He closed his eyes and rested his head against his arms on the steering wheel, the plastic creaking. Dan almost told him the story just to piss on him.
During the surge on tour #2, as their sector was quieting down, they pulled an absolutely terrible mission of escorting supply trucks to Camp Baharia. Not normally their purview, their captain had volunteered them. Guys grumbled but no one had the kind of energy necessary for mutiny. The drive to Baharia meant an hour-plus on open highway, exposed, heading toward Fallujah—not known as the sweetest getaway from western Baghdad. Of course, that was the mission that went without a hiccup. They could’ve watched movies on laptops.
In Baharia, he was lounging against the side of a blast wall, enjoying a rare cigarette, when he saw a muscle-bound guy coated in tattoos bench-pressing without a spotter. When he let the bar slam down, weights rattling, and sat up, Dan recognized Rick Brinklan.
“You embarrass me, man,” he said, walking over to Rick. His head snapped to Dan like he’d heard the pops of AKs. “I put on some biceps since I joined, but look at you…”
“Eaton.” He gave Dan a sweat-soaked hug, then rubbed his gray USMC tee in his eyes to clear the moisture. It must have been 110 degrees. “Don’t let me give you a boner, dude. Get home to Hailey.”
He’d heard Rick was 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines—Dad must have told him—but he never imagined running into him. There were at least a dozen or so kids from New Canaan serving, but what were the odds? He and Rick spent that afternoon smoking and walking the perimeter of the blast walls, listening to the sounds of small arms fire in the distance. Rick’s battalion had had a staggering number of casualties on this deployment, including the previous day.
“PFC Slopes. This surfer bro from Florida—real nice guy but a total airhead. When I helped him do his taxes he asked if he could deduct his stereo system ’cause it helped him get amped for battle. He was like mystified when I told him that was ridiculous.” He smiled in the grimmest possible way. He had small, tough eyes, but with all the added bulk his face looked bloated. His trapezius muscles were like suspension bridges coming down from his neck. The claw mark tattoo Dan remembered from high school now had neighbors all over his back, torso, and down his arms. He was like an old-timey steamer trunk slapped with erratic stickers. The only part of him inkless was from the neck up, as per military regs. How tough and leathered Rick looked now. Dan had once written a history paper for him, after Lisa begged him for help on Rick’s behalf. Apparently Rick was floating with a C in his history class already, and anything less than an A would make him ineligible to play football. “He’s all equations,” as Lisa put it. Dan did it because Lisa asked and because he liked writing history papers. Rick thanked him by buying him a six-pack, though Dan never actually drank the beers.
“EFP?” Dan asked him now. “We’re getting them every day.”
“Yeah, E-F-buttfucking-P,” Rick said, taking a drag. “I get there and the door was hanging off. Dragged Slopes out and tried to do something for him. He had blood coming out his nose, mouth, his ears.” Rick used his smoking hand to palm his entire face to demonstrate the extent of the damage. “I got his helmet off and a piece of his brain just splats out onto his MARPAT. He had this wound on the right side of his head, and it was like his brain was trying to crawl out. His eyes were all bugging.” He tapped his cigarette. “It was pretty grotesque. I got him sitting up so he wouldn’t get blood in his airway and started doing finger swipes. Got him wrapped from head to shoulder in Kerlix, but he might as well have been dead when I found him.”
“Were you guys close?”
“He lived until morning. We went out and pink-misted some haji for it, so…”
Dan didn’t particularly feel like reliving every combat death and traumatic casualty right then and there, but he understood the need to process the stuff that had just happened. He thought of watching Sergeant Wunderlich’s face on fire.
Rick didn’t seem much interested in talking about New Canaan, but Dan had to somehow change the subject. Of course he ended up having to explain about Hailey.
“Y’all are done?”
“I told her I was thinking of signing up for another tour. She didn’t take it well.”
Dan expected more pushback—the kind Mom, Dad, and his sisters had all given him—but Rick only nodded.
“Yeah, I’m thinking about becoming career. I fucking hate it over here, but it’s better than back home. No jobs, everyone’s on fucking drugs. Can’t believe I was thinking of going to OSU and then starting a family in New Canaan. So I get it. You might share blood with your family, but you sure as shit didn’t shed it with them.”
Exactly. Because how easy had it been to let go of her? He tested the subject of Kaylyn. The way Rick pretended to shrug it off, he could tell he’d gotten his heart good and broke. Rick had never been much for hiding how he felt. As transparent as glass and possibly as fragile.
“For the best,” said Rick. Someone had left a dust-coated forklift by the perimeter, and they stopped in its shade. Rick put one boot up against the machine. Dan had a memory of standing near Kaylyn when Rick made a heroic run in a football game. Her shriek had been the loudest. Get it, babe! Getitgetitgetit! Until her voice hit a pitch like a fire alarm.
Rick ashed his cigarette. “I can’t believe I proposed to her. Turned out she was a total whore.” He shook his head and looked at his hand to examine a fingernail, black and probably soon to fall off. “Total psycho dick-chugging whore.”
Dan had never heard someone use the phrase “psycho dick-chugging whore” with so much evident remorse. If Kaylyn had walked down from the FOB right then, he’d have bet his paycheck that Rick would have fallen into her weeping.
“Just wish I hadn’t thrown the damn engagement ring into the woods. Could use the cash now.” He smiled his gritty grin.
When Dan was back home on his eighteen-day R&R, he and Hailey had gone to Nashville only to have the fight that ended it. She made no secret that his deployments were breaking her. She didn’t like the wars, didn’t like him participating in them, absolutely loathed the president. When they talked by Skype or Gchat, there was no joy in it. She hated him doing what he did too much.
They had the final conversation in her apartment in Bowling Green. She hugged herself and told him if he signed up for another tour, she was done.
“I want to start my life.” She bobbed her shoulders matter-of-factly, strands of auburn hair piled around her thick pink cheeks. “Not sit around playing army girlfriend or, worse, army widow. I said I would wait for you one tour, and that became two, and now you’re telling me it could be three or four? No. That’s not what I agreed to. It’s not fair to ask me to do that.” He could feel the ill-lit kitchen, the buzzing fire in the bulbs. It sounded like she’d been rehearsing that speech. “Don’t fucking kid me, kid: You’re choosing Iraq over me, Danny.”
All he said was, “It’s a weird transition being back. You can’t turn it all off, especially for just eighteen days.” In the years that followed, when he’d have imagined arguments about their children, Dan would think of what he could have done differently in this moment. But she was right. He was happily, knowingly, gladly choosing the army over her.
“Well,” she slapped her hands on her thighs. “Then maybe it’s time not to worry about it anymore.”