Major Conflict Read online

My grandmother was out when we arrived back at the apartment. I think we both knew what this meant. We went directly to my room. I closed the door, snapped the fan on high, and we fell into the bed together, resuming the kiss that the Mexicans had interrupted, hardly missing a beat. We were sweaty now, and the cool air felt good on our skin. The noise from the fan sealed the room shut, in a way, so that it seemed at that moment that nothing in the whole world existed except Greg and me. We kissed until our lips ached, and then I found myself pushing Greg’s head down to my crotch, and before I knew it he had me in his mouth and I was exploding.

  In those few moments during the orgasm the world seemed to switch from color to black-and-white, and now, suddenly, though a part of me wanted just to enjoy the easy languor of lulling about in the afternoon heat with Greg, a larger part of me had me jumping up and pulling on my white briefs and jeans and rushing off to the bathroom. When I returned to my room, I was hoping Greg would be dressed and ready to go, but he was still lying there in the breeze from the fan, a peaceful half-smile on his face.

  “You should get dressed,” I said. “My grandmother might come home.”

  “Oh, okay,” Greg said, and he lazily pulled himself up and started putting his clothes back on.

  After he was dressed he said, “So, what should we do now?”

  “I really need to do some stuff around here. How about if I just see you tomorrow at work? You know how to get to the train from here, right?”

  Greg looked a little crestfallen, but he said okay and stood up and drew near to kiss me good-bye. I grabbed him and kissed him hard in the middle of the forehead. “Happy birthday,” I said. He looked a little startled but just smiled and turned around. I walked him to the front door, and he was gone.

  After he left I straightened my bed and sprayed the room with Lysol, convinced that the smell of sex was everywhere, and then I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But a few hours later it was all I could think of again, and I decided to try to write a note to let him know how I felt. I wanted it to be clear that I liked him a lot as a friend but that the sex wasn’t going to happen again. I wasn’t gay; we were just friends. After a half-dozen false starts I finally came up with this draft, which I ended up copying onto a yellow notepad and giving to him the next day at work.

  I thought of you the other day

  I was sad because I did not

  Adequately express all I had to say

  I am not a writer or poet

  But I was moved to say these words

  I thought of you yesterday

  They were good thoughts and sustained me.

  It was your birthday and I was happy for you.

  I want you to know that I care!

  My caring is different, I know

  But I feel that in the long run

  Your dignity is most important

  And your greatest gift to me.

  I believe in you, I hope in you and for you I trust you!

  I could ask to know no better and yet

  I know you can and will be better.

  Your birthday makes me think of

  The journey you will make

  All your triumphs and struggles, your

  Happiness and hurt.

  I am awed and wish to be a part of it.

  Mushy sounding, but from the heart.

  I suppose it was a function of my confusion and emotional immaturity that allowed me to believe that this note said what I wanted it to say. I handed it to Greg in an envelope the next day at work and told him to wait until he got home to read it.

  For the next month or so I felt like a crazy man half the time, crazy thinking about Greg, and then crazy with guilt after having sex with him. Greg complained that we spent less time just hanging out, but I always felt so guilty afterward that I couldn’t bring myself to hang out with him the way we used to. I was learning to compartmentalize my sex, to keep it in a nice box that had nothing to do with the rest of my life. Greg didn’t want to be kept in a box.

  Finally, the summer ended, and I threw myself back into school and ROTC, deciding once and for all that I wasn’t gay, and that the thing with Greg was just a phase. I went back to part-time at the store and managed to avoid Greg as much as possible. There was one last fight, and that was it. Deep down, I think I knew Greg was right, but I wasn’t anywhere even close to dealing with it. And being a soldier meant too much to me. So I deliberately switched off the light, leaving him in the dark, and he gave up, I suppose, and I suppose I broke his heart again, for the second time in a single year.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Boy on the Rock

  That fall I kept myself busy with school and ROTC and a part-time schedule at Doubleday. Greg got a new job, at a small, academic publisher downtown, but he continued to work part-time at the bookstore at night. This made things easier. Though we still ran into each other occasionally when our shifts overlapped, we didn’t see each other much and were able to abide by a relatively civil truce when we did. And this is how it went for the next few years. I had classes all week, Wednesdays were ROTC, and I worked at Doubleday Thursday through Saturday. Unlike high school, at Fordham I tried to get involved as much as possible, socially and otherwise. I studied hard and partied a good deal. And that year, my sophomore year, I even got involved in student government, getting elected president of my class.

