Iraq Memories: The Tent

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God, the things you bitch about in the Army. Do I have to share a tent with guys? With snoring guys? Do I have to share a room with other people? OMG, latrines. Hauling jugs of water to do laundry; standing in the burning sun waiting for chow, walking a mile each way in the heat to get to the internet cafe, all that stuff. And then you get home and you find that life is strange and different, and that you miss those things. Most of all you miss the greatest irritant of all, your fellow soldiers. All along it was there, and you didn't appreciate it. All along it there, hiding in plain sight, and you couldn't appreciate it till it was all gone. And then you miss it and them with your whole heart, and you're left trying to explain how, in war zone, there were these people who irritated the fuck out of you really bad...and you miss them. Bad.

Ah, your fellow soldiers. What a bunch. They irritate you when they're all you've got, and yet somehow they leave a mark that can't be forgotten once you separate and you're home...alone. Get a good group of good soldiers, and it's a return to a kind of innocence, before gender, before any of that stuff. You're not male or female yet, even though you all might be middle-aged, but something more and less and all of that: you're just human, and you're tired because you've been hauling your fucking duffels all over Camp fucking Wolverine, Kuwait, for hours after a hellacious long flight and you're so tired you just want to close those burning itching eyes and rest. It's an elemental existence. Sometimes the elements one gets reduced to are inhuman, but sometimes-----oh, sometimes, it's a delicate thing, where a huge ex-Marine asks shyly if he can have that set of Harry Potter some kind soul sent, or a grim-faced Captain sees the handful of chocolate you've got for him, and his whole face smiles. If you're all bitching about the same thing, you're not bitching about one another, and that's what counts. Pity it's bitching that binds people together, pity that it's war that gives people an appreciation for these tiny little moments that pass unnoticed in civilian life.

Every little second of happiness and contentment is finite in a genuine war zone, one where bullets really fly, where mortars land and people die. You savor those tiny little bits of privacy or quiet or happiness with some guilt and some desperation, because they can't last and unless they're happening right here and now it's hard to put your finger on them later. Only when you're home do they hit with full force, when you dare to experience them fully, and by then they're gone, like the smoke from a long-dead fire. You might as well try and catch the smoke.

You remember that tent choked full of soldiers in Kuwait, when you were so tired you dropped your duffels on the cot and leaned against them and conked out till they shook you awake for chow. You remember the thrill of opening boxes and handing eagerly-awaited stuff to soldiers, the way their faces light up, the way they scurry off with their treasures. Sometimes it's a soldier from another country, in good times and bad. I was feeding some wild Iraqi cats one day with food purloined from the chow hall when a Polish general stopped dead in the courtyard and watched, his expression changing to something lost and longing. After a bit, he came over to me, a tall, spare, stark man, with hollow cheekbones and a luxurious mustache, to pet the kitties and sigh over them and what they meant to him. "I...have cat home," he said. "She is very bad." The mamacat, rasping at him when he paused in petting her, purred like an engine. "She is boss, she is queen."

"I have cats, too," I said. We smiled at one another in complete and international agreement: cats boss us around. I don't know what rank of general he was, but love of cats reduced him to just another supplicant before the Almighty Feline. Later on, in the twilight, I came out to put out some more food and found some already placed there: a bowl of tuna and some milk. Home is where your pet is, evidently; home is where you have something fluffy to cuddle and love, no matter your nationality or rank. Even generals bow before cats, it seems. Not a startling sentiment, but when you see it in action, it touches you, literally. Every time that general and I spotted one another, after the salutes there was a tiny little bond. You look for those when you're far from home, you're living in a weird environment in a strange way. A lot of those tiny moments can add up.

Later, after the XO had his first kid---pretty much listening in on the phone the whole time---and then got leave to go home we goofed around so much before the convoy that we were late in line leaving the gate. I don't remember the details really well----going out on the road was normal. We did it every week. There was always a line of vehicles on the grand road that led into Babylon. Leaving the gate boiled down to one or two seconds of fear where you remembered IEDS and bombs, and just for a moment, you were a human and not just a soldier. Then you took a deep breath. You just get used to startling amounts of danger.

It was a normal trip till we were about a half hour out and spotted an obstacle on the road ahead of us. That obstacle was a stalled convoy. What I remember is that they were Poles, and that I'd gotten used to seeing them and hearing about them at Babylon. The Poles have such bad vehicle armor that they hang their vests over the door to block bullets. The Poles love the US. The Poles have really shitty vehicle armor. I was in the gun turret and I saw the stalled vehicles, pulled over to the side, even while we were pulling over. One windshield had a red coating that slicked its glass like a sun screen. One stretcher lay next to the vehicle, a form on it entirely covered by a blanket except for the soles of the boots. Then a Polish soldier ran up to my vehicle and I forgot everything else. He was wearing a light uniform, pressed and perfect, and the only thing that stood out on that hot dusty day was the bright red blood on the front of his uniform, on his hands to the knuckle, and on top of his helmet. He was very young. Behind him, I saw that the driver's side door of his vehicle was adorned with a flak vest. He was not wearing one. He had blood on his helmet. He had blood splashed on the top of his helmet. What do you do to the human body to make it splash blood that way, like a puddle you've stepped in?

