Major Conflict (14 page)

At one point I gave up trying to talk and just stood silently and listened, occasionally sneaking a covert glance at him. My feelings were all over the map. Not only was he perfect, he was also in the army. And not only was he in the army, he was an officer as well. I couldn't believe it. I had to keep reassuring myself that I had on a kind of poker face; my feelings were so strong that it seemed impossible they weren't showing all over my face. I considered leaving, going out to get some air, going to the bathroom, anything to extricate myself from this uncomfortable situation, but I couldn't, my attraction to him was so severe that I could barely move. The desire I felt seemed appropriate for a cheesy romance novel; it wasn't the kind of thing I imagined I'd ever feel myself. I mean like huge waves of desire crashing against the White Cliffs of Dover, that kind of thing. I felt helpless in his presence; all prior restraints had suddenly been cast off, and my entire life had suddenly been recalculated as a new equation, one that had been inconceivable until the moment this new variable was introduced.

At the same time I felt an inchoate sadness building up that soon began to make me feel as if I were being smothered.

“Dude, what's wrong?” I heard Lostrapo's voice coming at me suddenly. “You look like shit. Need another diaper change, Jeffy boy?”

“Nah,” I said, “I'm just beat. You want to call it a night?” I tried to keep my eyes focused on Lostrapo and not look at Paul.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. He shook Paul's hand and said good-bye to the female lieutenant from Hanau.

After saying good-bye to the female lieutenant I put my hand out to Paul, and he took it with a big smile, and like clockwork, I swear, fireworks went off in my head—Fourth of July fireworks, and New York fireworks, too, high up over the East River, not some little hick-town excuse for a fireworks show.

“Nice meeting you,” he said.

“Yeah,” trying to sound cool, “same here. Maybe . . .” Suddenly I realized that I might never see him again. “Maybe we'll see each other—you know, around—have a couple of beers, or something.”

“That'd be cool,” he said.

I turned my body to leave, though my head stayed in place as he held my gaze for a split second longer than normal, adding fuel to my suspicion that the attraction might not be entirely one-sided. This really didn't seem possible, though. I was blinded by his good looks, that's all, I told myself. For a few days afterward I pined privately but ferociously over him, and soon, when it seemed clear I wasn't going to see him again, I began to let the image of him slip from my mind.

About three weeks later I was sent to the Unit Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical officer course in Hanau, the purpose of which, as the name suggested, was to teach army personnel about the various chemical and biological munitions we might face and to explain how to plot the direction of fallout from nuclear weapons. Since all mechanized Artillery units at the time were nuclear capable, it was very important to have a few people in every unit trained regarding such matters. Despite the serious nature of this particular course, the experience felt—as did most of the classes we were periodically compelled to take—kind of like a little vacation. And rather than commute back and forth I was allowed to stay in the BOQ in Fliegerhorst Kaserne.

I reported for class on the first day at seven forty-five A.M. and took a seat in the back of the classroom. I was tired and wished I could remain invisible. The other students, mostly NCOs and lieutenants, filed in during the next fifteen minutes. A lot of them seemed to be from the same nearby unit, so they were all talking to one another. Occasionally one of them would nod or say hello to me, and I'd return the nod and then go back to doodling in my notebook. I wasn't interested in talking to anyone that morning. Finally, the instructor walked in with a large white binder and was just about to begin when Paul walked briskly through the door and headed right toward me. We made eye contact, and he smiled and sat down next to me.

“What's up?” he said quietly, leaning over and extending his hand.

“How's it going?” I whispered, bursting, though trying my best once again to remain visibly cool. We shook hands, and I got goose flesh instantly.

The instructor cleared his throat. “We'll just wait until these two gentlemen have gotten to know one another sufficiently,” he said.

The rest of the class laughed a little bit, Paul and I faced front, and the class began. Instead of a nice little vacation, I thought to myself, sitting next to Paul, smelling him (yes, there was a scent that drove me crazy), this week away from the battalion was going to be a week's worth of exquisite torture.

The portly sergeant first class with the Coke-bottle glasses droned on and on about VX and sarin gas, and I kept thinking that an ice pick jammed deep into my eye would have been more fun. But Paul was there. And every hour or so the portly sergeant first class gave us a ten-minute break. I tried to appear aloof and indifferent, but during every one of these breaks Paul sought me out and struck up a conversation.

