We Meant Well (20 page)

• Anything to do with Sparta.

• The phrase
blood and treasure
, as if we were paying for the war from a pirate chest overflowing with gold doubloons.

• The Teddy Roosevelt quote about the man outside the arena, that guy who knows neither victory nor defeat.

• Patton: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

•
Henry V
: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

• Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan Jessep to the court: “You can't handle the truth.… You want me on that wall, son. You need me on that wall.”

Which led, finally, to this one, dubiously attributed to George Orwell: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Different versions had those rough men standing on walls or “freedom's walls.” But any which way, given that Orwell was no war lover, the quote sounded wrong. (It was. I looked it up: “He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”) Right or wrong, it lives on in a million e-mail signature lines.

Soldier talk needed to be negotiated around rank. Outside the FOB you could curse in front of an officer, while in the DFAC it was wise to start every sentence with “Sir” and keep it clean. The Sergeant who ran your squad might allow you to joke in some cases and demand a formal answer in others. Get it right and fit in, get it wrong and be labeled fresh meat. Civilians, lacking an explicit rank, confused the system and so some improvisation was required. One day, the main water pipe broke and everyone had to get in and out of the few working showers in ninety seconds. I must have stayed under the water too long, because the next man in line pounded on the door screaming, “Goddammit, get the hell out!” I heard someone say to him, “You can't say that, he's one of those State Department guys,” to which the man responded, “Goddammit, get the hell out, SIR!”

Deep in the soldiers' language was a wry, sad humor that dispelled misery while acknowledging it existed. Almost nothing in this environment was in the soldiers' control, not where or how they slept, not what or when they ate or when they got shot at, and so almost everything was worth complaining about. Of course, everyone was experiencing the same misery, so complaints were often redundant, but they were permitted as an escape valve. Complaining was in fact a privilege allowed to long-suffering soldiers since Napoleon's time (
grognard
, meaning grumbler in French, came to mean an experienced combat vet). Complaining might build a kind of camaraderie. We could complain all the time, but then we would be sad all the time and that wouldn't be good. Better the bitching came out as a joke, a mockery, in great phrases like
Embrace the suck
or
Love the suck
. The suck was anything/everything wrong. On good days, such as frozen shrimpette night at the DFAC, people said, “We suck less tonight.”

Sex

We all thought about it all of the time. A DJ flew in to play music as a morale thing. A blond nonsoldier woman with pneumatic breasts barely restrained by her T-shirt, the DJ thus attracted some attention. She was as comely as modern medical science could make her, her surgical enhancement a weird echo of the prosthetic limbs ubiquitous in this war. However, it was also 120 degrees outside and the DJ had set up in the sun on the shadeless basketball court, so even the most desperate soldiers stayed out only long enough to recharge their stores of fantasies. After two or three songs most soldiers realized she was not going to have sex with all several hundred of us, and the event ended up as dull as flat beer (also not allowed) that brought you nowhere but closer to the memory of better times and places.

In some of the small hajji shops on the FOB if you were a regular and things were, you know, cool, porn was available. Most of it was cheap stuff with four-letter verbs as titles, though with some effort you could score professional filth from India, Asia, the Arab world, and of course the United States. Publicly, at least, the Army was a chaste organization, and while rampant DVD intellectual piracy was OK, looking at boobs was not. By order of Congress, the PX sold no
Playboy
or
Penthouse
. The naughtiest thing you could buy was
Maxim
, which sold out within minutes of restocking. The joke was that the Army once wanted to research the difference between soldiers who looked at porn and those who didn't. The problem was they couldn't find any men who did not.

