Locals from around Bangor, Maine, meet us at the airport gates, holding WELCOME HOME TO AMERICA signs above their heads, passing out cans of soda and bags filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies, shaking our hands as we pass. American Legion and VFW veterans wear their hats, their unit pins, grasp our hands hard, make eye contact hard, looking but not saying, The hardest is yet to come. They lead us into a closed-off room with a table full of donated cell phones, letting us call home in a time when day minutes were a thing and it must have cost a fortune. I cry a little, head tucked to the side, because it’s kind and unexpected. A woman in a BANGOR sweatshirt wraps an arm around my shoulder and hugs me in a strong, sturdy way. I laugh. She laughs.
I call my dad and tell him I’m here in Maine, of all places. I had called him from our stop in Germany, telling him we might land in Bangor, but also maybe not. Command keeps it vague. Loose lips sink ships, and all that. They only tell us once the plane is up in the air, and they pronounce it wrong so that the men snicker for hours, yelling “Bang her!” back and forth to each other. My dad scrambles, trying to make it to the airport on time, but Maine is a big state and we’re back on the plane before he even has a chance.
So I don’t really stop to touch American soil until we land in Fort Polk. I clomp down the metal stairs onto the tarmac and pause in the shadow of the plane as the rest of the platoon flashes by. I crouch and press my palm against the hot asphalt.
“What are you doing?” Andres asks, half turned back toward me.
“I don’t know, it seems apropos or whatever. First time touching American soil and whatnot.”
“You know that’s not soil, right?”
Stones and tiny bits of asphalt stick to my palm, and I have to brush it against my leg. The image of kissing homeland is a bit marred but I stand, lean back on my heels, and breathe in the wet Louisiana summer air. “It’s good to be home,” I say.
He scrunches up his nose. “It fucking reeks.” He turns back toward the platoon, shifting his pack higher on his back. And it sort of does, of diesel fuel and smoldering tar, but that’s Fort Polk for you.
I’m not the only one touching the ground, though. A few guys copy me, fingertips against the pavement. Several wait until they reach the edge of the tarmac, stooping down to touch the tangled green weeds and blooming dandelions.
* * *
There is an otherworldly feeling to walking up the stone steps of the barracks. They take our M16s, pack them away, and now my left shoulder feels too light. They collect our gear and there’s nothing on my back. My entire body feels off. There’s no guard duty, no walls. The open and unprotected spaces between barracks buildings are startling. I’m home, but not. Something has shifted. I never cared for this place, not after what happened, and now it has changed again, even though the cement blocks are still the same. The floors are still linoleum, the walls are still whitewashed to cover the black mold creeping along the upper corners of the ceiling. It all looks the same but everything feels different.
The 2nd ACR is deactivated, Tenth Mountain takes over, and the entire brigade is moved to Washington State. They have no use for the linguists and are ready to ship us off to Fort Gordon. Except Andres isn’t a linguist, which means he stays, I go, and we’re handed an expiration date. We break up slowly, bit by bit, in the three months before I leave. I yell a lot now. I don’t know why, except that it feels good. Words bubble up behind my teeth and spill out with a sneer, with a hiss, and it burns as it exits, feeling like power. Andres yells back. We create our own little war.
We try to vacation for a weekend in Lake Charles. In a few days I’m going to Fort Gordon, which is where I always wanted to be posted. I’m happy, Andres is not. We haven’t decided what we’ll do with this new, physical distance between us. We yell about it. The hotel room shakes with our anger.
“God, see? This is why we can never be together,” I scream, gesturing sharply between us. “All we do is fight.”
Andres stands in the bathroom threshold, stunned into silence, as if his entire body has been struck immobile. He stares at me blankly for a moment, then rounds on his heel. He slams the bathroom door in my face.
I didn’t mean to say it like that. I didn’t mean to tell him that way, so definitively, that I already know there isn’t anything left for us. I don’t know how to tell him I’m not feeling much of anything but rage, that only in these brilliant moments of anger do I vibrate with excitement. Here, in this emotion, I feel invincible.
He cries in the bathroom, on his side of the door, privately, because Andres hates naked emotion, hates revealing anything besides anger and general disgruntlement.
You’re destroying a good man, I realize. Dismantling him piece by piece, because despite his flaws Andres is a good, kind man, attentive and faithful. I watch myself breaking him. I’m an effective poison. I hate myself on the other side of the door, forehead rested against the wood, and yet I don’t tell him to come out. I don’t take back the words because I don’t know how.
And even still, when I leave Fort Polk, he stands by my car door, holds me tightly against his body, face buried into my hair. We linger there. I etch the span of his shoulders into my memory, the feel of his arms around my back, how mine tuck under his and press around his waist. I carefully fold up the memory of that last kiss, soft and sad, one of his thumbs brushing along my jawline, and I tuck that memory away, somewhere safe where I can’t taint it. This, at least, is real.
* * *
I love Fort Gordon. I love its green, rolling hills, its massive oak trees, the fact that the base sits fatly in the middle of Augusta, Georgia, a bustling city. I love my platoon, filled with almost all linguists; my command, who have been in the military intelligence field for years; my female commander, who has a way of stopping what she’s doing when you talk to her, of making eye contact while you talk, like she’s actually listening. I love the smartness, the casual enjoyment people have for intelligence, the appreciation of academic discourse.
