The Sandbox (13 page)
Authors: David Zimmerman
Here’s a filthy,
dirty little secret that combat vets will almost never tell a civilian. And truly, anyone who’s fired a weapon in combat wouldn’t even stop to consider something so obvious. It’s like getting excited over the sudden discovery that humans need air to breathe. This is it: we love doing this shit. Guns, blood, grenades. All of it. As good soldiers, I know we’re supposed to pretend we only fire our guns and blow up stuff out of duty, and that really killing a man and destroying his family’s home is something we only do out of awful necessity. But that’s a lie. It just isn’t true. We love this shit.
Those shrill women on afternoon talk shows are right about the reasons for this. And it shouldn’t really surprise anyone who gives it more than a moment’s thought. This is going to sound like such a greasy whopper of a cliché that I’m almost embarrassed to bring it up, but it’s the truth: I’ve been trained since birth to love what I do. I’ve been playing with guns since I was three years old. One of my first post-toddler toys was a squirt gun. I shot the hell out of that thing. Later, I got a pellet gun. And then a .22. The blood may sicken us, the pain and misery of those afflicted may horrify us, the noise and destruction might strip the insulation right off our nerve wires, and yet. And still. I relish the sound of small-arms fire. The hiccup of an M16. The smell of cordite gives me a hard-on. There’s nothing better than the thwock of a grenade coming out of my launcher and the big orange boom when it hits. I fucking love to blow shit up. A firefight is the kick to end them all. Every single one. My body thrills to it even as my head shouts, get the fuck away before you get hit. The world takes on an intensity it never possessed before. I suppose it’s traditional to compare this feeling to sex or religion, but to be honest I never felt anything close to this in bed and certainly never in a pew. Before going into battle, I never realized that a cooling engine block contained so many sounds, that dirt could be that yellow, that blood could be that red.
All of us, down to the last swinging dick, have a little of the Boyette in us. At the oddest, scariest times, I’m surprised to find a weird joy creeping up on me, slipping in through my ears, in through my eyes. In a firefight, time goes back to feeling the way it did when I was eight. The moments s t r e t c h. Merely living in a combat zone will do it. Even when I’m not fighting, days last months and months last years. And this is why: I am here. Right in the center of my life. I am occupying this moment and then the next in a way I’ve never done before and will never do again. Even on the dullest days—and believe me, most days as a soldier are dull—time transforms.
And the reason for this? At any moment, I might pick up my rifle and kill somebody. Shoot some poor bastard right between the eyes. End somebody’s life faster than it takes to say the words. Flip that over. I could be killed in an instant, unaware, some afternoon when I’ve just settled into the latrine for a quick wank. I can say in all honesty that I hate it here. I hate war. I hate what it does to us, what it does to this country, and what it does to the families of civilians who live here. I hate the way it fucks up my head. I’m disgusted by the idea of murdering someone I don’t know, for vague reasons that our leaders change each time they appear on TV. But that wouldn’t be the whole story. Because even as I’m hating it with every inch of my guts, and I’m talking about the exact same instant, I’m loving it with all my heart.
Later that night
as I’m spelling Rankin so he can catch a little rack at the back of the tower, I hear somebody mumbling on the Motorola radio Boyette left behind in his assault pack when they dragged him off to the clinic. Doc Dyson had to force him to go. Boyette didn’t think the wound was all that bad. A bee sting, he kept calling it. Doc shoved him into the Humvee. I could hear Boyette yelling as they drove off, “I want to do some more shooting.” Studdie wouldn’t say a word, no matter what Dyson asked him. Rankin and I helped slip the backboard under him and lift him into the vehicle. Studdie’s eyes stuck to mine the whole time, as if I could fix it, like there was some magic I could do. It made my stomach shrivel down to the size of a bean. When I asked Dyson what he thought, he shook his head and climbed behind the wheel. Later, we saw a chopper come in. I heard over the radio that it took out two men—Studdie and a guy named Wendell from the other weapons squad. Wendell got hit in the cheek with shrapnel. The chopper caught some tracer fire as it left but kept on going. Rankin and I watched in silence. I’d promised Studdie we’d meet up in the States when I got back, but I think we both knew it’d never happen.
Rankin and I were ordered to stay behind and pull an OP, an observation post, for the rest of the night. The lieutenant has every guard tower manned. The whole base is alert, watching. It seems like a waste. I take out the radio and dial up the volume. It’s Salis.
“Yours truly, a satisfied salesman in Wisconsin.”
A different person laughs.
“You want me to read you another one? Over,” Salis says.
