The lieutenant colonel looked up from the paperwork on his desk. “Excuse me?”
“It wasn’t Brutus, sir, who had to beware the ides of March. It was Caesar.”
Sullivan scowled. “Dismissed, Private.”
3.
“This is not,” Sullivan had announced in his introductory lecture, “a free country.”
The day Brutus had arrived at Taszár, he received an orientation package of army propaganda. More than national defense or fighting wars or peacekeeping missions or any of that, paperwork justified the existence of the U.S. military. He was handed three three-ring binders stacked one on top of the other. That was only the beginning. He pitched most of the material into the garbage, but kept a few pamphlets because of their comic value. One described the dangers of Hungarian women, known to be a predatory race of acid-tongued nymphets interested only in obtaining an American passport. There was nothing a Hungarian girl — especially “a girl from the countryside,” it was stressed — wouldn’t do to sink her claws into a G.I. The handout told horror stories of girls getting pregnant and demanding child support from the U.S. government, of angry fathers seeking retribution (“The honor of one’s family is extremely important among the peasantry of Eastern Europe”), and of mafioso thugs using their girlfriends as bait to extort money out of the unwitting soldier. “Socially Transmitted Diseases (STDs) run rampant in emerging democracies.”
The battery of physical and psychological examinations, and the innumerable injections, lasted for weeks.
Back before the construction of Camp Bondsteel over in Kosovo, the American brass decided that Taszár Air Base could be another Guantánamo. Originally built for the Red Army in the 1950s, it was conveniently located within striking distance of the Yugoslavian border. The Russians abandoned the base in 1990 and a few years later, Uncle Sam moved in. To the Hungarian government, opening Taszár to the United States gave them a jackbooted foot in the door to NATO. The Budapest media, like the American, was effectively state run and did little to feed the nation’s appetite for political scandal, even in the face of another occupation by another imperial power.
Taszár served for a short time as the operational headquarters for the theoretically multinational force charged with “keeping the peace” in the Balkans. Once things cooled down over there, though, the American government refused to decommission the base. Instead, they repurposed it for use in their War on Terror. It wasn’t like they could illegally intern civilians on American soil — they had tried that with the Japanese during World War II — so instead, they used bases like Taszár. The so-called black sites. The few Brits and Dutchmen Brutus saw around existed purely for symbolic purposes. For obvious historical reasons, there were very few Russian, or even German, soldiers on Hungarian soil.
Brutus rarely had any contact with the foreign troops or with the few Hungarian officers who, in theory, still technically ran the base. He knew the deal. His presence at Taszár represented another step in Hungary’s transition from Soviet satellite state to American satellite state. No one in the army appeared willing to question the exportation of America’s racist, imperialist tradition into yet another foreign land. Most of the other soldiers, even the rare black officer, couldn’t distinguish between Eldridge and Beaver Cleaver.
The whole base reminded Brutus of Eastern State Penitentiary back home. That was the first real prison built in the colonies, but it hadn’t housed prisoners for at least thirty years. He had taken a tour there once with his sister, before she had J. J. The administrators opened it to the public in summertime and at Halloween turned it into a haunted house. Sometimes one of the local universities would rent it out to put on plays and shit, but the theatergoers had to wear hardhats because the place was in such dismal shape. The prison was designed so that a guard in a central tower could see into every cell. It didn’t matter if you were being watched at any given time — you had to behave because you knew you could be being watched.
Taszár worked in the same, panoptic way. The army created a pervasive environment of paranoia. There was one notable difference, though. Instead of just the officers and the M.P.s being able to see everything going on all the time, all of the soldiers — like the prisoners they were — could as well. Everyone knew everyone else’s intimate business. If someone stole food from the mess hall, or snuck across the motor pool to play a little grab-ass with one of the Hungarian civilians, everyone knew about it. The testosterone-powered cycle trapped everyone on the base in a feedback loop of constant surveillance. That included the foreign troops too. The M.P.s didn’t even need to keep an eye on the soldiers. They policed themselves and each other, just like Orwell had predicted. Even if Brutus wasn’t being watched at any given time, the police and Sparky and these other hillbillies could be watching him, and that was usually enough to make him think twice about doing something stupid. His letters from home were read, his e-mails intercepted, and his uppity behavior reported, all in the name of national security. But hanging out with Magda on occasion was the one bright spot in the dreary grind of army life. He heard the racist murmurings behind his back about his dating a white woman, sure, and although no one said much to his face, there existed a constant threat of reprisal from some gung-ho supremacist.
He felt the weight of his pistol bouncing against his hip with each step. Its presence unsettled him not because he didn’t want to carry it, but because he didn’t like the fact that everyone else was carrying a weapon too. There were too many cowboys running around, anxious to lay down their own personal versions of the law. The higher-ups readily encouraged a system of justice that wasn’t based upon any consistent moral authority Brutus could identify. What, in his reading, Paul Ricoeur referred to as “the practical field” Brutus thought of as “the Man.” And at Taszár, each man had become the Man to the other men. Himself included.
When someone got caught fucking up, it was only elevated to the M.P.s if the situation — and the punishment — couldn’t be handled first within the ranks. As a message, a solider might get stuck on shithole duty for a month, or even pistol-whipped while he slept. The inmates ran the jail, which was why it was so dangerous not only letting everyone run around with a firearm but requiring it. West Philly had been the same back in the eighties, when everyone carried a piece because of all the crackheads. There were shoot-outs every night. Elvin got himself shot in the stomach and had a scar from his ribs all the way down his fat belly.
Apart from catching up with Magda now and then, Brutus stayed more or less in line. He sometimes voiced his more subversive political views, but still, he never expected this kind of trouble, least of all from Sullivan and the higher-ups.
Being watched and scrutinized all the time was bad enough, but the people watching him were now better armed than he was. His weapon no longer functioned properly and hadn’t for a few days, since a couple of components got lost the day he left it in his room to go see Sullivan. Huge disadvantage. And he couldn’t just go and order replacement parts either. Questions would be asked, discipline administered. Fuck all that.
He suspected that Sparky found the pieces and dumped them down the toilet. Brutus was already in a world of trouble, though, so he didn’t care if his roommate put the word out, as he invariably would, that his sidearm didn’t shoot. He carried it with him anyway. Like all things in the army, his weapon existed for the sake of appearance. Every day, he regretted quitting college. Every single fucking day.