I took off my boots and crawled up the side of the black metal frame and into the top bunk. Wrapping myself in a poncho liner that still smelled of tropical Hawaii, I pushed my temples together, but they pulsed back against my palms like a metronome. I wished our room had windows so that it didn’t always reek of balls and heat and sand. Closing my eyes to hide from the dull, pounding light I’d forgotten to turn off, I thought about other, better smells, like perfume and sex.
We’d spent most of the late morning and afternoon rehearsing dismounted battle drills with the jundis in the gravel courtyard behind the outpost. It hadn’t gone well. It’d been hot. And confusing. And really fucking hot.
Their platoon leader was on leave, so I’d been stuck explaining officer tasks to jundi sergeants, which wouldn’t have been so bad had their noncoms understood that they were more than glorified privates. The concept of empowered and professional enlisted leaders was new to the Iraqis, something that became plain when they talked during instruction and asked questions about lunch. It wasn’t until I took out my M9 that some of them decided to feign caring.
“They hate pistols,” Snoop said at the time, telling me nothing I didn’t already know. “The weapon of Saddam’s secret police. For executions!”
I smelled my own stink. It wasn’t pleasant. So I thought of someone who was. I thought of Marissa. I thought of how she always smelled like mango, even after a long run through Granite Bay. I thought of the slight crook in her smile and the small gap between her front teeth. I thought of the way she would sleepily scold me for not cuddling enough, for never cuddling enough. I thought of how she’d read on her front porch for entire summer afternoons, gossip mags, thick historical biographies, old newspapers, anything she could find, legs tucked under her into cushions, eyes slapping across the pages like sneakers on pavement. She’d look up every forty minutes or so, just to make sure I was still there, and wink in mock seduction. I loved her most in those hours, before the suburban sun became suburban stars, when our plans became communal property with friends who didn’t matter the ways we mattered. When we were all our own.
The jundis were all their own, too. They were okay at entering and clearing buildings—they’d had plenty of practice with that. But here we were, still trying to convey the concept of reacting to contact by splitting into support and maneuver elements. On the fifth attempt to answer the question “Why?” I’d snapped and said, “Because we win wars and you don’t, that’s why.”
Snoop had said he didn’t want to translate that, and Dominguez intervened and asked if he could try. He did a better job even though he was a sergeant and I was a lieutenant.
The headache came like fire the third hour of the battle drills. I hadn’t been drinking enough water. We had the rest of the afternoon off, and I’d wanted to spend it calling my parents and maybe even Marissa, but now I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t.
I thumbed the thin bracelet on my wrist. Sometimes I told people it was a good-luck charm. Maybe it was. The beads were red, green, and yellow, the colors of Hawaiian sovereignty. Marissa and I had bought matching ones from a shrimp truck on the north shore as a joke, two mainland haoles as representative of the Hawaiian occupation as the Union Jack on the state flag.
“I’m no imperial pawn!” she’d laughed at my accusation, long, delicate arms dancing through the wind of the ocean drive, crystal blue to our front, green, jagged cliffs at our backs. “I’m going to be an environmental lawyer. I’m going to change things.”
“I’m going to change things, too,” I’d said. “Just in a different way.” Then I’d held up my braceleted wrist and pointed to hers and asked if we were making a mistake.
“Oh, Jack,” she’d said. “Just appreciate the moment. Things are already too complex.”
I didn’t want to think about complex anymore, so I thought about something else.
The first time Marissa and I had slept together, we’d been on the slide of a neighborhood park, underneath a row of cedars and a black well of sky. We’d called it a midnight brunch, a bottle of cheap red wine and grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. I’d collected together a few blades of grass, two dandelions and a three-leaf clover, and handed her the bouquet with ironic flourish. Not bad for a high school senior. “Mister Romance,” she’d said, pulling me down with resolve, her soft lips filling my mouth.
She hadn’t responded to my e-mails in a few weeks. Maybe I’d come across as too needy. Facebook said she was “In a relationship.” Or maybe not needy enough. Back when I had civilian hair, shaggy brown like a Beatle, she’d made me use coconut-scented shampoo because she said it smelled nice. As long as she wasn’t back together with that lurp she dated before me, I was cool with it. He was a real estate agent now, for Christ’s sake.
Or that orangutan of a dental student. He had bad gums.
Or that tennis player with spiky hair. He smiled too much. What a fucking clown. Anyone but that guy.
I tried thinking about some of the others, like the Danish tourist I’d met in Honolulu the year before, who’d called me Mark the next morning. Sometimes she was the answer, but not this time. I kept my eyes closed and breathed in a cloud of mango and Marissa’s body went up and down that slide and up and down and my pants went up and my hand went down and—
“Sir?”
I poked my head out from under the poncho liner and opened my eyes, finding a burly, confused Slav.
“Alphabet?”
“Doc Cork gave me these. To give to you.”
I grabbed the pair of white pills from his palm with the grace of a startled dog. “Thanks, man.” There was a long pause. “Sleeping pills.” There was another long pause. “Things better at home?”
“Yes, sir, sure are.” The skin on his face so used to frowning flipped upright. “Thanks for checking on me so much. Meant a lot.”
I sat up and leaned against the wall, arms draped over my knees. I’d always been all angles and elbows, there wasn’t a joke about it I hadn’t heard. Sitting like that also hid the proud little grunt standing at attention in my lap.
“Course,” I said. “What are lieutenants for?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re halfway done. Remember that. Like a run to Kolekole Pass—we’re on the downslope, back at the barracks before you know it. Just need to keep moving.”
“Good call, sir.” He pursed his thick lips, blood draining from his face. “It’s okay for people to make mistakes, right?”
I chewed my bottom lip. He and his fiancée couldn’t be more than twenty. Young love meant young heartache, something I knew all about. He had an unmolded roundness about him, the type of Rust Belt clay that had been switching out high school football jerseys for the uniform of a soldier for generations.
Then I remembered that Alphabet hadn’t played high school football. He’d been on the debate team.
“Sure is, Alphabet,” I lied. “All relationships go through rough patches. What matters more than anything is honesty. All that other stuff? Just static.”
“Roger that. Want some water to wash those down?”
“Gracias.”
I popped the pills and drank the entirety of Alphabet’s canteen because he said it was okay. It tasted lukewarm like bathwater and had sand bits in it that slid down my throat and into my stomach. I was waiting for Alphabet to leave the room, but he lingered at the bunk. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk more about his fiancée.
“Something else on your mind?”
“Was just wondering,” he said. “Why’d you join the army?”
“Huh.” It was a strange question from a soldier. Civilians back home asked it all the time, and I’d learned the stock set of responses to keep them and their fixed notions at bay. College money. Participate in history. Because someone had to. All were true, but none answered the actual question. “Lots of reasons, I guess. What about you?”
“To be part of something.” Alphabet looked ready for the front of a cereal box, he seemed so damn serious. While I was touched by my soldier’s earnestness, alarms began ringing in my head. Purists broken by the realities of life were capable of crazy things—especially ones with access to guns and bullets and fucking grenades. When he grinned to himself and shook his head, betraying some perspective, I praised God and then the other two parts of the Trinity for good measure.
“Kid stuff, you know?” he continued.
“That’s good,” I said, “You should be proud you were like that. Most people go through life never serving anything but themselves.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I said “Yeah” too. We’d had our moment and it’d passed. Alphabet left the room with his canteen, and I lay back down. I realized I’d never answered him about joining up, but that could wait. So could the calls home, and Marissa, and the goddamn war. It could all wait.