Ryan Smithson Read online

“I just meant—”

  “You meant what? Now I’m the liar?”

  “I—”

  “I—I—uhh—” mocks the drill sergeant.

  “I disrespected your formation, Drill Sergeant.”

  “Oh, a little integrity, I see. That’s mighty kind of you. Tell me, Honest Abe, what are the other six army values?”

  These can be found in the Smart Book.

  “Drill Sergeant, the other six army values are loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity—”

  “Yeah, we covered that one!”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant. Um, uh, respect—”

  “Said that!”

  “Um…Drill Sergeant, I…”

  “You what?”

  “I—”

  “You what? You what?” The drill sergeant screams in his face. “Well, cupcake, while you’re stammering around trying to figure out that the seventh army value is personal courage, your battle buddy is over there dying from a bullet wound!”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  The kid looks like he wants to cry. No one is really dying from a bullet wound. The drill sergeant is proving a point. In combat there’s no time to think. You just act.

  “Cannon cockers until I say stop!”

  Anywhere else the kid’s punishment would have been called squat thrusts. In basic training they’re called cannon cockers.

  The kid stands at attention, drops his hands to the ground, and kicks his feet out behind him. This puts him in a push-up position. He pulls his feet back underneath himself and stands back at attention.

  “One cannon cocker,” he says.

  “You forgot to say ‘boom,’ sweetheart!” roars the drill sergeant. “Do it right or they all do it.”

  He points to us. With his finger he’s saying, “If one soldier makes a mistake in combat, they all suffer.”

  Kid drops, throws back his feet, and then stands back up.

  “Boom!” he says.

  “Damn it, private! You ride the short bus? Every time you kick your little feet, you say ‘boom.’ That’s the cannon cocker. When you stand up, you say the count. Think you can handle that, numbnuts?”

  “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

  Drops to his hands. Feet shoot back like the recoil of the M16’s buffer spring.

  “Boom,” he says. A hundred recruits watch him, hearing his Mississippi accent echoing. Stand up. “One cannon cocker!”

  Back down. His feet shoot out twice. “Boom. Boom.”

  Back up. “Two cannon cockers.”

  “Boom. Boom. Boom.”

  “Three cannon cockers.”

  This goes on for way too long. His booms the only sound. At the seventh cannon cocker, someone in the formation can no longer take the echoing Mississippian accent of this kid: “Baoum…baoum…baoum…”

  “You wanna laugh at him, you little puke?” yells another drill sergeant. “You can join him!”

  Now there are two. And they’re both nervous and hysterical. They can’t synchronize.

  “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…”

  “Baoum, baoum, baoum, baoum, baoum…”

  Which gets them yelled at some more.

  The rest of the shaved recruits form up, and we thank God that this cannon cocker charade is over. We are all seconds away from doing them. We stand there, a sea of bald boys learning to become soldiers one cannon cocker at a time.

  Many people can’t do it. Most of the privates who “wash out,” or fail to complete basic training, do so during Red Phase. And the army doesn’t care. It doesn’t want the washouts. The army doesn’t believe in pity, because its enemies don’t believe in pity.

  Only after we have been completely destroyed can we begin to find ourselves.

  Red Phase is about reflection. It’s about looking around and realizing how much all this means. This ground, this place we call a home. This space and time given to us for free. These people we call countrymen.

  And the way it feels to lose it all, to lose our free will. The drill sergeants tell us when to train, when to push, and when to pull. When to laugh (never) and when to cry (don’t even think about it). They tell us how to walk and how to talk, how to sit and how to eat, and when to shower and when to shit.

  When we have something to say, we stand at the position of attention and request permission to speak. And hope the drill sergeant doesn’t rip our bloody head off for interrupting his busy day.

  Red Phase is about duty. The opposite of freedom.

  And standing there being screamed at for not tucking in the corners of my bed sheets properly, I have an epiphany. The drill sergeant is two seconds away from tossing my whole mattress on the floor. He’s five seconds from tossing my battle buddy’s mattress on the floor. If we don’t pick them up and remake our bunks in time, the whole room—six other privates’ mattresses—will be tossed. But it’s okay. I get it.

