Ryan Smithson (19 page)

It’s after dinner. No one can sleep, so we’re up telling riddles. LT comes in the tent, bags under his eyes, and joins our group.

I stand up to meet LT and say, “Sir, a farmer has twenty sick sheep. One dies. How many does he have left?”

When you ask someone this riddle, they’ll say twenty-five sheep until they’re blue in the face. Because out loud, when you say “twenty sick sheep,”
it sounds like “twenty-six sheep.”

LT doesn’t know the answer, so he just keeps walking. Now, he’s 6'2" and I’m 5'6". So as he walks, he has to look down. And since you don’t stand toe-to-toe with an officer, I have to back up. He gets police-interrogation close and stares me down, grinning the whole time.

“Sir, I’m going to need an answer,” I tell him.

He keeps walking.

“I’m warning you, LT,” I say.

When we’re ten feet away from the original group, I feel something brewing down below. It’s just unnecessary for LT to still be towering over me with this shit-eating grin he’s wearing, so I do something about it.

I turn quickly so my butt is facing him. Then I let out a little fart, a tiny squeaker. Think of a rabbit burping.

When I turn back to face him, LT has stopped dead in his tracks. The group explodes in laughter.

“Push” is all LT says.

I get down in the front leaning rest and start knocking them out. From the group Zerega says, “You don’t fart on a commissioned officer in the U.S. army!”

LT says he needs a spot to sit and contemplate the
answer to my riddle. That’s when I get flattened on the wooden floor.

“I didn’t say stop,” he says. I make a feeble attempt to push with him sitting on my back.

“Recover, Smithson,” he says when he gets off me. “You know, they put you through a lot of training classes when you become an officer. What to do when one of your soldiers farts on you? Not one of them.”

“That’s because the army never saw me coming, sir.”

“I can’t even be mad at you, Smithson,” he says. “You were desperate. And that, my friend, was a brilliant solution. You looked like a squid shooting your ink.”

The tent at FOB Summerall has plywood floors. This is so the puddles of rain and mud that collect outside the tent don’t come inside the tent. But apparently these tents were set up during the dry season because there’s slack in the tent’s roof. So every night when it rains, the edges pool with water until they leak. Obviously, after only one night of sleeping here, we figure out to place our cots in the center of the tent and leave the edges clear.

During the second week of the Samarra mission the commander comes out to the field with us. He walks in the tent, and you can almost hear the sigh let loose from everyone’s mouth. The commander is wearing his tan army-issue gloves. Outside of his office he always wears gloves. His uniform is pressed and sparkling clean. And his body armor and field gear look like they were just pulled from their plastic packaging.

It hasn’t started raining yet, and the commander begins setting up a cot. Instead of taking a hint or—here’s a thought—asking someone, he sets his cot up on the outskirts of the thirty others pushed toward
the tent’s center. He must assume we all pushed our cots together because we enjoy the smell of one another’s feet and morning breath. Though I’m sure he thinks we pushed our cots to the center to give him more living space. While he wrestles with the cumbersome army cot, no one offers him a hand or bothers to tell him that the edges of the tent drip rainwater all night.

The commander is the first one asleep, and it doesn’t start raining until one in the morning. We’re woken up by his lone, key chain flashlight as it dances blue light across the tent.

Sticking my head out of my sleeping bag, I see him trying to keep the little LED’s button pushed down with one hand and move his stuff with the other. I turn back over to go to sleep.

Quietly, head in my sleeping bag, I laugh because it’s the middle of the night in a combat zone….

“Somebody has to stay back with him,” says Munoz.

“I’ll stay back,” I offer immediately. How can I turn this down?

“All right, we’ll bring you guys a plate,” says Jesse Lee.

Normally dentists won’t pull all four wisdom teeth in one shot, but this is the army and we are in a combat zone. There’s no time for mercy.

However Rhodes doesn’t feel the slightest ounce of pain. He’s still drugged from whatever they gave him at the dentist. Though “drugged” may not be the right adjective. Downright royally stoned seems more appropriate.

Rhodes sits in a chair in our common room, the one with the shelf full of candy, in a drunken slumped position. His head is back, jaw open, and the clump of gauze in the back of his mouth makes it difficult for him to talk.

