Echo Company’s stay at Camp Hob featured better amenities than at Forward Operating Base Riviera. We’d stood-to as 2/24 Battalion’s Quick Reaction Force for about a month at Camp Hob, spent weeks listless on a QRF’s schedule of bad sleep and broken gym-time. Our turn of fortune impacted every aspect of our lives, except for entertainment. I didn’t have the gall to ask someone to send me an ounce of dirty weed off of some peckerwood’s pound—the USMC had a zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized drug use, and alcohol was a felony for US troops to possess in a warzone, although an off duty drunken soldier, sailor, or Marine could still straight-faced beg for leniency—so I decided to get drunk. Booze had to be on the base somewhere, and contractors would have it, the folks doing laundry and manning the desks at the communication center or gym.
I needed to make friends, but interaction with base personnel was asymmetrical; menial laborers were reserved with Marines and other coalition forces. They were expendable and knew it; unskilled labor being especially plentiful on the global market. Most of the time Marines and staff got along well with their base-side counterparts, but not all the time. Marines’ were tempersome, and Military Police favored their own. All this, and the war, made base personnel distrust me.
I scouted the base for potential points of contact. The laundromat workers didn’t talk to Marines. Chow hall staff were busy pushing trays of food and standing at buffet lines, all older and serious. The Indian workers who manned the logbooks at the communications center were young and worked long hours. During the day, there could be hundreds of Marines milling about the sizeable barn-like building. At night, a handful of Marines lounged on old couches, waited for their name to be called for a phone or computer, or spread out across the rest of the facility playing ping-pong, board games, or cards. Never watching a movie in the small theater though, because the Gunny in charge didn’t like the idea, saying, “This isn’t a fucking episode of M*A*S*H!” when asked.
The way Marine Corps NonCommissioned Officers who should’ve taken charge of the area avoided it instead made it easy to loiter for a few hours and size-up everyone. I figured zero-dark-thirty the best time to approach the mousy Indian man behind the desk at the communications center. One of the Indian guys who manned the call logs and computer waitlists entertained bored Marines with magic tricks. He was cordial, and smart enough to know I didn’t care about card tricks when I returned early morning, after my watch.
“There is television. Marines watch television. You do not like television?”
“Not since coming to this place.”
“Miss your family?”
“I have trouble remembering them, but I know they’re safe at home.”
“Because you are here protecting them—”
“You believe all that?” I asked smiling, brow raised. “How long have you been here for?”
“Eighteen months,” he said.
“Goddamn!” I exclaimed. A year and a half in-country was a long time for the most hardened mercenary, much less a kid.
For a few long seconds, silence filled the air. I wondered how much this young man had sussed out already. Not just about me, but about the war.
“Want to see a magic trick?”
“Are some of the cards cut shorter than the rest?”
“So, no magic,” he said, putting away his deck of cards.
“I enjoy watching your card tricks when I’m waiting in line to use a phone.”
“What are you waiting for then, Marine? Can I call you that?”
“What?”
“Marine.”
“You can call me whatever you want,” I said. “Right after I use a phone, after all.”
The phones used credit purchased by people back home to speak with their loved ones. Marines scribbled the account numbers in small notebooks carried for orders and maps. With no passcode to keep accounts secure, there was only the account number itself; if a Marine lost the number, their balance could be drained all at once, or siphoned from imperceptibly. Where Marines congregated, it wasn’t uncommon to find a notebook left behind, especially around phones overseas.
*
The notebook espoused insecurities in broken English. The Marine listed the pros & cons of breast augmentation surgery, along with various materials available for implementation. Along with a brief layman’s guide to body modification, there was a bullet point account of a night when his girlfriend back home had been partying and hadn’t been able to take his calls. The bullet points were arranged without regard to chronology or order, and among the point by point story of a young woman having fun with her friends were allusions to a reluctant man accepting the emotional embrace of a woman before deployment, and references to an affair only haphazardly covered up without the forethought of deleting texts or pictures. While the scant few pages only offered me a look at the Marine’s life through a peep-hole, it was easy to tell the Marine was young, insecure, immature, and his ideas about women were what conservatives called traditional, and progressives called regressive. Moreover, he was scared, of himself, of being alone, of the world, and most of all, the war. It’s what was most likely to do him in, and although he had no conception of it then, the war may not have killed him all at once. As for the juvenile expressions of jealousy, fear, and anger the young Marine injected into a relationship without communication—as I sat there and traced the carving and writings of graffiti on the table, I thought about what might have been the topics of conversation that night, between him and his girl, if he’d even gotten ahold of her. The Marine could have left the notebook out of sheer boredom and frustration with the entire situation.
*
I walked down the row of cubicle like phone booths, wondering at how there was only one Marine using the phone. Even though it was zero-dark-thirty, I’d assumed the booths would be busy and folding chairs still warm from the ass ends of Marines due to the daytime a gang of Marines waited for phones. As I settled into the only one with a small Right-In-The-Rain notebook, the sole Marine, a Latino Marine who had been whispering Spanish, had just risen and walked past me back into the comm center’s main room. I wasn’t there for the phones and turned the notebook over and over in my hands before opening it and leafing through its pages.
