Grunt Life (6 page)

As I stared at it, other people began to speak.

“I saw my best friend get shot through the face.”

I closed my eyes as I listened.

“She was standing next to me behind the sandbags,” came a female voice, raw with emotion. “She was telling me about her prom dress and how her stepmother had helped her get it, but she was too embarrassed to let her mother know. She turned to me and smiled, then a round came from nowhere and made her dead. There wasn’t even any fighting. We didn’t even know to be careful—I mean, we were always careful, but on that day we didn’t think about it. It was almost like we were regular people again. Is anyone even listening?”

I opened my eyes.

“I don’t know what good this damn thing is if no one listens.”

“I’m listening,” I said hesitantly. My voice was still rough with sleep. I cleared my throat and repeated myself.

“Oh,” came the voice, a little softer, a little less raw. “Sorry, I think it was my turn. I listened for a long time to get up my nerve.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“No names. Didn’t you read the rules?”

I lifted the tablet and saw the link for the Community Rules FAQ. I’d need to review them at some point.

“I just woke up,” I said.

“Well, it’s your turn if you want to.”

I thought about it. “I think I’ll just listen for awhile.”

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll listen for awhile, too, just to see if you want to talk about what it was that made you want to—”

“Kill myself?”

“Yeah.” She said in a breathy whisper. “That.”

I thought of a dozen things to say, but none of them held the appropriate gravitas. I’d always deflected seriousness with humor, and death was no different. In fact, I’d pushed death even farther away with jokes that everyone used, making fun of the termination of life like it was the turning of the page in a book.

As I thought about this, someone else spoke up.

I glanced at the screen. I noticed the text beneath
COMMUNICATIONS TREE
read
SUICIDE 101
. Beside this was another branch of the tree which read
DEPRESSION 101
for those who were so locked in their own holes they hadn’t thought to commit suicide.

“I ran into traffic,” began the voice of a somber man. “I thought I’d timed it just right. It was a big delivery truck. But when the asshole saw me, he swerved.” It was a moment before the voice continued. “I learned later it was a mother and her two children he crashed into. Their names were Mary and Brett Sykes and they were in sixth and seventh grade.” A longer pause. “How do you live knowing that even when you tried to kill yourself you killed other people?”

The silence on the line was resounding. No one dared answer the unanswerable question. Finally, the voice said, “Thank you,” and was gone.

It was soon replaced by what sounded like a young black man. “The sound of someone screaming with their legs missing is something I go to sleep with every night. Even when I listen to music, it’s there, in the background, some sort of instrument torturing the notes into the same fucking sound.”

I stood and tossed my Bluetooth onto the bed. I wasn’t ready for a notional Kumbaya group hug. Mention of the deaths everyone else was responsible for brought mine front-and-center. It didn’t matter what barriers I’d constructed. The memories slid past and confronted me.

Brian, Jim, Frank, Steve, Lashonne, Mike, Mike 2, Isaiah, Jesus, Todd, and Nathan all pushed and prodded for attention. Eleven friends, eleven comrades, eleven soldiers with whom I’d served and fought and laughed and cried and cursed the universe. The relationships in war are like none other. When you’re scared and the world is shooting at you, your love for the soldier next to you is so transfigured that only those who’ve been there can really understand. I once tried to explain that to a psychologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He strung together a dozen or so ten-dollar words to express the simple fact that warriors on the battlefield love their friends more than their own lives. We do this without knowing it or acknowledging it. We’d rather we died so that they might live.

So the idea that I’d survived eleven instances of friends dying, eleven separate times where someone I’d loved more than myself passed forcibly from this life into another, felt like a God-wielded ball-peen hammer to the soul.

And they wanted me to fucking talk about it?

