Just Another Soldier Read online

  After I heard it from Kirk and Whiskey, John runs into me and says, “I hear your entire squad hates you, that you slept while you made them go on patrol.” Keep in mind that John is the company commander’s RTO (translation: captain’s radio man). For him to hear this rubbish pretty much meant that I could assume that Soledad O’Brien was at that very moment convincingly feigning veiled disgust as she read from her teleprompter before a bank of CNN cameras: “Today at Fort Drum, an Army post in upstate New York, it was discovered that infantry team leader Jason Hartley of Bravo Team, Second Squad, brazenly slept while his fellow soldiers sludged through the snow in single-digit temperatures. Sources say that it is a certainty at this time that Sergeant Hartley is a shitbag.” At this point I could take no more. I was gonna drop bombs. I stormed back to my room and found to my livid wonderment another gay joke—a picture torn from a magazine and taped to my wall locker of what I was supposed to assume was a gay sailor, bare-chested and tattooed. Then my cup runneth over. I tore the page down. In the margin on the back side was printed the source of this untimely homoerotica: FHM, page sixty. I opened the door of the room to Alpha team, the soon-to-be recipients of SPLEEN, JASON TYPE, 1 EA., but they were gone. Ah, lo and behold, there layeth an issue of FHM. And page sixty was torn out! So I did the mystery owner of the magazine a favor and took it back to my room and tore out all the rest of the pages to save him time in the future. (Side note: This was the international version of FHM, and it actually broke my heart to destroy it like that. There were so many hot girls in it.) Then I lay in wait, my rage at a slow boil. When they returned, I entered their room, closed the door, and locked the bolt. I flung the mass of pages to the floor and out of my throat boomed the words, “IF YOU FAGGOTS HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ME, TELL IT TO ME NOW!” It’s really embarrassing how when one is pissed off, all political correctness goes out the window and the use of disparaging terms based on sexual orientation are used without thinking. Anyway, once I was done venting and they had explained to me that it wasn’t them who’d ratted me out (it was actually my platoon sergeant who’d made an observation that I appeared to be slacking, something I didn’t learn till it was too late), all that was accomplished was I had made an ass of myself by being overly furious and destroying a magazine that didn’t belong to any of them. It was Kirk’s magazine, and his personal joke and my little act of rage was completely lost on them. “Um, Sergeant, whose magazine is that? Did you tear those pages out? I’m confused.” I felt like that guy who sprayed manure all over what he thought was the courthouse that had wronged him, only to find out that he had the wrong building.

  December 24, 2003

  I RUDI BAKHTIAR

  It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting on a JetBlue flight to Salt Lake City. CNN Headline News is on the little TV screen. I’ve had the biggest crush on Rudi Bakhtiar ever since I became a news junkie after 9/11. I was working at John F. Kennedy Airport for eight months, watching passengers get violated at the security checkpoints, and after work, in the wee hours in my crummy hotel room, I would watch Rudi intently as she told me about the day’s stories. She seemed more attractive every night I watched her. Those bewitching Persian eyes, that aristocratic Iranian nose, breasts too small to preclude her from the category of sophisticated beauty. (Before this deployment, I was able to watch the news during the day, and I found I was becoming infatuated with Soledad O’Brien and her mesmerizing smile.) But of course they have to broadcast from Atlanta. How will I ever be able to visit? Why can’t they broadcast from New York City? What the hell is in Atlanta anyway? While I was at the airport, I emailed CNN a few times asking them if they could set up a service that would email fans of Rudi each day what she would be wearing the next day. I got no response. So I would stare at the TV waiting for that fleeting moment when the ticker at the bottom of the screen dropped, just before or after a commercial break, revealing her body below her armpits. Willy was my roommate for those eight months, and he found my Rudi obsession amusing and slightly troubling.

  January 2, 2004

  Tomorrow we leave for Fort Polk, Louisiana. Tonight will be the last night I ever spend at Fort Drum. That’s actually completely untrue. I just wanted to say that. After Polk, we come back to Fort Drum. We’ll be mobilizing from here to ship out to Kuwait.

  The last few days have been incredibly uneventful. The only thing that’s really happened is there was a huge battalion “dining-in” on New Years Eve. Basically it was a large kinda-formal dinner for the battalion, with the battalion commander as the guest of honor. One can tell that the dining-in is an event with a lot of tradition behind it. There are a lot of rules, a lot of ceremony, and a lot of toasts. There probably was a time, maybe fifty years ago or so, when this kind of thing was really cool. But with the Jackass generation, trying to get soldiers to follow proper dining etiquette, especially after they’ve been drinking for five hours, is like trying to get a kindergarten class to sit still after they’ve gotten all jacked-up on red Kool-Aid. And I can’t really blame it all on my Nintendo-raised colleagues. We all pretty much let it slide into a drunken brouhaha. It became a two-bit comedy hour. At one point, after the same corporal stood up for the fourth time and yelled at the master of ceremonies, “POINT IN ORDER, MR. VICE!” trying to be as funny as he was the first time he pulled the same stunt, I had had enough and yelled, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I found myself sitting there at my squad’s table imagining my grandfather, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, at a dining-in at a naval base in Alameda or San Leandro during World War II, adhering to the rules of conduct, remaining silent while the commander spoke, giving hearty toasts and generally getting in the spirit of the event. I’d like to think of myself as being someone who is unafraid to enjoy “grown-up” events like this, but even despite being happily drunk for the duration, I found the whole thing unbearable. I feel horrible for saying this. After all, this was meant to bring a battalion together before they went into combat, but it was undeniable that the dining-in went over like a turd in a punch bowl.

