is that?” the linebacker asks. He squares his hips and shoulders to face Folson, a pit bull reflex.
“The problem is, I’ve promised to stuff your nutsack down your throat, but studying you now…” Folson scans the linebacker one more time, “it’s not clear you really have one.”
The linebacker lunges, and the two momentarily vault, then hit the ground.
“Tackle low enough for you, shitbag?” the linebacker asks. They grapple chest to chest, and he pins Folson into the dirt with admirable efficiency.
“Get off of me, you faggot. Get off!” Folson bucks in useless defense. Pressed into the ground, he appears utterly small and flailing, his sunburned face reminiscent of a newborn’s—scrunched, helpless. In one humph and exhale, the linebacker rises to his feet. Both teams stare for a moment as Folson writhes in the dirt.
“Who’s the faggot now, Spartan?”
Miller moves in, offering Folson a hand up. Face-to-face, they could be sunburned siblings at a beach party, matching brown buzz cuts and blistered ears, the booze and heat getting the better of them. But, of course, there’s rank. There’s experience. Miller has both. He’s also got bad news to deliver to Folson, and there’s no more putting it off. “My office,” he spits. “1900 hours.”
“Yes, Sir,” Folson responds. His affirmative sounds like defeat. Typical, for this half-bro-bra/half-teddy-bear soldier whose personnel file reads nothing like Miller’s three years in the army after high school, including two deployments. When Miller got out, he joined the National Guard to pay for college—not that he graduated—and now, with tour three under his belt and number four almost wrapped up, he’s the 2LT every grunt dreams will take him outside the wire. More experience than his rank suggests, without the ego, which is why he knows it’s best to give Folson the letter from the divorce attorney privately, sparing him the humiliation at mail call.
But there’s more to Miller’s confidence than experience. Back in his room, showered and shaved, he thinks about the locked filing cabinet in his office. The bottom drawer of pills. Six bottles of Ritalin. Another two of Percocet. It’s comforting, knowing they’re there, like a rich man who never spends a dime. Mercer would have understood that—the dignity in death over failure. Trying to lead the Spartans has felt like reaching for something dropped into a pool, then watching how quickly it sinks away. Knowing how easily he could down those pills, Miller thinks—or how he could mishandle his own weapon or put himself in harm’s way outside the wire to end it quickly—gives him more than confidence. It gives him permission to do whatever it takes to keep his men alive and his sense of pride, at least outwardly, intact. During his third tour—the Korengals, Mercer shot dead while Miller targeted the wrong man—Rachmann served on the same fire team. Now, Miller is superior to the one person who saw just how clearly he failed.
If he stayed true to his promise, Tenley would know all of that. But how could she understand? He hasn’t been able to tell her. Can’t even give her the chance to love him the way he needs it most, and perhaps that, more than anything, is what makes him consider ending it all. He’d seen ground zero on a debate team trip in high school. He’d visited the Grand Canyon, the old growth forests out West. He’s a father, a husband. He’d held his daughter the day she was born. A lot for one life, if you considered the big scheme of things. Can he say he’s lived well? Would Tenley say as much? He likes to think so, and if Rachmann dares to suggest otherwise, dares to even mention Mercer, that locked drawer is within arm’s reach.
Strange to realize the last time Miller felt such desperation, he’d been falling in love with Tenley, now his wife of six years. It was a different kind of desperation, but the core of it—the burning hot middle of wanting something so badly you’d hurt yourself just to get it—felt one and the same. It’s been four tours and almost as many years away since he first felt that burn for her. Miller is hardly familiar with the house they bought in Tenley’s home state of North Carolina just a few months after tying the knot. Still, Tenley waits through tour after tour, tied to her Appalachian roots with stubborness. What has Miller been doing all these years away? He can hardly name it, the war fanning in countless directions, each mission a drop in a leaky bucket. Waiting is about the only thing he and Tenley have shared these past years. Meantime, she’s racked up $5,000 in education loans (and counting) starting an online degree program in social work. “Just because you’re stalled, doesn’t mean I have to be,” were her words, and Miller had to admit, the military itself, the machine of it, had never felt like it would take him anywhere.
He remembers how good the Guard looked back when life growing up as an Indiana farm boy didn’t. In high school, Miller was impressed by the recruiter who came to the assembly hall and gave a presentation about signing bonuses and education benefits. The bell rang, and half the graduating class stayed put, lured by the idea of something bigger than all the cornfields in Indiana combined. “But you’re valedictorian,” his art teacher had said. “You got scholarships...” she wrinkled her forehead and suggested he belonged elsewhere. The recruiter’s requests felt reasonable: work hard, follow rules, and get paid. It was an equation that never manifested in farm country, where hard work and harder work meant a government subsidy, his father’s breath held as tightly as a clamp over the dinner table. Finally, someone understood the injustice of that basic lie and offered Miller a way out. Seventy-eight days to graduation, a summer job in North Carolina as a camp counselor before boot camp that fall, and as the husk-scented air whisked around Miller on that graduation stage, the sun burnishing his skin to a young, hornball perfection, he grinned—button nose to the sky—and tossed his cap into the air with a fat wish and a fuck-it smile. It was very likely the last cap and gown he’d wear, the commission from National Guard Officer Candidate School his junior year of college too strong to turn down.
Eight years since that graduation stage and Miller believes that fuck-it smile will get him through these last days on the FOB leading Spartan Platoon. Through the paperwork, the homecoming. It’s a good enough smile. It has gotten him this far. Just one more mission.
3
Stars & Stripes Forever
…The arrangement for moving supplies throughout Afghanistan, known as the Host Nation Trucking contract, began in May 2009. There are eight companies handling the work. The full $2.16 billion contract covers the movement and transportation of 70 percent of the material needed for US troops in Afghanistan. Security guards hired by the trucking companies funnel that money to the local warlords or the Taliban to ensure the supply truck convoys get to their destinations unscathed…
Miller sinks into his chair, reading on his Army-issued Dell PC tucked into the back room of a stripped down trailer. Drywall panels barely set straight. No paint or decor to hide the fast-paced construction demanded in wartime. Even his desk, a large piece of plywood lofted by milk crates, is hastily gathered. The discomforting irony isn’t lost on him; everything in this room came from someplace else. Everything has a price.
Folson’s letter rests atop a small pile on the center of the desk. Stacks of Army Times and kid-signed “Dear Soldier” letters cluster around a burgeoning wastebasket on the floor. A box of lotion Puffs sits on top of the filing cabinet, pills locked below. Tenley had sent the tissues when Miller caught a cold, though by the time they arrived, the virus had moved on. What he could really use is a tube of ChapStick, his papery lips constantly cracking and peeling, little lines of dried blood like cosmetics. The front door to the trailer opens, and the drywall shakes when the door slams shut. Three swift clomps of a soldier’s boots across the hollow floorboards and a knock on the office door.
“LT?”
“Come in, PFC.”
Folson enters and salutes.
“Sit
