“One pitcher,” he told Bill.
“Five,” he said, hopping out of the truck.
“Two.”
“Fine. Seven pitchers, and that’s it.”
During tour #3 in Afghanistan, Private First Class Rudy Jamirez enjoyed mocking Dan for “just how shithouse Northeast Ohio actually is.” Rudy, the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, was from a scrubby town in western PA not that much different from New Canaan. Even though he was Dan’s subordinate, he also became his fastest friend in a kid brother sort of way. Maybe it was a nerd thing. He loved graphic novels and went on long disquisitions of what he considered the classics: Watchmen, Y: The Last Man, Sandman, Miracle-man, From Hell. But they truly bonded over Calvin and Hobbes.
“Bill Watterson,” Dan told him. “Ohio’s like a factory for talent and brilliance and guts.”
“You got Watterson and Harvey Pekar,” he countered. “That’s it.” Only a few inches over five feet, strong, and stocky, Rudy wore a military buzz on a bucket of a head and had small, protruding curlicues for ears. He had this tattoo on his shoulder of a medieval knight, and beneath it the words Sí Se Puede. He was tough, irascible, funny. He reminded Dan of kids he’d grown up with. Even after he finished Ranger school and moved up to sergeant first class, when he really began to feel the weight of his responsibility toward the guys, Rudy would be the friend he’d look to, much like Greg Coyle, to keep him sane.
Dan schooled him: “Uh, LeBron James? The Black Keys, Chrissie Hynde, Steven Spielberg? John Brown spent his formative years in Ohio.”
“Christ, don’t get you started on Ohio. You’re a fucking walking Wikipedia entry.”
“Johnny Appleseed. Ever heard of him? Ohioan.”
They were sitting with a bunch of guys at FOB Lagman, harvesting time before they had to go back to the Hindu Kush and not get a shower for who knows how long, watching Black Hawk Down on a projector screen. Everyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan saw this movie a dozen times, but they had nothing better to do so they talked through it, savoring the A/C while they could. Rudy changed the subject.
“You know the problem with war movies? They never show how funny the army is. It’s always drama-this, eyes-squeezed-shut-crying-that, but c’mon, dude, the army’s fucking hilarious.”
On-screen, a .50 gunner took a bullet in the neck. Fake gore exploded into the camera, dousing the lens. “What’s his status?!” Commander Tom Sizemore demanded, while Staff Sergeant Josh Hartnett, stricken, held the dead man in his lap.
“See?” said Rudy. “That’s fucking funny.”
They’d be humping up and down mountains on patrol, skittering over loose shale that broke ankles, trying to look everywhere at once for Taliban or farmers earning a buck by popping off shots at Americans, and the second they got back, Rudy would grab someone by the collar and scream, “What’s his status?!”
Rudy had a point, though. There’s probably no funnier profession than the military. You can spend five hours arguing about something totally bizarre. On tour #2 in Iraq, Della Terza and Josh Packard got into a two-day debate about who they’d Fuck, Marry, and Kilclass="underline" Harry, Ron, or Hermione.
DT: “Ron is the obvious Kill. Put him in one of those Shiite torture basements for all I care. Then marry Harry, fuck Hermione.”
Packard’s rebuttaclass="underline" “You’re an idiot. Marrying means you get to fuck all the time anyhow. You marry Hermione, kill Harry, and fuck Ron.”
Coyle’s two cents: “Trust me, marrying does not mean you fuck all the time.”
Packard: “Fucking Della Terza. You fucking beshitted moron. Ron’s butthole’s gonna be the most satisfying. That’s what all the books are secretly about.”
The two of them actually got pretty heated about this. Lieutenant Holt had to enter the fray and give them both a time-out to cool down. Years later, at Della Terza’s wedding, Dan brought this argument back up, which didn’t seem fair because Pack was in jail for firing a gun off at the Iowa State Fair and thus unable to defend his point.
“I don’t care what the fuck Packard thinks, I still say I’m right,” Della Terza muttered, and he threw an ice cube at one of his new wife’s bridesmaids.
Something about the mix of tension, the specter of death or grave injury, and being around guys for whom nothing is off limits—but Dan had never laughed harder than during deployments. It’s what he could never explain to Hailey: You’ll never be closer to human beings than in combat. Not your parents, not your wife, not your kids. That sense of duty you leave with—the one toward God and country—evaporates in the murky realities of Baghdad or Kandahar. What’s left is your duty to your friends, your brothers. It’s what Rick Brinklan would describe when they ran into each other in Iraq. Even after only months, you feel like you’ve known these guys for millions of miles of a hard, dark road.
He and Ashcraft had barely crossed into the sweet chill of the A/C, eyes working with the dim red light and HDTV glow before a boisterous greeting bellowed through the evening crowd.
“Holy faggot-fucking shit, look at these two queers!”
Jonah Hansen had gone seriously bald. A PacSun hat tilted back on his head, the bill nearly vertical. The visible follicles looked so thin, each like a pore with a blackhead. To compensate he now had a chinstrap beard outlining the contours of his jaw. He was drinking with Todd Beaufort, also ball-capped and battered. Sun-fed face with a slaughterhouse smell to him, looking depleted and fat under his Buckeyes hat.
Beaufort greeted them with a jerk of his head. When Bill saw him, his face made all kinds of buried calculations before returning to its default expression of bemused distance, of riding above the storm and laughing downward at a world of jest.
“Tee-Bee. Five-Six,” said Bill. “How you doing, man?” They shook, and it came with a stir of awkwardness. Jocks sizing each other up long after their moment of relevance.
“Remember Dan Eaton?” Jonah said. “My class.”
“Hey man, how’s it going?” Beaufort shook his hand, and Dan was sure it was the most they’d ever interacted.
“Of all the dive bars in all the Midwest, you two go and walk into mine,” said Jonah. Dan started with his hand out, but Jonah wrapped him in his arms.
“C’mon, dude, no need for a welcome parade,” said Dan, laughing.
“Nah, it’s just you look good. All in one piece, man. That’s all you can ask for.”
They pulled up stools, and Jonah poured the rest of their pitcher into two opaque plastic cups. He ordered another from the bartender, Jessica Bealey, class of ’02. A cheerleader who was rumored to have scored a thirty-two on the ACT by filling in bubbles at random. She didn’t seem to recognize either Dan or Bill. As she walked away, Jonah looked at her behind skeptically and said, “That thing’s gotten chunky as Campbell’s Soup.” He had a pointed, serpentine tongue that frequently slithered out to taste his lips.
“We’re celebrating. I just bought a helicopter,” Jonah declared.
“A helicopter?” Bill could cock an eyebrow like he was throwing a knife.
“I fly it to our place up on South Bass.”
Bill looked pained. “How in the fuck?”
“Real estate. It’s been rocket fuel lately.”
“Real estate,” Bill sniffed. “There’s a fucking depression on. There’s no real estate.”
“Just gotta know how to play the game, dude. Everyone’s got chips in, so play the right cards and know when the other guy’s whistling bullshit.”