The Last Magazine: A Novel (8 page)

T
he desert, the steaming dry desert.

No, that image doesn’t work. Deserts don’t steam.

A fog, then?

Ten details.

If I force myself to write ten details, then I will always be able to paint word pictures for each scene.

A.E. Peoria leans back against the Humvee, thinking about the system of description he had devised, systematic, rigid, a format he could repeat. A disciplined way of reporting. He didn’t want to rely on his memory as much as he had in the past—was it black or blue, three cars or six, a sparrow or swallow. He would write everything down.

He’d marked his notebook, spiral, with numbers 1 through 10. Page after page of 1 through 10.

A.E. Peoria stretches, shakes his head, wonders how bad his breath smells.

1. I lean back against the Humvee.
   
2. Humvee is tan, sand-colored.
   
3. Five Humvees, parked in a row.
   
4. 8 soldiers. 3 smoking.
   
5. Desert fog looks like steam.
   
6. Two soldiers in chemical biological nuclear suits. Astronauts. Scuba?
   
7. One soldier pulls off glove.
   
8. Shit, he says, my wedding ring flew off.
   
9. Other soldiers search for wedding ring.
   
10. Wedding ring glimmers in dirt.
    

“There it is, sir,” A.E. Peoria says, then immediately regrets saying it. Shouldn’t have put myself in the story; now if I use that anecdote, I can’t be in the objective third-person voice of
The Magazine
.

A.E. Peoria is holding his digital tape recorder under his notebook. Along with description, he wants to work on listening, or if not listening, recording.

The digital tape recorder is picking up this dialogue.

“That’s fucking gay, dude,” says Lenny.

“Ball flaps aren’t fucking gay,” says Tom Yelks, a twenty-three-year-old from Akron, Ohio. “I want to start a family when I get back, not just give fucking blow jobs like you. I’m keeping mine on.”

Ball flap: a piece of Kevlar with Velcro that fastens onto the bottom of the flak vest.

Yelks holds it up, examining it under the early light.

“You gotta ask yourself, you know, will this actually stop a bullet? If a fucking bomb explodes, you think this will actually stop the shrapnel? Look at this piece of shit,” says Lenny, waving it around. “It’s thinner than a fucking pantyhose.”

By this time, others in the squad have gathered around.

“It’s better than nothing,” says Staff Sergeant Gerome Phelps, twenty-six, from Midland Springs, Texas. “And all you guys are going to wear it. Captain’s orders.”

Lenny walks up next to A.E. Peoria and confides, “If you haven’t noticed, the Army is a twenty-four-hour gay joke.”

A.E. Peoria writes in his notes, “twenty four hour gay joke.” That clicks with what he’d been observing. The gayness is everywhere: bursting, ironic, warmly comforting, a way to deal with the homoeroticism of hanging out with a bunch of dudes.

Peoria divides men into two categories: those who like to shower with other dudes and those who don’t. Peoria is very much in the those-who-don’t category, but it has been his experience that athletes, frat types, golfers, and now soldiers fit in the showering-naked category, the ass-slapping, dick-hanging, towel-whipping category. This is not to say anything homophobic—god knows Peoria is against any kind of talk like that at all. He’s had to deal with it his entire life.

When he was twelve years old, his father came out of the closet. When he was fourteen, his mother came out of the closet, a lesbian. Father was a professor at Harvard, mother taught at an elite all-girls college in New York. He didn’t reveal this to the soldiers, though each brain cell, genetically wired by his compulsive disclosure disorder, wanted him to blurt it out. He resisted shouting: Stop with the gay jokes, my parents are gay. It’s not cool. His therapy must be working. Was he betraying his roots and his parents by keeping silent? By letting words like “faggot” and “butthurt” slip by without comment? Should he explain how that kind of language might cause offense?

“Let’s ask the reporter,” says Yelks.

“Ask me what,” Peoria says, realizing he hasn’t been listening, only recording.

“Is wearing a ball flap fucking gay?”

This would be the moment to protest.

“Not if you care about your dick, I guess,” Peoria says.

“Fucking Lenny loves dick!” says Yelks.