“Roger that, motherfucker.” Now I recognize the voice. It’s Nevada.
“Dear Penthouse Forum: Last week I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. I am a twenty-three-year-old widow. This past year I was forced to take over my husband’s business after he died in a car accident.” Salis snickers. “You’re gonna like this, over.”
“Just read it, over,” Nevada says.
Salis continues, lowering his voice for effect. “When most people think of widows, they imagine gray-haired old biddies, but I’m five-foot-one and weigh just a tad over a hundred pounds. My auburn hair hangs all the way down to my waist. I like to keep fit by jogging and yoga. One morning while running, I happened to pass a young man in an Army T-shirt. His muscles—”
Someone in the next guard tower down shouts, hooah.
I turn the radio off. The perimeter of the base has turned into a giant circle-jerk. Jesus.
The dark eye
of my rifle barrel looks out over the purple hills and keeps watch. Beside me, Rankin shifts under his poncho and mumbles. Sometimes when I’m alone but for some racked-out soldier on duty with me way up on a teetering observation post, I imagine everything I see is from the vantage of that black hole at the end of my barrel. A small circle of delayed threat. I do not look out on the world around me as an American soldier or a man or even a human. I am simply a weapon waiting to go off, and everything that comes into my field of vision also comes into my rifle sights. When I first arrived at FOB Cornucopia, Nevada told me that if you looked into the barrel of your loaded rifle long enough, really stared down into the heart of your weapon, you’d see the place and time of your own death. I laughed it off, thinking he was just giving me shit. Yeah, I said, it’d probably be right then, because it’s pretty fucking stupid to look into the barrel of a loaded gun. He pressed his lips tight and shook his head. I wasn’t ready for real war wisdom yet. And he pitied me for it.
Rankin snores as softly as a cat. I scan the hills sector by sector. I make sure Rankin is really sleeping. Then I flip my weapon around, eject the chambered round, and click on the safety. The wind is cold enough to numb my earlobes and the tip of my nose. The air smells clean for once, like an ice cube. I tug my neck gaiter up around my ears. The gunmetal feels frosty enough to pull away some skin. I close my left eye and stare into the center of my rifle. I stare hard. Hoping for a comfortable bed and a sleeping Clarissa. This is what I want to see. This is what I’m straining to find. Want to know what I really see? Nothing. The inside of my gun is as black as an empty sky on a cold, dry night in the desert. That’s what I see. Nothing.
During the burn
this morning, Ahmed asks me if anyone got hurt in the attack. I don’t like the look in his eye when he asks me. I don’t like it at all. So I lie. Nobody, I tell him. Just cuts and bruises. His obvious disappointment is disgusting. More and more, I have to make a real effort not to smack this guy. The truth is different. Studdie is down at HQ in Inmar awaiting a flight to Germany and surgery on his broken back, and Wendell is in a hospital in the capital. Bulletproof Boyette, however, is up and around with his arm in a sling. He’s more than willing to show you his wound if you ask him, despite Doc Dyson’s attempts to keep him from messing with it. Boyette’s taken to calling it his fuck-me wound.
“This is going to make a sick-looking scar. Back home when girls see this, they’ll be wanting to fuck me like crazy,” he explained to the mess tent this morning.
No one else got hurt.
After dropping off Ahmed, I risk a quick trip to the factory. I whistle the chorus from the song “We Are Family,” hoping she’ll come out, but the building is silent. Today I bring a plastic bottle of water and five more MREs. I set them down beneath the window and wander back toward the factory office. The door hangs on one hinge. At the bottom there is a foot-shaped hole. I smell something strange and sour I can’t identify. The office contains several metal desks and a broken chair. On the wall is a picture of the deposed president. His moustache is as glossy as a terrier’s coat, and he looks well fed and content. I thump his forehead with my middle finger. At least we got rid of you, I tell him. The floor is swept clean. On the third desk, I discover a curious collection of rocks and shards of metal and bits of colored glass. They are arranged in the shape of a star. I open a drawer. Someone has laid out a row of feathers according to size. In the drawer below this, I find a necklace made from purple and blue button eyes, strung along insulated copper wiring. I put it back and shut the drawer. I am just about to leave when I notice something in the back corner of the room. At first I think it is a covered body—my heart gallops—but when I look closer, I see it is a bed made from plastic sheeting stuffed with dismembered toy bears. It still holds the imprint of a small body. I bend down and sniff it.
Something hisses.
I wheel and aim my rifle.
