Repo Men (4 page)

A
short quiz on the nature of battle:

Soldiers are…

A) Prepared to die


B) Willing to die


C) Eager to die


D) All of the above


E) None of the above

The teacher’s edition they use in today’s Corps gives the answer as choice E. A soldier is nothing but an overgrown ragamuffin conscripted into a duty his adolescent brain can neither fully comprehend nor appreciate, and as such cannot be prepared, willing, or eager to do anything regarding his insignificant life. A soldier, they say, has nothing more than the knowledge that he will, potentially, be killed, and, more important, the belief that it will never happen to him. This is the Holy Grail of the military. Preparedness, willingness, and eagerness will always pale next to the mighty force of an irrational and unsupported faith.

The war was a bitch.

I’d love to type that without cracking a smile, but I can’t. The war wasn’t a bitch, despite what you might have heard; it was a bore at worst, a momentary diversion from real life at best. Two years of my life spent in near darkness, my body yoga-twisted into all sorts of unnatural positions, eyes glued to an infrared screen that rarely showed signs of life, movement, or anything out of the goddamned ordinary. No wonder my eyesight has dropped through the bottom of the statistical average. Had I known then where I’d be today, I would have taken on some artiforg eyeballs—the new ones from Marshodyne have zoom capability of 200× and near-perfect color enhancement. Sweet little babies.

Of course, had I known then where I’d be today, I’d have taken on artiforgs for damn near every part of my failing body. What’s another twelve mil in debt when you’re already running from the Union? They can’t leave you any more dead.

Mother didn’t want me to sign up for the war. Father thought it was a grand idea. Thanks, Father. Mother said it was dangerous. Father said it would build character. Thanks, Father. Mother based her opinions on neighborhood gossip and rumor. Father based his on his own stubborn ideology. Both were wrong.

Example: The Kashekians were a Persian family that lived across the street. Persians are what Iranians living in America called themselves after the first Middle Eastern war. Since the end of those first little skirmishes, Middle Easterners found themselves being subjected to snide remarks and sidelong glances from librarians and grocery-store baggers who thought they were doing their patriotic duty by snubbing the foreign infidels. It was grassroots prejudice, by golly, and it sure divided the “us’s” from the “thems,” easy as pie. So some bright Iranian came up with the idea of retrofitting their name to their language, and after a while, people up and forgot that Persians were Iranian and Iranians were Persians and the shopping-mall persecution came to a close.

This was a blessing for all Persians, but particularly so for the Kashekians, who wanted nothing more than to blend in with their adopted culture. The elder Kashekian was the spitting image of George Washington, only swarthier, and he passed his overflowing enthusiasm onto his family, perhaps genetically. When they took patriotic craps on their patriotic bowls, there’s no doubt in my mind, their shit came out red, white, and blue. On national holidays, when my family would sit on our faded sleeper sofa, eat Italian takeout, and stare mindlessly at the endless parades on the television, the Kashekians waved flags, held barbecues, and sang the national anthem ad nauseam. Father had to physically restrain them from erecting a miniature Mount Rushmore in the middle of our block one particularly fervent Presidents’ Day. America was still the great melting pot, and they wanted nothing more than to be the representative feta.

Their son, Greg Kashekian, was two years ahead of me in school, and was as all-American as any Persian could hope to be. Football star, straight-A student, homecoming king, prom king, and president of the senior class. I thought he was something of a prick, but the rest of the student body obviously disagreed with my assessment. He kicked my dog once. No matter. Greg Kashekian graduated from high school with honors and only one illegitimate child and, in an effort to complete his patriotic duty, joined the military.

It was through Mrs. Kashekian that my mother obtained the majority of her information about the war. Hers was not a dispassionate viewpoint.

Greg Kashekian died on his eighteenth day in the desert, one of the seventy-five hundred and some odd deaths during the entire nine-year African war. His passing was a fluke, an accident, a needle-in-the-haystack coincidence that nevertheless convinced my mother that the deserts of Africa were a killing field, sand stained red with the blood of young American boys such as myself.

Mrs. Kashekian did nothing to alleviate the situation. “My boy was a war hero,” she told my mother. “He died in battle, saving the other boys in his platoon. He took a bullet for America.”

Beautiful. Not true, but beautiful. I saw the official report, the condolence letter sent to the Kashekians. They kept it locked in a hidden safe behind a staircase, beneath a chair, under a pull-away section of carpet. Why they kept it at all is beyond me; a good paper shredder would have done the trick.

The autumn that Greg died, I had the good fortune of going steady with his younger sister Tilly, a knockout in a summer sundress, and she showed me the letter one afternoon in a state of post-coital candor.

It went something like this:

A year later, Tig—Sergeant Tyrell Ignakowski—would tell me in the privacy of a desert tent that Greg Kashekian died because “the Iranian imbecile didn’t know his dick from an ejection lever.” Sarge never was one to mince words.

I remember the day they tweaked me.

They came to my high school in full military dress, shining knights all gussied up for the next crusade. I was in the back row of the lecture hall, cracking jokes with Jake and a sixth-year senior we all called Turtle, but those dress whites shut me up right away—the glitter of the brass buttons, the crisp folds of the lapels, the blazing insignia on the left breast. This was power. Authority incarnate. Suddenly, they had as much of my undivided attention as my raging hormones would allow. Stacey Greenberg was sitting two rows down, and watching her cross and recross her legs took up at least a fifth of my brain, but otherwise, I was rapt.