I reconnect with Josephine, my Air Force friend from DLI. We friend so hard that the men are baffled by our bond and call us lesbians. She encourages me to continue writing, because I had stopped shortly after I came back from Iraq, when I sat at my desktop and tried to read back my novel in progress. I quickly deleted the thing. I dug through drawers and bags to find any paper copies, gathered them up, and took them outside to the dumpster, disposing of the book without a backward glance. The naïveté of that writer infuriated me. Her staunch view of black and white, as if there were either, was childlike. Josephine encourages me to start from scratch and I write a world of gray.
But mostly, I love that they don’t really know me here. Those who transfer over with me, Starre, male and female King, Baum: They say nothing. This command doesn’t know who I was or what happened to me. I stroll into the unit with a combat patch on one shoulder, at a time when combat patches are rare, when most of the soldiers at Gordon have been carefully hidden behind computers and top-secret equipment, and I am more than just a novelty. When a guy from Strategic tries to get too mouthy with me I sneer at him, “Suck my dick, kid.” He startles and scampers off for less hostile prey. They can’t handle me anymore.
I relish the swagger that accompanies a combat patch. We are the few and get to pause when a higher-up attempts to correct us, to glance at their shoulders, to raise our eyebrows when that space is empty, when they have no war to speak of. It’s an unspoken hierarchy that is silently enforced, and I get to be right up there at the top. My unit notices.
I’m made squad leader almost immediately, despite only being a Specialist. I’m given soldiers to attend to. Fort Polk never did this. They never gave me responsibility, they never trusted in my abilities. So here I shine. I am given the chance and I shine with all I have. I am offered days to lead PT. When I lead, we run suicides, lunge steps, bear crawls, sprints, destroying our quads so that the next day we can’t make it up the stairs and I love it. I love that they schedule me only to lead on Fridays, knowing I’m brutal, knowing the soldiers will need the weekend to recover. Here, they never know I was once fat. They’ll never know I failed PT tests, I who run on my off time, around the track at night so that I keep up with our platoon sergeant on long-run days, six miles, right behind him. For the first time ever, I pass the PT test at the male standard.
I cover for the platoon sergeant some days, acting platoon sergeant, three ranks above my own, and this isn’t supposed to happen. I’m specifically chosen, this time singled out for the better, sitting in meetings with the commander and First Sergeant, and other platoon sergeants, taking notes, and they take me seriously. They take me seriously, turning toward me at the table, asking questions, wanting my take on the situation, how I think our platoon sergeant would act. Fake it till you make it, my drill sergeant always said, so I do, and they listen, and they nod, and at some point I actually know what I’m saying. I’m actually in the know.
My First Sergeant selects me for the company Soldier of the Month board, where I’ll go before my senior NCOs and officers, display my military knowledge, answer questions about current events or whatever else the board decides to throw at me. It isn’t just a matter of skill and knowledge, but professionalism and confidence. Be confident even in your uncertainty. A confident soldier who knows nothing is better than a weak soldier who knows everything. I win.
On my work shifts, I’m still not the best Farsi linguist, but I get by. They task me with learning Dari as well. I manage. NSA selects a few military linguists to help carry their workload and I’m one of them. I love my job.
I receive special training as a range specialist with new sighting equipment, a job that should go to someone well above my pay grade. I train soldiers in ranks above and below me on how to better sight their weapons. The Command Sergeant Major drops in on one of my classes. He lets me show him the new equipment, how to zero the weapons, keys on how to shoot efficiently. He doesn’t remember my name but he speaks about me later, at a meeting for the higher-ups, saying, “We even have Specialists doing amazing things well above their rank,” and it feels so good to be recognized. It feels so good to be here.
After morning formation, a few weeks before my ETS date, I see a video of myself in uniform, a rarity in the days before smartphones, and I’m a little shocked by what stares back at me. The woman on the screen carries a slanted grin, shoulders back, hands in her pockets because it’s not allowed and she’s a little defiant, legs spread as if to make space for her swinging dick. I want to say, Who is that girl? but that’s no girl. I’m a little shocked at the visual evidence of the masculinity that slides on with the uniform, the easy vulgarity, the cocksure tilt of the head, that steely confidence. I don’t hate him, though. I kind of love him. I love his self-reliance.
A quiet part of me wonders: If I had always been here, if it had happened here and not at Fort Polk, maybe I would’ve been all right. Maybe I still can be. A doctor at the aid station admires my medical file, looking up at me, at my easy grin and the way I lean confidently against the table, and she says, “It looks like you managed to heal yourself over there. That’s really impressive, you know. Most people come back worse and you came back better.”
My grin raises a notch, my spine straightens with satisfaction, and I agree with her, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m in love with this Army, with this uniform, and nothing can take this away from me, that which I’ve earned and fought for. The war, the rape, it didn’t really affect me that much at all. I think this even as my relationships end and I fall into random beds, picking men who close their fists around my neck, who bust my lip open while I laugh, blood staining my teeth, high on the sheer violence of it all.