Major Conflict Read online

  “Hey, pretty white boy, whatchuwant?” one toward the far end yelled. “You come to make love with an African goddess?” she went on, and then laughter scattered through the hallway.

  “Why you so quiet?” another one said, then, “Girls—they look so nervous!”

  “We have to calm ’em down,” the girl next to her said, laughing with her friend.

  Nervous was an understatement. Maybe the first two floors were a ploy, I thought, set up to lure in unsuspecting idiot white boys like me for the entertainment of the wild she-devils up on the third floor. As I tried to look cool, though sweat was now dripping from my forehead, and make my way down the hallway, one of the women reached out, grabbed my crotch, and held on, firmly. I turned my head abruptly and looked at her. She was smiling big, a Madonna-like gap between her two front teeth.

  “Hey GI, wanna fock?” she said, still smiling, and still holding on to my crotch.

  I was momentarily stunned. My mind raced, what the hell did “fock” mean? Fock, fuck, I thought, right, I got it. I tried to regain my composure and answer her as politely as possible.

  “No, thank you,” I said, sounding, I’m sure, like the whitest GI on the face of the planet. “I have a girlfriend, but thanks, thank you very much.”

  This was completely untrue, of course, and the girl didn’t care one way or the other. She tightened her grip on my crotch and started massaging me, and I felt myself starting to get hard. I pushed her hand away and walked on, feeling humiliated, and the laughter and yelling grew louder.

  “He got one a dem skinny white tings?” one of the shorter girls yelled. She was kind of plump and had had her hair straightened. She was laughing so hard it looked as if tears were streaming down her face, and when someone else yelled, “Not so skinny on a big guy like dat!” She collapsed into the arms of another girl, whose shoulders were shaking from laughter.

  “You gonna tell your girl you made love to a goddess?” said another, with arms akimbo and a look of truly venomous sarcasm across her face that made me think of what battery acid does to a car hood.

  “Go home and tell her to come back wit you and we teach her a couple a tricks.”

  Zach bumped into me then, as if he’d tripped, and kind of pushed us both through the door onto the stairwell. We stood for a moment, laughing at ourselves, Zach with his back up against the door as if to keep the women from chasing us.

  “Geez-o-peets,” Zach said, “what the fuck was that?”

  “Yeah, I know, they kicked our ass, didn’t they?”

  “Geez-o-peets, Christ, I feel like a log on a table saw,” he said. “You want to check out the fourth floor or just give it up?”

  I looked at him steadily. A part of me just wanted to get the hell out of there but curiosity got the better of me.

  “Let’s do one more floor,” I said finally. “But if it’s as fucked up as this one, last man out buys beers.”

  So up we went to the fourth floor. A sense of deep relief washed over me as we entered the floor. It was quiet here. There was a kind of dismal tranquillity to everything. All the women were Asian. A few were quietly chatting among themselves, but most were simply standing or sitting, waiting. The scent of coriander and ginger hung heavily in the air. Despite their reserved manner it looked as though these Asian girls specialized in the more exotic sexual activities. Every room was outfitted with a swing and a lot of bizarre leather equipment. Halfway down the hall Zach suddenly stopped in front of a particularly beautiful Chinese girl. She was maybe five feet two inches, with long shiny black hair and a petite, nicely proportioned body. She had a squarish face with high cheekbones that gave her a kind of serene dignity. Her eyes were soft and a little bit sad.

  I listened to Zach negotiate with her. Her voice was soft when she spoke to Zach in just barely passable English, though harsher and much louder when she was interrupted by two of the other girls and forced to reply, first in German, and then in Chinese. I heard her tell Zach she was from Hong Kong. Behind us, one of the other girls said something in Chinese, and everyone starting giggling. I began to sweat again, thinking of the floor down below, but the giggling soon ran its polite course and petered out.

  “So how much will it be?” Zach said

  “Pipty mahk for bof.”

  “Both? Both what?”

  “Suck n fock.”