The argument continues, and Peoria starts to compose in his head
something he can send back to New York. He is supposed to, according to his editors who are preparing a big package on the ground war, look for “examples of fear.”

Soldiers afraid of gay men wouldn’t cut it. But the fear of getting your balls blown off was something he could work with.

The soldier’s number-one fear, Peoria writes in his mind, throughout the history of human warfare. An ancient anxiety, as large as death. Writings from Genghis Khan’s time show that the Mongols were worried about a saber to the groin, putting a crimp on the raping. A legion of Romans in
A.D
. 23 refused an order for battle near the Sea of Galilee because the bronze cups they had requisitioned from Carthage—which all the other legionnaires from competing formations, even the African slaves, had been given—hadn’t arrived yet. A near armed mutiny. On sea, conscripts in the British fleet under Nelson described a phenomena called splinter cock, the result of a cannonball crashing into the wooden deck, sending shards of handcrafted timber ripping through hammocks and pantaloons. Letters home from the Civil War—letters that aren’t talked about too much—mentioned how Confederate soldiers had competitions to take aim “a smidgen lower south from the goddamned Yanks’ belt buckles.” In World War I, a French general famously gave a rousing speech, urging the young Frenchmen, already ravaged by two years of back-and-forth in slaughterhouses like Verdun and the Somme, to advance over the trenches
“avec courage,”
helmets
“sur la tête.”
In the hush following the speech, one private, sick with louse bites and scarlet fever, quipped, “That’s not the head I’m worried about.” (
C’est ne pas cette tête qui me préoccupe!
)

Weapons manufacturers explicitly exploited this anxiety in the second half of the twentieth century, designing explosive charges that jumped from the ground to hip level before they exploded—the
Bouncing Betty, named after Betty Boop, the first hypersexualized female cartoon of the postwar era. The chant that Marines out at Parris Island introduced in 1966: “This is my rifle, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun.” Lose either, and the fun ends.

The fears: soldiers spent a lot of time not really thinking to avoid them, and when they did think, it was about home and girlfriends and fiancées and sex, and after that, when they thought about the future, which seemed to loom in the country overheard to the north, it was about their balls. True fear and the language of courage. Testicles,
cojones
, testosterone to stand up under fire and not be a pussy.

Since arriving in Kuwait, Peoria had spent more than twenty days in the Humvees with the soldiers—mostly men, mostly nineteen to twenty-eight—prepared for the invasion. We need color, the editors had said, and maybe find a scandal too. War crimes are always good.

Peoria has assigned each of them a place in the group hierarchy. Characters, all of them. The staff sergeant is someone you could say is straight from central casting—is there a central casting anymore? The men are stereotypes with legs and animated mouths. They have affected their roles in the unit almost cinematically, so much so that Peoria feels like he has watched this scene before, certainly he has read about it in all the war novels, heard the banter, or a variation of it, in the dispatches from the front from every other war reporter he has ever studied. Chicken/egg, egg/chicken. What comes first: the drill sergeant or the drill sergeant in
Full Metal Jacket
?

Phelps is the badass, can-do NCO, a veteran of four deployments who has seen it all, no sweat, regularly abusive. Yelks is the typical private: talkative, youthful, running at the mouth in an ongoing and evolving profane banter with his buddy, Specialist Lenny. Yelks is always anxious to explain and make sweeping judgments on Army life and on his fellow soldiers, like “problem in the Army is that most
of these guys didn’t have friends in high school. I mean, they were picked on in high school. I mean, if they had friends, you know, they were fucking losers, to be honest, and now they’ve got guns?”

There’s the large southern redneck, with a neck red from the sun, from Arkansas. A pair of black kids from Brooklyn and Jersey, who even today make jokes about the white man, though there is the double irony that they really don’t feel very oppressed. The young lieutenant, an intellectual sort from one of the Ivy League schools who went against the grain and signed up to learn about war because, as he puts it, “it was such a part of human history, the human experience, and to understand myself and the world, I need to understand war,” with whispers that he is thinking about a career in politics.