  If you sacrifice your freedom, you’ll learn what freedom means. And once you know what freedom means, you’ll know why it’s worth fighting for.

  Sacrifice. Godforsaken, selfless, nothing-matters-less-than-my-well-being sacrifice. “I serve the country” is tattooed right across my forehead. I am a part of the all-warrior circus. We are snarling clowns with spiked teeth and bleeding gums. We smell like rotten war paint.

  We smell like old camping gear. That’s the smell of the army.

  Mostly it’s the TA-50, our field issue. The web gear that wraps around my chest like a python, its ammo pouches are full of the army smell. The Kevlar helmet that dents the top of my head smells like it’s leaking army-scented oil. The rucksack, poncho, and the worn-out, recycled wet weather gear that doesn’t work. That’s TA-50, all of it reeking of the army.

  That smell was stuffed into my duffel bag, inside my extra uniforms, my socks, and my brown underwear. (Yes, the army even tells recruits what kind of underwear they’ll wear in basic training.) All of us, we smell like the army now, too. That smell is in the towels we use to dry off. It’s in the sheets we sleep in. It’s in our washcloths and wall lockers and brown T-shirts. It has been said that after a certain amount of time, one can get used to any smell. That’s either not true or I need more time.

  The army smell is distinct, something I’ll smell a thousand years from now in my hundredth next life and I’ll turn and say, “That’s a smell from a previous life, A.D. 2003.” The army smell is indestructible. It cannot be washed off or worn out. It cannot be manipulated or covered up with cologne or deodorant. It is pungent but hardly offensive. It’s earthly, the army smell, like dust on a shelf. It’s ancient fabric dipped in OD (Olive Drab) green dye and handed out to new recruits.

  Sometimes you can rub at the new dye and it lightens. It fades away little by little. Then if you look hard enough, the old dye peeks through. Behind the ugly green-brown dye, the fabric is blue. Some of the spaces between the splintering olive color, the parts that were given up, sacrificed, these parts are white. In some spots the old fabric is stained and bloody. Red.

  Lying in my bunk writing a letter to my parents, the red flashlight making my paper pink, I realize that when I am sent to the Sandbox like all the drill sergeants say I will be, if I die, the flag they give my parents, the Stars and Stripes, is going to smell like the army. Dipped in new dye, sure. Crisp and clean and folded in a compact triangle, absolutely. But it’ll still smell like the olive green and dirty brown of everything that surrounds me here in basic training. It will smell like these sheets. And whenever my parents remember their son, they’ll have to smell that old vinyl, dust-on-a-shelf smell I now live in.

  I try not to think about it. I finish my letter and lay my head on my pillow, thinking of tomorrow, Sunday.

  Sunday is our day off but that doesn’t mean what you probably think. We don’t get to talk to our families, run down to the PX (Post Exchange) to buy a soda, or take a leisurely walk around post. Our heads are still shaved, the drill sergeants still yell, we still crawl out of our racks at four thirty A.M.
, still wear army greens, and still get three minutes to hammer chow. The difference is that there is no training.

  During the week we practice marching. We do teamwork-building exercises and confidence courses, the obstacle courses for which basic training is famous. We do hand-to-hand combat and pugle stick fighting. We sit through classes on the army values, first aid, and financial skills. We walk through a gas chamber full of CS gas, the tear gas that police use at riots. All this stuff is training. And all of it comes to a halt on Sunday.

  Sunday is the only day we can look forward to each week. In drill sergeant language our only task on Sunday is to “conduct barracks maintenance.” This means clean.

  Using pine oil almost exclusively, we scrub every inch of our section of the barracks. On our hand and knee. We buff the floors, scour the sinks, polish the toilets, scrub the showers, and wipe the counters. (Regular shaving cream gets a shoe scuff off a tile floor like no one’s business.)

  And the smell, that virtuous smell of Sunday. Tangy and sour, like pine pitch fermented in peroxide wrapped in sin. Are sins really forgiven on Sunday morning? Or are they just washed up and sanitized, covered up with a piney solution?

