Ryan Smithson Read online

  Munoz leans his head out of his window.

  “Watch out for my shit,” he says.

  “All right,” I say, looking down at the small mound of dirt on the ground outside the back passenger seat.

  I laugh and continue my stream. When I’m done, I shake off and button my pants. I look out over the flat, brown desert. Seeing the curve of the earth makes me laugh and shake my head. I decide I want a cigarette. Now, I don’t really smoke, but this is a stupidly dull detail. Smoking is something to do besides read and nap.

  People wonder why soldiers smoke. This is why: because two days of range watching is enough boredom for your whole life.

  I pull the lighter from my pocket and try to burn the cigarette hanging from my mouth. The wind blows hard, and the lighter’s flame won’t stay up. I turn my back to the wind and try some more. This still doesn’t work.

  The Humvee is built like a sort of pickup truck. The wind rushes right over the back half. So with my back to the wind I move to the left, finding cover behind the taller, rear passenger seat.

  With the cigarette lit I stand up and gaze at the curve of the brown earth. I inhale a few times.

  Iraq can’t be this boring, I think.

  I fuss around like people do when they’re bored, when they’re smoking. I shift weight from one foot to the other and twist my feet in the dirt.

  Uh-oh, I think. Please tell me it’s farther left.

  I slowly lower my stare to my feet. There between them is light, desert brown sand swirled like ice cream with dark, Munoz brown shit. I lift my feet and look at the bottoms. The treads are packed with sticky, recycled army chow.

  I look around for a place to wipe it off. The only thing around besides the Humvee is the Range 2 sign. It stands off to my right like a pillar. It’s a pretty large sign supported by four by four posts. On one of these posts is where I rub my shit-covered soles.

  Munoz sees me and pokes his head out of his window. Then he looks back at the trampled mound he made. His laugh is hearty, from the belly, just like his crap.

  “You stupid ass,” he says.

  I wipe my boots off the best I can on the Range 2 signpost.

  When we get back to the range control station, where we sleep in the Humvees, we meet up with LT and Roman. Of course Munoz is eager to tell the story as I pour water on my boot and scrape the treads with a pointy rock I found.

  “So LT’s about to fall over laughing—”

  “And then”—LT takes over the storytelling—“Smithson says, ‘You eat corn yesterday, Sergeant Munoz?’ I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life!”

  LT wipes the tears out of his eyes.

  Soon the company is led outside to another runway. This time, we board a commercial plane, like the one on which we came over. Instead of Germany, this time we refuel in Ireland. Then we board the plane that will take us to Fort Bragg.

  The moon shines out the window. The waves in the Atlantic break up the moonlight, making it dance around thirty thousand feet below us. There are a few overhead lights on in the plane, the ones you use to read, that give some of the cabin an orange glow. Most of the plane is sleeping, dreaming of home. A bunch of us from EQ platoon, we stay up.

  We reminisce about the year we wished away, the year that would never end, the year that’s over now.

  “LT,” says Marc Zerega, “you want to talk about falling over hilarious. What about the time on the Samarra mission?”

  “With Smithson?” asks LT.

  Zerega nods.

  “Oh my God. I haven’t thought about that in months.”

  “What happened on the Samarra mission?” asks Jesse Smith.

  “That’s right, he wasn’t here yet,” says Zerega.

  Smith and a few other guys joined our unit about halfway through the tour. So they weren’t there for the Samarra mission.

  “Why don’t you tell this one, sir?” I say to LT.

  “So this was the mission when you guys got ambushed?” asks Smith.

  “Actually I think it was the same night we got ambushed,” says Zerega.

  “Yeah,” says LT. “In the tent at FOB Summerall. I walk in and a bunch of guys are in the back by Zerega’s cot….”

  It’s after dinner. No one can sleep, so we’re up telling riddles. LT comes in the tent, bags under his eyes, and joins our group.

  I stand up to meet LT and say, “Sir, a farmer has twenty sick sheep. One dies. How many does he have left?”