  Fort Polk

  January 7, 2004

  So here I am, sitting on my bunk in a giant warehouse at Fort Polk, Louisiana—a top bunk this time; I let the guy beneath me, one of the medics, keep the bottom bunk he seized before I had a chance to claim one—trying to collect my thoughts on what I want to write about, when a bunch of guys start giggling about something. I look down to the guy on the bottom bunk next to mine. He’s dead asleep, his poncho liner half pulled over his head, half falling off the side of the mattress. He’s lying on his back wearing long johns (or “poly pro bottoms,” as we call them) and no socks. My first thought is, Hmm, with the covers falling off the bed like that, his feet must be getting kind of…Hey, wait a second! Oh my god! He has a boner! And it’s protruding straight out of the fly of his poly pros! Yuck! Guys would come over, whisperingly giggle like conspiring schoolgirls, then grab as many other guys as possible to witness this foul spectacle, this thing so bizarre and macabre and most abhorrent of all to the heterosexual male: a completely visible and turgid phallus! Then everyone started taking pictures, me included. If a girl shows her tits in a bar, two guys take pictures. A guy falls asleep with an exposed hard-on, twenty guys take pictures. Go figure. Finally someone woke him up by swatting him with a shirt, like he was the village leper, and he rolled over, instinctively resheathing the errant meat saber.

  January 14, 2004

  WHAT, YOU DIDN ’T GET THE WORD?

  My company motto is “Let’s Roll.” Or at least that’s what I’ve been led to believe. We yell it when we’re in company formations. I cringe every time I have to say it. But I cringe less than when I hear Delta company yell their motto, “Death by Wire,” which is meant to signify their killing the enemy with wire-guided TOW missiles, I think. Or their hanging themselves with piano wire instead of going to Iraq, or maybe their always calling their cheating wives on the telephone (wire) and then eventually eating a bullet. I dunno. Since “Let’s Roll” is our motto, we use it
colloquially, sadly always sarcastically, but still, we employ it regularly in conversation.

  But I have noticed for quite a while now a few other phrases used on an even more religious and fervent basis. Some of them go like, “What, you didn’t get the word?” or “What, you didn’t hear?” or “You’ve been here three months and you still don’t know that?” or “You’re an infantry team leader and you didn’t know that?” All this time I thought when guys asked these questions they were being condescending, patronizing assholes trying desperately to fight for the alpha dog position by leveraging themselves ever so slightly with even the most minuscule information advantage like a bunch of petty little bitches, but now I realize they were just being hooah and quoting the new company motto: “What, you don’t know?”

