Reception
I was twenty-two the year I learned you could want a person so bad it felt like a security clearance you’d lose. That was the word that kept coming to me for it, all that summer, lying in my bunk in Oklahoma with my heart going. A liability. Like the thing I was carrying around inside my own chest was the kind of thing they’d pull a man’s access over.
I came in late. Most of the kids at reception were eighteen, nineteen, fresh out of some high school, and I was twenty-two with two years of community college I never finished and a job at a tire place behind me, which in that crowd made me an old man. I’d enlisted in the spring of 2000 for reasons I told everybody and one reason I told nobody, which was that I needed to be somewhere with rules so loud I couldn’t hear myself. I had a good idea by then what I was. I’d had it confirmed in the worst possible way, back home, and I’ll get to that. The short version is I came to Fort Sill already knowing exactly what I had to keep buried, and exactly what it cost when you didn’t.
I’d come to Fort Sill out of basic, like everybody does. I’d done mine up at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, the whole screaming boot-camp machine of it, and I’d survived it the same as I survived most things, by going somewhere behind my own eyes and waiting it out. I was good at going somewhere behind my own eyes. I’d been practicing my whole life. AIT was supposed to be a different animal and it was. You’d already been broken down and built back by the time you got there, so the cadre eased off. They were sergeants now, instructors, the men who’d teach us the actual job, and they ran a tighter ship than any civilian would believe and a looser one than basic by a country mile. You got treated a notch more like a soldier and a notch less like a problem. You got a little of your own self handed back to you. Which, for me, turned out to be exactly the wrong gift, because the self they handed back was the one I’d enlisted to get shut of.
They bused us over to the AIT company our first day in, a busload of us hauling duffels, a long brick building with the company guidon out front and a sergeant named Hicks on the steps with a clipboard, not screaming, watching us unload, which after ten weeks of being screamed at felt like a different army. Inside it was two-man rooms off a long center hallway, no doors on any of them, just open doorways, gray tile, gray walls, a latrine and a shower bay at one end. Hicks read names and room assignments off the clipboard and you grabbed your stuff and went. I was standing there with my duffel cutting into my shoulder when he read off my name and then read off the name that was going to wreck my life, except of course I didn’t know that yet. It was just a name. Some kid from West Virginia.
Tanner came down the hall toward me with his duffel up on one shoulder like it weighed nothing, and he stuck his hand out before he even got to me, which nobody did, and said his name in an accent so thick it took me a second, and grinned like we’d already gotten away with something. He was twenty. He looked younger. He had that lean farm-kid build, all rope and angle, a jaw that hadn’t quite finished, ears the buzz cut had left too big, and a way of looking right at you that I wasn’t at all ready for. I shook his hand and told him my name and went somewhere behind my eyes and locked the door, hard, a reflex I’d drilled into myself, because the first thing I felt looking at Tanner was the thing I’d come two thousand miles to a place with very loud rules specifically so I would never feel again.
Here is what I knew, standing in that hallway. I knew there was a regulation, and the regulation had a name everybody said as a joke, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and underneath the joke it meant that what I was could end me. Not get me in trouble. End me. Pull me out by the roots and write a word on my paperwork that would follow me into every job I ever applied for after. I knew it because it had already happened, that spring, to the one other person on earth who’d known about me, and I knew exactly what his face looked like the day they did it. So I shook the West Virginia kid’s hand and I thought, very clearly, like an order to myself, not him. Not this. Not here. You came here to disappear. Disappear.
We carried our bags into the room. Two beds, one against each wall, two wall lockers between them, a window that looked out on the PT field and past it the brown hills that everything at Sill happened in the shadow of. Tanner threw his duffel on the bed by the window and claimed it without asking and then turned around and asked me if that was all right, which I would learn was the whole of him in one motion, taking the thing he wanted and then checking your face about it after. I said it was fine. He stuck out his hand again, even though we’d already shaken.
“Well, looks like we’re stuck together,” he said, and grinned.
And I stood there in a gray room in Oklahoma with my whole life riding on never letting anybody see me, shaking a stranger’s hand for the second time in five minutes, already in more trouble than I had the sense to know.
Battle Buddy
The Army doesn’t let you be alone, and that turned out to be the cruelest thing it ever did to me, though it took a while to feel like cruelty.
They assign you a battle buddy, your battle, everybody just said in AIT, and your battle is supposed to be with you basically always. You don’t go to the latrine alone, you don’t go to sick call alone, you don’t walk to the PX alone. The idea is that two soldiers keep each other out of trouble, and the deeper idea, the one nobody says, is that two soldiers are easier to control than one. My battle was also my roommate, the kid from West Virginia, and so from the first day on I was almost never more than ten feet from Tanner, and the wanting I’d come there to kill got fed three meals a day and a bed five feet across the room from mine.
He was the easiest person I ever met. I don’t know how else to say it. People liked him without thinking about it, without it costing them anything. By the end of the first week he knew everybody’s name in the platoon and half their hometowns. He talked the whole time, low, under his breath in formation, a running commentary on everything, the sergeants, the food, the heat, his girl back home, and I was the one he aimed most of it at because I was the one tied to him. He had a girl back home named Mandy and he mentioned her with no weight on it at all, a fact about himself he set down between us so I’d have it. I took it and filed it where I filed everything that was going to keep me alive. There. That’s the wall. He’s got a girl. Good. Get behind it.