Might as well give me a knife and let me stab myself over and over. That would hurt less than having to relive the violent deaths of eleven men who were, each and every one, better than me. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the ear bud for several minutes. Then I took it and placed it on one of the recessed shelves. I went back to the bed and picked up the tablet, and scrolled until I found the rules for
Suicide 101
. A strain of unwanted music filled my head as Blue Öyster Cult sang about forty thousand men and women everyday who killed themselves. What was so bad? I mean if the pain got to the point where it was unbearable, why not deliver yourself from it? I found what I was looking for, and as I read, my chin sank deeper into my chest. I had to
bear witness
before I could move onto the next step.

Fucking mindjacked!

I dropped the tablet on the bed as explosions shook the surface of my mind, rounds whizzed past my head, a helicopter swooped in from somewhere and crashed. I staggered to the other side of the room, put my back against the wall, and sank to the floor. I let my arms dangle over my knees as I stared across the room with slitted eyes, barely able to see the Bluetooth over the horizon of my many dead.

Rodney came and went.

Whichever meal it was, I skipped it. It wasn’t the first time. The robot waited a moment, beeped a few times, then moved on.

And I continued staring.

During the entire time I was trying not to relive anything. I was trying to make my mind a blank. But like that old trick where you tell someone not to think of a white horse, all I could think of was what I was trying not to remember. But my mind was getting it wrong. Frank died from a sniper, but in my mind he was run over by a tank. Lashonne was hit with an RPG, but in my head he was shot by a platoon of five-year-olds with Kalashnikovs. The more I tried not to think about them, the more my mind rebelled. It was that damned, overwhelming sense of responsibility I had for them.

Mike 2 knew it better than all of them. He’d been a Baptist preacher, married with three kids in some podunkity place in Arkansas when he’d figured out one day that he was gay and couldn’t continue to live the life he lived. He divorced his wife, gave her everything, resigned from the church, and joined the Army. He could have come in as a chaplain’s assistant, but he became a grunt like me. When I asked him why, he said, “I was once a foot soldier for Christ, now I’m a foot soldier for the American people. I think both them and Christ are pretty much oblivious to my dedication, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is in here,” he’d said pointing at his heart.

That same heart gave out during a skirmish in Karbala. Mike 2 was thirty-four when he joined. He’d lost sixty pounds and was in perfect condition. But his heart had been the victim of years’ investment in pastries and wine and didn’t reflect his current state.

I held him as he died. He joked about the movie
Heathers
, where the burly father says to a church filled with people,
I love my dead gay son
.

When he saw I was crying, he cupped my face and I looked at him and in that moment, I loved him more than anyone else in the world.

“This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault. People die. Shit happens. Don’t be that fucker who survives and feels guilty. If you survive, you should live. In Corinthians, it says,
Be sorrowful, but always rejoice
.
Rejoice in the idea that we died with you by our side. We died with your friendship
.”

And then he passed.

I realized I’d been blubbering for some time. I wasn’t sure how long, but a pool of tears had gathered on the floor between my feet. I rubbed my nose with the back of an arm and got up and walked across the room. I grabbed the ear bud and put it in. I waited silently for the person who was speaking to stop.

When they did, I began. And I told them about my friends. And I told them how much I loved them. And then I told them about the bridge and what I’d tried to do.

And then it was someone else’s turn.

The alien culture in C.J. Cherryh’s
Faded Sun
trilogy is very similar to the Muslim culture. Do you believe that if every soldier had read this before combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, their reactions to those countries’ peoples and customs would be different?

TF OMBRA Study Question

CHAPTER NINE

C
ATHARSIS.

An Army chaplain explained it as going through an event which transforms you. My platoon sergeant said it was like being eaten whole by a lion and coming out the other end more or less intact. Regardless of how one described the word, it meant pain, pain, pain, then an acceptance of pain, then spending your entire life attempting to live with a journey you never asked for but finally understood.

I’d stood with my head leaning against my cell for hours, staring at the great expanse of floor. I stood there long enough for the cold to creep into my brain, numbing it. I stood there long enough for Rodney to come again and see if I was hungry, then leave with a few somber beeps. I stood there long enough to see another of our merry troop of world saviors be dragged across the floor, his hair sliding behind him and leaving a trail of blood as our all-purpose robot pulled him indelicately by his heels across the wide, empty floor and through the door in the far wall, before returning to clean away the evidence.

