Unburying Hope (16 page)

His voice was gravelly, lost, “I’m okay.”

“I know you’re okay.
 
What just happened there?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“But you were half asleep?”

“I’m never more than half asleep.”

“Don’t we sleep together?
 
Don’t you sleep when I sleep?”

He jostled himself, “I haven’t slept in
years.
 
Not really slept.
 
I can’t sleep unless I take the sleeping
pills.
 
And I hate taking those,
they black me out for 6 hours.
 
Anything
could happen, and I wouldn’t be able to protect you.
 
That’s not sleep, that’s death.”

She rubbed his shoulder, pulling him close,
kissing his forehead and his cheeks.

“Is that why you leave sometimes in the middle
of the night?

His body continued to relax, the danger was
passing.
 
“I never really got back
on U.S. time.
 
Sometimes I wake up
and I’m back in the desert and I can hear the shelling, all hell is gonna break
loose and it’s daylight in my head.
  
So I get the hell up because I don’t want to be ambushed.
 
I get myself outside.
 
And my brain gets confused because it’s
dark outside but my eyes see daylight, so I walk and walk until the real sky
matches what I see in my head.”

“Why don’t you just stay in bed, close your
eyes and imagine being a kid again, try to place yourself somewhere you were
happy.”

“Can’t do that.
 
These things create a reality in my skull.”

“I’m worried about you,” Celeste said.
 
“Maybe you have Post Traumatic Stress.”

He shook his head vehemently, his voice was tired.
 
“It’s just my screwed up internal
clock.
 
It can be daylight in
Detroit but in my head I’m in some souk looking under tables and behind
leather-faced old men, trying to find a suicide bomber who wants to get with
virgins for taking out me and my company.
 
Why the hell does he want to kill me?
 
We were supposed to be the good guys.”
 
His voice tapered off, half asleep
again.

“Well, you are, aren’t you?
 
You’re getting the bastards who bombed
us in 9/11.”

“It’s not clear anymore.
  
When we first went in, it was
clear.
 
We’re taking out the tall
guy who put together the terrorist cells.
 
But ten years later they finally take him out, SEALS did it.
 
I wonder if they found his dialysis
machine.
 
I never did hear about
that.”

Celeste was relieved that he was talking.
 
Maybe the darkness was freeing for
him.
 
“What do you mean, dialysis?”

“He’s huge, like almost seven feet tall.
 
And he’s got kidney failure.
 
So he’s got to do dialysis, he has to be
hooked up to a machine that pulls all your blood out, cleans it and then sends
it back into your body.
 
If he
didn’t get a kidney transplant, he should have been easier to find.”

“But didn’t all those countries train the
terrorists?”

He shook his head, tired, he said quietly, from
having to tell the truth again, he was just one soldier up against a battalion
of bad press.
 
“It’s about Saudi
Arabia, who we are friends with.
 
Our President held hands with the Saudi King, he kissed him on the mouth.
 
The 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, not
Afghanis or Pakistanis.”

“Then why are we in those countries?
 
Aren’t they next to each other?”

“We’re there because they have huge oil
pipelines.
 
We’re really there to
protect the private guys.”
 

Celeste wondered what to do besides
listen.
 
It was the most he’d talked
about his past since their first meal in the diner when he’d told her about his
camp dog.
 
His skin had stopped
sweating and he was lying on his back, staring in the darkness at the
ceiling.
 
“Who are the private guys?”
 

“We safeguard the private guys, the
contractors.
 
The private guys get
paid more to knock down than they do to build up, but then they get paid to
build up what they’ve knocked down, it’s crazy.
 
We sleep on bunk beds we make by hammering 4x4s together, in
tents on the dirt, and the contractors live in walled compounds with lawns to
throw footballs around on.
 
We
drive bombed-out jeeps with no doors that we can’t afford to leave behind, they
drive the newest SUVs that they walk away from if they get shot up.
 
 
I bet Detroit is still in business because we’re making cars
for the compounds.”
 
His voice was
tight.
 
“That’s why I want to get
the hell out of Detroit.
 
We don’t realize
we’re delivering big cars while the peasants just want clean water.
 
My platoon stands in long mess lines
for meals while contractors eat indoors in air-conditioning.
 
I went once to give a Sit Rep, a
Situation Report, to tell them what we’d been up against out on the plain we
were hunkered down on.
 
We eat crap
while they eat seafood flown in and chilled and heaped on tables.
 
They eat when they feel like
eating.
 
We’re sitting ducks at the
mandatory chow time, in a line in the desert, a bunch of grunts waiting to be
picked off by planes with infrared, we show up every day at the same damn time.
 
A guy in my platoon had his legs blown
off, standing in line for chow.”

“Did you want to quit when you saw their
place?”
 

“You never go rogue, never.”
 
Eddie lay with his eyes open, staring
at the half darkness of her bedroom doorway.
 
“All we’ve got is our discipline and chain of command.
 
So you trust your CO.
 
Until he’s blown apart and you carry
back enough of him to bury. “
 

Eddie rolled on his side facing her, his voice
low and enraged, “Then you find out that the Army’s not in charge of the
military.
 
The contractors, they
move a couple pieces on the chessboard they got in their war rooms and then a
new CO comes and he does what he was taught at West Point until he’s called
into the compound and fed some bullshit about how important his company is and
he’s given a packet of pills to give us, to keep us awake.
  