The thing about Tanner, though, the thing I couldn’t account for, was that he was kind in a way that didn’t seem to be working any angle. He noticed things. He noticed I didn’t talk much and instead of deciding I was stuck up, which is what the eighteen-year-olds did, he decided it was interesting, and he started trying to get me to talk just to see if he could, like I was a puzzle worth the time. He’d ask me real questions. Where in Illinois? What my mom did? Why I’d waited till twenty-two? And I’d give him the short answers, the safe ones, and he’d take them and ask the next one, patient, never pushing past where I shut it down, but always coming back the next day to try again. Nobody had been curious about me in a long time. I’d made sure of it. And here was this kid from a holler I couldn’t have found on a map, deciding I was worth being curious about, and I felt the wall I’d built start to do a thing walls aren’t supposed to do, which is want to come down.
We were good at the same things, which helped. We’d both tested into 13F, Forward Observer, the guys who go out front and find the targets and call the artillery down on them, and it turned out we both had the head for it, the math and the map sense, where a lot of guys struggled. So we got paired up in the field too, not just in the room, and that’s where it really started, though I’d have denied it under oath at the time, even to myself, especially to myself.
Nights were the worst. The lights went out at 2100 and I’d lie there with five feet of gray tile between our two beds, one against each wall, close enough to hear every breath he took and too far to cross, too close and too far at the same time, and not sleep. He talked in the dark sometimes, low, half asleep, telling me about home, the dirt road, his daddy’s truck, the river, Mandy, and I’d lie there and answer in one or two words and want, just want, in the plain hopeless way you want something you have already decided you can’t have, and across the room from me Tanner would finally go quiet and drop off to sleep like a kid, easy, nothing riding him, and I’d be awake in the dark for another hour with the thing in my chest that the Army would have called a liability, doing my arithmetic, the same arithmetic Cole had done and lost. Keep it in your pants. Keep your head down. Disappear. I was so bad at it already and we were two weeks in.
The Last Stall
There’s no privacy in the Army and there’s nowhere to hide a body, and for a man trying to keep a secret the size of mine, the shower bay was a daily test I kept failing in small ways nobody could see.
It was an open bay with stalls down one wall, the cheap kind, shoulder-high dividers and a shower curtain that never quite closed, and in the morning forty of us cycled through it fast, no time, a sergeant counting, everybody too tired and too rushed to be anything but bodies. I learned to look at the wall. The grout, the rust stain, a fixed point I could put my eyes on and keep them on while I washed, because the alternative was to look at Tanner one stall over, soaped and dripping and grinning at me about something, and I couldn’t afford what looking did to me. So I kept my eyes on the grout and did my arithmetic and got out fast.
Everybody knew about the last stall. You figure these things out by the second week, same as you figure out which sergeant means it and which one’s putting on a show. The last stall, the one at the end farthest from the door, was where guys went at night, after lights, when the bay was empty, to take care of themselves, because it was the one place in the whole building you could be alone for four minutes. Nobody said it out loud. It was understood. You’d hear the water come on at 2200 and you knew, and you gave the man his privacy, and in the morning nobody knew anything. It was the only mercy the building had in it, and the whole platoon protected it without ever once discussing it, eighteen-year-old boys a thousand miles from anyone who’d ever touched them, keeping each other’s one secret by pretending none of us had it.
I used it like everybody else and I hated how much of my mind it took up. Because the problem wasn’t the four minutes alone. The problem was who I was alone with, in my head, in the last stall, with the water running, and how it was always the same person now, across the room, asleep, easy, breathing, and how I’d come back to the room after and lie down five feet from the actual him with the shame of it still wet on me and tell myself tomorrow I’d think about Mandy instead, or about nobody, about the grout, the rust stain, anything.
It came to a head, the first time, over nothing. We’d had a long field day, land nav in the heat, and we’d come back filthy and dead on our feet, and it was late, near lights out, and the bay had mostly cleared. I was at a stall washing the day off and Tanner came in behind me still talking, about a point we’d missed and how the azimuth had been off, and he took the stall next to mine, and I put my eyes on the wall. And he kept talking. And then he wasn’t talking. And I felt him looking at me. You can feel it, when somebody’s looking, it’s a real thing, it lands on your skin. I kept them there and my heart started going and I thought, very clearly, do not turn your head, do not turn your head, and the water ran and the steam came up and for a long few seconds neither of us said anything and the whole bay was the two of us and the water and the thing I wasn’t turning my head to look at. Then somebody banged through the door at the far end, a third guy, and Tanner went back to talking about the azimuth like nothing, and I got out fast, and lay in the dark doing my arithmetic with my hands shaking, and understood that I was in real trouble now, the kind Cole had warned me about, the kind with a name on the paperwork, and that I wasn’t, when it came to it, going to be able to keep looking at the wall.