We Meant Well (11 page)

My roommate woke up an arm's length from me in the small trailer. I was rarely alone. Sometimes he asked how I slept, sometimes he just made morning noises. We lived close. He snored, he talked while dreaming, he sometimes paced at night, he read in bed, he took pills to sleep. He felt freer to chat at night with the lights out, like at camp. I knew he wanted to hit on the sort of hot redheaded female captain in the Ops Center who wouldn't even give up a friendly glance, tired of being everyone's go-to fantasy, and I knew he missed his wife. He talked about being afraid. I felt the same way, so we held these conversations in a kind of jailhouse shorthand. He usually ended up talking about some event that happened to him just before I got to Iraq. Everyone was entitled to tell a story and we all were careful to keep our stories distinct. Mine never overlapped in time with his so we were each free to tell the story we wanted to tell. I learned to listen, but with only half an ear at most, because the telling was usually for his benefit, not mine. Just before falling asleep we both had a few minutes with our own thoughts, the worst time of the day.

Showers were communal, and where you showered was assigned based on where you lived. Evolved primate standards allowed me to grunt hello but not make eye contact. It was partially a way of getting along, maybe a way to create the illusion of privacy, but we weren't supposed to look at one another. Still, I saw tattoos of wavy patterns or unknown Chinese characters, names of mothers or girls, shadow pictures of lost friends. The soldiers were still kids, with acne on their shoulders. Most had short hair or shaved heads, so the need for toiletries was minimal. Some kids had no hair but the whole kit anyway, bottles of Axe and tubes of lotions for softer skin, less dandruff, better scents, a little like home. Showers were short as the hot water ran out quickly. The worst thing was to come into the shower area and hear “Oh shit,” which meant no more hot water. Shaving was a big deal in the military and many people lathered up their entire skulls to shave clean each morning. They went over and over the same spots with their blue plastic razors. They could never get their heads clean enough, no satisfaction, just enough to get on with the day.

We knew a lot about one another whether we liked it or not. We cared if a roommate made noise in his sleep or, the worst sin, had poor hygiene and stank. Nobody seemed to care, however, about who was and who wasn't … you know. The Army had some dumbasses, and they didn't like queers, blacks, or working chicks. But that was beside the point, as this was not about liking anyone. When it rained we all got wet, and when it was too hot we all sweated together, and everybody knew what we had in common was more important than what we didn't.

Breakfast was like everything else, something that used to be shared with a selected few wives, girlfriends, or boyfriends if not eaten alone, transformed here into another communal event. Most people would make the best of it, commenting about the weather. A few would annoy the majority by trying to talk about work, and some would rush to grab the corner tables that faced toward the TV, which, whether it was on or off, showing sports or a cooking show, made a little safe splash zone to eat in in silence. The food was bland, and the Army still insists chipped beef on toast is a breakfast food, but there was always coffee and you could fill up a mug, thermos, canteen, or bucket for free to take out.

After eating, one by one we slipped away. Even in cavemen times people went off alone, maybe for sanitation, maybe because it was hard-coded in our lizard brains to do this one act privately. The nearest latrines, portable toilets, were lined up in groups of five or seven. You nodded hello to people, male and female, on the way in and out. Like on an airplane, the genders shared the facilities. There was nothing to flush, no running water, no hand washing, only a swipe of gel afterwards. The imported Sri Lankans used a large truck to suck out the tank underneath and then used cleaner water to hose down the interior. If they did it wrong the toilet paper got soaked and devolved into a goopy mess. I learned to check for paper, another new skill for Iraq. Everyone missed once but few people made the mistake twice—the lizard brain at work. People were forced together in such private ways in such public places to do their own thing, rarely acknowledging one another until they were thrown back together at nightfall.

Haircuts and Prostitution

There was only one thing you had to pay for on the FOB, and everybody needed it: a haircut. Housing was free, food was free, laundry was free, but haircuts cost three bucks. As with any other capitalist venture, you had competition. There were two places on any FOB to get your haircut.