  February 1, 2004

  A couple of nights ago some of the other guys and I went out and got into a little trouble at the last bar we were at. There was a small fight in the parking lot between some soldiers, and we were all out after curfew. I didn’t realize I was even at that bar until someone told me the next morning. I barely remember the third bar we went to. Anyway, the point is, there was a scuffle. All I really remember was this guy taking off his shirt to fight. Today I was questioned by the company executive officer (XO) regarding the incident. There is now an “investigation” ongoing. What the hell they are investigating is a mystery to me. There’s nothing to investigate. A bunch of guys were out after curfew (just like they have been every night for the past four months), got drunk, and got in a fight. Better question: of all the things a company XO could be spending his time doing a month before going into combat, why is he investigating a fucking curfew violation? So now, as part of my punishment, I have to guard ammo on some range for twenty-four hours, starting at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, with my fellow curfew breakers (except the guy who started the fight; he was out at the mall tonight while the rest of us were on lockdown). But here’s where it gets really fucked up: Word is we rule breakers are going to lose some or all of the time off we have before going overseas. We are supposed to have the seventh through the ninth off, and again four days on Valentine’s Day weekend. Our deployment ceremony is on the seventh. Plane tickets and hotel rooms have already been paid for by my father and sister so they can come up for the shitbird deployment ceremony. I haven’t seen my father since my deployment began four months ago, and this is the last chance I’ll have to see him. If I can’t spend the night of the seventh with them, there is no point for them to come up for only the ceremony, as it will most certainly be fucking retarded—we’ll stand around while every local politician wishes us well. Hey, local politicians, you want to do something for me? Keep your remarks short at the ceremony. We don’t know you, and the longer you talk, the longer we have to stand at attention. If I don’t get to see my family, I’ll live; it’s not that big a deal. However, my family may feel differently. They may really want to see me before I go into combat. If I get blown the fuck up, what do I care? I’ll be dead. But if I get transformed into a fine pink mist because I was on point for an IED patrol as punishment for not clearing my weapon properly before entering a military building, it may draw the ire of my family that they didn’t get to see me for that last time because I was being punished for breaking my 11:00 p.m. curfew. I’m a thirty-year-old infantryman who will soon be given the ultimate authority of killing anyone I adjudicate to be a threat, but until then I have the same curfew I did when I was in junior high school. I realize that this kind of argument is really unoriginal and too easy to use, but the thing that really scares me—and I’m being serious here—is that my command makes this big a deal about me and a few guys being out after curfew; what’s gonna happen when we actually start getting into shit? Am I going to be interrogated every time I pull the trigger? Am I going to be investigated every time I look at someone sideways? My commander is a prosecutor in real life. The guy is a pit bull. He is competent, solid, and ferocious. He loves Hemingway and Melville. His vocabulary exceeds mine. And I love him as my commander. But right now I feel that if he wanted to make a big deal about this, we’d be fucked. This guy prosecutes organized crime in New York City for a living. When I truthfully say that I don’t remember shit because I was completely blotto that night, I really mean I don’t remember shit. But this isn’t necessarily to my advantage. If my commander decided to get involved, he could place me at the scene of the crime wearing a white hood with my boot on the throat of some mentally retarded nun, clubbing a baby seal with one hand and igniting a cross with the other.

  February 3, 2004

  Dear readers: This blog will be going offline. I have been informed that I have violated operational security and additionally that I am smearing my unit and the Army. I, of course, strenuously disagree.

  I am taking the blog offline at the request of my company commander. I do so under protest and I do it as a favor to my platoon sergeant and first sergeant.

  I will continue to write, but I will no longer be posting it publicly. The warrior ethos states that I should never give up. So now I have to do things a little more on the down-low.

  I love America more than I can describe. I love the Army and the invaluable opportunity it’s given me to give back to a country that I love with all my heart. And as much as I love the Army, I love to exalt it by sharing with you exactly how ridiculous it really is. If you can grok what I’m saying, you are among friends. Thanks.

  February 11, 2004

  RAY AND THE COIN

  There’s a tradition in the military where if you’ve done something that merits a pat on the back or if you are in the right place at the right time, someone with rank may give you a special coin, usually engraved with a unit and rank or place. Sometimes entire units are given coins for certain accomplishments, like completing a rotation at the National Training Center in California. In general, receiving a coin is a prestigious thing. How many coins you have and where you got them gives you certain bragging rights. If you are out drinking and someone drops a coin on the bar, you are expected to drop one of your own coins in an attempt to trump it. The guy with the least prestigious coin (or no coin at all) is expected to buy that round. There is no official standard for the hierarchy of coins, but if you have a coin that a two-star general gave you while you were in Bosnia, you can rest assured that the guy with the coin his unit received for attending the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk is going to be the one buying the drinks. If both you and the other guy have coins from sergeants major, the coin that came from the Eighty-second Airborne Division will trump the one from the Three hundred and whatever Finance Brigade in Toledo, Ohio.

  Some guys take the whole coin thing very seriously. I knew a soldier in my old unit in Utah who used to carry around a small coin purse that held his collection, so if anyone ever dropped a coin on him, he’d be prepared to trump it or at least try to impress the other person with the number of coins he had been awarded. There are also guys who do not take the coin thing too seriously. Ray is one of these guys.

  On the last day of our rotation at JRTC at Fort Polk, Louisiana, our forward operating base (FOB) was crawling with brass. Generals, colonels, sergeants major, and the like were all visiting to see how the newest batch of soldiers set for Iraq were faring. These guys usually make the rounds to all the command tents and shake hands. Our snipers are part of our headquarters section, so it’s no surprise that the adjutant general (AG) of the state of New York (the guy in charge of the New York National Guard) should meet Chris and Ray on that day. Chris and Ray were in their ghillie suits looking like a couple of cold-blooded killers when the AG came around, so not surprisingly he decided to give them coins.

  Ray is a no-nonsense kind of guy. He’s not a big fan of accolades being given for nothing, so he tends to see coins being given for something as pedestrian as running into a general while wearing a ghillie suit as kinda lame. Ray took the coin, undoubtedly with no expression, but he had been waiting for a moment like this for quite some time. Afte
r accepting the coin, he told the general, “Sir, I have something for you now,” at which point he dropped his rucksack on the ground and started rummaging through it. Knowing that Ray is prone to certain eccentricities, Chris started to sweat.