They cheerlead, so you know
you’re in the right, you represent America, you’re avenging the murders of 3,000
people in New York City.
 
It makes
it easier to storm through a village to find one bad guy in a crowd of 40 men
that all look the same.”

Celeste took in a sharp breath.
 
Here was an explanation that made sense
of his mood swings, he’d gotten started on some drugs on his deployments.
 

His voice came out of the darkness, pouring
slowly like molasses.

“I wish I’d grown up around other kinds of
people.
 
I know those men are each
different, but because I only grew up with white and black people, I don’t know
how to read brown people.
 
I can’t
tell the difference between two bearded men.
 
And my buddies’ lives depend on me finding something
different, when I don’t know how to.
 
So I stare at their noses, their mouths, their eyebrows to see if I can
match it to the description we’ve been given of a 30ish brown man with a beard
and brown lined eyes.
 
That’s every
damn man in the village over 20.
 
And the young guys, they all try to grow beards to prove they’re men, so
suddenly we’re killing the young guys too, thinking they might be a 30 year
old.”

He was silent for a few minutes.
 

Celeste knew he wasn’t falling asleep, but he
was quieting on a deeper level, somehow finding peace in his unlivable
story.
 
“When did we get to be the
bad guys?”
 

Celeste listened as his voice droned on, she
could hear the mental unwinding, his mind releasing strings of thought that
were knit so tightly together that they had strangled him in his previous
silence.
 

“And now they want war to move to the
skies.
 
And not the skies of my
grandfather’s war.
 
They want to
kill with drones, no human contact needed at all.
 
A bunch of old white guys with x-box controllers, playing
with bombs in space.”

Celeste lay on her back, staring at the
ceiling herself.
 
“You remember
that old gaming arcade on Cass Corridor?
 
I think we should set up a war room that’s an x-box gaming system and
turn the lights down and give them comfy chairs and then set off some explosion
lights on a map wall.
 
Let them go
at it.
 
Against a machine, instead
of real people.
  
Have all the
monitors showing war up in space but take the batteries out of their
controllers.”

He laughed sardonically.
 
“That would be funny.
 
A bunch of old guys.”

“The Generals.”

“No, it’s not the Generals.
 
They don’t run wars anymore.
 
It’s been out of their hands for
years.
 
It’s the private guys.
 
The guys in suits.
 
They get the money from their buddies
in Congress, they take them to hunt lions on closed preserves, or they go on
unbelievably expensive vacations to the Caribbean and shake hands and then money
flows from the government to the private guys.”

“That is so screwed up,” Celeste said softly,
not knowing how to console him.

“When I’m out walking in the middle of the
night here, Celeste, my body takes over and my brain stops and I can breathe
easier.
 
I’m not so gripped.
 
I can walk for hours and hours from the
jet darkness into the daylight and it’ll feel like just a few minutes’ walk.
 
Sometimes I tuck into those broken down
old buildings that have been taken over by trees, or vines that no one is
around to cut back.
 
And I try to
sleep near that smell, the smell of green things living, the smell of the dirt
that lets them grow wild since no human is around.”

Celeste listened as his breathing calmed, she
looked and saw in the bare light that his eyes were closed.
 
He had his arms crossed over his chest,
his hands tucked into the opposite armpits.
 
She leaned over to kiss his cheek and he said quietly that
he was going to close his eyes for a few minutes but he quickly fell into a
fitful sleep.

She could not sleep now, he’d painted too many
pictures of his pain.
 

Eddie in his uniform, jacked up on
amphetamines, wandering a rock strewn hillside, weighed down by a heavy
backpack, the waist pack he’d shown her, guns, ammunition, his heavy metal
helmet covered with ripped camouflage fabric, bits of metal sticking out, a
piece of tape across the front with the words ‘forward to the enemy’ written
above his brow with a Sharpie pen.

Chapter
Twenty

Eddie had been out walking at night lately
after his nocturnal talks with her, so he probably wouldn’t be there in a few
hours when she woke up.
 
It was
Saturday though, and she knew that meant she might be spending her days off
alone.
 
That would not be fun, she
thought, as exhaustion crept into her brain, her arms still warm around Eddie’s
shoulders.
  

Celeste thought about the differences between the
ways that Eddie slipped away from her.
 

Sometimes, and she felt fine about this
leave-taking, he’d look at her sideways, cock his head to acknowledge her, then
pat his shirt down and tuck it in to his pants, wipe any sweat from his face
and wipe it on his pants, hunch his shoulders forward so that he got smaller in
size and, with a half strong voice, he’d say, “I’ve got to get some air.”

She didn’t feel scared those times.
 
Because it felt like he didn’t want to
leave her.
 
He didn’t know how to
go, but he had to force himself out.

When he came home from those trips, he smelled
like bacon, or burnt food.
 
And his
shoulders were still slumped.

“Come here,” he’d say, and he’d pull her
tight, leaning his head against her hair, eyes closed in the middle of a storm
of thoughts.

The first time, she had asked “Who did you
hang out with?” but his momentary terse, fearful shake of his head told her not
to press.
 
So she didn’t, because
he seemed to come home more committed to her than he had left.