  Like most of my friends, I dated girls casually in these years and had a few of the standard late-night drunken fumblings that characterize college life. Commitment was never much of an issue. The most memorable of these casual dates was a girl named Eileen, whom I met at Clarke’s, one of the local watering holes that catered to Fordham students. It was the spring of my junior year, and my roommates and I were hanging out at the bar at around one in the morning. Eileen walked up to me and introduced herself. She looked familiar and I said so, and she said she was in my Soviet foreign-policy class. We hit it off right away. She was sweet and smart and had a great sense of humor. There was a softness to her that seemed to blunt my own oversize clumsiness. We talked for a few hours at the front end of the bar. Periodically, one of my roommates, none of whom was getting lucky that night, would interrupt us to monitor my progress, jealous that I was one step closer than he was to getting laid. One of them would appear to make some lame remark and then disappear. I figured since Eileen was willing to put up with them she was pretty interested in me. After the bartender had made last call around three-thirty, she asked me to walk her home. I said sure and then yelled over to my roommates that I was leaving.

  Eileen and I talked nonstop all the way up Fordham Road, laughing at our own bad jokes, and at the thought of my roommates hovering over us at the bar, watching my every move. When we finally got to her room in the mini-skyscraper on campus, known as the “Fives,” she turned around and looked at me keenly. Without really thinking I gave her a long lingering good-night kiss that lasted for about twenty minutes, and then we exchanged numbers and kissed again, briefly.

  We arranged to meet again the following weekend at Clarke’s. We closed the place again and I walked her home, but this time, when we got to her door in the “Fives,” she invited me in. Truth was, I’d enjoyed her company and her conversation so much that I’d kind of forgotten about sex. And as we started making out and then actually having sex, I found myself disappointed because I thought it would be more exciting than it was. This wasn’t the first time I’d had sex with a woman, but it was the first time I’d had sex with one to whom I felt so connected, whom I liked so much. Everything worked perfectly, physically speaking, but the whole thing felt perfunctory, it lacked real passion, it lacked the vitality and sheer animal quality I’d felt with Greg and would later feel with other men. Eileen was beautiful and I liked her, but having sex with her felt like an intellectual exercise. It seemed entirely quantifiable, easily explained, unlike sex with a man. For me, the experience of sex with another man, I’d already learned, was unquantifiable; you just knew it was great. And it w
as this very fact that made it so special; it was the fireworks I’d been watching in the movies for years finally translated into the language of my own heart. An-drew Sullivan once said that having sex with a woman was like watching black-and-white TV, whereas having sex with a man was like watching the same TV in full Technicolor. I couldn’t agree with him more.

  This little dalliance with Eileen went on until I went off to ROTC Advanced Camp in July. The night we said good-bye I think it was clear to both of us that when I returned in August and when we got back to school in the fall, we’d probably not be an item. We’d had a good run, but I think she sensed the limits of my affection early on and, sensing them, had limited her own. Still, I firmly believed that it was just a matter of finding the right girl, and that someday I’d find her and marry her and we’d have kids and the whole bit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this little spring-into-summer affair with Eileen would actually be my last shot at that, since it would be my last relationship with a woman.

  Having said good-bye to Eileen, I went off to Advanced Camp. One of the most exciting things for me during college was experiencing what it was like to be in the field as a soldier. Every year up to this point we’d been sent to West Point for a weekend training exercise. These training exercises and our weekly classes were basically preparation for what is now called National Advanced Leaders Camp. When I went, though, it was called simply Advanced Camp.

