Major Conflict (17 page)

After he finished, he stood up and motioned for me to follow him, and we left the dining hall together. A Hummer was waiting outside. Apparently he'd come back to Cement City to check on some equipment that had arrived late and would be in the rear for only a couple of hours. He stood talking to me with one foot resting up in the passenger's side, holding on to the windshield frame since the Hummer had no tarp for cover. The driver was sitting on the other side, waiting, so our conversation was a lot less animated than it normally might've been. Not only did we have to conceal our excitement (at least I knew I had to conceal mine, at that point), but we also had to behave like officers, so there were certain limitations.

We finished our conversation, and he extended his hand to me; I shook it firmly. He didn't squeeze me on the shoulder. There was no hint that he'd even considered hugging me good-bye, which couldn't have happened anyway, considering the circumstances. No, it was just a formal, soldierly handshake, executed in a bit of a hurry, and then he was gone, speeding off toward the gate and back out to his unit in the desert.

Walking back the short distance to my tent, I felt as if I were glowing. Our conversation had been, by any standard, just friendly, innocuous banter, not the dialogue of a great romance, but that didn't matter to me. I thought about the impassioned promise I'd made to myself prior to our departure, that if I saw him again I'd tell him how I felt. But somehow that didn't seem so important right now. Just seeing him had been enough. Seeing him had healed everything, had set the narrative straight: we had connected one last time before combat, and that was good enough. We were at war now, in theater, waiting to commence operations against the enemy; now simply wasn't the time to be distracted by some vague longing for a fellow officer who may or may not be gay. I was here to do a job, plain and simple. And it would no doubt be the toughest job of my life, requiring my undivided attention every step of the way. Paul had a job to do, too, and for the next few months he would be focused on nothing else as well.

It was clear now. The conflict between my dedication as a soldier and the longings of my heart had now tipped decisively in favor of our roles as soldiers. I would worry about him. But I also knew and respected his commitment and that we shared a bond of sacrifice for a greater good: what we were doing was right, and it was far more important than either one of us alone, even more important than the two of us together.

Over the next several weeks all the equipment arrived in good order, and we were finally prepared for movement into the desert. We moved out and headed for the port of Dammam, where everything was being marshaled for the final push to our assembly area. UN Resolution 678 had condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and called for withdrawal of all troops and influence by January 15. Just two days after the passing of the deadline, on January 17, aerial bombardment of Iraq and occupied positions in Kuwait began. Fearing Iraqi retaliation with chemical weapons, we were put on threat condition DELTA. We were awakened by the shriek of sirens indicating a chemical threat. The war had begun, and with a bang.

We scrambled to pull on our masks and gloves, fear causing many of us to shake, making the task more difficult. All you have is seconds, literally, with no margin for error, and when the sirens are for real, not the sirens of a drill, those seconds seem like hours. Every sense goes into hyperdrive, every move counts. Your life is at its most meaningful, in a way, since during those moments
everything
is consequential.

Once everyone was suited up and communicating, I began to take in the scene around us. The port was bathed in the eerie glow of floodlights. The light cast huge ominous shadows out of the exposed steel girders that composed the guts of our maintenance bays. Bradley fighting vehicles raced up and down the streets of the compound, turrets spinning madly. The gloves were finally off, and we were going to do it to them before they did it to us. As we sat there immobilized by the stifling layers of charcoal-impregnated cloth and rubber, we gazed up at the sky and watched the flickering lights of hundreds of planes streaking north on their first mission, knights of the air thundering across the sky to engage the enemy and reduce their defenses to ashes. Soon after the initial wave of planes had passed overhead, the thud of exploding munitions could be heard from hundreds of miles away as we unleashed on them the full fury of our might.