  The mixture of pine oil and sin, it smells like atheism.

  After one brave soul announces to the drill sergeant that we are done cleaning, he comes upstairs with a white glove and runs his finger along the windowsills, wall lockers, radiators, shower walls, and everywhere else. If he sees a speck of dust, it’s back to cleaning.

  During the first Sunday of Red Phase, we’re thinking if we clean quickly, we’ll have time to make a phone call or more leisure time. We soon find out how naïve we are. Even if the drill sergeant doesn’t find dust, he finds dust. And since we bothered him before the job was done, we are irrevocably stupid and therefore deserving of some good old-fashioned PT (Physical Training). We quickly learn to use the entire Sunday to clean.

  But cleaning is the facade. Sundays are about escape. We can talk to one another all day on Sunday. We are finally allowed to find out about one another. I would not usually be interested in what fifty people, whom I met only weeks ago, would have to share with me. But here it seems important. For some reason basic training makes me appreciate strangers.

  And Sundays are about getting away. Sundays give us an excuse to leave the pine-scented barracks, if only for an hour. There are Protestant and Catholic services. There are Buddhist and Hindu services. There are Jewish and Muslim and Southern Gospel services.

  As a bus rolls up for the first service of the day, the whole company forms up outside the barracks.

  “This one’s for you Methodists,” yells the drill sergeant.

  Only a few people step out of formation and board the bus.

  “There better be more for the Protestant service,” says the drill sergeants. “I don’t want to look at you nasty privates all day.”

  And then there’s the atheist. Born and raised in New York City.

  “What if you don’t believe in God, Drill Sergeant?” she asks from the back of the formation.

  Now, there are a couple things that need to be understood here. First of all, just because Red Phase is almost over and White Phase starts tomorrow doesn’t mean we’re out of basic training. You can’t just yell out in the middle of a formation. I’m not terribly religious myself. Spiritual, I’d say. But regardless. We’re standing in the heart of the Bible Belt, sister. The majority of the military comes from the South, and if you think they don’t love teaching valuable lessons to every blasphemous, Northern hippie they come across, you’ve got another think coming.

  “What did you say?” he says, walking over to her spot in formation.

  “I said, ‘What if you don’t believe in God, Drill Sergeant?’” she says.

  We all wait to hear the drill sergeant yell “drop,” meaning push-ups, or “front leaning rest position,” meaning push-ups, or of course, “cannon cockers.” But he says nothing. He pauses. A long time.

  “There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole,” he tells her.

  I picture World War II and Vietnam flicks: soldiers sitting in foxholes praying with rosaries. This is how I make sense of what the drill sergeant told the atheist.

  When you’re in the shit and all you have are a rifle and your own ass, I think, you’ll turn to God.

  Sometimes God isn’t listening. Pray all you want, and the only outcome you’ll get is a lead slug through the forehead. But sometimes, just sometimes, God is listening. And God hates the bad guys, right? The reinforcements show up, and the Krauts or the Gooks are wiped out. The platoon survives against miraculous odds, and the American flag waves in the foreground. Roll credits.

  I think, Soldiers turn to God during war.

  MAYBE A RING?

  After BCT I stay in Fort Leonard Wood for AIT and then finally return home in March 2004. The Iraq war has been going on for a year, and the military has captured Saddam Hussein.

  Heather is in her last semester of college, about to get her Associate’s degree, and still lives with her roommate in their apartment. As for my education, I’m now a full year behind the classmates of my graduating class. But I plan on starting community college in the fall. I guess I’ll go for auto mechanics.

  For now I continue working at the Denny’s where I worked in high school. I am no longer a greasy dishwasher, though. I’ve moved up and become a greasy short order cook. It’s decent work for being eighteen and living at home. And of course I spend the first weekend of every month at my reserve unit in Kingston, New York.

  The unit is fairly new to me, even though I visited a few times before I shipped out. I don’t know most of the soldiers, but I still have a feeling of camaraderie with them. I made it through basic training. I am their fellow soldier now. That’s where the camaraderie comes from. People understanding and accepting you without your having to prove yourself.

