Call for Fire
The letter from Cole came on a Tuesday in the back half of the cycle, after the pass, when I was already in so deep I’d stopped being able to see the edges of it, and it landed in my chest like a round coming in.
Mail call was a thing the sergeants ran in the evening, calling out names, tossing letters, and I’d gotten the usual, a card from my mom, and then one more, a cheap envelope with handwriting I knew, postmarked from back home, and I took it back to the room and sat on my bunk and opened it while Tanner was down at the latrine, and it was Cole, who I hadn’t heard from since the spring, since the day they walked him out. It wasn’t long. Cole was never one for a lot of words. The letter said:
Wes. Made it home okay, more or less. It’s bad here but I’m getting by. I’m only going to say this one time and then I’ll never bring it up again, I swear. Whatever you do out there, keep your head down and keep it in your pants. Don’t trust anybody with it. Not anybody, not even the one you most want to trust, especially not him. They will take everything you have and call it doing the unit a favor. I’m not telling you what to be. You know I’d never. I’m telling you what they do to it once they know. Don’t do what I did. Be smarter than me.—Cole
I read it twice and then I sat there on my bunk holding it, and the AC of the whole summer seemed to go quiet around me. Because here was the one person on earth who loved me enough to have lost everything rather than lie about what we both were, writing to me from the wreckage of it, telling me the exact, precise, true thing, the thing I’d come two thousand miles to obey, and the timing of it, God, the timing. He didn’t know. He couldn’t have known. He thought he was writing to me before, to the scared kid at reception. He didn’t know the letter was landing on a man who had a locked-door night three days behind him and a face he loved five feet across the room and his head all the way down in exactly the thing Cole had paid for. Don’t trust anybody with it, especially not him. And I’d already trusted him with all of it. There wasn’t any of it left untrusted.
Tanner came back from the latrine and saw my face and asked what was wrong, and I almost didn’t tell him, almost gave him the short answers out of pure reflex, and then I didn’t, because the wall was gone, it’d been gone since the mountain. I handed him the letter. I let him read it. I watched him read the part about him, especially not him, and I watched it land, and he sat down next to me on the bunk, close, our knees together, and didn’t say anything for a long time. And here is the thing I keep coming back to, all these years on. He didn’t tell me Cole was wrong. He was too honest for that, even at twenty. He knew Cole was right. We both knew Cole was right, about the risk, about the word on the paperwork, about what they’d do to it if they ever found it. And then Tanner said it, finally, real low, folding the letter back along its creases and handing it back to me careful like it was something that could break.
“Your friend’s right about all of it. And I’m not going anywhere.”
And I understood that he was telling me to choose with my eyes open, the same as he already had, knowing the whole cost, not pretending it away. And God help me, I chose him. I put Cole’s letter in my wall locker under my civvies where I’d see it every day, and I kept it the rest of my life, and I chose Tanner anyway, eyes open, the warning read and understood and set aside, because some things you decide you’d rather have and pay for than not have and stay safe, and he was the first thing I ever wanted enough to pay.
Danger Close
In the call for fire there’s a thing you say when the rounds you’re bringing in are close to your own people, close enough that they could kill you too, and you say it so the gun crews know to be exact, because the margin’s gone. You say danger close. I’ve thought my whole life that what we did the last week of that cycle was me calling it on myself, danger close, knowing the margin was gone, and bringing it in anyway.
We’d gotten reckless. Not in the daylight, never in the daylight, we were too good by then, but in the cracks the recklessness had grown teeth. The last stall wasn’t enough anymore. The four minutes weren’t enough. After the motel we knew what the whole thing was and we couldn’t go back to grabbing pieces of it, and that’s a dangerous way to feel in a place like that, where the only safe amount of want is none. We had a couple weeks left. Orders were coming. We both knew we were about to get scattered to opposite ends of the country, and I think that’s what did it, that’s what made us stupid at the end, the clock. You get careful for a future. We were running out of future. So we stopped being careful in exactly the proportion that we ran out of it.
It was a fire guard night, our shift again, 0200 to 0400, the dead middle, the whole platoon asleep in the open rooms down the long hallway and nobody else in the building awake but us. We’d walked the hall and checked the rooms and ended up where we always ended up, at the dark end by the latrine, and we started kissing, quiet, careful, the same as we had a dozen times on that shift, and it should have stayed that, it always stayed that, we always kept it to that on fire guard because fire guard was the one place the risk was total, open doorways on both sides, forty sleeping men, any one of them up to piss at any second. But that night it didn’t stay that.
That night the clock was too loud and we were too far gone and Tanner had me up against the cinderblock with his hand down the front of my PT shorts and I had no business letting it go past kissing and I let it go way past kissing, and then it was happening, right there, in the hallway, in the open, in plain view of every open doorway, him behind me with my shorts shoved down and his cock pushing into me and his hand clamped over my mouth to keep me quiet, the cold cinderblock against my hands.
I know how insane that sounds. I knew it then too. That’s the part I need you to understand.
You, reading this.
We weren’t careless because we thought we were safe or indestructible. We were careless because we knew we weren’t. Every open doorway in that hallway was a possible ending. Every sleeping soldier was a witness we’d been lucky enough to not wake up. The danger wasn’t outside the thing. By then, the danger was part of the thing.
It was rough and it was fast and it was reckless past anything we’d done, the open hallway and the open doorways and the total no-margin insanity of it ran in my blood right alongside how much I wanted him, the two things wound together so tight I couldn’t have told you where one stopped. It was pure wanting, spit, and recklessness.