I felt a strange evil glee as another wave of planes flew by, knowing that their mission was to annihilate the Iraqis. The overflight of planes signaled for me the final break from civilized behavior, a move from the politics of diplomacy and reason to the politics of war, which has its own set of rules that more closely resemble the rules of brute strength and force as opposed to the rules of mind and spirit that normally guide our everyday civilized lives. We'd stepped outside that world now and were locked in a titanic struggle from which only one could emerge victorious. Watching the power of our assault unfold, I knew that we were nearly invincible, and I was vaguely thrilled by the great jolt of energy that comes with witnessing the logic of pure aggression played out in real time. There was something immensely satisfying about experiencing in such a visceral way the deep connection to our animal ancestry, the brutal instinct to survive and triumph. All the impulses that polite society reviles were now not only laudable but indispensable—though still tamed, in a way, being wrapped up in the specific boundaries of organized warfare. It was like watching a great ball of fire harnessed and made useful. And to be a soldier was like being a part of that blaze. The enemy wanted me dead, and I wanted the enemy dead. It was either fight or die. And we were now fighting for our lives.

After those initial heady moments, the chatter of the radios began to die down as we waited for the NBC folks to give the word that all was clear. It seemed like an eternity, waiting in those hot, bulky suits, shrouded like moon men. Indeed, to find ourselves thrust into an environment where the very air we breathed might prove fatal was like finding ourselves suddenly catapulted to the moon. The minutes ticked away, and no word came. We listened to ourselves breathe. It was two A.M., and I was beginning to get drowsy, my body urging me back to the sleep from which I'd been awakened. Just as I began to nod off, Mike, a lieutenant from Alpha Battery, reached over abruptly and tapped the shoulders of Tom, the other officer in my unit, and me. I caught myself and began frantically gulping for air in the claustrophobic confines of the heavy mask. I thought he wanted to tell us something about the situation, but he only wanted to ask a question.

“Hey, you awake?” he said.

“Now I am.”

“Tom, you up?”

“Yeah, what's up?” Tom said through the mask.

“Um . . . I gotta take a dump, what should I do?”

There was a moment of silence as we all considered this. We were in full chemical gear, and there was still no way of knowing if anything had happened, if the air was safe.

“What about the diaper they issued us? Didn't you put it on?” Tom said without missing a beat.

“Diaper? What fucking diaper? What are you talking about. Are you outta your mind?” He looked to me for support. I played along with Tom.

“You didn't get one?” I asked, trying to keep from smiling.

“What? Fuck you, I'm serious. I gotta go, whaddaya think I should do?”

“Can't you wait?” I said. “It won't be that much longer.”

“What did I just say? No, I can't wait.”

Welcome to war at the end of the twentieth century. All the training in the world wouldn't have prepared us for this.

“Just try to find a private spot and seal it off as much as possible and don't take off your mask,” Tom said.

“I agree,” I said.

Mike got up and left the area to find a private spot to take care of business. We simply sat there in silence, waiting for the situation to change, lost in our own thoughts, sweating profusely from the rubber seals against our skin. After about twenty minutes, the radios crackled to life and the word came down to go to MOPP (mission-oriented protective picture) 2, which meant chemical suit but no mask and gloves. I pulled the mask off and let the fresh air flood over my face, then took my sleeve and wiped the sweat and grime off my face and off the mask's interior. Tom was doing the same when Mike walked in, still decked out in full chemical gear. He quickly pulled off his mask and gulped for air.

“So did everything come out all right?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, but some raghead is going to have the surprise of his life in the morning.”

“Whaddaya mean?” I asked.

“Well, I couldn't find a bathroom, so I barricaded myself in one of the offices and used a trash pail.”

Tom and I looked at each other, horrified, and then we broke out laughing.

“You idiot, the bathroom is two doors down that way.” Tom pointed, laughing.

“I just want you to know that it is moments like this that you establish yourself as a national treasure,” I said.

“Which office was it?” Tom asked, still smiling.

“That one.” Mike pointed in the direction of a small building some distance away.

“Jesus, Mike, that's one of ours, Americans are using that one. Didn't you see all the paperwork there? I can't believe it wasn't locked. Thank God we're leaving tomorrow.”

Tom and I both just shook our heads and stared at Mike incredulously.

After that first incredible night, with the jackhammering of the Iraqis nicely under way, things took on a predictability that we could not have anticipated just three weeks before. The Iraqis were unable to counter the massive air strikes, so we were able to conduct operations unopposed and largely in stealth. We moved our unit to a desert staging area and in doing so became part of the largest armored assault since World War II, all the new weapons systems of the 1980s proving their worth and then some.