That night he called me and asked if I wanted to go out to grab a bite to eat. I said yes immediately. We drove into Frankfurt to eat at a Turkish place he'd discovered several months before. I got to know him pretty well that first day. He was a really nice guy. I could tell that right away—on our first break during class—down to earth, easygoing, with a sharp sense of humor, sometimes cutting and sarcastic but never in a mean way. We were very different. He grew up in Washington State with his parents and several brothers and sisters, the very epitome of bourgeois respectability. He had a girlfriend back home, and they'd been together since high school. He was really into sports, including hunting and fishing. The only thing I'd ever fished for was a subway token at the bottom of my jeans pocket.

And so for the next five days we spent pretty much every available minute together. The time took on a magical quality. I'd never experienced anything like it before, never having known the sheer pleasure of being in the company of another person whom I liked so much.

It was a kind of relief when the week was finally over and we had to separate. That kind of intensity is exhausting. And besides, he'd said he had a girlfriend, so the relationship was never going to go in the direction I wanted it to.

As time went by and I gained some perspective on that magical first week, I was a little stunned by just how pure and right my passion for Paul seemed to be. It had caught me completely off guard, and I was overwhelmed by the suddenness with which it came on and by its sheer intensity and unqualified authenticity. I'm not sure I'd ever in my life been more certain of an emotion than I was about my feeling for Paul. This alone was cause, I assumed, for private celebration, but also, I was sure, for alarm.

Indeed, once my passion for Paul became clear to me, I found myself getting extremely paranoid. The thrill I had when contemplating a relationship with him was more than counterbalanced by a terrible sense of dread, knowing exactly what the consequences of that relationship might be. I knew with absolute certainty that should the relationship ever be discovered, my career would be over in a heartbeat. No excuses, no apologies, no benefit of the doubt, no understanding or turning a blind eye, nothing but pure, cold dismissal and professional ruin. With a stroke of a pen it could happen instantly. All the hard work and dedication, all the mental stress and physical strain, would instantly mean nothing. It would all be null and void. I would have broken the rules, and the punishment would be swift and sure.

The saddest thing about this was just how much I'd accepted it, and how perfectly incapable I was of seeing it any other way. What a failure of imagination! What a victim of a kind of cultural tyranny I was! So much so that I couldn't even see it. I was a slave to the word
normal
, as defined by the UCMJ. And I was still convinced that I belonged in the culture of the military, that it was my home, which meant making the personal sacrifice and denying myself what any heterosexual would never, in a million years, even dream of giving up.

After I got back to the unit I decided I was going to keep it light and not let myself get into a situation like that again. In my heart I knew that there was something very special about my attraction to Paul and that I probably would not fall that hard again for anybody anytime soon. I reasoned that it made no sense to put pressure on myself and focus on something that I had a snowball's chance in hell of changing. It boiled down to an old West Point maxim, “Go along and get along.” That's what I'd have to do. Very few of the lieutenants in the battalion had steady girlfriends or were married, so it would be easy for me to blend in, which is what I wanted to do.

But Paul wasn't interested in taking it light, and “Go along and get along” may have meant something different to him. He called me almost every weekend. And every time I heard his voice, all my reasoned resistance seemed to drop away, making me once again helpless. I'd travel down to Hanau and then to Frankfurt with him. If I tried to come up with some reason to say no, he pressed me and I'd give in immediately. In Frankfurt one night, a few months later, he told me that his unit was deploying to the field and that he'd be away for a forty-five-day rotation. I didn't say anything, and he got a weird look on his face, as if he was expecting me to say how much I'd miss him or something; when I remained silent, he quickly changed the subject. I felt guilty about this since I knew that I would, in fact, miss him terribly, but I was still unsure just how much of that feeling was mutual. The whole thing still made me so paranoid. Though I was upset, I was kind of relieved that we'd be able to bring an end to things gracefully and could just get on with our careers. Little did I know that this was merely the beginning of the relationship and, far from coming to a graceful end, it would be the catalyst that would ultimately lead to my departure from the army.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Desert Shield

As spring turned to summer we began to prepare for the annual fall exercises. We'd be doing a massive computer exercise to test communications and help us develop standard operating procedures. Some units would deploy their command posts to the field, where they would receive situation reports from the simulation center. Even though the Berlin Wall had just fallen and the enemy as we knew it for forty-odd years was no more, I was assigned to the OPFOR (opposition forces), which meant I got to play the part of the Soviets. Little did we know just how short-lived our lack of a traditional foe would turn out to be, for as we planned this simulation Saddam Hussein was beginning to threaten Kuwait.

During the simulation planning I was sitting in the office with a few of the guys talking about going to Switzerland to see a jazz festival when the boss walked in and told us the battalion commander had called a meeting of all officers in two hours. He wouldn't tell us what it was about. Two hours later we all filed into the battalion classroom and sat down until the adjutant appeared in the doorway and announced the commander.