  Scheduled during the summer between the ROTC cadet’s junior and senior years of college, it is the culmination of everything the cadet has learned up to that point and, more important, serves as an evaluating tool for the military. Cadets are rated on a scale of one to five, a one meaning you’re simply not cut out to be a soldier, a five meaning you’re the cadet equivalent of an Eisenhower. This score plus your GPA determines whether or not you’re placed on active duty. The camp also gives the cadet the chance to experience a little bit of every branch of the army so that he or she can decide where they most want to serve.

  Today the camp is held only at Fort Lewis, Washington, but when I went they had Advanced Camp at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well. I was sent to Fort Bragg. The whole experience was a nonstop adrenaline rush: constant activity played to a loud hard-rock sound track that included songs like “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and “Hell’s Bells.” Typical components were: Basic Rifle Marksmanship, Fire Support, Machine Gun Training, Hand Grenade Assault Course, and Confidence Training (Rappel, Obstacle Course, etc.).

  It was at Advanced Camp that I first developed my lifelong obsession with being a paratrooper. The Eighty-second Airborne assigned a brigade to Advanced Camp every year. It was with the Airborne that I formed my first real impression of the army away from cadet land and a better appreciation of what I was in for if I wanted to go on active duty.

  The most powerful experience I had while at Advanced Camp occurred about halfway through the course. It was a hot and clear Carolina day. As we made our way through an obstacle course on one of the western ranges, it felt as if the sun were getting closer to us with each step, beating down on us without mercy. In addition to the heat, this particular obstacle course made the afternoon feel like a crucible in which we were being tested mightily. The course included a timed portion that took us through a deep, muddy trench lined on both sides by sergeants barking at us like mad dogs. Coming out of the trench, I found myself covered head to toe in filth and smelling pretty bad, but feeling, somehow, exhilarated, as if I’d reached a new level of endurance. After the trench, there was a five-story tower. As we’d been instructed, I climbed to the top and slid down the long wire on the other side, letting go at just the moment we’d been trained to, and dropping down into the cool stream below. It was great to be in the water, feeling all the dirt slide off my tired, sweaty body. I relaxed for a moment and tried to actually enjoy it until one of the cadre above started yelling at me to get out of the way so that the guys behind me didn’t fall on top of me. As I swam downstream to the rendezvous point I suddenly heard behind me at the drop point a loud crack followed by a dull kind of thud. I turned back to the hanging wire and saw, on the jagged outcrop of rock that stuck out just below the tower, the crumpled body of a cadet who must’ve been just behind me. I waited for him to stand up, to roll over, anything, but he just lay there motionless, and I started getting an awful sinking feeling in my gut. I tried to see if I recognized him, but the way his body was twisted away from me I couldn’t make out a face. I was frozen there in the cool stream, treading water, transfixed by the scene transpiring in front of me. “Get up, get up, fuckhead, get up,” I heard myself saying, under my breath, pushing the water out around me harder and harder. But he still wasn’t moving, and I began to realize it was probably very, very serious. I can’t remember how long I stayed there, treading that black water. I remember thinking, I can’t move; I can’t look away, until he moves, until he gets up. But he didn’t move, no matter how much I willed him to, and the water seemed to grow colder and colder until I started losing feeling in my feet. Just as they reached him and began to survey his injuries and take his vitals, making sure not to move his body, I was yanked out of my state by the brusque voice of one of the cadre yelling at me to come out of the water and get with the group.

  I swam downstream. The sight of the kid’s body so impossibly arrayed across the rocks was terrifying. The image of his young, twisted body was immediately seared into my mind. I had never seen anything like it before, nothing even close, and I found myself getting a little queasy and a little short of breath as I pulled my body out of the water and joined the rest of the group. We sat silent, shivering, crestfallen, all the young, male energy that had filled the air just a few moments ago having instantly vanished. Deflated, barely able to look at one another, we waited quietly as they retrieved the boy’s body from the rocks. At one point I turned my head away from the recovery scene and looked at my fellow cadets sitting around me. Just a few moments earlier their faces had been the faces of young, vibrant men, invincible, eager to take on the world. Now all I saw were boys, little boys, some fighting tears, faced for the first time with evidence of their own mortality, evidence of their own limits, and most of all, the hard cold evidence of one of the most sobering realities of army life.