The AAFES barbershop run by the Army followed a franchise model from base to base, so every one of them was decorated with the same freakishly weird posters showing suggested haircuts, something like posters of sixties Brylcreemed masterpieces I remembered from childhood barbershops. Here, there were only two. The poster with the white guy showed a “high and tight” (hair on top, clean-shaven sides) and the poster with the black guy showed a “high and tight fade” (hair on top, shaved sides that tapered up into the hair on top). Most of us had our heads shaved clean for the heat, the fashion, and the ease of upkeep, and for that you didn't need a poster.

The AAFES barbers were all from Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, imported into Iraq by yet another unnamed subcontractor to work for cheap. They spoke little to no English, other than barber words like
short
or
shave
. A sign of a newbie soldier was his trying to have a conversation with the barber: “You see the Yankees game on AFN?” “Short, mister?” Filling up the silence in the shop were Bollywood movies blasting at near paint-peeling volume and featuring an endless parade of chubby Indian women and male actors with, ironically, elaborately styled thick black hair. I say movies, plural, mostly as an act of faith, as it was possible that the same movie played over and over again. The American customers knew no better and the endless loop of the same film would have hammered home the feeling of life in purgatory the Third World barbers no doubt knew well.

The special thing about the AAFES barbers was that they offered a sort of massage at the end of the haircut. It did not cost extra and it lasted only a moment but, if you liked, the barber would rub his hands on your head, pound his fists on your shoulders, and vigorously scrub up and down your neck with his palms. There was a barber who'd crack your neck for you, grasping your head in his skinny arms and twisting it. Once I felt vertebrae move halfway down my spine, with pain like an angry alarm clock. Some soldiers didn't like the man-touching massage part and stood up with their hands out, palms up in the universal gesture of “hell no,” while most just went with it.

Competing with the Bollywood barbershop was a small Iraqi-run place, an artifact of a 2005 campaign to revive the Iraqi economy by creating lots of small businesses, starting with ones right on the bases. Episodes of spectacular food poisoning shut down most of the falafel and kebab stands, while the market for Iraqi trinkets proved to be shallow, leaving by the time I arrived in Iraq just the hajji shops and the barbers.

The Iraqi barber on Falcon, like his brothers from Sri Lanka, had a vocabulary of about six English words, all synonyms for
short
. He favored the phrase
too easy
, meaning something you requested would be easy to deliver. “Can you cut my hair short?” “Too easy.” “Can you cut my hair quickly?” “Too easy.” Haircuts with this guy were indeed too easy because he seemed to deliver a shorter version of whatever your hair looked like, no matter what you asked for. It took only a few minutes given this efficient system, so this was the place to go when you were in a hurry. He also gave the closest shaves, scraping away with a single-edged razor blade he pinched between two fingers. Let a guy whose language you did not speak shave around your lips and up your neck with a single-edged piece of steel and you need never again prove your courage in any way.

At FOB Hammer the Iraqi-run barbershop was endlessly rumored to be a front for prostitution. The deal was that you waited until the other customers were not listening, then asked the barber for a “special massage.” Having spoken the code, you were led to a back room for paid sexytime fun. The barbershop operated out of a steel shipping container and so even the stupidest person knew there was no back room, or any room, absent the one you were sitting in. That time after time the barber would answer “no special massage here” just made the rumor more compelling, as not just anyone could order up a girl. The rumor would shift: sometimes it was only officers who could get a girl, or the girls would not service tall soldiers, or they would go only with civilians. But in fact no one could name a single person who ever got anything more than a mediocre haircut. I have no doubt that out there in the desert horny soldiers even today are convinced that sex is available for sale through that barber. You just want to believe.

Laundry

Everyone on the FOB had their laundry done for them. The process started with you taking your approved-size laundry bag to the laundry place. Signs explained that you could bring in only twenty items at a time; two socks counted as one item. You entered a large room staffed by ever-smiling Third World workers hired for these jobs. Perhaps they were happy because their job was to count laundry, not to do something hot, dirty, or dangerous.

