We Meant Well (19 page)

We had to move by feel once on the ground. Vulnerable to mortar attack, the pilot was in a hurry to get airborne again. I got out of the helo and the crew chief, whose job it was to load and unload us, also jumped out to make sure I walked away properly. Because it was so dark, it was easy to get disoriented, and walking into the spinning tail rotor blades was death. The crew chief had night goggles and usually gave everyone a push from behind to get them moving in the right direction. Somebody eventually flashed a dim light to guide you. Not so easy, but you got used to it. This time the crew chief sent my colleagues off the LZ but held me by the shoulder and shouted that I was to wait for a soldier with a lot of gear to get out and then help him carry the load.

Suddenly the helicopter engine engaged and the crew chief grabbed me by the jacket sleeve and jerked me backward onto the ground as the helo took off. The tail rotor spun over our heads and the bird disappeared with a roar into the black sky. There was no quiet like the hole left when a helo departed, the noise so powerful suddenly withdrawn. We were flat on the ground, with stuff spread all over by the downward blast of the rotors. Had the crew chief not flung me and himself down, we would have been killed. Dead without knowing it, just like that, dear Mrs. Van Buren, the Department of State regrets to inform you …

It was a rough way to break free from the Embassy cocoon, where their ignorant eagerness for things as they wanted them to be ran head-on into our thoughts about things as they were. We had not always gotten along, the four of us from the ePRT, arguing over the right thing to do, the best way to spend our money and get through our year. Still, though I was a bit in shock from the helo incident and scared after the fact, I was happy to be back with my teammates in the more familiar world of the FOB. Regrouped, we moved gracelessly to a small patio near our office outlined by a Conex shipping container on one side, a sloppy brick wall standing because it was too lazy to fall on a second, and the remnants of another building on the third. Usually when we came back with our secreted beer from the Embassy, we parceled the cans out in ones and twos, trying to make the stash last longer, like teens in our parents' basement. A can tonight, maybe two on Friday, and a couple of cases could pass the time for weeks. Tonight something unspoken made us greedy. We chugged cans, we popped the tops of the ever-warmer brew (room temperature was 104 degrees), and slurped the foam like Vikings on a New World bender. One of the benefits of not drinking often was that your body dried out, and so even a little alcohol thrown down that dry hole kicked your ass. A lot of alcohol drunk purposely under these conditions sent four adults into drunkenness marvelously rich and fine. It tasted of a high school June.

With a lot of dust in the air and only a toenail-clipping-shaped moon out, the darkness was complete as we sat drinking the last beers. A light would have embarrassed us. Seen in a photo, we could have been anywhere; there were no clues for an outsider to decode. We four felt closer to this place, and to one another, than we ever had.

The long days at the Embassy, where we had been laughed at as Muggles, unworthy, the warm beer, and the blanket of the dark led to stories. With the exception of a long, wandering tale that had something to do with a tree, the Germans, and a lawsuit, we had all heard the drunken stories before. The two divorces, a daughter who did not write, the woman whose name had been forgotten even as the teller spent ten minutes describing how her shoes looked next to his bed—the stories all poured out in equal measure to the booze we poured down our throats. Some were bitter (the sum of our ages totaled over two hundred), most more matter-of-fact. A lifetime of experiences, a thousand autumns, all tied up in those voices.

We realized, maybe for the first time, that we had more in common than we had differences. Like every dog year equaling seven human ones, time spent together in Iraq fast-forwarded how you felt about the people sharing it with you. Nobody cursed Iraq—on the contrary, though none of us could walk a straight line to save his life, we were sharply aware that it was only because we were in Iraq that we could share what we were sharing. There was little talk of the routines of home that used to govern our lives: mortgages, Saturday morning chores and errands. That happened only at the beginning of your time, when you could still smell home on your shirt, or at the end of a tour, when you had to will yourself to remember so you could fit back in. The talk instead was about people, friends, lovers, girlfriends, wives, dads—what we did not have here and for whom we all accepted one another as surrogates. Maybe because we were drunk, we recognized we cared about one another, our differences not resolved but perhaps less vital. We hoped it would all end better than it probably would.