Marines were ordered to have a notebook and writing instrument so they could take detailed notes and write down any orders, messages, directions, maps, or general fields of fire. I thought about the contents of my notebook, the pieces of text and snippets of conversation and quotes. I’d been reading a great deal while in Iraq, and although I’d had girl problems of my own, they had passed just as I’m sure they would for this Marine. It’s always easy to assume the best when the worst isn’t happening to you. My attention returned to the business at hand, and I flipped back to the account numbers. Trying not to think about it too much as my heart thudded in my ears, I checked the time left in the account. There were sixteen minutes and change.
As I stood, a plan formed in my mind. I needed to win over the Indian magician behind the comm center desk. Disarming him would be hard considering he sounded about half-way to the conclusion that I was a spook, as intelligence personnel were called. Leveraging the account, even though it had so little time, was the new plan. As soon as I set booted foot back in the waiting area, I held the notebook up in front of me like it was my golden ticket.
In years to come, I’d think about my notebook compared to his. The way he viewed body modification for his partner as if he was detailing a car. It wasn’t just her breasts; it was her vagina as well. How many ways could he find someone he cared about lacking; me caring more about having stolen the notebook than the Marine had for the mind, soul, and body of the person he was trying to control from around the world. Eventually, I’d tear the fucked up pages out of the notebook and throw the rest away. When I look at it now, it makes me think of a Marine I served with, Corporal May, who often spoke of sex with his girl back home, and how they’d had an affair at work that ended both of their careers at one of the best places to work in town. May’s ideas about women were muddled at best, seeing how he got back from his first deployment to find the stripper who he’d fallen in love with and subsequently given power of attorney to had drained his bank account and had even sold his clothes.
When I walked back to the table and held the notebook up in between myself and the mousy Indian man, saying, “This account for a favor. I need booze,” as I tapped the account numbers. The Indian man took the book and rushed into one of the phone booths, abandoning his post without even asking me to cover for him. I followed in trace, wanting to see what he would do.
“Father,” he said into the phone. “It’s me. I’m fine. I call again tomorrow.”
When he got back to the desk, he wouldn’t meet my gaze and spoke carefully.
“How long had it been since you’d last spoken to your family.”
“Several months,” he answered. “Thank you. Now, you want drink. What kind? Beer?”
“Not beer. It would take too much,” I replied. “How about some whiskey?”
“You want Three Kings?” he said.
“What?” I replied. I didn’t know if Three Kings was an Indian expression. I wasn’t familiar with that region of the world at all. “Do you mean the rich guys who came to see Jesus’ birth?”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“In the Bible, it’s part of a prophecy that comes true when Christ is born.”
“Oh! I see,” Mouse said, chuckling. “Here, Three Kings is what you call … liquor?”
“Yes!” I couldn’t believe it was going to be this easy; it had only taken less than three days. “What do you need? Money? I can front you the money—”
“What is front?”
“I’ll give you the money, and you bring me the booze,” I said, pulling out some bills. “Ain’t nothing to it.”
“No, no, no. Just listen! It’s in my roommates mini-fridge. You meet me by where I live in two hours. Pay then.”
Camp Hob was a small base, so I knew right where he was talking about when I asked for directions. He wasn’t late; I was early enough to give myself time to loiter, and watched bats whirr out from palm trees and snatch bugs out of halos made by streetlights. I hadn’t brought a book, having perused most of the worthwhile literature around the barracks. Maybe my restlessness was because I’d jogged the perimeter so long it started to feel like a cage, I wondered as I watched my new business partner walk toward me.
*
During boot camp, recruits who felt piercing loneliness and longing for what they’d called home would keep lists of all the memories they were waiting to turn into realities when allowed—I had only been aware of this peripherally. I’d thought chronically what was missed foolish in the most basic sense: if I wrote lists about the food I missed, I’d be hungry; if I wrote lists of people I missed, I’d be lonely. The understanding of my desires, how to quell, quash, or stoke them, seemed elementary; I didn’t realize it was my rudimentary dreams, crooked inner compass, and because I set my course by them instead of ideals, it was made so.
*
I kept the Marine’s notebook in the breast pocket of a dirty camouflage utility blouse the remainder of my stay in-country, or next to my notebook, which I only sparsely populated with thoughts. The Latino Marine desired to control the future, even the body of the person he would share it with. I wanted to escape the present, where I felt trapped in constructs in which I no longer believed: myself, the conflict in Iraq, the Marine Corps, my country, my God. Maybe it’s as reductive as: we were both scared and naked before the war. The enormity of what we were a part of hadn’t even begun to dawn on us. And though the microcosms of our existence reflected it, we remained unaware of our broader struggle with identity. Trying to reinforce the bulwarks that had held for so long—the Latino Marine attempting to police his girlfriend’s behavior, and my striving for escapism—proved to be much more difficult.
While I don’t know what became of the account’s balance, it was likely drained by a young Indian man yearning to hear the familiar voices back home. I could have taken the notebook back to Battalion HQ, they could’ve ascertained whose family was attached to the credit card and found the notebook’s rightful owner, but I doubted the outcome would be clean or simple. So, instead of throwing it away, I kept it–for reasons still unknown. Not for posterity’s sake, in a time before I thought about tomorrow.