To get your things washed, you had to get a chit from the Third World guy. The chit required your last name, first name, the last four digits of your social security number, your rank, and your unit name. But instead of writing these things yourself, you needed to tell them to the Third World guy so he could write them. When he came from a place where the language did not have a
v
or
b
sound (both came out as
w
), Van Buren was a tough one. Vocheszowski probably just threw his dirty clothing away.

After ninety minutes of respelling your name, it was time for the counting. This served two purposes: to ensure you did not violate the twenty-items rule and to allow the Third Worlder to indicate exactly what clothing was being washed. You pulled out a wad of tangled damp stuff and said “one underwear, two T-shirts” while the guy recorded it. Then for some reason you were allowed to print your own name on the bottom of the chit and sign. Somewhere back in time there must have been an investigation into a missing piece of laundry, because after signing the chit you signed a separate form certifying that what you claimed on the first form about the contents of your laundry was accurate. Each side got a carbon-copy receipt. (They still used carbon paper, perhaps the last vestige of this once common office supply tool. Some really young soldiers had never seen it before.) There could thus never, ever be a disagreement over a lost T-shirt. Nothing could have been more certain.

And then one day, just when my skull was about to explode from yet again counting out my underwear in front of a stranger, I was handed the “pearl.” You'll remember the moment in
On the Road
when Kerouac sums up his purpose in traveling cross-country: somewhere when you least expect it someone will hand you the pearl, that piece of wisdom that you needed without knowing you sought it. For me, it was learning about “bulk,” and a little bit about how the Army worked. There was always another way around something. After spending days of my life on laundry chits, a soldier told me you could say “bulk” and not have to count anything. You signed yet another chit waiving all rights to contest lost items of laundry, now and in perpetuity, but in return you needed only mumble “bulk” and the counting of laundry ceased. That was my happiest day in Iraq.

A Break for Dinner

Food was the real universal, the FOB's great unifier and equalizer. We had one place to eat, a cafeteria, the DFAC, or dining facility. Everybody ate the same stuff in the same place, no special deals for VIPs, officers, or FSOs, so this, like the weather, was a neutral topic for conversation. To join in, you had to follow the script: where you were previously had way better food than where you were now. The food in the Air Force was better than the food in the Army, unless you were in the Air Force, in which case the best food was in the Navy (everyone agreed the Marines had it worst). With the exception of the Embassy cafeteria—business class versus economy but it was still airplane food—the food at one FOB was pretty close to identical to the food at any other FOB. The KBR contractors who provided the vittles all bought from the same approved stock list and prepared things the same way. As in any other large-scale industrial operation, the emphasis was on food that was cheap, easy to store, and easy to prepare and that, sadly, would be familiar to most of the people. Many of the soldiers were young kids, and so grilled cheese and corn dogs were comfort food, as thoughts of Mom and TGI Friday's were closer to their hearts than thoughts of 300-plus cholesterol counts and high blood pressure. The bulk of the enlisted corps could digest Tupperware. The “healthy bar” had turkey wings instead of deep-fried chicken wings, and the steamed broccoli came drowned in bright orange cheese goop. Seasoning meant hot sauce. Every table had bottles of hot sauce, and even in the most remote outposts it was available to kill, condition, and season anything from Cheerios to mashed potatoes to bananas.

My favorite meal was Buffalo Shrimp, a dish rejected by the Long John Silver's chain as below its already low deep-fried-everything standard. Frozen hunks of batter, some even containing hints of shrimp pieces, were soaked in oil, fried, and then immersed in a viscous red sauce that burned the hell out of your tongue. The sensation was novel, a memory of actual food having an actual effect on your taste buds, and the fiery burps that followed allowed you to keep the dream alive for hours. Buffalo Shrimp usually appeared on alternate Sunday evenings. All of the food rotated on a schedule, and I worked very hard not to memorize it. Bad enough to have to eat bright yellow Chicken à la King. Worse to have to think about it in advance.