“The military is not for everyone,” they told us. “It’s a special job, for special people.” I swelled with anticipatory pride. Only later did I learn that the students who had been called to the assembly had been culled from a list of the decidedly average—no failing grades, no honors classes. Lucky me, I fit the bill perfectly. Aside from a few B+ grades in my sophomore and junior English classes—hey, a boy’s got to excel at something—I was Johnny Normal all the way. Cannon fodder, so to speak. But at the time I smiled inwardly, for I was going to be given the option of holding a
special
job and becoming a
special
person. Keen.

I excused myself from the back row and took a seat down in front.

Someone once said that it’s the special people who are first up against the wall when the shit hits the fan. This is as good a reason as I can think of for keeping your butt firmly planted in the back row of any lecture hall.

The recruiter’s name was Lieutenant Medieros, and he was the proud owner of one arm and one stump. The good lieutenant, it seems, had lost his left arm at some point during his esteemed military career. He didn’t say how. He didn’t say when. We accepted it. It wasn’t so strange back then to see someone walking around with an empty sleeve hanging off his shirt like a garment worker’s error—some war or another was always raging in some godforsaken part of the world, and only the wealthy could afford prostheses. The Credit Union, still in its infancy, had not yet opened wide the jeweled gates of mechanical rejuvenation to the poor and downtrodden working classes.

But the lieutenant had a voice like a bazooka and a knack for manipulation, and within ten minutes we were eating out of his remaining hand. He held us, rapt and wide-eyed, for a full half-hour, longer than any of our instructors had been capable of for the entire school year.

I took notes.

Places we would travel: Seven continents, seven seas.

People we would meet: First world, third world, developing cultures, savages, heads of state.

Things we would do: Train, exercise, hike, fight, play.

How we would do it: To the best of our abilities—further than we ever knew we could.

Why we would do it: For the love of America. For the love of democracy. For the love of freedom.

I believed every word.

After the assembly, Lieutenant Medeiros and his officers sat at a rickety card table outside the auditorium to answer any questions we might have concerning a career in the military. A husky boy with acne scars pocking his fleshy cheeks had cornered a command sergeant and edged him into a one-sided debate about current military policy in Southeast Asia. The second lieutenant, the only female in the group, was taking her time with three or four others of her ilk; I noticed Stacey Greenberg speaking quickly, earnestly within the small group, and wondered for a brief moment if she was talking about me.

But Lieutenant Medeiros was free. Rushing up to his table, startling the man with my sudden presence, I spat out, “Do you think I’d make a good soldier?” I made a show of flexing my puny muscles, though I doubt they gave the slightest ripple through my cotton shirt sleeves.

The lieutenant leaned back in his chair and gave me the once-over, clucking softly to himself. He cocked an eye, sizing me up like a prize hog at the county fair.

“You play a sport, son?”

“A sport, sir?”

“You got sports in this school, don’t you?” He glanced meaningfully toward the gym entrance across the hall.

“Oh, yes, sir. Lacrosse. I play lacrosse.”

“You any good?”

I shrugged. “We came in fourth in interstate competition.”

“Fourth, eh? That good enough to get you a college scholarship?” he asked me.

“I don’t…I don’t know. I don’t think so, sir.” This was the first time the word
scholarship
had ever been mentioned in my presence. It sent chills through me.

“Your family got enough money to send you to college on their own?”

“No, sir, we don’t.” Same old story—father working hard to keep our family in the middle of middle class, grip slipping on that rung with every passing day. “Doesn’t the military pay for your college education, sir?”

He ignored me. “You must have some other skills. You want to go into a trade, don’t you? Computers? Mechanic? There’s some awful good jobs for mechanics nowadays, if you have the right training.”

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered, trying to force a grin to my lips. “I think I might like something like that, but…I don’t really know. I think maybe first I’d like to see the world, like you were saying. Travel. With the Corps. I think I want to join the Corps.”
That’ll make him happy
, I thought. For those few minutes outside the auditorium, I wanted nothing more than to please this man, this magnificent creature of warfare wounded so nobly in the heat of battle.

It took some seconds to retrieve my answer, and in that time I imagined all of the possible ways in which I could be rejected from the position, right there and then. Every possible fear welled up inside, and my stomach did a loop-de-loop that threatened to take the next available turn up my throat and out of my mouth; I stifled a burp as I tried to keep from drenching these soldiers in partially digested school-grade lasagna.

Finally, Lieutenant Medeiros shook his head as a sentence formed about the corners of his mouth—then disappeared just as quickly. “Take these papers home and talk it over with your parents.” He sighed, pushing a sheaf of letters toward me with his good arm. “You’ll make as fine a soldier as any.”

Lieutenant Medeiros tried to talk me out of it. I can see that now. It was a half-assed attempt, but he’d probably been trying and failing to talk boys out of joining the service for years, and after a while even the most passing effort can become a tremendous drain. But at the time I was blinded to all motives, hidden or otherwise, by those dress whites, those buttons, those lapels, and that beautiful shimmering insignia.

I signed up for the sake of a uniform. I was not the first, and I will not be the last.

Three years later, after my tour of duty had come to a close, I would once again join a profession with something less than the clearest of intentions, and I would once again have my judgment clouded by the accoutrements of office. Camouflage, knives, gas, guns—these were the privileged tools of the Bio-Repo man, and after two years of the military doldrums, I was ready to put myself to good use in the battlegrounds of America’s medical establishment. Not coincidentally, these are the same weapons I am using to defend myself now that I am on the run from my previous employers. The war hasn’t ended; it’s just changed venue.

Jake never seemed particularly taken by the soldiers who came in to talk to us that day. He called them knobs and jarheads and a bunch of other things I’m pretty sure he’d gotten from the movies, but he took his papers home just like me and had ’em signed and ready to go by the next morning.