Imagination was not prohibited, but General Order Number One in Iraq outlawed all other forms of fun: no cohabitation, no sex with locals, no booze, no pets, and none of anything else you might enjoy.
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It was pretty thorough and lay like a wet blanket on top of a bunch of other military rules. For officers, adultery was an actual punishable crime, as, most likely, was dueling or having a handlebar mustache whilst commanding a cavalry charge. “Don't ask, don't tell” was also a rule of sorts in force at the time and was aimed right at sex. The Army loved its rules and, to be fair, needed some way to control the actions of so many people living so close to one another under wartime conditions. But as comprehensive as the rules were, in practice penning up a bunch of twenty-something soldiers, male and female, gay and straight, tired and active, tops and bottoms, exposing them to danger and then saying NO SEX, PLEASE worked about as well in the military as it worked in prisons, in college dorms, and at out-of-town sales conventions.

Sometimes it was sad. One female contractor, whose husband had unilaterally started divorce paperwork while she was still in Iraq, reacted by trying to sleep with as many married soldiers as possible. When word got to the Base Commander, he threatened to have her transferred until her employer balked, claiming she had essential technical skills needed to keep the computer network alive, and agreed to assign a 24/7 escort to keep her out of trouble. The Commander was responsible not only for the people on the FOB but also for the military spouses left behind. Word traveled fast between Iraq and the unit's base back home, and the Army was becoming more and more sensitive to winning the homecoming as well as the war. Jesus, it was hard enough for the Commander to read devastating blogs by twenty-year-old war widows, never mind having to assume responsibility for not busting up marriages.
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On any given night, as I took a walk hoping to get sleepy instead of just tired, I couldn't ignore the wet, sloppy sounds from behind nearby Hesco barriers. Latrines might be dirty and dark, but they also offered couples a bit of privacy. Liaisons were risky in a two-person trailer. A roommate could be bribed or begged to spend a little more time outside in sexile, but your neighbors might hear more than they cared to learn, and anyone could wander by and later decide to tell on you. One soldier acquired the keys to an empty CHU and shared his bounty with a lot of couples until a shower mishap put the soldier in a tough place—fess up to “borrowing” the keys or idly watch a broken pipe flood an entire daisy chain of sleeping quarters. He did the right thing, but the fun times ended after the KBR plumber ratted out the scam. If TDY meant “temporary duty” elsewhere in the world, in Iraq it stood for “temporarily divorced year.” For those desperate enough, toilet graffiti remained a reliable advertising channel, and the requests were remarkably specific (“Eight-inch cut dude needs rough sex tonight behind gym”). It was human. It happened. A lot.

The biggest sexual adventure in our office was most noteworthy as a failure. Even for a middle-aged man, our ePRT colleague Harold had no game. Divorced equaled desperate in Iraq, and you could almost smell it on him. After weeks of trying to chat up a young female Lieutenant in the gym, Harold decided a nice e-mail inviting her for lunch would be just the thing. He spent so much time composing the text that just about everyone in the office had had a say in it. Most of us were ready to ask her out for him to get the process over; high school had gone smoother and quicker. Finally the e-mail was ready and Cupid hit SEND. Harold waited. We all waited. Follow-up strategies were discussed, and various reasons for the lack of an immediate response were suggested as the clock ticked.

The first sign something was wrong was at the gym, where said young Lieutenant began to appear not just in her somewhat clingy regulation workout gear but also with a tall Captain who seemed overly solicitous of her need for barbells and towels. The signs were all there, but the floor did not fall out until about three days later, when Harold's e-mail to the young Lieutenant, which she had forwarded to her not-so-best friend with a snarky put-down was forwarded to the not-so-best friend's friend with another remark about creepy old guys in the gym, which was forwarded to a fourth person, who sent it on to most of her company, who seemingly all had friends in Iraq (and eventually Afghanistan). It took about a week before Harold's simple, innocent words to the young Lieutenant morphed into viral electronic statutory rape. Two snotty Facebook groups were set up just to pass on the e-mail. One page offered “Harold's Pickup Lines” as contributed by fans: Do you want to become the ultimate measure of my success in Iraq? Please date me before the war ends. I really have nothing better to do so would you like to go out? Let us start our enduring legacy today. Hey, baby, give me your e-mail address so I can ask you out in a lame way. I have diplomatic immunity … wanna wrestle?