  When you ask someone this riddle, they’ll say twenty-five sheep until they’re blue in the face. Because out loud, when you say “twenty sick sheep,” it sounds like “twenty-six sheep.”

  LT doesn’t know the answer, so he just keeps walking. Now, he’s 6′2″ and I’m 5′6″. So as he walks, he has to look down. And since you don’t stand toe-to-toe with an officer, I have to back up. He gets police-interrogation close and stares me down, grinning the whole time.

  “Sir, I’m going to need an answer,” I tell him.

  He keeps walking.

  “I’m warning you, LT,” I say.

  When we’re ten feet away from the original group, I feel something brewing down below. It’s just unnecessary for LT to still be towering over me with this shit-eating grin he’s wearing, so I do something about it.

  I turn quickly so my butt is facing him. Then I let out a little fart, a tiny squeaker. Think of a rabbit burping.

  When I turn back to face him, LT has stopped dead in his tracks. The group explodes in laughter.

  “Push” is all LT says.

  I get down in the front leaning rest and start knocking them out. From the group Zerega says, “You don’t fart on a commissioned officer in the U.S. army!”

  LT says he needs a spot to sit and contemplate the answer to my riddle. That’s when I get flattened on the wooden floor.

  “I didn’t say stop,” he says. I make a feeble attempt to push with him sitting on my back.

  “Recover, Smithson,” he says when he gets off me. “You know, they put you through a lot of training classes when you become an officer. What to do when one of your soldiers farts on you? Not one of them.”

  “That’s because the army never saw me coming, sir.”

  “I can’t even be mad at you, Smithson,” he says. “You were desperate. And that, my friend, was a brilliant solution. You looked like a squid shooting your ink.”

  “You called me Squidy for two weeks,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, Smithson,” says Jesse Smith.

  “Hey,” says Todd Wegner, who joined our little EQ huddle when he heard the farting-on-LT story. “Remember when the commander came out on that mission?”

  “Yeah,” I say, laughing quietly so I don’t wake up the rest of the people on the plane, who all seem to be sleeping.

  “And he set his cot up on the edge of the tent?” says LT. He covers his mouth with one hand, and all I can see are his eyes. On top of the dark bags his eyes laugh with all the force his mouth can’t right now.

  “I gotta hear this one,” says Jesse Smith.

  “All right,” I say. “Well, in the wintertime, all it does in Iraq is rain….”

  The tent at FOB Summerall has plywood floors. This is so the puddles of rain and mud that collect outside the tent don’t come inside the tent. But apparently these tents were set up during the dry season because there’s slack in the tent’s roof. So every night when it rains, the edges pool with water until they leak. Obviously, after only one night of sleeping here, we figure out to place our cots in the center of the tent and leave the edges clear.

  During the second week of the Samarra mission the commander comes out to the field with us. He walks in the tent, and you can almost hear the sigh let loose from everyone’s mouth. The commander is wearing his tan army-issue gloves. Outside of his office he always wears gloves. His uniform is pressed and sparkling clean. And his body armor and field gear look like they were just pulled from their plastic packagin
g.

  It hasn’t started raining yet, and the commander begins setting up a cot. Instead of taking a hint or—here’s a thought—asking someone, he sets his cot up on the outskirts of the thirty others pushed toward the tent’s center. He must assume we all pushed our cots together because we enjoy the smell of one another’s feet and morning breath. Though I’m sure he thinks we pushed our cots to the center to give him more living space. While he wrestles with the cumbersome army cot, no one offers him a hand or bothers to tell him that the edges of the tent drip rainwater all night.

  The commander is the first one asleep, and it doesn’t start raining until one in the morning. We’re woken up by his lone, key chain flashlight as it dances blue light across the tent.

  Sticking my head out of my sleeping bag, I see him trying to keep the little LED’s button pushed down with one hand and move his stuff with the other. I turn back over to go to sleep.

  Quietly, head in my sleeping bag, I laugh because it’s the middle of the night in a combat zone….

  “And the commander took the time to put on his gloves,” I finish.