One special note from those eventful days was the fact that the New York Giants were in the Super Bowl. On game day it was raining pretty heavily, as it does very often during the winter in the kingdom. Several other football junkies and I stood at the foot of one of the Hummers with a small radio that could pick up the game and listened as the Giants kicked the winning field goal. It was a great boost to our morale, and we took it as an omen that the fighting would go well. The outcome of the war would be clear in a matter of days, and we'd have control of the ball the whole time.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Desert Storm

Iraq in January; rainy season in the desert. I know to some that may sound fabulously exotic, enchanting almost. You imagine stunning gold-and-jewel-encrusted mosques jutting up from low-lying clouds; a morning mist gently rising above bone-white sand dunes; dramatic snow-capped mountains to the north; the twin rivers, Tigris and Euphrates (the names alone evoke a kind of magic), which flow unencumbered southward like azure-colored ribbons; partridges and wild geese perched atop miles and miles of date palms and poplar trees effortlessly swaying in the soft temperate air, the birds flying off, then disappearing beyond the endless horizon.

But no, I'm afraid that's not the Iraq we found ourselves in. There was no temperate air, and it wasn't soft. It was muggy, wet, and hot, and it often changed to wet and very cold in what seemed like an instant. There were no jewel-encrusted mosques where we were. The only architecture we were privy to was the ugly gun-metal oil wells that shot up incongruously from the dirty gray sand like petrified fistulas. We saw no exotic animals or birds—only the occasional lost and tired camel; the ever-present scavenger buzzards that, if given the chance, would peck out your eyeballs while you slept; and hideous swarms of giant bats the size of 155mm projectiles. The Iraqi desert was entirely unexotic, unenchanting, unfriendly. It was goddamned uninhabitable.

We were on the move in the southernmost part of this hellhole somewhere along the 33rd parallel, stealthily positioning our troops and precision-readying them so that when the word came to unleash hell on Saddam's army, we'd be able to do just that with surgical accuracy. I was commanding a group of five men out of an impossibly small M577 personnel carrier. It was approximately seven feet wide and nine feet deep, and that was with nothing in it. Once it was filled with the computers, communications equipment, chairs, and platforms, as well as the actual personnel it was meant to carry, available space shrank considerably. Working inside that thing I often felt like a one-hundred-pound sausage living in a ten-pound bag.

The interior of this very ugly, very expensive armored sardine can was drab olive green and black. Thick black cables coiled around everything, and there were big chunky bolts and hard angles every place you moved. We considered ourselves especially blessed if we managed to avoid jabbing ourselves at least once over the course of the day. The worst was getting jabbed in the groin by one of Uncle Sam's little wake-me-ups. Needless to say, the working environment in this highly necessary communications node was tight, charmless, and cruel.

Working in such a small space with four other men really makes you appreciate the value of personal space, however tiny that actual personal space may be. And a lot of barriers are broken down as well. For instance, in most working environments you wouldn't expect to be present while one of your colleagues is having a bowel movement. And if you were, you probably wouldn't expect said colleague to describe the deed in perfect detail for anyone within earshot—probably just to counteract the absolute lack of privacy. Good manners and other niceties that have been deeply ingrained in you your whole civilian life are tossed aside during the extreme circumstances that often come with deployment. But when you realize that the colleague describing the bowel movement is a fresh-faced, eighteen-year-old enlisted boy, who could be reduced to mere vapor by a stray RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in a nanosecond, you suddenly understand how trivial all your hang-ups are. Humor, comingled with the stark realism of the prospect of serious injury and death, has a funny way of cold-slapping you into reality.

In this close environment, where there's zero visual stimulus, it's very important, if you want to avoid going stark-raving mad, to develop a level of comfort and trust with the men you're working with. And, primarily, this translates into talking. It's important to talk. So the guys talked first about their sports teams back home, then the girls they'd known, then the miserable, unpredictable weather, and then maybe the last book they'd read or the last movie they'd seen; gradually, it was only a matter of time, everyone became a little more personal, and soon enough the whole scene took on the feel of informal group therapy. Of course, for me it was different. I couldn't be totally honest with these men. God knows I wanted to be. But that would have been professional suicide and might've easily led to a total breakdown in morale. So, for the sake of my career and for these men whom I was leading into battle, men whom I was convinced I'd die for and who would die for me, I chose to continue living the lie.