The next morning I awoke with a vicious headache and the realization that someday I would come to miss being with those men as much as I now missed the smell of pillows on my bed at home or kissing my wife when we both tasted of coffee. It was already over 100 degrees, a Thursday.

Soldier Talk

As the reconstruction suits had their meticulously chosen but empty terms such as
capacity building
and
Lines of Effort
, the troops had their own language and it always came as a welcome change. Playfully obscene, sneeringly in-your-face, it was a way of drawing in others who knew the language while politely excluding the rest. Sometimes it was spat out in the terse tones of an order, other times it was streaming commentary as the soldiers made fun of one another and their world.

I got a crash course in soldier talk over the internal headset communication system inside Army vehicles. On many of our drives to and from project sites we were alone on rural roads and had no need to give or receive orders. To pass the time, the soldiers entertained themselves with conversations that did not start and end but instead picked up a thread left dangling from the last mission, from lunch, from a conversation started a day ago.

CORPORAL WEISS:
That dude can bench like 375, no shit.

LIEUTENANT ORTIZ:
Don't hit that fucking dog up there.

CORPORAL WEISS:
Why not, fucker is half lame anyway.

LIEUTENANT ORTIZ:
You hit it, I'll fuckin' make you clean that fucking shit up.

Fucker is probably some kinda al Qaeda dog. Clear left?

Yeah, go ahead.

You seen the Staff Sergeant the other day?

No, what?

Fucker was all fucking high speed, like he was gonna dump the dismounts at some fricking railroad tracks.

Why?

Watch that.

OK, I fuckin' see it.

You didn't fuckin' see that garbage can you hit yesterday, asshole.

Like I was sayin', he said we had to see if we could cross but I told him we fucking crossed the other fucking day.

Yeah, fucking White is always like, “Watch that guy on the road, he got a cell phone, he could be triggering an IED,” like every motherfucker in Iraq ain't got one.

That's it. He's all like, “He wearing a red shirt, and he got blue sandals, and he speaking Spanish” or some shit like it matters what the description says.

Check the radio.

LT, man, I just did.

I said check the fucking radio.

Falcon X-Ray, Red Cap One, Red Cap One, over.

I bought my wife like eight dozen roses online.

What the fuck for?

'Cause of our anniversary.

Red Cap One, this is Falcon X-Ray, send it, over.

Falcon X-Ray, Red Cap One, radio check, over.

You see the game last night?

No, my fucking hajji shop TV is fucked up again.

Fuckers cheat you.

Red Cap One, Falcon X-Ray, read you five by five, over, out.

No, why the fuck did you buy eight dozen fucking roses?

'Cause I thought they'd come from some real flower shop, you know, and some dude'll bring 'em up to the door, but instead they came from some shit-ass factory and they showed up in like eight boxes and she had to put them together herself.

No, asshole, why'd you buy eight dozen? How much did they cost?

'Cause I tried to click twelve but ended up with eight.

Dipshit motherfucker can't freakin' count.

Three hundred bucks.

I'd only fuckin' spend that on my girlfriend.

I'd fuck your girlfriend.

Like she would do you, no way. Checkpoint.

Where?

Up there by that rusted car.

Fuckin' Iraqis, man, everything is shit here. Why we gotta stay 'til fucking December LT?

Watch your three o'clock.

I got it. Ain't nothing.

Shit, look out for that little kid on the left.

I fuckin' see her, shit.

You tried that Iron Man shit? Dude, get with the Sergeant Major, he got a video of it. Run a mile, then like fifty pull-ups—

I seen it, there was some chick in that video, right?

Yeah. She was like 120 pounds and she lifting like eighty-eight pounds fuckin' forever.

She was wearing that blue spandex shit, right?

You think of anything but fucking? You a fucking freak, man. Even the train it stop sometimes. Shit, turn up there.

Where?

