me.
“You guys showed up after the all clear. Were you in the firefight?”
Mustache chimed in again with that look still on his face, patience with sad acceptance. “No kid, we didn’t fight in it, but we were around. We’re kind of always around stuff like this.” He touched his face and smoothed his mustache before he continued, “Now you are too.”
I scoffed, “Because I get a combat action badge now? That’s what this is all about? Some fucking merit badge? That’s why you guys are looking at me like I died? Silence filled the tower as the all looked at each other again. Then it dawned on me. These weren’t costumes that they had because they were here to see me. Something had happened in that shoot out, something I don’t remember. “They told us about this, I had my helmet on and everything but I must have hit my head. Easy, I had a TBI and you guys are my hallucinations. I don’t know why I was hallucinating a bunch of dudes but this trip has been a sausage factory anyway. I guess that part makes sense.” I pushed into them with new found strength. “Well you guys had better get out of here, Taylor’s gonna be back with chow any minute and I’d appreciate it if my brain wasn’t bleeding when I get to enjoy my chili mac.”
Mustache went to take a breath but Desert Storm cut him off, “That’s not it kid.You did hit your head but you’re not hallucinating us. We’re really here.”
It felt like trying to punch underwater, or when you’re dreaming and no matter how mad you are, how committed to violence you punch like a kitten. I stood and threw a haymaker at Mustache, any other time it would have snapped his head back. Fed him his own teeth, in the movies he would have fallen to the ground with a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth so you knew he was really fucked up. But none of that happened. I went to hit him, threw my hip and weight behind my shoulder like they talked about in basic training, like Sensei Smith had shown me in karate as a kid. Throw from the hip, the shoulder, fist loose until just before contact and boom, the board was broken, the assailant was averted, but this time contact never happened. Like running in the shallow end of the pool, I just couldn’t get there.
Mustache sighed, “You’re dead kiddo. We all are. We’re here for you.”
“What?! When? We won, I …I had called it in.” I stumbled, the words vomiting out of me and spewing into the air between us. How could I feel the cold? How do I not remember? “But, but I can feel the cold, I can see all of you here. Shit, you guys are smoking!”
Cowboy looked up to see me fully and took a deep breath, paused, and let it out. Again without the telltale vapor of his breath in the cold. “You try it, kid,” like he was reading my mind. I took a breath and let it out as well, shakily, haltingly I exhaled. The frantic gasps of childhood. The kind of raking breaths that would attack for an hour after a crying fit after a tantrum or a beating and you’re trying to act hard around your friends and a staccato aftershock grabs your diaphragm without warning. That kind of breath and… nothing came out of me.
I sputtered, dumbfounded, not 10 minutes ago I had noticed that they did not breathe and now I had the same affliction. “How did it happen? Why can’t I remember?” I asked stupidly to no one in particular.
“Just now,” said Desert Storm. He was about the age my dad would have been when he left for that same war. I remember the old pictures for his trip, how excited he was to be out of the green fatigues. Like a passing of the guard and into the new hotness. “None of us remember the exact moment. We just are.” He shrugged. “It helps with the transition if you can’t remember more than feelings. At least, that’s the theory,” he explained.
“No no no, just a few minutes ago I saw that you guys didn’t smoke when you breathed, you needed the smokes, but I could. I thought it was strange. Like something was up with you guys. A prank, like the clothes.” I was bargaining, pleading for the life that I had barely started. Threw away to a nation, an Army that wouldn’t even notice. I was an afterthought, reduced to a line item on some spreadsheet. I probably wouldn’t even make it as a bullet point on McDermit’s fucking all imporant Powerpoints. I could still feel the cold, freezing the tears in my eyes as I transitioned to pleading, the ugly, sad pleading of a child feeling pain, real pain for the first time and not having the experience to deal with it. A cosmic panic that sat on my chest. “No, it’s not right.” I blubbered around the cold tears.
“I know kiddo. It never is.” Desert Storm moved and sat closer to me on the improvised plywood bench. “It’s a timeless plight of soldiers. If the job doesn’t drive us crazy, it straight up kills us.” he took a deep inhale and I wondered idly why he did that if he didn’t need to breathe, was it for me or out of habit? Muscle memory left over from a life that was also cut short. “That’s the machine, man. It feeds on young poor kids and it pumps us full of hopes of honor and a better life.” He started, “Mustache was drafted, called up in the middle of the local news. Vietnam or jail, at least you get a choice, citizen. By the time it was my turn to get into the crushing machine it had already changed. No more drafts; that was political suicide. Luckily the world had moved enough by then that poverty was the draft. None of us are here because he had better things to do, you know?”
At his words I thought back to the movies and commercials and shit, the fucking American flag beer cans that had taken over my hometown since 9/11, probably taken over the whole country. All of it propaganda, cultivated to both not offend and to raise the hackles of young men itching to prove themselves. Now my body laid on the cold ground of a country that had nothing to do with that. Why was I here? What had it all been for?
Desert Storm put his hand on my shoulder and continued, “We’re all ghosts but we don’t haunt houses. We haunt each other.” I reached to hand him my last smoke and he chuckled hollowly.
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