  When we land in Fort Bragg, the applause is deafening. EQ platoon sits in the back of the plane laughing and cheering. We pat each other on the back and shake each other’s hands. And the whole time, in all of our eyes, that look of regret. The same one I gave Heather. There’s that shameful feeling of abandonment.

  This time I’m not leaving the love of my life for a year. I’m leaving my only brothers and one sister forever. Even if the unit gets deployed again, the half of the platoon that was cross-leveled won’t be cross-leveled back. The army just doesn’t work like that.

  Back in Old Division Area, we settle down into the barracks the same way we did while we were going through mobilization training.

  The first night the whole platoon is taking turns in and out of the bath and shower room. I stand next to Justin Greene and Austin Rhodes at the sink, brushing my teeth. I look in the mirror, and my eyes are desperate.

  When I was here the first time, I was desperate because I wanted to be brave. Now “brave” means nothing. All I want to do is hold on to that year. I don’t necessarily want to return to Iraq. And I sure as hell want to go home and see my family, but in the last few days of something you know will never come back, your mind has a desperate way of holding on to it.

  “Remember when you got your wisdom teeth pulled?” Greene asks Rhodes through the minty suds in his mouth.

  “Yeah, all four of them,” says Rhodes, spitting into his sink.

  “I remember that,” says Jesse Lee, standing a few sinks down. “And Smithson had to watch him.”

  “Had to?” I say. “I volunteered for that. It was hilarious….”

  “Somebody has to stay back with him,” says Munoz.

  “I’ll stay back,” I offer immediately. How can I turn this down?

  “All right, we’ll bring you guys a plate,” says Jesse Lee.

  Normally dentists won’t pull all four wisdom teeth in one shot, but this is the army and we are in a combat zone. There’s no time for mercy.

  However Rhodes doesn’t feel the slightest ounce of pain. He’s still drugged from whatever they gave him at the dentist. Though “drugged” may not be the right adjective. Downright royally stoned seems more appropriate.

  Rhodes sits in a chair in our common room, the one with the shelf full of candy, in a drunken slumped position. His head is back, jaw open, and the clump of gauze in the back of his mouth makes it difficult for him to talk.

  “No tea-bagging Rhodesh,” he says.

  The whole group of us is laughing when LT walks by. He looks down at Rhodes slumped there in his inebriated state and smiles.

  “You feelin’ okay, buddy?” asks LT.

  “You arn gonna tea-bag me are you, shir?”

  LT laughs and assures Rhodes that no tea-bagging of any sort will occur. Then the group heads off to chow.

  Minus two, that is. Rhodes and I sit in the common room, next to the fridge, and he tells me all about how he’d fought to stay awake while the dentist intravenously knocked him out.

  “I don think itsch werrkin’,” he had told the dentist. The dentist prepped another needle and gave him a second dose. “Then my head juss fell back and I passhed owt.” Rhodes fakes his head falling back and almost falls out of the chair. This is why he needs a guardian while the rest go to lunch.

  I catch him and lift him back into his seat.

  “Thanksch,” he mutters.

  He looks to the platoon’s dry erase board, which sits on the wall beside him. It has all the soldiers from EQ listed by last name. There are small corresponding boxes for writing in where they are at any given time. It’s for accountability.

  Rhodes turns in his chair, grabs the marker, and begins scribbling things next to the names of those who had just gone to chow. Normally, we write a D for DFAC (Dining Facility) when we go to chow. Rhodes just writes “food.”

  “I need a shmoke,” he tells me.

  “I don’t think you should be smoking,” I say.

  “Doctor shaid itsh okay ash long ash the gauze esh there,” he informs me. “Maybe Fawldeh hash shome shigarettesh.”

  “He’s at chow,” I say.

  Rhodes apparently doesn’t believe me and stumbles out of his chair to prove me wrong.

  “Be careful,” I tell him.

  “For wha?”

  He staggers through the nearby doorway to the hallway and Folden’s room. Knocking on the door, he asks for Sergeant Folden.

  “He’s at chow,” I say again. Rhodes opens the door and enters the room.

