Private Young

Over the phone I tell my mother the details no ordinary mom would want to hear. How when our hall failed the morning cleaning inspection, we were all made to crawl from one end to the other with a rag underneath our face, allowed only to look up when we soaked it in a mop bucket. I tell her not because I want her sympathy. I tell her because hearing her laugh makes me laugh, and no amount of difficulty I could express would get any other response. She’s a tough lady, my mom.

“Young! Private Young!” yells Corporal Collins while pounding on my door inside the barracks.

 When I open it wide I am greeted to his calloused face – his eyebrows leveled beneath his cropped hairline revealing no emotion. He is wearing a plain black t-shirt fitted around his large biceps covered in tattoos that extend completely down both arms. The tattoos are chains, breaking at the peak of each defined muscle, so that he resembles some mad beast on the verge of coming completely loose. We stare at each other for moments that feel like an eternity before his eye twitches, and he cracks a half smile.

“Drop!” he says, and I begin doing pushups. 

It is after work hours. I do not know what it is that rouses him from his own room, and brings him slouching down the same hall we cleaned with our faces to my door, but it is not long before I get an idea. When he bends down I smell the familiar scent of whiskey on his breath. Then, angry and sudden he barks, “Satan was a shit hot gunner and you can be one too o lordy!”

He repeats, “Satan was a shit hot gunner!” and looks across the hall to Ryder’s open door.

“Private Ryder, I know you’re in there! What do you say?”

Ryder yells out of his room “and you can be one to o lordy!”

“Shit yea, Young, you maggot, what do you think of that? You think I’m Satan?” Corporal Collins says.

“No, Corporal!”

“No? fuck you. Keep pushing. Ryder get your ass out here!”

“Moving Corporal!” Ryder replies, and he snaps to parade rest next to me.

“What do you think Ryder? You don’t want to be joining your buddy here! You think I’m Satan?”

“Roger Corporal!”

Corporal Collins takes this in a moment-- his eyes, glazed and tinted red by the alcohol in his system—He almost appears distraught by the answer like now that he has heard it he doesn’t know how to respond.

“Get out of here, Ryder!” He finally says. “And keep your fucking door shut.”

I look down the hallway, and hear the fluorescent bulbs click. Now all the doors are closed. Memorials to the fallen line the walls in glass cases, each containing some of their final possessions—A pair of combat boots, their uniform, dog-tags. A picture behind one shrapnel pierced helmet is now the only other face I can see.

“What do you think it is?” I asked Ryder one weekend while at a local restaurant.

“What’s that?” he said.

“Why, Corporal Collins, and the rest of them are always ganging up on me?”

“We all have it rough.”

“I know, but they like to single me out. You’ve seen it.”

“Well, cause you’re small, and a wise ass half the time,” he said “Always smiling even when they’re making an example of you. They don’t like that.”

“I can’t help it! That’s just my nature,”

“You asked,” he replied, and took a long drink of beer.

I waited until he was done, a little upset after hearing his reply, and then asked if he’d buy me a beer.  I was too young, he said. I’d get him in trouble and that I did enough of that while at work. I didn’t think it was fair of him to go that far.  I felt like I paid for most of my mistakes by myself, and besides I respected Ryder. We had gone through training together and his refusal to bend the rules for me struck me as meaning something deeper about our relationship.

“Jesus, cheer up would you,” Ryder said. “We’ll pick up a case on our way back to the barracks.”

“Now you’re speaking on my level--we getting wasted tonight?”

“Only if you promise to do that dance for me,” he said.

            I looked around the restaurant to make sure the coast was clear of any wandering 1^st Sergeants who might recognize me, took notice of a mighty attractive waitress, winked at her, and then replied, “Shit, I’ll do it now!”  

I stood up and started two stepping with one hand on my belt, another hand in the air twirling it like I would a lasso, and danced circles round the table while yipping like fool. Ryder started rolling with laughter. He couldn’t help himself of course. It was pretty funny.

“Oh Shit, oh man sit down,” he said. “Sit down before you get us kicked out of here. Everyone’s looking.”

“You think that’s funny?’

“Too funny!”

“I’m a good monkey ain’t I?”

“The best monkey.”

There is a small puddle of my sweat forming on the linoleum beneath me now. Corporal Collins is still crouched next to me, glaring.

“What part of being an Infantryman do you think is funny?” he asks.

I want this to end quickly, so I keep my mouth shut this time. Maybe I am learning.

“Is it the killing part,” He continues. “Does that make you laugh?” then he pauses for a moment, looks around, and says in a low menacing voice, “Yea, I think that part is funny too. Real funny. Sooo fucking funny.”

I keep doing pushups.

“Let me tell you a story,” Corporal Collins continues. “Its about our last deployment.”

I pause to look at him.

“No, no don’t look at me. You keep pushing and just listen to what I have to say,” He starts the story-- then, stops. Says he’s going to need beer first-- leaves and returns with one too quick for me to get more than a second’s break.