And then there is the quiet loner, non-aggressively awkward, effeminate, near pretty, always a half step behind, not on the ball, with a silent mystery hinting at some hidden depth, some sensitivity in a very insensitive environment—and in this unit, that soldier’s name is Justin Salvador. From what Peoria has gathered, he’s Puerto Rican, though he’s often called Mexican or Honduran or Panamanian, and his nickname—as most in the unit have a nickname, just like soldiers in the movies—is Chipotle. He is the soldier the conversation seizes on in moments of silence. Rather than talk about the weather, a joke thrown Salvador’s way acts as the icebreaker.

Salvador, slight and fair-skinned, is fumbling with the ball flap.

In the silence, the velcroing and unvelcroing can be heard.

Yelks turns to Salvador.

“Now Chipotle over there, he being a Mexican, it might not be a bad thing for him, you know, since his race breeds like field mice. We don’t want your spawn taking over the country now, do we, Chipotle? New order—only the Mexicans don’t need to wear the ball flap.”

Everyone laughs, and Salvador mumbles a “Go fuck yourself” or something to Yelks.

The lieutenant walks up.

“Okay, guys, we got the word. We’re gonna be going first. The convoy is gonna stay a couple klicks behind us. We’re clearing the way. I remind you we are about to enter hostile territory, but we are liberators. As such, we will kill, but we will kill only those who are trying to kill us. Shoot if you are shot at, shoot if you are threatened. Make sure you get a positive ID. The S-2, the intel that we got, says there are unfriendlies. No shit, right? Sergeant Phelps will brief the ROEs and EOFs. All that being said, it is a free-fire zone, meaning, if you feel yourself threatened, do not hesitate.”

Peoria is in the first vehicle, sitting on the hard metal seat behind the driver. Yelks is driving; Salvador stands on the .50 caliber machine gun; the lieutenant sits shotgun. The engine starts, the trucks roll off, kicking up dust.

The invasion is under way.

At the border, over the radio, the lieutenant announces, as hundreds of others did, “Welcome to Iraq.” He smiles as he turns to Peoria, marking the time.

Two-thirty p.m., March 19, the year of our lord 2003.

The Humvees follow a main highway for a few hours.

There is dust, hundreds of vehicles, armored machines, loaded up, snaked out, rolling, churning a magnificent storm, choking, eye-irritating. Brown dust, and of course the dust is brown, brown dust hit by light particles, particles of sand and light, and the sun is rising up, the sun rising up in the east, and the dust becomes less brown and the dust becomes a big vocabulary word:
translucent
.

A road sign: BABYLON, 312 KM.

And over the radio, the redneck from Arkansas, who is also a Baptist, who also studies the Bible and knows it by heart, starts to recite:

“Thus saith the Lord, Behold I will rise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me,
a destroying wind, And will send unto Babylon fanners that shall fan her and shall empty her land, for in the day of trouble they shall be against her round about and spare ye not her young men, destroy ye utterly all her host. . . . I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter, like rams with he goats. Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwell, neither doth any son of man pass nearby. And thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her: and they shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah.”

A.E. Peoria is taking notes, thinking he needs to check that passage, or have someone in New York check it for accuracy. He doesn’t want to interrupt the poetic moment by asking an intrusive journalist a question, but he does.

“That’s, uh, Old Testament?” Peoria says over the net.

The redneck doesn’t answer directly.

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice saying, Babylon the great is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird . . . And the light of the candle shall shine no more, and in her was found the blood of the prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”

The Humvees are so enveloped in the dust that they can keep an eye only on the vehicle in front of them, staying a safe three hundred feet apart.

“He’s fucking playing you, sir. Redneck can’t even do a fucking briefing and he’s saying he can say all that from the Bible by memory,” says Yelks. “He’s reading that fucking Bible of his, I bet.”

The dust clears.

The lieutenant’s five-Humvee reconnaissance convoy has put enough distance between itself and the main route of hundreds of
vehicles that Peoria can now see clearly, and what he sees is shocking. He sees blue sky, an overwhelming blue above the desert.

He has a strange tingling sensation and a sentence goes through his head that takes him a second to place.