As Harold begged us to bring him sandwiches so he could avoid stepping outside during daylight hours, the e-mail found its way to the Colonel who knew the solicitous Captain, who it turned out was now engaged (timing was everything in war) to the young Lieutenant. Things would have been bad enough for Harold had he not, in a fit of passion, mentioned in the same e-mail that he had “lots of free time to meet, even during the business day.” That line reached the Embassy at the exact moment Harold's contract extension was up for consideration. The intersection of the ever-spiraling rumors that Harold had proposed treason, plus the tossed-off remark that he had a lot of free time, hit the poor guy right in the balls. The Embassy fired him and sent him back to the United States, where no doubt he lived not so happily ever after in the land of eHarmony.

As for Thomas in our office, it started with more curiosity than lust. Loneliness is a powerful thing; add to it some time for daydreaming and an atmosphere of 60 percent airborne testosterone and you start looking around. The woman who worked at the IT help desk, the one you saw a couple of times a week on business, what was she like? What did she do other than staple repair orders together? Did she ask those questions that seemed not work-related for some reason other than to pass the time? It was from there just a few short steps to saying the words “We should get coffee sometime,” words that Thomas had not said to anyone but his wife for many years.

Coffee was purchased. Jokes were made about work. Common acquaintances were identified. Songs Thomas knew as anthems, the background sounds of his youth, she had maybe heard on an oldies station while driving her parents' car. She mentioned a few bands Thomas had never heard of; he tried to remember a group from anytime after 1985. She still hoped to read books Thomas had committed to understanding years ago. He had started a Facebook page to friend his children, while her page talked about the horses she hoped to own one day. They had no common background, only life histories hopelessly out of sync. Still, it was funny, it was exciting, it was forbidden with a big Do Not Touch sign. Unlike a wife, she represented not actuality but possibility. She was smart, there was paper there that had not yet been written on, and she was restless in a cocoon she wanted help in removing. They agreed that the food was terrible, that the weather was awful, that sometimes the public service announcements on AFN TV were funny, but mostly they agreed without saying a word that they were lonely and they were curious, and those were powerful things. Finally, it was dusk, which helped hide what they wanted to do.

Thomas kissed her, suddenly, and after that they fumbled together at unfamiliar Velcro on Army uniforms and civilian clothing that seemed out of place. It was a long way for Thomas from a high school dance when that first rayon bra strap had slipped off that first pale shoulder. But, like summer rain, the drops had been threatened for a long cloudy afternoon before the clouds broke open. After the storm the air was precious and sweet and simple, a watercolor of shampooed hair unbundled and Dial soap and the perfume of Army toothpaste and baby powder.

The overhead fluorescents, the only lights available when light was finally necessary, were harsh. The two realized lingering would make things more wrong than anything that had passed between them. Thomas never saw her again, the press of business being what it was, the Army moving people around as it does. In some moments alone he remembered what happened. She was pink, soft, and, well, new.

Later that night Thomas's wife e-mailed to say their youngest child was sick, had come home late from a party, was throwing up, and the washer was full of messed-up sheets. He told us he ran back to the office to Skype home, say a few words of encouragement, what a drag, hope she is OK, sorry he could not be there to help. He knew where he lived, he knew what he was, and he knew he had indeed left more behind now in Iraq than he could take home. Thomas was human, and it isn't always easy to be human. It happened. It was awful. It was wonderful, wonderful.

General Anxiety

Most of the troops were easygoing, officers and enlisted alike, accustomed to austere conditions and committed to making the best of things. Discipline was always present, and low-ranked soldiers needed to show respect for those above them, but under combat conditions what some would call bullshit was generally kept to a minimum. The exception was VIP visits, which required that the foot lockers full of bullshit be brought out from storage and opened for all to put to use.