“Gentlemen, the battalion commander.”

As one, the whole group of us stood at attention until he told us to take our seats.

“Gentlemen,” he started, in a formal voice I'd never heard him use before, “the president of the United States has just ordered elements of the Eighty-second Airborne to Saudi Arabia in response to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. We are there to ensure that the president of Iraq does not attempt to invade the kingdom as well. The operation is called Desert Shield, and it is very, very serious. We may end up fighting a war in the Middle East for the first time ever, and for those of you who do not know, Iraq's army is the fourth largest in the world, so it would be a tough fight.

“I called you all here to let you know about the situation and to inform you that we must be ready to deploy as well. The word has come down that we will be called upon to backfill units if casualties occur, and we may even go ourselves. Right now there is nothing but a thin green line of paratroopers standing in the way of a mechanized force that is equipped with Soviet weapons. The focus of the entire army is to build up to combat power as quickly as possible in order to handle whatever comes next. We must be focused and ready to do whatever we are asked to do. As more information flows to me, I will pass what is not classified down to you. At this point I will take some questions. The S-Two will—Deuce, where are you?—okay, the Deuce will help me out answering your questions since he's been doing his homework over the last several hours.”

The Virgin Mary herself could have walked into the room at that point, and to a man we would have completely ignored her. Iraq? I'd heard of it but wasn't sure how big the border with Saudi Arabia was; as for Kuwait, all I knew was that it was jammed somewhere among the Arab Emirates in the Gulf. My first instinct was to think we were interested in protecting Kuwait because of the oil, but then I remembered that the United States had a policy stating that any alteration of existing borders in the region would be viewed as a threat to the interests of the United States. This was one of the few times my political science degree from Fordham came in handy. I'd taken a course in Middle Eastern politics and so was pretty familiar with the geography and the issues.

After the initial shock had subsided somewhat, the room began to come to life and hands shot up with questions for the commander. The questions were all over the place, from the basics like where these two countries were and what languages were spoken, to the weapons they had and who ruled them. It wouldn't be the last time we'd discuss this, obviously, but it seemed as if everyone was straining at the very limits of his comprehension in order to process what was happening.

The possibility of our going to war was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard. Images of glory, of being tested in combat—not just winning in a training exercise, but fighting against an actual enemy—is what every real soldier dreams of. Finally, we'd have the chance to cut our teeth, to test ourselves in the ultimate arena. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that with the fourth-largest army in the world, the Iraqis had all the toys to give as good as they got. It had been twenty years since our army had engaged in a conflict of similar size and scope. Panama, which had occurred just months before, had been too small to be of any major note. It was only when mechanized forces were in play that a conflict took on a certain grandeur, if you will. The brute power of even one mechanized brigade is truly awe-inspiring. The entire mechanized force of the greatest army in history on a rampage would be something beyond words, and surely something that would warrant more than a footnote in the history books. I had no doubt we'd be victorious, none at all.

But beneath this élan and sense of invincibility there was the more thoughtful and questioning part of myself, one that even then began to think about casualties and to wonder, too, if the lessons that Vietnam had taught us would be applied. But this would be a question for the generals and the historians. Just then, all I knew for certain was that the undertaking would be enormous and that we were about to begin a brutal couple of months preparing for battle.

Looking around the room at my fellow officers, I couldn't help but see them in a new light. Up until now they were simply young men like me, little more than college kids, really, but now, as the reality of the news sunk in, they seemed to age before my eyes. No longer simply the fun-loving, hard-drinking knuckleheads I'd bonded with, they began to look like soldiers, serious professionals who'd heard the call and were now prepared to do whatever it took to make sure the United States came out on top.

We all knew what war meant in theory. We'd all studied the battles and walked the sites where they'd been fought, but now we'd be experiencing the real thing. And we all seemed to realize instantly that the mental process of steeling oneself against the prospect of whatever was thrown up at us had to begin right away. Blanks, computer simulations, and referees had done what they could to keep us as prepared as possible in peacetime, but now the real training would begin in earnest. We had to know our jobs cold and be able to act effectively in any and all situations in which we found ourselves.