I had to create a series of sex stories in order to fit in, to show that I was just one of the guys and that I was willing to open up. Lying so blatantly to these men always made me feel more stressed. The more lies I told, the more I'd have to keep track of.

I definitely felt the pressure to fit in whenever the talk turned to sex. Once we were conducting dry-fire missions, an exercise in which you compute all the acquired data on certain hard targets without actually firing on them. It's an excellent means of getting the processing time down and remaining frosty before actually having to uncork hell. Specialist McCarty was the computer operator that day. McCarty looked as if he was just a couple of years past puberty. I swear, if he'd told me he was nineteen, I'd have been shocked. He was rail-thin, and his uniform was too big for his slender frame, giving him a gaunt, almost sickly look. He did, however, have a great knack for making us all laugh—no small talent in circumstances like these—and he never had a problem being the brunt of his own jokes. He was well liked by everyone, and, quite honestly, the tour wouldn't have been the same without him. As he was applying dabs of Clearasil onto to his thin, pimply face, he looked up from the standard-issue metal mirror and said, “Anyone heard from home lately?”

No one answered. There was no e-mail then, during this first Gulf War, so “hearing from home” meant a letter, usually, and it carried a kind of weight and meaning that I imagine e-mail doesn't provide in quite the same way for soldiers being deployed today, if only because a letter actually exists as a physical object the lover or friend or family member has actually created and touched and sealed themselves, something tangible. It was probably a combination of nerves and sadness, anxiety and homesickness, that prevented the men from answering McCarty's simple question. No one really wanted to think about home because it was a special category, something to be cherished during happier times. As things now stood, we were just days, maybe hours, away from literally scorching the earth and killing Iraqi soldiers, and we needed to be game-face ready. Our main focus at that point was simply to kill with great precision while absorbing little or no collateral damage. We had been privy to most of the intelligence gathered on Saddam's army: seven hundred thousand strong, well equipped with heavy armament and chemical weapons, willing to die for their cause. We all knew it wasn't quite going to be a cakewalk.

But McCarty, always unruffled and unfazed and ready to talk and laugh, said, while replacing the cap on his near-empty tube of Clearasil, “My girl just wrote me a letter. She's worried about the ground phase. She thinks we're going to take massive casualties. Imagine that. Where'd she get that kind of information?”

“Real loyal bitch you got there, McCarty. What's she look like under her veil?” said Private First Class Moore, a twenty-year-old homeboy from the Bronx. I had a soft spot for him, despite his being a pain in the ass at times, because my memories of home were good, and it was thoughts of New York that often kept me balanced during times of anxious calm like this one, when there was too much silence and too much space to think.

“Fuck you, Moore!” McCarty parlayed back, “my bitch is prime corn-fed, red-blooded, son. How else she gonna handle”—he became suddenly animated, grabbing his crotch and pumping his hips into a frenzied gyration—“Big Daddy's python? She gots to be all woman to handle some a this!”

Everyone laughed, and he kept pumping his hips, occasionally slapping his ass, and then he pulled on one of the extension cords, taking the slack and wrapping it around the imaginary neck of his girl, and whispered through clenched teeth, “Whose python is that? Who's your daddy? Who's giving you the monster fuck of a lifetime? Who? Tell me who!?”

And then, in a high-pitched falsetto, he responded as the girl. “Why, you are, Daddy! Oh—give it to me harder! Yes, you are, Daddy!” fluttering his eyelashes and swishing his hips.

“Okay, McCarty, finish up now,” I broke in. I was afraid that if I'd let him go on, we would've been privy to the
really
dark side of an eighteen-year-old mind, one that had way too much time and testosterone on its hands. But everyone was still laughing, and the men seemed visibly more relaxed. They always got a kick out of watching one of McCarty's outbursts. It broke the tension, so I allowed it, within reason.