  “Okay, and . . . okay,” Zach stumbled over the words a little.

  “Anything you want, you ask an ah give you plice.”

  “No, what you said first, that’ll be okay,” Zach said, and he walked into the room past her. She quickly turned around and closed the door behind her.

  Meanwhile, I suddenly found myself standing alone in the hallway, blinking like an owl. The other girls seemed to be eyeballing me now with renewed intensity.

  “Hey, GI, you wanna have fun? Whassa matter? You no look so good.”

  I looked hard at them, unsure what to do, and I guess I must’ve looked pretty intense.

  “Oooh,” one of the girls said. “He bery mad, I think. Wha happen . . . you wanna go in room wif friend. Jus knock is all right.”

  “Hey, you come here I make better,” another one said.

  “Smile, it not so bad,” said a third. “We give special for the soldier, bery special for the American soldier. You soldier boy?”

  At that moment I knew I had to get out of there. It would be too humiliating to just stand there and wait for Zach. I fixed my gaze on the light above the door at the end of the hall and walked resolutely toward it. I felt like shit. My emotions were all mixed together, and I couldn’t make sense of anything. I guess I hadn’t really expected Zach to actually do anything. Part of me thought he was just plain stupid for doing it, but another part of me gave him credit for being so fearless. He was a good-looking guy, and for a fleeting moment I saw his ass again on the stairs and wondered what he would look like doing it with the girl from Hong Kong. But then I felt guilty about having this thought and pushed it from my mind. Being here in the whorehouse was hard for me because I couldn’t be in the moment. I found myself getting angry that I felt pressured to take a girl myself. Deep down I knew that what I wanted simply wasn’t here. And I resented the fact that it seemed so easy for Zach.

  Suddenly, standing there in the midst of all these beautiful Asian prostitutes, an American soldier they said they’d treat special, I felt like an enormous fraud. It was the same feeling of fraudulence and in-authenticity I’d experience a few years later while I was waiting for a plane in full uniform at La Guardia Airport in New York. A woman approached me holding the hands of her two young sons. The boys, both of whom looked to be about five or six—they may have been twins—trailed a half step behind their mother, as if they were afraid of where she was dragging them. By the time she reached me she had a big smile on her face, and she quickly introduced herself and then pulled her sons forward to shake my hand. The boys came to me shyly but then beamed when I shook their tiny hands. The woman said her sons had never met a real soldier before. I knelt down when one of the boys asked a question and stayed there while the other boy asked another; when they both seemed satisfied, I stood up and shook the mother’s hand. The mother thanked me and took her sons back to their seats in the waiting area, and I was left standing there feeling like a million bucks. But it was a hollow feeling; something wasn’t quite right. I knew that her wanting her sons to meet me had nothing to do with me personally. It was the uniform, which, in many people’s minds, still stands for all the ideals of a great democracy, and it is for little boys, and now, increasingly, little girls as well, a clear representation of something they can aspire to be.

  On career day in the fifth grade, say, there is the policeman, the fireman, the soldier, the teacher, and on and on. Becoming one of those things is presented almost as if it’s an existential choice, as if that is what you’ll actually be, as opposed to what you will, in fact, simply do. As they began to announce preboarding for my flight, the hollow feeling seemed
to deepen. It occurred to me that when I was in my uniform, I felt as if I were onstage, as if I were an actor performing a role. This in itself is not such a bad thing, really. It’s the one of the things that assure the smooth functioning of the military, in fact—clear-cut roles, duties, privileges, places within a strictly defined hierarchy of titles and responsibilities. But maybe I’d taken it too far. I’d come to believe that I was, above all, a soldier, rather than simply a man who happened to have made a career out of soldiering. I’d become the role, and because I perceived the role of soldier and homosexuality as mutually exclusive, I’d manage to forfeit one of the most important aspects of myself.

