and a looming question: What next?”
“Hmm,” he grunted. “Go on.”
“The days were long, waiting for Denver.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“No, my family’s in Portland. I grew up in the Northwest.”
“Why didn’t you visit your family?”
“As a reserve I had to demobilize at Camp Pendleton first and then return to my reserve unit in Denver. It’s a paperwork thing. I had to wrap up my deployment before I could visit my family.”
“I see.”
“Hours before, I remember thinking: I’d been wrapped in a sleeping bag, stuck in a combat zone. And now, here I was, comfortably tucked into a safe bed. I was in the United States, you know? But I had to constantly remind myself of that. I couldn’t sleep. I expected mortars in the distance and nearby howitzers exploding into action. I expected to wake at seventeen hundred hours and row on a rickety machine in the middle of Ramadi. I expected war and death—and adrenaline. But my expectations were stupid. It probably wouldn’t have been so extreme, except that . . . I was home, right? But I was alone. Most of the Marines in my reserve unit were still in Iraq or on their way home. And somewhere along the way, on the active duty side, I’d been lost in the shuffle. To them, I was already a civilian.”
“At the risk of sounding like a counselor,” Trent broke in, “how did that make you feel?”
“Life lost its luster. For me, the war was over. My living moment of history had passed. I’d thought that I would embrace my return. But I didn’t. After war, everything else was bland. I felt empty, I guess.” My last words hung in the air.
Trent waited for me to finish.
“And there I was,” I said, circling back, “staring at a flight of stairs in the Denver airport. I didn’t know what I’d find on the other end. Family? Friends? Reservists? Would there be waving flags and patriotic bands? Or would I be an anonymous face in a bustling airport? I don’t know why that image sticks in my mind—those longs steps stretching up into the distance. Or why it’s so important. I took a step, then another, and finally crested the top of the stairwell. The foyer was empty. It was after midnight. No one was there. I fought in our war and there I was, home and alone.”
“And what did you do?”
“Found a shuttle. Lugged my seabag to the front of the airport. Rode through a dark and snowy Denver.”
Trent was filling his notebook. “And where did you go?”
“To a hotel near Buckley, where I’m stationed.”
“I see. And?”
“The following morning I contacted my reserve unit’s gunnery sergeant, Gunny Bravo. He picked me up and drove me to Buckley. Before deployment, I’d been allowed to store my truck on base. There was an exchange of papers. Gunny handed me the keys to my truck. He told me to take the rest of the week off, relax, and report back the following Monday. I’d have to keep living like a Marine for another few months, he’d said, until my orders officially ended.”
“And you wanted out?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew I would be starting seminary in the fall. Other than that?” I stopped. “At the hotel, I remember dumping out my seabag and looking around the room. It was sparse. A queen-sized bed, a desk . . . a box television. I only had a few civilian clothes; three or four books; a laptop. That was my life. I remember thinking how small it was. I crawled into bed and slept.”
Trent glanced at his watch. “I think that’s all we have time for today. Can we do next week? The same time?”
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
9. Weapons of Opportunity
During our myriad training sessions it was customary to respond to our instructor by screaming, “kill!” This was most common throughout our painful MCMAP lessons. Each recruit would face a partner while our instructor sagely discussed weapons of opportunity. A weapon of opportunity, we learned, was anything that could kill or maim an opponent, or anything that might provide a fighter with an advantage. In the Marine Corps, in war, he told us, there was no such thing as a fair fight. When the fight was over, you needed to make sure you were the one standing. “So,” he said, “I want your partner to start choking you, kill?”
“Kill!”
“Then I want you to break the choke hold using the MCMAP techniques that I’ve taught you, kill?”
“Kill!”
“Then, after you’ve broken the choke hold, kill?”
“Kill!”
“I want you to grab a weapon of opportunity and break your opponent’s skull, kill?”
“Kill!”
“Alright, recruits, kill!”
And we would begin.
At times, a scratching whisper would break through my subconscious, posing questions of rebellion. I would see the recruit in front me. See him as my enemy, my responsibility. I would then envision his head crumpled and rotting at my feet. I had to do this. It had to consume me. There could be nothing else. Only the dead. If I waivered, then it would be me lying at his feet.
“Kill!”
They also taught us, as our Drill Instructors phrased it, “to put a bullet in Habib’s head.” Of course, my ability to place a bullet in one of Habib’s eyes from five-hundred yards was not an inborn skill. It was a learned skill. During our seventh and eighth weeks at Recruit Training, we were schooled in the art of the long-distance snipe: “One shot, one kill.” In week seven, we learned how to take apart a rifle, thoroughly clean it, put it back together, and perform a function check. We also learned the science of windage knobs, trajectory, sighting, breathing, and locking-in. The latter was the exercise of switching between the prone, kneeling, and standing positions while aiming our weapons at a 50-gallon barrel and dry firing. As the sun set behind Camp Pendleton and the cars on interstate five sped by, we honed our skills.
I-5. I sighted in my M-16. One thousand miles to the north is home. I had lived in Denver such a short time that I still associated the Northwest with home. The rifle clicked as I squeezed the trigger. I wonder what Dad’s doing? There was a lot of divorce in my family, and, as such, the childhood memories of my father were few. I didn’t really meet him until I was fourteen. Before that, he was a vague presence two thousand miles away. He lived in Dallas and I had lived with my mother in Portland, Oregon. Before my freshman year of high school, he moved to the Northwest. I moved in with him. We had done our best to rectify a lost relationship, but he traveled for work and I was an egocentric football player. I joined the Marine Corps feeling the weight of national responsibility, but with an eye on clarifying my father’s ambiguity. I knew he was proud of the decision I had made. And his pride was my pride. It was my father who I was thinking of as I pulled the bolt back, breathed, and paused. I bet he’s watching TV. Click.
“What the fuck?” Beelzebub roared. “What are you doing, Recruit?”
One of the Canadian