He had a hand clamped over my mouth and his other arm banded around my chest holding me up and he fucked me against the wall in the dark with forty men asleep ten feet away on either side, and I bit down on his palm to keep silent and he pressed his mouth to the back of my neck to keep himself silent and we did the most dangerous thing two soldiers could do in the year 2000, right out in the open, where anyone, anyone who lifted his head in any one of those open doorways, could have ended both of us, the word on the paperwork, the whole thing, gone, and we did it anyway because we were twenty and twenty-two and in something neither of us had a name for and out of time. He came in my ass with his teeth set in my shoulder and his hand crushed over my mouth, and I came against the cinderblock with no hand on me at all, just him, just the whole insane danger of it, and then we froze there, joined, shaking, his hand still over my mouth, both of us listening to the hallway, to the open doorways, to forty men breathing in their sleep, waiting to find out if we’d thrown our lives away.
Nobody made a sound, no one woke. That’s the part I still can’t believe. We got away with it. We pulled apart and got our PTs right with our hands shaking and a minute later we were just two soldiers walking a hallway on fire guard again, checking the rooms, getting ready to wax the floors, and at 0400 we acknowledged our relief and lay down in our own two beds five feet apart and didn’t say a word.
In the morning the lights came on and we ran PT in the cool dark and nobody ever knew. But I knew. I knew we’d called it danger close on ourselves and the rounds had come in inside the margin and missed us by luck, by nothing, by the grace of nobody needing to piss at two in the morning, and I lay awake the rest of that night more scared than I’d ever been. More sure than I’d ever been, both at once, because I finally understood what I’d been refusing to understand all summer, which was that I’d have paid the price. If someone had stepped out into the hall. If it had all come crashing down. I’d have paid the price, the word on the paperwork, Cole’s whole nightmare, all of it, and I wouldn’t have been sorry, because some things are worth the rounds coming in close, and he was the first one I ever found that was.
END OF MISSION
Orders came down the last week, indifferent, a sheet of paper on a clipboard, and the Army did what the Army does, which was to take the one thing I couldn’t stand to lose and send it to the far side of the country with a straight face.
I was going to Airborne school at Fort Benning, down in Georgia, jump school, three weeks of learning to throw myself out of perfectly good airplanes, and then on to a unit from there. Tanner was going to his first real assignment, a unit up at Fort Drum, New York, the top edge of the country, snow country, about as far from Georgia as you could get and still be in the same army. We found out the same morning, standing at the board with the orders posted, and we read each other’s and didn’t say anything for a second, and then Tanner did the bravest thing I ever saw him do, which was grin at me, easy, like always, and say it.
“Well. New York and Georgia.”
He kept his voice level and his face right because there were people around, and only I could see what it cost him, and only because I knew his face better than I knew my own by then.
We had a few days left and we spent them the way you spend the end of something, pretending it isn’t ending right up until it does. We didn’t get another pass. The last stall a couple more times, careful now, the recklessness burned out of us by how close we’d come in the hallway. Mostly we stayed near each other, battles to the last, our shoulders together in formation, and talked, low, in the dark, about everything except the thing that was a week out and then was three days out and then was the morning the buses came.
I’m not going to make the last morning into more than it was, because part of what it was, was that we couldn’t make it into anything. There were buses and duffel bags and a hundred guys and a couple of sergeants, and Tanner and I shook hands, because that’s all two soldiers could do in the open in the year 2000, we shook hands like we had the first day in the hallway, and he held on a half-second too long, the same half-second his hand had stayed at the small of my back on the ranges, his shoulder against mine on the mountain, a half-second that nobody else would ever have clocked and that I have carried for over twenty years.
“Take care of yourself, Wes,” he said, and I said it back.
And that was it. That was all we got to say. He got on the bus to the airport and the snow and his unit and I got on mine to Georgia and the airplanes, and I watched his bus pull out through the smeared window of mine, and I went somewhere behind my eyes and waited it out, what I’d done my whole life, except this time there was something back there with me that hadn’t been there before.
We stayed friends. I want that on the record, because it’s true and because it’s the part nobody expects. We wrote, back when people wrote, and then we emailed, and we’d call, and over the years it got to be the once-or-twice-a-year thing that old friends have, the thing that doesn’t need much to stay real. He got out after his enlistment and went home to West Virginia. He married Mandy, the girl from back home he’d mentioned the first week like the weather, and they’ve got two kids now, a boy and a girl, and he sends me a picture every Christmas, the four of them in front of a tree, and he looks happy, he really does, settled and sunburnt and happy, and I’m glad, I’m genuinely glad, because I love him, in the worn-down once-a-year way you go on loving the people who were the realest thing that ever happened to you a long time ago.
Cole was right. I’ve thought about that letter a thousand times and he was right about every single thing in it, the risk, the cost, what they do to it once they know. He was right, and I read it, and I understood it, and I did it anyway, and the one place he was wrong, the only place, was the last line. Be smarter than me, he wrote. Don’t do what I did. But Cole didn’t do anything wrong. Cole loved somebody and got caught and paid for it, and the only mistake in any of it was theirs, the regulation’s, the word on the paperwork, and not his and not mine.
I wasn’t smarter than Cole. I just got lucky. That everyone stayed asleep that night, and the rounds came in close and missed. That’s the whole difference between us, luck, and I’ve never once been able to call what I did a mistake.
I had a summer in Oklahoma when I was twenty-two, in the most remembered place on earth to me, with a kid from West Virginia who kissed me back in a dark hallway like he’d been waiting for me. We found the nav points and called fire and shared the bed we didn’t have to share, and got away with it, and went our separate ways into our separate lives, and it was the realest thing I ever did.
Danger close.
The margin gone.
I’d bring it in again exactly the same.
Every time.