Staff Sergeant White, my sergeant, slid his chair away from the computer terminal, looked up into the nothingness of the drab metal ceiling, and said, “Goddamn, I miss pussy. Been too damn long.” White was a devoted father of two with a third on the way. He was as straight as an arrow and generally very mild-mannered, always impeccably uniformed, and almost obsessed with cleanliness. And he was a highly valued tool in my arsenal, since I knew that when it was time to do the job, he'd be a virtual killing machine. He was indispensable to me in other ways as well. The younger soldiers had a lot of respect for him, so he often served as a buffer between the men and me. Any problem that arose in the field would go to him first. He would then filter out all the bullshit and give it to me straight. He saved me hours of effort. Now he was turning toward me with an expectant look on his face. I tried to busy myself in order to derail the conversation before we got to where I knew we were headed, but it was too late.

“What about you, LT,” White said. “You have anyone at home you keeping company with?”

Keeping company with
—I had to smile at the phrase. My grandmother used to ask me if I was keeping company with any girls, and my answer was always the same: no. I looked up from my terminal, tried to deflect the question by doing my best imitation New York cool.

“Nope, no one special at the moment,” I said, smiling a little.

Moore jumped all over that. “Sucks to be you, sir,” he said.

Now Moore knew he had a slight tilt with me, but he also knew he was dancing on a very thin sheet of ice. I leaned in, only half serious, and tipped my head at him. “Come again,
Private
?” I said.

The track was suddenly quiet. Moore quickly resumed his job of capturing coordinates. He laughed when he finally spoke. “I was just saying,
sir,
” he said, slowly, “how totally fucked up it must be that the last piece of pussy McCarty got was in this very track just thirty seconds ago . . .
sir
.”

Specialist Ranklin was a twenty-two-year-old fresh-faced kid from Kentucky, just six months removed from a trailer park. He was checking the chemical-warfare suits. He looked to White at this point and smiled, said, “No offense, Sarge, but when was the last time you got laid?”

“No offense taken, Ranklin,” the courteous sergeant said. “Just before I left we put the kids to bed early. My wife made us a great steak dinner with some broccoli and potatoes. We had a little wine, put on some easy listening. . . .”

His face was filled with a sad kind of pleasure, remembering the night with his wife. Looking at him, I suddenly understood in a way I hadn't before just why the men respected him so much. He was just so honest and good, a good father, a loving husband; he was everything you saw right in front of you, no deception. How I admired that and how I wished I could be more like him! But how could I be? Was it even possible? Not in this army, I thought, not in this war. But maybe in the next?

“We lit some candles,” White continued his reverie, “got in the bath together, and made love all night long.”

“Check out the sarge getting all Barry White on us and shit . . .” Moore said, breaking up the soft moment with his own brand of New Yorkese. He started to sing in a big sultry baritone, doing his best Barry White imitation, and there was more laughter all around. The sarge was a good sport and took it all in stride. There was a warmth to the moment that was very special. These were good men I was living with, and I was proud to lead them into battle.

“What'd you do before we flew, Moore?” White asked then.

“Went down to Kstrasse with one a my homies from Charlie Company,” Moore said, referring to the red-light district in Frankfurt.

He stopped what he was doing and looked up to the ceiling as if he were savoring the experience. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear about his night in a Kstrasse brothel. I told myself it was because I was twenty-six and Moore was only still a kid, just twenty, and I was way beyond this kind of thing. I realize now that it made me uncomfortable because it was somewhat transgressive, like my own sexuality, outside the accepted norms represented by Sergeant White's perfectly respectable sex-in-wedlock-with-children, making-love-by-candlelight-in-the-tub-all-night story. He could've told the story on
Oprah,
for God's sake, word for word. Despite my discomfort, though, I let Moore continue with his brothel story. It was a morale booster, after all, and everyone needed to feel comfortable enough to be open with the other men. That is, everyone but me. But I was leading these men, I told myself, so I had to make certain sacrifices, I couldn't afford to be quite as open. Which was true, to an extent. All differences of sexuality aside, I still had to maintain a certain distance as the unit leader. And I wasn't so naive as to think that I or anyone else for that matter would be able to tell a same-sex story among a group of men like this—in the army or otherwise—anytime soon. But still, still, did I have to be this isolated? Did I have to remain this hidden? We might all die together, for Christ's sake, and soon; yet I still had to lie, in the face of death I had to keep on lying.