Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

Or not waiting. The women back home were always posting pictures of the fun they were having on Facebook, where anyone could see them in their low-cut dresses, raising their glasses and blowing kisses (“This one’s for you, honey!”), which made the men crazy because it was hard to tell the difference between passing-the-time-’til-you’re-home-baby prowling and a full-bore, cat’s-away, see-ya-later-buster hunt, and anyway, what were they going to do about it here?

Danny wiped his fingerprints off the barrel with a ragged chamois cloth, the sweaty skin of his massive forearms shining more brightly than the metal of the gun, and then he ambled around the corner into the yard just in time to see Corporal Joe Kelly climb up on the hood of a Toyota flatbed pickup and bow his head as if in prayer. But something about how Kelly’s muscles were twitching told Danny that prayer was the last thing on his mind. Even when Pig Eye climbed up beside him, Kelly faced ahead and slightly down, not turning the way Pig Eye turned to check on who was watching and not smiling or catching anyone’s eye before ramming his fist into the bone-dry air just as Captain Sinclair opened the sagging canvas door of his office and stepped out into the yard, followed by Velcro, whereupon both men jumped down, but not before a television crew that was passing through camp on its way to Tikrit caught the incident on tape and afterward went around asking the soldiers what the stop-loss orders meant for them.

Having an audience fired Le Roy up again, and he repeated his incendiary message into the microphone and also to a truckload of new recruits who drove up looking both shocked and optimistic. But by dinnertime, the furor was dying down and the men trooped off to eat, anger already giving way to resignation.

Danny watched the scene unfold from a corner of the yard, trying to remember the last lines of a Shelley poem that might sum up what he was feeling, if a creeping sense of desolation and inadequacy shot through with a deeply percolating anger was even subject to summation. He knew that most anger was born of misunderstanding, and he wanted to understand. More than that, he wanted to fit in. But he had never fit in, not in school, where he had wanted to study literature, and not in the army, which was why he had been transferred to the logistics unit and why, if he had asked Kelly the proper technique and thrust his own fist into the air and called him and Pig Eye “brother” or whatever the proper word was in order to let them know he shared their disappointment, they would have stared at him without a speck of comprehension. He understood that their identity in a funny way depended on his, and his was alien to them, which was just the way they wanted it. Men like Kelly wanted solidarity and separateness at the same time. It would have filled him with sadness if it hadn’t first filled him with other things, one of which was anger, but another of which was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“It’s not good enough to be an American anymore,” he said to Harraday, who was standing near him.

“What?” asked Harraday. “I’m with them. This stop-loss bullshit really sucks.”

Harraday spat and walked off, and Danny would have given anything to have an exclusive hand gesture to wave in Harraday’s face, a gesture that defined the knife-edge of identity and proved to Harraday that, whatever Harraday was, Danny wasn’t that.

Instead of going to dinner, Danny made his way to the latrine, where he took off his uniform jacket and carefully rolled the sleeves of his T-shirt in overlapping folds, which made his bulging biceps look almost as big as, if a little softer than, Kelly’s biceps looked when he rolled his sleeves the same way. Danny glanced behind him to make sure he was alone, listening carefully for the sound of footsteps on the packed earth outside the door. But most of the troops were in the DFAC and all was quiet. He stood at attention in front of the rectangular sheet of metal that served for a mirror and searched his face for signs of what he was thinking and was glad when he couldn’t find any. Then he took a deep breath and thrust his fist into the air. The exposed ridge of arm muscle hardened, and for a moment he didn’t recognize himself. His gray eyes darkened a shade closer to black, and his brows soared above his nose like the wings of a raptor.

Danny was startled to find that the gesture had both an outside and an inside. All he had known of it before was what it had looked like when someone else did it and also that it had worried him, the kind of worry that turned to anger before you knew it was really fear. But now, standing in the latrine where the only observer was a tinny mirror image of himself, he felt the adrenaline rush and almost understood what Kelly and Pig Eye had been thinking when they had practiced the gesture on the rest of the battalion. He could almost feel, rising within him, a big Fuck You to the war.

2.4 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy had to laugh. All he had to do was say “slave labor” and everyone’s panties were in a twist. He had to laugh at the fresh, unbaked faces of the new recruits, who didn’t know the first thing about war but were about to find out. And there was Pig Eye, waving a torn envelope and wondering now that the US of A had them in Iraq, was it allowed to keep them there?

“Shit, man, they can do anything they want,” said Le Roy. “Isn’t proving that the point of the war?”

“But,” said Pig Eye, and then he just stood with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out and the letter hanging limp at his side.

“Slave labor,” he said to Kelly, and it was a beautiful thing to see that man’s muscles tense and his eyes become hard and dense, like if you touched Kelly’s trigger, they’d come shooting out of their sockets straight at you. Kelly could be a politician, the way people automatically looked in his direction — if he could control his temper, that is. If he could control his mouth.

Velcro said, “Nobody here cares what color you are, Jones. You have to go back home for that.” But Velcro was like an android, strictly by the book. If something wasn’t written down in a manual, Velcro didn’t know about it. So Le Roy said, “Slave labor” to the new recruits, and he laughed to see their jaws drop open and their eyes go wide. Jeezus, it was funny. What did they think they were getting into? What did they fucking think?

It was funny until a current of something that wasn’t quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E’Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere — and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn’t yet found a new body to inhabit.

So it was natural Le Roy thought of E’Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E’Laine’s energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false, he couldn’t deny that the tremor coursing through him was more than an idle premonition. It was as if the mood of the world had changed or the air molecules were bunching up and crowding in on him. He’d felt that way before — in moments of despair, but also in moments of wild but unrealistic hope. Like the time his computer science teacher had asked, “Have you ever thought about college, boy?” The question had caused the atmospheric molecules to shift and part, and Le Roy had seen a path to a different future, a path that lingered in his imagination long after the teacher forgot all about the college talk. He didn’t meet anyone so optimistic about his future again until that army recruiter had said, “You interested in computers, son? Damn right we can teach you that.”