I knew that one of the big things hanging heavy in my fellow officers' minds was the prospect of chemical weapons. The commander had mentioned that the Iraqis were known to have them and to have actually used them against their own people. He tried to reassure us that our equipment could handle anything they threw at us, but it was clear that few were convinced. NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) training was one of the things that officers blew off regularly, for two reasons, I think. The main reason was just the sheer unpleasantness of the training. Imagine gardening, in the middle of one of the hottest afternoons in August, wearing a heavily padded coat, with a dozen layers of cellophane plastered across your face. Imagine so much sand getting caught inside the mask that you end up feeling it in your teeth for days. The second reason was, I think, the knowledge that one wrong move and all these elaborate precautions would prove to be futile. There was something particularly dreadful about imagining it, too, something just so qualitatively different from imagining, say, bullets and shrapnel, that some soldiers just weren't willing to face it.

The commander took questions for about an hour, and when it appeared that we were all talked out, he dismissed us, instructing us to keep the troops informed and to let them know that more information would be forthcoming. As we got up to leave, my buddy Duncan came alongside of me and said, “Dude, you know we'll never go. They would never pull troops out of Europe.” Normally I would have agreed with him, but somehow I felt that this time was different, this time all bets were off.

Over the weeks that followed, the situation worsened. The president used every means, short of combat itself, to signal to Saddam Hussein that the invasion would not stand. Preparations were fast and furious as the machinery of war went into high gear, moving forces halfway around the world to reinforce the thin green line in the sand.

Finally, about a month later, when it became clear that only a lot of body bags filled with Iraqi soldiers would convince Saddam to pull back from Kuwait, word came down that we were going in. My friend Duncan had been wrong, and my hunch had proved correct. The Pentagon decided to deploy an entire corps into the theater to provide the coalition with a credible offensive punch. After we found out our unit would be going, everyone had a newfound spring in his step, and morale was very high. We were going to kick ass! Differences dropped away as we bonded over the higher purpose of deploying, fighting, and bringing everyone home safely. In an effort to reduce stress and keep morale high, the chain of command made sure soldiers' families were included whenever possible. Married officers went out of their way to invite single officers like myself over for dinner as often as possible, a gesture that was deeply comforting to me at the time.

The next few months were like taking a dozen rides back-to-back on the Cyclone at Coney Island. There was so much to do that it was hard to find time to sit down and examine all the feelings swirling around inside me. I decided it was time to do just that when, one day, as I was watching my driver perform maintenance checks on the Hummer, I suddenly wondered what I would do if his head were blown off right in front of me. Talk about wanting to be prepared for every single scenario. Some things were just unknowable, I realized. Some things you just couldn't be prepared for. Like the boy on the rock, like the young German dead in his Mercedes, there would always be things that didn't make sense, that fell outside the narrative— horrible loose ends, tragedies that you'd discover your reaction to only after they'd occurred.

And, I realized, the only antidote, the only salve for this strain of senseless tragedy that so often infects the world, is love, family. And even that treats only the symptoms; it's never a cure, for these things are, by definition, incurable. Still, they're made bearable by love and family and that may be as good as it gets. Where was the love in my life? I asked myself. Whose arms would hold me when I returned from the war? Naturally, I thought of Paul during these moments. But even as his face materialized in my mind, even as his arms reached out to embrace me in some imaginary homecoming, I realized what pure fantasy the whole thing was. And, realizing this, I became overwhelmed with a sadness that seemed to reach into the very core of my being. In an ideal world I would have been able to have a relationship. But the world I'd chosen to live in, the world of the U.S. military, strictly forbade the use of my particular antidote; the love I wanted was against the rules. I was, in fact, a criminal. The irony of my situation was so incredibly galling to me! Here I was, ready to put it all on the line in the service of my country, willing to pledge my blood and breath for the United States, and yet I faced dying, I faced meeting that pledge a liar, a cheat, a criminal. Even if I had a lover, even if Paul and I had been together for years, all our communication would still have to be camouflaged in the most bland and platonic terms. If I was killed, he'd have no rights, receive no benefits, be handed no crisp widower's flag. I could earn ten thousand Purple Hearts, but still there'd be no Paul standing on the tarmac, waving a little flag, waiting to embrace me, to kiss me hard on the lips, when I returned home from the war. Why did it have to be this way?

Did
it have to be this way? Everything I'd been taught, from St. Joan of Arc through Archbishop Malloy, every Catholic pronouncement on the subject, every faggot joke I'd had to endure by a straight man who couldn't imagine that a gay man was actually standing next to him, all of this told me that if you had to ask the question there was something wrong with you. But still, there it was. I was off to war, and there the question was. It was so simple and so powerful, so replete with common sense, why on earth could no one in the Pentagon see it? I could meet the standard, I was popular, I was accepted by my peers; my blood would shed as red and as easily as the straight soldier's fighting next to me. Why was I forbidden to be the person I am? Why could I be a soldier but not a man?