  “Surjen Fawldeh?” he asks the empty room.

  This room is the size of a cubicle and to anyone except Rhodes obviously unoccupied. I stand at the doorway chuckling as Rhodes pats down Folden’s bedsheets.

  “He’sh not shleepin.”

  I try to remain polite and avoid just laughing at him, but when I see him physically pat down a bed to be sure no one is sleeping in it, I lose it.

  “Yoush okay, mahn?” he asks me.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Let’s go to your room and sit down.”

  We walk back into the hallway and down to his bay.

  “Wanna shee the tooths that got pulled?” he asks me.

  “Sure,” I say.

  He pulls a small plastic jar from a nearby shelf. Inside are four bloody teeth.

  “Look at thish one.” He points. The tooth he refers to has a gnarly, pointed chunk sticking out of its side, not unlike the barb on the edge of a fishhook. “Thatsh gonna hurt when it comesh out.”

  “Yeah,” I agree. He puts the teeth down and sets up to play me in Battlefield 1942 on his laptop. Sadly he kicks my ass.

  After a little while Jesse Lee comes back with the crowd and gives us our to-go plates. I have a hamburger and onion rings. Rhodes gets peaches and some Jell-o. He takes the bloody gauze out of his mouth. Then, after more than a few unsuccessful tries, he pokes his fork into a peach slice.

  “Ish thish my lower lip?” he asks us with his finger on his lower lip. We tell him yes, and he places the peach there. Tipping his head back, he opens and closes his mouth. Think of a seal trying to swallow a dead fish. I guess he’s hoping gravity will help him out and shimmy the peach into his mouth.

  Lee and I stand in the doorway watching him. Our laughs start as scratchy grunts in the back of our throats. Again, attempting to save his dignity, we try to keep the laughs from becoming audible.

  After a couple of jaw flexes the peach falls right into Rhodes’s lap. And his dignity falls with it, because as it sits on his pants, Rhodes keeps opening and closing his mouth, attempting to eat the slippery thing.

  Lee and I roar with laughter. Rhodes looks at us like a lost puppy. Then down at the peach slice in his lap. Then, as he tries to poke it with the fork, I say, “Sorry, man.”

  Although I’m still laughing. So I have to say it a few more times before he actually believes me.

&nbs
p; “Rhodes ate the rest of his meal in front of a mirror,” I say.

  After a week of out-processing we are all flying out from the airport in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before we head to the holding area (also in Old Division Area) where the buses come to take us to the airport, the commander lines us up in formation.

  In Iraq, because of the danger of mortars, we couldn’t hold formations. With the whole company lined up one well-placed mortar could wipe out a whole platoon. So being in formation at Fort Bragg, although we’re in the army, is a pretty foreign thing.

  However, we don’t forget our little twist on the commander’s attempt at motivation and morale. Every time he calls us to attention, we’re supposed to yell, “Adapt and overcome.”

  We’re all lined up, standing at ease. The commander comes to the front with his head high.

  “Company!” he yells.

  “Platoon!” yells Munoz.

  Then the commander: “Attention.”

  The whole company says his quirky little line. EQ platoon cries out what we always say: “Inept and overdone.”

  We all grin as we stand at attention. This is our last little attempt of holding on to the year, the last time we get to do something as a platoon, the last time we get to use our sense of humor, the biting sarcasm that got us through our year in Iraq.

  All of our planes take off at different times, so every couple of hours the buses come and load a bunch of us at a time. We’re all trying so hard not to cry. No one offers to shake a hand, because you’re supposed to hug your brothers and sisters.

  SILENCE AND SILHOUETTES

  When you come home from a combat tour, the veteran’s association lets you collect unemployment benefits for a few months. It’s so you can have time to readjust, to get back on your feet.

  Sitting on my own couch again while Heather is at work, I watch daytime TV. I’m not really watching, though. Daytime TV sucks. And my mind has never been further from home.

  Seeing Heather at the airport was magical. Seeing my parents again, indescribable. Their tears, their hugs of joy. Their fears are finally over. They hold me like they’re never going to let me go.