I went back to my bunk and lay on the ground so that I could see the wire. Catharsis. Eaten by the war, shit out the other side, and left to stink by the side of the road. Lion shit. That was me all over. What was clearer than any other feeling was the hatred I felt for myself.

I gripped the underside of the bed. My hands slipped off the mattress at first and I had to find just the right hand holds. Finally, I was able to pull myself up in a reverse pushup so that the end of the bent wire was a mere inch from my eyeball. I was strong and fit, so holding myself wasn’t an issue. All it would take was a solid jerk and I could put the piece of wire through my eye. If I hesitated, or if I didn’t commit, I’d just blind myself. I had to pull hard. A solid jerk, like a pull up, would do it; as long as I could jam the wire deep enough into my brain it would free me from my friends. I said goodbye to Mike, Mike 2, Jesus, Todd, Isaiah, Nathan, Steve, Frank, Lashonne, Jim and Brian. I said goodbye to their memories, to their stories of home and their favorite movies and books, to their favorite foods, their tales of sexual conquest and pretences at prowess, to their fears and loneliness, their family photos, their service to their country, to their friendship and their death.

Then I jerked upwards.

Or I wanted to.

Death has many faces and I’ve seen hundreds of them. Some people believe in angels, some believe in devils, but as far as I knew, no one believed in a robot named Rodney. As I lay wracked with emotion, barely able to breathe, Rodney stood silent at the bars of my cage, my anthropomorphic needs creating a nurturing and tender being in the place of the logic-brained metal and silicon construct who was as much our jailer as he was our feeder. He didn’t beep. He didn’t buzz. He just stared.

Catharis.

Lion food.

Lion shit.

When the edge of self-pity stole into my grief, I found my way to my feet. It was hard at first, but I finally made it, like a drunken sailor getting his balance on the high seas.

And Rodney was still there.

Realization crept into my thoughts. Rodney wasn’t there to help me. It was a machine. It was there to remove me, like a piece of trash.

“What?” I shouted.

Nary a beep.

“What the fuck do you want, you fucking R2D2-wannabe? What are you waiting for, you mechanical vulture? You want to drag another one of us out? You want to witness us at our very fucking worst?”

I ran at the bars. I slammed into them before I could grab him, of course. My nose exploded with blood. Instead of covering it with my hands, I gripped the bars with the power invested in me from three wars, eleven deaths and a lifetime of suicidal thoughts.

“You know!” I craned back my head and laughed. As it rang through our prison, it slid towards a cackle. But I couldn’t help it. The realization was too much. “You know about the wire! What is it? Did Mr. Pink and the rest of you have a pool? Was I next? Were you waiting for me to kill myself so you could pass each other money and laugh about how fucked up we are?”

“Shut the fuck up,” someone yelled.

“Fuck you! You shut the fuck up, you fucking fuck!” I glared at Rodney, now fully anthropomorphized into everyone I ever hated. “You think a few sad tales of woe from the rest of these suicidal rejects is going to make me end it all? Do you really think I’d be so weak that I’ll kill myself just to pleasure your sadistic ideas of saving the world? Hey, I have an idea. Let’s pick the most fucked-up soldiers from every corner of the planet right at the moment they’re about to kill themselves, then tell them they can save the world, only to lock them up in some godforsaken prison beneath the most godforsaken state anyone’s never been from. And hey! Just to make sure, let’s have each of our sorry asses weep into a magic tablet that can cure all of our wounds if only we believe that we deserve to live, that our friends deserved to die, and that God didn’t make some immense fucking mistake, you know, like he did when he invented cyanide, midget bowling, internet porn and starving people in Africa.”

“Dude, we can hear you,” a man’s voice shouted.

“Will you please shut up?” someone else said, the words barely intelligible amidst her sobbing.

I backed away from the bars. My hands and arms were shaking. I felt something wet on my face. I reached up and wiped away blood from my nose.