  After about a half hour, without any sort of explanation, they moved us downstream to the next site. It was hard, of course, to recapture the energy we’d had before the accident, to reinflate ourselves, so to speak, but that seemed to be what they expected, so we all did our best. As the afternoon progressed, the heavy-metal music they played through the loudspeakers to pump us up seemed callow and crass, a kind of mockery of the boy whose fate was still entirely unknown to us. I was distracted and sluggish the rest of the afternoon, unable to shake the image of the boy on the rock from my mind, and increasingly angered by the total silence coming from on high regarding the incident. By the end of the day I was so worked up that for the first time I found myself questioning whether or not I actually wanted to be an officer, whether or not the army life was actually the life for me.

  That evening the sergeant in charge of our platoon called a meeting to discuss the day and to assign the next day’s leadership positions. Before he could even start he was bombarded with questions about the accident. He tried to update us on the injured cadet’s condition and what had apparently caused the mishap, but we were all too worked up to absorb his rather clinical explanation. We started talking among ourselves, recounting our own reactions and thoughts. We were all feeling a little bit raw that night, some of us almost tearyeyed, and more clumsy with our feelings than usual. We needed more than the normal cut-and-dried response. The sergeant seemed to get it and listened to us patiently, murmuring reassurances, and when the geyser of emotion seemed to have run its course, he got straight to the point about the boy on the rock.

  “He’s alive, but, unfortunately, the word is the boy’s pretty fucked up,” he said. “They say he’ll probably never walk again. Spinal cord. N
ot much they can do.”

  Walking back to my bunk that night, I tried to process what he’d said and what I’d seen that afternoon and how I felt. Nothing seemed to want to come together. It just seemed so ludicrous, so enormously random and unfair. Now this boy of no more than twenty-two was doomed to spend his entire life in a wheelchair, his strong limbs left to shrivel away pathetically, all the freedom and vitality of his youth snatched away in an instant, without even as much as a peep of explanation from the universe.

  Accidents and death happen in every profession, I reminded myself; but I hadn’t chosen just any profession, I’d chosen the only one in which a pledge of your life, your very breath and blood, is a prerequisite. Is this what I really wanted? Advanced Camp was merely a training exercise. You’re not supposed to get killed or maimed or paralyzed in training. This was a fluke, this boy on the rock. I tried to comfort myself, lying in bed that night, but it wouldn’t work. The reality of my choice had been made clear. I’d have to be prepared for this sort of thing. If we ever went to war, it would no doubt be a lot worse. I was fast learning that there was a big difference between rhetoric and reality, and that life, and life in the army especially, is serious business indeed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Coins and Butter Bars

  The accident notwithstanding, my experience at Advanced Camp was overall a good one. I’d gone down to North Carolina thinking it would be a piece of cake and discovered it was pretty challenging. I ended up being evaluated as a three out of that possible five. Not bad, but no Eisenhower. I was disappointed, felt I could’ve gotten a four had I gone in a little more focused, and I caught hell from the cadre when I returned to school. But after a few ass-chewings they let the matter go. And for senior year, I was promoted to commander of the entire corps of cadets.

  By the time I officially started my senior year at Fordham, I’d already made up my mind that I wanted to serve in the infantry and go into the Eighty-second Airborne. I let the detachment commander know and asked him to do what he could for me. I even wrote a letter to the battalion saying that I wanted to serve with Second Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR). It turned out that I would actually serve with them a few years later, though in a different capacity. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. I felt pretty confident I was going to get what I wanted. But the army was short artillery men in the late eighties, so I ended up being assigned there. I was disappointed at first but then less so once I’d learned a bit more about the artillery. I was to report to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, two weeks after graduation.