We guarded the disabled convoy and the bodies till the Medevac choppers came. I was pointed in the opposite direction but I could hear and catch a glimpse that it was two of them: one for the living, one for the dead. Then we pushed on to Baghdad.

If you go to Baghdad as a soldier for a temporary thing, you find yourself in the transient tents. At least, back then you did. The transient tents are stuffed full of cots, maybe two feet wide, and feature a heavy duty air conditioner unit and maybe a cot filled with donated items left behind by departing soldiers. Lights out is eleven; sometimes you have to impress that on newcomers. The call to prayer punctuates the day, till it becomes normal and expected. You don't realize its absence will mark your days when you return home. Nor do you realize how comforting it is to be surrounded by bodies, by women, by fellow soldiers. There's safety there, in ways you can't precisely identify. You sleep with your weapon in your bunk. You sleep with fellow soldiers beside you. Surrounded by enemies, you find that you get along with people you'd hvae argued with back home. And then you go out on the street and find yourself talking recipes and gossip with Iraqis. It never ceases to be confusing.

Then you're home, alone, with a bedroom all to yourself or to one other person, no gunfire going off, and suddenly you find yourself feeling...naked. The stuff you looked forward to suddenly isn't that pleasant.

One day in April my team got stranded in an ambush. Incoming fire got so bad we got separated from the radios in the Humvees, and for a long time we were unable to comunicate with base. Twilight came and went. With darkness came ability and then, finally, we were able to get back to the vehicles and let the camp know we were still in the fight.

At the base, as our radios fell silent, soldiers and workers of various nationalities listened in. They told us so themselves later on. Poles, Ukrainians, Australians, English, and the Pakistani workers passed the word from one to another, over plates and from person to person. Music usually dominated the meals as Pakistani workers fed their favorite CDs into the CD changer. That dinner, nobody had the stomach to listen to it. The soldiers requested silence. That night, we had no nationality and every nationality. The enemy never asks for ID. That night, we were all just soldiers.

The tougher the situation, the greater the camraderie, if you've got a good bunch of troops. What's a good bunch of troops? Here's me in South Korea, the sole female in a tent full of guys given to getting up in the morning and talking about their 'little friend,' their dicks. After a couple mornings of this I was tired of it, not in a sexual harassment kind of way, because it was obvious that wasn't the intention, but because, you know there are other things in the world, right? The next morning I waited to pounce. Before the first guy opened his mouth I held up his hand and went into my spiel, which went like this:

"There's thirteen of you and one of me. You guys all get up first thing and each one of you talks for five minutes about your...shortcomings. Now, some evening things up is in order. Either change the subject or I get five minutes to talk about whatever I want to times thirteen. Fair's fair."

The next morning, one of the guys got up, cleared his throat, and was promptly hushed by another guy, who nodded at me and said, "Shh. Mixed company."

"Yeah," I said, "There's an officer in the tent."

The ranking officer in the tent, caught literally with his pants down---in mixed gender tents you either change in your bag or the shower or exercise tactful eye aversion-----looked up suddenly, his blue snowflake-printed boxers on display. "What did she say?"

"Nice boxers, sir."

Ah, your fellow soldiers.

You sleep in the same room with somebody---usually several somebodies---to whom you are not married and to whom you probably have not really been introduced. You learn far too much about them, too fast, and it feels too intimate, too fast, and a little depressing. I don't as a general rule want to learn about somebody's stretch marks unless, you know, there's been generally-accepted upon preliminaries. In the military you find yourself getting acquainted with somebody's music tastes, sleeping habits, sleeping noises, lapses of taste, bad habits, good habits, and all manner of things that usually come with marriage or intimacy. You can be stuck in a room where your only privacy comes when you toss a blanket over the top bunk of your bunk beds---yes, adults sleep in these things---and pretend there's no world outside that for a few minutes. Where so many people are crammed into any available spaces, the most valuable thing is a little bit of territory to call your own.

It's funny, though, after a sojourn in an aircraft hangar with a hundred other women and one electrical outlet, when you get home as good as it feels to have space of your own it's having a hundred opportunties to talk that you miss. Nobody talks about that, that feeling that you're alone in a strange world. They warn you about all kinds of things but they never tell you that you'll miss being a part of something, and you'll miss it badly. All those months of longing for privacy and a bed that's more than twenty four inches wide and suddenly you find that the feeling of not having people around makes all that space around you too large to fill with anything. People go mad trying to fill that space. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't hit you till later; you're too busy marveling at the sybaritic conditions of civilian life: a room with just one bed in it? Really? An electrical outlet all your own? The ability to crank your stereo without waking someone else up? It's just that sometimes you think it's not worth it, that there's something good about having your aspirations humbled just a bit. Maybe it's not a bad thing to just be grateful your bed's comfortable, your bookshelves are stuffed, and your existence makes you happy. Maybe if you could trade it for a room full of those damned irritating fellow soldiers, you'd do it, you'd trade in the relative luxury of civilian life for the rigors of a soldier's life without a backward glance. There's nobody you can explain that to any longer, because they're gone and scattered to any and everywhere, and all the things you experienced and understood are gone with them. It's all over, and you never knew anything was happening till it's gone, gone, gone.

Her first book is under contract.