“Aww that’s better,” he says. “Now where we…right, Kandahar-- Southern Afghanistan supporting a Marine operation to drive the Taliban from one of the cities. They were rampant in the area —anyway these Marines were losing men everyday, whole squads at a time so, we go in. Try to catch these guys off guard- end up getting ambushed ourselves. Smart fuckers really-- Hit us with an IED first. That’s what got Hillis,” he points to the face behind the shrapnel pierced helmet and his anger begins to rise. He takes a drink and then continues.

“Hillis took it, then the firefight starts. Back and forth as we take cover behind a mud wall that’s getting chopped to pieces, but we get a read on their position. And that’s all it takes. I unloaded four SAW pouches myself- and can tell you that I laced two of em up before the helicopters came. Id seen to it that their guts was hanging out. I put down the fire we needed to get Hillis and Vinny too! --on a stretcher, so we could get them out of there.”

He takes another drink and then shouts, “I laid down my rounds!” He backs up now and looks away breathing heavily.

I am tired and arch my back to take the pressure off my shoulders by raising my hips in the air, which quickly returns Collins attention back to me.

“Oh, now you feel like resting!” He says. “How about you put your feet on the wall, and keep pushing you short, big nosed, buck toothed, little shit! Just lookin at you makes me sick.”

I do as he says, and stay in that position for a long time with my feet raised over my head, and my hands on the ground pushing my body up when I get the strength.  To take my mind off the pain I try to imagine my childhood back in Wyoming. This is before the girls cared how I looked. It’s when my buddies knew I had their back. We were soldiers then too—building forts near my house, fighting imaginary bad guys, playing late into the evening and crashing home through the tall grass with the last amount of our joyful energy before our parents dragged us reluctantly inside.

“Flutter kicks go!” Corporal Collins says, and I lie on my back with my hands on my chest and my feet barely off the ground as I alternatingly kick them six inches towards the ceiling. I think of the woods where I used to hunt --looking at the blue sky and get lost in the clouds drifting high above me -- slowly, without worry until like the ceiling they turn grey.

“Get up!”

I am brought back to my reality.

“Truth is I don’t trust you. Not to be able to carry me off a battlefield or lay down rounds. I think you’re a fucking liability! Do you hear me?”

“Roger that!” I enthusiastically reply.

“Roger’s last name is not That! It’s fucking Roger!”

I realize now I can’t win.

“Fucking Roger!” I repeat.

After the last comment I spend the next two hours, doing every imaginable sort of physical punishment-- Alligator crawls, mountain climbers, iron mikes, burpees--There is no one that can help me. Corporal Collins only takes a break to grab beer from his fridge, which he drinks as he watches me while sitting against the wall. He is quiet and cold and does not speak. Then, he stands up and shouts.

 “The cunt left me too! Three tours was too many for her! Too many her—what about me? They’re all fucking whores. Everyone of them.”

I am back in a pushup position as I started. Every muscle in my body burning, my skin is red and I taste pennies. I see my mother and father—My father having come undone after his experience in Vietnam full of misplaced rage and my mother crying while I try not to listen behind a closed door. A beer bottle shatters against the wall.

“You will clean that up!” Collins yells and just before I think he will hit me, his feet coming close in anger-- He stumbles to his room, thrashes his locker, and throws it to the floor with a resounding bang.

A couple guys come out from their room to ask how I am doing. They expect me to be smiling as I always have but I don’t feel it now. I feel nothing as if I’ve been stripped away of all but my exhausted breath, and left with the cruelest memories. The glass in the memorial reflects my image as I scramble to gather my thoughts. Ryder appears—his face dark and malignant as any man I can now remember laying eyes on.

“Hey you alright Monkey?” I hear him say. His voice passes through me like a piece of barbed twine being slowly threaded through my ears and I. Can. Not. Take it.

“Fuck you!” I yell.

“What?” he says.

            “You heard me. I said—‘Fuck. You!’ ” And he as stands there stunned, before he can reply, I walk into my room and slam the door.

            “Don’t worry about the beer bottle,” I hear.

            The lights are off. The shades are half open and a little sunlight leaks in. I walk over to the window and look out to see the sun setting. It is a beautiful sun- set. The sky is filled with red rays that burn through the moisture in the air. The last few days have been rain.

            I look far into the horizon beyond the tops of the trees where there is a faint outline of snow-covered mountains. We are on the third story. I wonder if it is high enough. As the final light disappears from the sky and my room goes dark I walk to my bed and sit with my head between my hands.

            I can think of nothing to do and no one to talk to but my mom. I want to tell her I’m sorry I left, I’m sorry dad left, that I miss her—That I miss Wyoming and regret leaving. I want to tell her how awful this place can be and that I really mean it. I want her to understand. So, I pick up the phone and dial the number.

            “Mom,” I say-- my voice shaking with all the uncertainty of my situation. She senses my distress and before I can find my words she replies, “You must be strong.”  She says this as solemn as I’ve ever heard, and for the first time since my father left I hear her begin to cry.