After that ditch, shit for brains, on the same fucking Route Fatboy where we always fucking turn.

Roger, I got it LT.

LT was a shorthand way to refer to the lieutenant who oversaw the small group of soldiers who protected us while driving around Iraq. His mom and dad once gave him a name, but here he was just LT. He was rumored to have a sense of humor, but the job required that the LT's human side was on hold during the war. For example, when stopped near one of our projects off Route Fatboy, we saw a puppy, not more than a few weeks old, with no mama dog in sight. An enthusiastic debate opened up among the soldiers, with three wanting to bring the puppy back illegally onto the FOB (General Order Number One allowed for no pets) and two wanting to shoot the puppy and put it out of its misery. The debate ended with the LT saying, “We are not in Iraq to care about fucking puppies” and that was that. Another reason we were not fighting this war: it is not about puppies.

*   *   *

Route Fatboy was just one of the roads we commonly traveled on. Most roads in Iraq didn't have names, so as the US military created detailed maps, it supplied them. It was unclear how the process unfolded, but the results were Cheese Whiz American. Out in the area we worked, one set of roads named after stock car drivers connected to another named after heavy metal bands, which connected to a network named after beers. There was a road called Route Ricky Bobby, which merged with Earhart before becoming Fatboy. Take Route Fatboy for a while and you could turn off onto Incubus, then Slipknot, before reaching Metallica. Metallica was a straight shot north, but you could turn off at Bud, PBR, or Miller. In other areas, the roads were named after cars or, more romantically, women left behind, Betty, Marie, and Elizabeth by the older soldiers, Brittany, Tawana, and Carlita by the younger men. You heard it on the radio—“Gladiator Six, turning now onto Ricky Bobby, over”—and no one said the names ironically. Of course, no Iraqi knew who Ricky Bobby or Carlita was, so the road names also served as a kind of code.

In a cross between slang and officialese, the military made strange use of some words. I liked how they used the word
hasty
, as in “We set up a hasty perimeter” or “We chose a hasty defense,” instead of
quick
,
casual
, or
sloppy
. You didn't see
hasty
used commonly otherwise except by George Will. I also liked how they used the phrase
get with
to mean talk with, work with, coordinate with, or check with, as in “SGT Ponds can help you. Get with her on that” or “Soldiers need to get with MED for redeployment checkups.”
Kinetic
meant violent; a gunfight was kinetic, a tea party was nonkinetic. One soldier who served in Asia referred to snacks at a meeting as “licky-chewies.” The Army still used all the old Indian fighting words—
troop
,
cavalry
,
saddle up
. The best was
guidon
, which could refer to the unit flag or the soldier carrying the unit flag. What other twenty-four-year-olds in America knew that word? The military also used a strange form of verb tense. They wrote, “Soldiers will not wear civilian articles of clothing in the gym” instead of “Soldiers may not wear civilian articles of clothing in the gym.” It was as if the event had already not happened and the verb form described what already had not happened.

As in any other language, there were rules you had to follow to join the conversation. You never spoke about your spouse, kids, or pets by name. In soldier talk, names confused things. A guy had a girlfriend or a fiancée or a cat and that was that. The anonymity insulated you from troubling questions when the girlfriend left (Kristal was replaced by Shawna, still a girlfriend). No names allowed people to fudge the target of statements like “I am not believing I can't be with her for another eight months. I am going fricking crazy.” Girlfriend? Wife? Who knew? But this way you could avoid violating another rule, speaking disparagingly of a current spouse or girlfriend. That was never done, and if you transgressed, the silence from your listeners slapped you across the face. It was permitted, however, to say pretty much anything about someone who had left you—cathartic for many and a challenge for the poets of profanity in our ranks.

When it came to talking about their profession, the soldiers would retreat to a set of clichés. Officers in particular seemed to need to repeat the same gung ho quotes over and over. They recited these tired lines to inspire at briefings and to perk up morale at meals and later memorialized them on plaques and fancy scrolls hung on the wall. My wish for when I left Iraq was never again to have to see or hear: