Matriculation

by Jack Lewis

It’s not exactly the changing of the guard, more like the coming of the rear guard.

Suddenly, li’l old Forward Operating Base Sykes is bustling with activity, like a hot new suburb riding a real estate bubble, sprawl and all. Building projects abound: several new, multi-acre hooch pads will accommodate hundreds more Italian-built modular steel housing units. There’s an enormous steel-framed building going up behind the dining facility that will replace our homely little MWR (Morale, Welfare & Recreation, aka free e-mail) tent. No one will have to duck cold rain pushing through the tent flaps this winter, as they wait their turn to e-mail wives or girlfriends—or now, perhaps, husbands or boyfriends.

Yes, the whole multiflavored “Big Army” has descended on our heretofore quiet hinterland like a chirping plague of locusts that lost its way. We’re officially dual-gendered now (no trans-gendering so far). There’s an entire regimental headquarters settling in, and that includes a heavy percentage of
the fat-asses and females, who just don’t exist in combat units.

Pad One, where we hang our faded hats, was virtually abandoned once. Most of what you heard at night was the mournful wind. The foxes here—like the owls, like the Long Range Surveillance Detachment, like all night hunters—are silent.

Suddenly, it’s junior college dorm day. Giggling kids stumble past my hooch door in the warm twilight, doubled up to carry bunks, TVs, and shelving units from hooch to hooch. A passing lieutenant peeked through my open door earlier tonight and asked if she and her roomie could take my plywood bookshelf. At least she didn’t demand my books. I didn’t salute her when I came to the door, nor call her ma’am—beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to military courtesy or anything else—but she’s welcome to the shelf in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m keeping my door closed.

We have to watch our mouths, now. It’s a garrison environment, and military strictures on behavior are bolstered and extended by the PC requirements of the age. It’s not the Wild West anymore. Maybe the Mild West. When the Paladin artillery pieces fired rocket-assisted projectile rounds a few nights back, some new fish ran screaming away. What army teaches that tactic?

“Fobbits,” we call these newbies at our Forward Operating Base, or “FOB goblins.” Soldiers who never leave the wire, unless they’re choppering off to some conference like young executives. We don’t leave anymore, either. We’re stuck in a crack between the 2-14 CAV RSTA (Recon, Surveillance & Target Acquisition) Squadron and 2/3 ACR (Armored Cavalry Regiment), and we’re not complaining. Our crack is dark, comfortable, and safe. We don’t need to peek out. We know what’s out there, beyond the crack. We’ve learned every lesson we came here to learn. And we’ll never be FOB goblins, anyway: too many bullets on our resumes. Too much human produce on our boots.

Meanwhile, the concrete monument in front of Soldier’s Field—where the names of fallen combat soldiers are memorialized in house paint hand-brushed by talented Turks, who are well paid by KBR—is being extended by two panels. Now it will accommodate, next to the names from 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles,” 2nd Infantry Division “First to Fight,” and 25th Infantry Division “Tropic Lightning,” the players (to be named later) from Third Armored Cavalry Regiment “Brave Rifles.”

A prediction: Those guys with their names painted on cement in front of a field of crushed rock, surrounded by bunkers built for a former Saddam air base, won’t be staff weenies, females, or field-grade officers. They’ll be sergeants, privates, specialists, lieutenants, and captains—young men who died with rifles in their hands, just like every other name on that wall.

We hide in our office, sometimes key-locking it from the inside. We hide in our hooches, and hope “they” don’t discover that we’re not tripled up like the new guys. We talk about the new people, and we are never kind, never generous. They didn’t come here and do what we did, and we owe them nothing, not even the benefit of the doubt. Let them earn it all.

We make up our own greetings of the day now: “Brave Waffles, sir!”

“Rattlesnake, ssssssr.”

“Whatever, sir!”

Ghosting around the FOB and watching the new guys bobble to and fro, we’re reminded that these DCUs, desert camouflage uniforms, that we wear are nicknamed “chocolate chips.” Kind of forgot about that, since what looked so sharp, so expeditionary, back at Ft. Bragg—bold chocolate streaks over light and lively green—has faded to vapid butterscotch stains on a piss-bottle yellow background. Now we’re reminded that not only did they have color when we got here, they’d hold a press, too. The service life of DCUs in a combat zone is one year. Sometimes the soldier wearing them adds prodigious amounts of his own dye to the pattern, and the uniform has to be discarded. Maybe that soldier is discarded, too. America is rich. We can import almost anything, but we still have to manufacture our own soldiers.

My product pack has more sweat stain than camo pattern left. Our boots are patinated by blown dust, old blood, dried sewage. The sun bleaches them, but sweat and worse darken them again.
There’s a bright-eyed 24-year-old infantry lieutenant who’s the mortar platoon leader for Apache company and has been a friend to our team. He’ll have a lot of color on his dress uniform when he returns, what with his campaign medals, Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts. That seems only fair, because the color is draining out of his hair like indigo squoze out of old Wranglers. Not quite young enough to be my son, the lieutenant is grayer than my father now.

We drift past these energetic newbies, pale as ghosts. We are ghosts, in a way—we count several restless young dead men in our social set.

New people, chattering loudly and striding vigorously, hardly know we’re here. We murmur nods and quiet greetings to our friends in the Stryker troops, but stroll indifferently past the recently arrived Bradley IFVs and turbine-powered Abrams tanks without a sideways glance, hands jammed insouciantly into our pockets. Sometimes we forget to salute the new officers, but it’s not intentional disrespect. I guess we don’t see them, either.

We bitch bitterly about things that don’t matter, crack sickeningly inappropriate jokes, and take refuge in our don’t-give-a-fuck, call-someone-else, short-timer’s attitude.

The sergeant and I are sick of looking at each other, but there’s no one else worth talking to. I don’t quite hate this country and everyone and every dog and kid and grain of sand in it yet, but if I stay long enough, I will. We keep acting stoic, imagining that no one can see how shopworn we’ve gotten.

We’ve just got to hang in there another few weeks. It’s like President George Walker Bush said, famously and inexplicably: “Ya gotta preserve.”

It’s about half-past time to go home.

Jack Lewis served as a staff sergeant with a psychological operations team chief in Tal ’Afar, Iraq, returning home last July. He now makes furniture—nightstands and blanket chests—in Lake Forest Park, WA. Several of his “letters home” were published in local newspapers and webzines, but this is his first formal memoir in print. E-mail: jaxworx@gmail.com