One Too Many Mornings

The smells first: fried something from the FOB chow hall, the sticky tang of chemicals in the latrines, cigarette smoke from the always present knots of soldiers smoking. The damp odor of mud if it rained overnight (like mushrooms, like an old basement) or if a pipe broke. My least favorite smell was rotted tobacco from the butts can, a steel ammunition box half filled with brown water and hundreds of cigarette butts molded into a gelatin. The smells did not mingle, they were layered, and I experienced them sequentially. Smell, the one sense that always seemed like a joke, gave you no rest. I could close my eyes or stuff something into my ears, but with smell I could only move away or put up with it.

My roommate woke up an arm’s length from me in the small trailer. I was rarely alone. Sometimes he asked how I slept, sometimes he just made morning noises. We lived close. He snored, he talked while dreaming, he sometimes paced at night, he read in bed, he took pills to sleep. He felt freer to chat at night with the lights out, like at camp. I knew he wanted to hit on the sort of hot redheaded female captain in the Ops Center who wouldn’t even give up a friendly glance, tired of being everyone’s go-to fantasy, and I knew he missed his wife. He talked about being afraid. I felt the same way, so we held these conversations in a kind of jailhouse shorthand. He usually ended up talking about some event that happened to him just before I got to Iraq. Everyone was entitled to tell a story and we all were careful to keep our stories distinct. Mine never overlapped in time with his so we were each free to tell the story we wanted to tell. I learned to listen, but with only half an ear at most, because the telling was usually for his benefit, not mine. Just before falling asleep we both had a few minutes with our own thoughts, the worst time of the day.

Showers were communal, and where you showered was assigned based on where you lived. Evolved primate standards allowed me to grunt hello but not make eye contact. It was partially a way of getting along, maybe a way to create the illusion of privacy, but we weren’t supposed to look at one another. Still, I saw tattoos of wavy patterns or unknown Chinese characters, names of mothers or girls, shadow pictures of lost friends. The soldiers were still kids, with acne on their shoulders. Most had short hair or shaved heads, so the need for toiletries was minimal. Some kids had no hair but the whole kit anyway, bottles of Axe and tubes of lotions for softer skin, less dandruff, better scents, a little like home. Showers were short as the hot water ran out quickly. The worst thing was to come into the shower area and hear “Oh shit,” which meant no more hot water. Shaving was a big deal in the military and many people lathered up their entire skulls to shave clean each morning. They went over and over the same spots with their blue plastic razors. They could never get their heads clean enough, no satisfaction, just enough to get on with the day.

We knew a lot about one another whether we liked it or not. We cared if a roommate made noise in his sleep or, the worst sin, had poor hygiene and stank. Nobody seemed to care, however, about who was and who wasn’t … you know. The Army had some dumbasses, and they didn’t like queers, blacks, or working chicks. But that was beside the point, as this was not about liking anyone. When it rained we all got wet, and when it was too hot we all sweated together, and everybody knew what we had in common was more important than what we didn’t.

Breakfast was like everything else, something that used to be shared with a selected few wives, girlfriends, or boyfriends if not eaten alone, transformed here into another communal event. Most people would make the best of it, commenting about the weather. A few would annoy the majority by trying to talk about work, and some would rush to grab the corner tables that faced toward the TV, which, whether it was on or off, showing sports or a cooking show, made a little safe splash zone to eat in in silence. The food was bland, and the Army still insists chipped beef on toast is a breakfast food, but there was always coffee and you could fill up a mug, thermos, canteen, or bucket for free to take out.

After eating, one by one we slipped away. Even in cavemen times people went off alone, maybe for sanitation, maybe because it was hard-coded in our lizard brains to do this one act privately. The nearest latrines, portable toilets, were lined up in groups of five or seven. You nodded hello to people, male and female, on the way in and out. Like on an airplane, the genders shared the facilities. There was nothing to flush, no running water, no hand washing, only a swipe of gel afterwards. The imported Sri Lankans used a large truck to suck out the tank underneath and then used cleaner water to hose down the interior. If they did it wrong the toilet paper got soaked and devolved into a goopy mess. I learned to check for paper, another new skill for Iraq. Everyone missed once but few people made the mistake twice—the lizard brain at work. People were forced together in such private ways in such public places to do their own thing, rarely acknowledging one another until they were thrown back together at nightfall.