She crouches in the doorway and bares her teeth like a hungry wolverine. Neither of us moves. I let go of the rifle and let the barrel swing down toward the floor. She hisses again but with less insistence. I hold up my hands and greet her in Arabic.
Salaam aleikum
.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say.
She takes a step back, glancing over her shoulder. This is the first good look I’ve gotten of her since that day after the IED attack. Her face is filthy and her hair hangs down in matted clumps. Her makeshift dress appears to be made from the skins of the stuffed animals the factory once made. Her feet are wrapped in rubber tubing and tied onto her ankles with curling loops of phone cord. She smells strongly of wet dog.
“I brought more food. Did you like those MREs?”
She crouches in a defensive posture but doesn’t run away.
“What’s your name?” I point to my chest. “I’m Toby. Toby.” Then I point to her. She flinches, so I pound my sternum with my fist. Once for each syllable. “Toby.”
Slowly, she stands upright again, scratching at her head. I expect she has lice. Her knees and elbows are covered in scabs, and one of her eyes is puffy and red. I’m overwhelmed by an emotion I can’t identify. Her parents must be dead. No other relatives? The villagers have their own problems. They don’t need another mouth. Or perhaps they cast her out. What has she been eating up until now?
I point to her again. “Name?”
She steps back. Something about the way she moves seems distinctly masculine. I can’t quite place it. It could be the set of the shoulders. Whatever it is, it makes me think. Maybe she is a he.
“How about I just call you Herman? Huh? How’s that sound, Herman?”
Herman yawns.
“I don’t have any parents either, Herman. Mine died in a car wreck. My grandpa took me in. His name was Herman too. Then he died. His liver finally quit on him. We’re both orphans.
“What awful shit happened to you, Herman? Why are you living here?”
Herman cocks his head to one side and sneezes.
Oh, right, I think, I should give him the candy bar. All kids love candy bars. This particular Snickers came from one of the boxes that fell off the snack truck. The last one. Rankin and Boyette ate all the rest. I dig it out of my cargo pocket. It’s flattened and melted looking. Herman flinches at the movement and prepares to take off. I hold it out to him, but he doesn’t move. I set it down and step back. Herman eyes me, then the candy bar, then me again. In a move so fast it’s a blur, Herman snatches it and vanishes. One moment he’s standing in the doorway picking at an elbow scab, and the next he’s gone. I walk out onto the factory floor. A board falls at the far end of the room, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
At the doorway, I smell something burnt. I follow it to the pile of splintered wood heaped beside the back wall. Behind it, Herman has arranged a circle of broken bricks for a fire pit. The crumpled wrappers from a few cherry energy bars and a stack of half-melted MRE bags lie in a neat pile beside an old plastic bucket. I look inside. This answers my question about Herman’s diet. A heap of burnt feathers and blackened bones. I shake it around a bit. Three large rat pelts. I wonder if there isn’t some way I could bring Herman back to the base. Maybe I could bribe Ahmed to say Herman is his cousin.
Rankin decides I
need to go on the offensive. Strike back at Lopez. We’ve just come in from a sleepless night of area patrols. Someone snuck onto the base just after dinner, around 2000 hours, and torched two Humvees. The lieutenant sent us across the wire to look for them. No luck. We circled the base in thin-skinned Humvees looking for ghosts. I’m so tired I don’t even bother wiping myself down with Wet-Naps before falling backwards onto my cot. I get my boots off, barely. Rankin, on the other hand, paces around the tent, tapping the canvas with his index finger as he talks. Oh God, I think, whatever it is you’re planning, I’m too fucking beat for it tonight, friend.
“I’m willing to sacrifice Uday,” he tells me, pulling out the plastic container where the scorpion lives.
“I don’t get you.”
“Let me borrow your Gerber knife and I’ll show you.”
Rankin immobilizes the scorpion by grabbing its thorax with a pair of pliers. Then, very gently, he uses the blade of my knife to trim off the venomous stinger from the end of its tail. He smiles like a dentist. A drop of poison drips from the end. With his lighter, Rankin burns the stinger in an ashtray.
“Now,” he says, “it’s kiddie-proof.”
Then, with a bottle of white correction fluid he’s swiped from the Comm Trailer, Rankin paints the unfortunate creature, head to mangled tail, with thin white stripes.
“Why the hell are you doing that? Won’t that stuff kill it?” I ask him.
“So he knows it ain’t no accident.”
“Why the stripes? Why not just paint the whole thing white?”
“You’re a white man, ain’t you?” He points at his chest with the brush from the correction-fluid bottle. “And I’m black.”