  As summer approaches, Heather and I move into an apartment in Troy together. I finally assume the responsibility of living on my own. The Real World isn’t such a scary place after all.

  Even though it’s tiny and our neighbors are a little rude, this apartment serves as the foundation for the rest of our lives together. We talk over dinner. Mushy, romantic comedy stuff. Boyfriends talking to girlfriends about things they would never even consider talking about with their buddies. Things like “I missed you at work today, sweetie” and “Poor kitty has to get booster shots tomorrow” and “Which is a better aroma for our laundry, white lilac or summer breeze?” We talk of marriage and kids and owning a home. We talk of the future. We talk of the army.

  “What happens if you get deployed?” Heather asks me.

  I shrug.

  “You think you will?”

  “Yep,” I say.

  She nods slowly, bites her bottom lip.

  “So…”

  “So I’ll pack my bags and give you a kiss.”

  “Maybe a ring?” she asks.

  I smile and kiss her on the forehead.

  “Maybe,” I say.

  Historically in peacetime our country’s military is all volunteer. But the Iraq war is different. Now during wartime our country’s military is still all volunteer. There hasn’t been a draft. Problem is, there aren’t enough active duty soldiers to function in Iraq and Afghanistan the way DoD needs them to. So the reserves and national guard are deployed.

  I never really think it’s coming. I deny the inevitability of deployment. I doubt the drill sergeants when they tell me I’ll end up in the Sandbox sooner or later. I doubt myself when I tell Heather, “Yep, I’ll be deployed.” But my denial doesn’t matter. Because duty comes first.

  I am standing in the unit administrator’s office when it happens. The UA picks up the phone. The guy on the other line asks a question and the UA repeats it.

  “Is Private Smithson deployable?” he says.

  To me he says, “Can you get your two oh one file out of that cabinet behind you?” and tosses me a key.
/>
  I turn around, unlock the filing cabinet drawer, and snatch my 201, my entire life history with everything from what hospital I was born in to my PT scores in basic training to what the MEPS doctor saw when he checked my asshole for hemorrhoids.

  The UA flips through the thick folder, pulls out a typed sheet containing some secret, returns it, and hands me the file.

  “Yes, he is,” the UA tells the guy on the phone.

  As I put the folder back, I say, “No. Tell them no.” And I try to make it sound like I’m joking.

  At least I finally have an answer to the question I’ve tried to answer since I enlisted. The million-dollar question, the first question people ask when they find out I’m in the military: “Will you have to go to Iraq?”

  In my head the answer is usually, Probably, jackass, and thanks for bringing it up.

  From my mouth, the answer that usually comes out is “Maybe.”

  People don’t know what to say to this. They say, “Well, I hope not” or “Man, we shouldn’t even be there,” followed by a totally blank stare.

  In the civilian world, it makes perfect sense: a deployment roster months ahead of schedule. But this is not the civilian world. This is the place where we are property of the U.S. government, and there is no such roster. There’s no convenient, all-knowing inventory of names and social security numbers, all the soldiers who’ll be deployed in the new year. And there is definitely not a neat little dotted line where one can write I respectfully decline.

  People don’t understand, and I don’t bother explaining that I’ll be lucky to get a full week’s notice before I’m deployed. So when I respond to the million-dollar question, I press my lips together, nod my head, and say, “Maybe.”

  The phone call to my UA is from another engineering unit out of West Virginia. This reserve unit is just like mine here in New York. For one weekend a month and two weeks a year, the unit fills up with engineering soldiers and they train; they do their MOS. The way the army works…Well, I have no idea how the army works. But for this one soldier at this one moment during this one war, the way the army works is like this.

  A general somewhere needs an engineering unit in Iraq. In one way or another he finds the unit in West Virginia. This reserve unit, like most others, is not at what the army calls “full strength,” they have to pull soldiers from other units, oftentimes in other states. This is called “cross leveling.” Hence the call to my unit administrator in New York.