  Rushing out of the whorehouse into the Frankfurt street that day back in 1989, I tried to shake all the unease from my mind. I sprinted down the street, trying to physically outrun my feelings, to sweat out the desires, to run back to myself. I don’t know how far I ran, but it seemed like miles. When I finally stopped, exhausted, sweaty, I felt calm again. I reminded myself firmly that I would have a family one day. I reminded myself that if I kept thinking about men, that wouldn’t happen, at least not in the way I’d imagined it.

  Back on the bus that day I was talking to one of the sergeants when Zach came running up. He bounded up the stairs, came down the aisle, and sat down next to us, smiling and breathing hard. His hair was disheveled and his face was red.

  “Missed you, buddy,” he said. “Where’d you get off to?”

  “I got bored,” I said, “so I thought I’d just come back to the bus.”

  “And just where, pray tell,” asked the sergeant, “did you two fine gentlemen spend the day?”

  He was looking directly at me. My face went blank. Zach took a deep breath and said, quickly, “We just walked around, basically.”

  The sergeant looked at us curiously. His looked seemed to indicate that he, too, had seen the inside of one of the apartment buildings in the red-light district that day.

  “Yeah,” I said firmly, “we just . . . walked around.”

  Riding back on the bus that Friday afternoon, it occurred to me that my formal education as a soldier had finally come to an end. No longer a cadet in training, Monday morning I would report to the Headquarters and Service Battery with the title fire support officer (FSO).

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Meeting the Troops

  The day after the Frankfurt trip with Zach and the orientation class, I reported to headquarters to meet my new boss and fire support sergeant. I’d been assigned to a Fire Support Team (FIST), the group responsible for calling for artillery fire for a particular infantry company. We were attached to A Company, Third Battalion of the Fifth Cavalry, which was a mechanized infantry company consisting of fourteen Bradley fighting vehicles.

  My unit was to be deployed in three days as part of Exercise Centurion Shield, the latest iteration of the REFORGER exercise (more about this later). It was mind-boggling to me the way the unit shifted into action, making all the last-minute preparations to load the track vehicles onto the flatbed trains so they could be transported to the “maneuver box,” the name given to the area of the country in which the exercise would take place.

  And it wasn’t just my unit, of course. As I walked across the post on that cool October morning I saw that the whole place was frantic with preparations, the kaserne having been transformed into a virtual hive of activity. Every unit was out in front of its barracks, conducting thorough inspections of every single piece of equipment in its possession. The normally placid motor pools, row after row of huge tanks, silent behemoths parked snugly one right up against the next in order to save space, were all out of place, jutting out at odd angles, surrounded by equipment and the soldiers who were making adjustments and repairs. Troops laughed and joked as they prepared for the maneuver, packing up equipment, changing tires, checking oil—a flurry of dipsticks going up and down like the pistons of an engine, the whole thing working so smoothly and with such precision it really did seem like a well-oiled machine.

  For a moment, walking past the railhead, I suddenly felt as if I were in an old Hollywood war movie. Everything seemed to be working so well it almost felt choreographed, as railcars slowly and ponderously backed up to the platform under the careful supervision of a sergeant wearing a fluorescent safety vest. As each car gently made contact with the thick rubber blocks placed there to protect the cement structure, a soldier walked onto the flatbed and began the process of guiding his vehicle onto the car, using a carefully defined set of hand signals. Once in place, enormous chains were applied to the front and back of the vehicle and then ratcheted down. Though the whole process was done slowly and with a kind of steady precision, it wasn’t quite what I’d imagined. Everything seemed to lack the pomp and formality all my training had taught me to expect. Looking back now, I realize I was still very much the cadet at this point, still very much wrapped up in the romance of army formalities and too invested in the rhetoric of soldiering to appreciate fully the reality of army life. These people preparing for Exercise Centurion Shield weren’t playing at soldiering, they were actually doing a job, they were working. Their uniforms weren’t perfectly pressed and starched; some were actually a little ratty and covered in oil and grease. There was little, none in fact, of the self-consciousness that so often accompanies the activities of cadets in training. No, I wasn’t in a movie, after all.