“No tea-bagging Rhodesh,” he says.

The whole group of us is laughing when LT walks by. He looks down at Rhodes slumped there
in his inebriated state and smiles.

“You feelin’ okay, buddy?” asks LT.

“You arn gonna tea-bag me are you, shir?”

LT laughs and assures Rhodes that no tea-bagging of any sort will occur. Then the group heads off to chow.

Minus two, that is. Rhodes and I sit in the common room, next to the fridge, and he tells me all about how he’d fought to stay awake while the dentist intravenously knocked him out.

“I don think itsch werrkin’,” he had told the dentist. The dentist prepped another needle and gave him a second dose. “Then my head juss fell back and I passhed owt.” Rhodes fakes his head falling back and almost falls out of the chair. This is why he needs a guardian while the rest go to lunch.

I catch him and lift him back into his seat.

“Thanksch,” he mutters.

He looks to the platoon’s dry erase board, which sits on the wall beside him. It has all the soldiers from EQ listed by last name. There are small corresponding boxes for writing in where they are at any given time. It’s for accountability.

Rhodes turns in his chair, grabs the marker, and begins scribbling things next to the names of those who had just gone to chow. Normally, we write a
D
for DFAC (Dining Facility) when we go to chow. Rhodes just writes “food.”

“I need a shmoke,” he tells me.

“I don’t think you should be smoking,” I say.

“Doctor shaid itsh okay ash long ash the gauze esh there,” he informs me. “Maybe Fawldeh hash shome shigarettesh.”

“He’s at chow,” I say.

Rhodes apparently doesn’t believe me and stumbles out of his chair to prove me wrong.

“Be careful,” I tell him.

“For wha?”

He staggers through the nearby doorway to the hallway and Folden’s room. Knocking on the door, he asks for Sergeant Folden.

“He’s at chow,” I say again. Rhodes opens the door and enters the room.

“Surjen Fawldeh?” he asks the empty room.

This room is the size of a cubicle and to anyone except Rhodes obviously unoccupied. I stand at the doorway chuckling as Rhodes pats down Folden’s bedsheets.

“He’sh not shleepin.”

I try to remain polite and avoid just laughing at him, but when I see him physically pat down a bed to be sure no one is sleeping in it, I lose it.

“Yoush okay, mahn?” he asks me.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Let’s go to your room and sit down.”

We walk back into the hallway and down to his bay.

“Wanna shee the tooths that got pulled?” he asks me.

“Sure,” I say.

He pulls a small plastic jar from a nearby shelf. Inside are four bloody teeth.

“Look at thish one.” He points. The tooth he refers to has a gnarly, pointed chunk sticking out of its side, not unlike the barb on the edge of a fishhook. “Thatsh gonna hurt when it comesh out.”

“Yeah,” I agree. He puts the teeth down and sets up to play me in Battlefield 1942 on his laptop. Sadly he kicks my ass.

After a little while Jesse Lee comes back with the crowd and gives us our to-go plates. I have a hamburger and onion rings. Rhodes gets peaches and some Jell-o. He takes the bloody gauze out of his mouth. Then, after more than a few unsuccessful tries, he pokes his fork into a peach slice.

“Ish thish my lower lip?” he asks us with his finger on his lower lip. We tell him yes, and he places the peach there. Tipping his head back, he opens and
closes his mouth. Think of a seal trying to swallow a dead fish. I guess he’s hoping gravity will help him out and shimmy the peach into his mouth.

Lee and I stand in the doorway watching him. Our laughs start as scratchy grunts in the back of our throats. Again, attempting to save his dignity, we try to keep the laughs from becoming audible.

After a couple of jaw flexes the peach falls right into Rhodes’s lap. And his dignity falls with it, because as it sits on his pants, Rhodes keeps opening and closing his mouth, attempting to eat the slippery thing.

Lee and I roar with laughter. Rhodes looks at us like a lost puppy. Then down at the peach slice in his lap. Then, as he tries to poke it with the fork, I say, “Sorry, man.”

Although I’m still laughing. So I have to say it a few more times before he actually believes me.