  My life as a cadet was finally over. This was the real world at last. I spent the next six months unlearning a lot of what I’d been taught during my four years of training and learning how to translate the rest into a language I could actually use and apply to my real job as a second lieutenant.

  When I reached headquarters the duty NCO (noncommissioned office) directed me to the FIST office down the hall. It was a large, spacious office that would be my home for the next year or so. I took a seat self-consciously and waited for about ten minutes when suddenly I heard voices in the hall. They were talking loudly and laughing, and they seemed to be coming my way. I got anxious for the first time, thinking about the fact that whomever I was going to meet would probably be reporting to me.

  In walked a tall blond staff sergeant with a full mustache, followed by an even taller NCO with light brown hair and a huge dip of tobacco stuck in his lower lip. Behind them was a major. He was shorter then the two NCOs. He was also one of the fittest men I’d ever seen in my life.

  “Ah, fresh meat!” the major said with a broad smile. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, Mac,” he said, a little ironically, extending his hand to me, “John Taglia here.”

  “Jeff McGowan,” I said, a little hesitantly, caught off guard by his casualness. Since I was the lower-ranked officer it would have been customary for me to report to him. None of that seemed to matter to him, though. He waved his hand through the air as if pushing away a cloud of formality and quickly got down to business, jabbing a finger at the two smiling sergeants standing on either side of him.

  “This is Staff Sergeant Reid,” he said, pointing to the big blond, “your team chief, and this is Staff Sergeant McNeil,” he went on, pointing to the tobacco chewer. “Same battalion but with Bravo Company. Both of them are total and complete scoundrels, and you’ll learn a lot from them. All right,” he said, smacking me on the shoulder and winking, “go get your cherry popped. I’ve got a meeting,” and he turned quickly on his heel and walked out, leaving me standing there, smiling like an idiot, not sure what to do.

  Staff Sergeant McNeil cleared his throat and extended his hand.

  “Hey, sir, welcome aboard,” he said. I shook his hand. I liked McNeil right away. He struck me as being competent and smart, and he had a genuine warmth that put me at ease.

  “Welcome, sir,” Staff Sergeant Reid joined in, putting out his hand. “How was the trip? And inprocessing?”

  “Everything went really well,” I said, “no problems at all. So what’s next?”

  “Come with us to the motor pool and you can meet the team. Tomorrow I’ll take you to A Compan
y, where I’ll introduce you to the commander.”

  McNeil broke off from us as we approached the line of vehicles, letting us know that he had some business with the maintenance technician. When Reid and I arrived at our team vehicle, the engine cover was open and a rag was lying on the lip of the hood. The laser was in its upright configuration. Two of the team were on top doing something with the compartment that held the laser while another guy was packing large, heavily padded boxes into the back.

  “All right, guys,” Reid said, “gather round and meet the new lieutenant.”

  For a moment everyone simply stopped what they were doing and looked up, first at Reid, then at me. Then slowly they began to walk to the front of the vehicle and form a line. In a way, I’d been waiting all my life for this moment, being presented as an officer to the group of men I’d lead. For the guys on the team, though, it was just another distraction in an otherwise long day. I found myself feeling awkward and clumsy and unsure how to hold my body in place. A part of me wanted to smile and laugh and treat them like new friends, put them at ease, but I reminded myself that I was in charge now, and that that wouldn’t be appropriate. So I opted instead for a kind of professional aloofness that I thought made me look authoritative, but actually made me look, I’m almost certain, like a bit of a pompous, insincere asshole.

  I went down the line and shook hands—too hard, I realized afterward—with every guy on the team, and listened to them tell me their names. Privates all, and most of them relatively new to the unit and not used to being around an officer; they seemed a little cautious, eyeing me as if I were a strange curiosity. The appearance of an officer was so rare in the daily lives of these guys that it usually served only to raise the tension level and get in the way of the work at hand.