We all got our orders on the same day. My orders said I was going to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas.
Fort Hood hadn’t been on my wish list.
There were two divisions at Fort Hood, the 1st Cavalry Division and the 4th Infantry Division. I knew I wasn’t going to 1st Cav because people going to 1st Cav had orders that were different from mine. Theirs said 1st Cav and mine didn’t. Mine only said III Corps. But that meant 4th ID.
It wasn’t five minutes before I’d found out that 4th ID was deploying to Iraq that fall. And I was thinking, Emily will be mad at me.
Kovak’s orders said he was going to work in a hospital on a base in Alaska. He wasn’t happy about it, but I envied him.
I walked to the stairs. A girl was there. She was crying into her cell phone. “They’re sending me to Walter Reed, Mom….No….But, Mom…but, Mom…MOM…Mom, I’m a WARRIOR Medic!”
Life is strange.
* * *
—
I HAD read in the news that Joe’s battalion was in some bad shit that summer. There had been one week when his battalion lost 19 killed, all kids from Ohio.
I’d tried getting in touch with Joe by email and I hadn’t heard back from him. I did talk to Roy, though. He said his cousin was still alive and in one piece. He said he would let me know if anything changed as far as that went.
* * *
—
WEEKEND PASSES had come to an end because clinicals were to start that week, so we were stuck on post. It was 21:00. We were formed up and waiting on Drill Sergeant Masters to come down and do accountability. Masters was a fuck, and he had got it in his head to go upstairs and inspect the barracks. I didn’t remember having locked up my aid bag, and sure enough when Masters came down the stairs, he was holding it up like he’d really done something.
“WHO IS NUMBER EIGHTY-NINE?” he said. “WHOSE AID BAG IS THIS?”
I raised my hand, and he had me get out of ranks and stand at attention.
“FRONT LEANING REST POSITION…MOVE.”
I got in the front leaning rest, and he left me that way while he went about telling us what the black market was.
“HAS ANYBODY HERE EVER HEARD OF THE BLACK MARKET?”
We assumed this was a rhetorical question.
“WARRIOR MEDICS, SOME OF YOU WILL BE GOING TO IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN SOON. IN IRAQ, IN AFGHANISTAN, THEY HAVE THE BLACK MARKET. THE PEOPLE THERE ARE POORER THAN DIRT. THEY WILL STEAL ANYTHING THAT IS LEFT UNSECURED AND SELL IT ON THE BLACK MARKET.”
He picked up my aid bag and opened it and dumped its contents onto the ground. The contents—a few field dressings, some Ace wraps, two Israeli bandages, a dusty-looking combitube set, an oral pharyngeal, a nasal pharyngeal, an unpackaged syringe, some IV tubing, two 500-cc bags of lactated Ringer’s, maybe half a dozen 14ga needle catheters—had little to no monetary value.
He tossed the bag aside: “MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IS A BIG SELLER ON THE BLACK MARKET.”
He bent down to address me face-to-face. “WARRIOR MEDIC, YOUR BATTLE BUDDY HAS JUST DIED BECAUSE YOU DID NOT SECURE YOUR AID BAG AND IT WAS STOLEN AND SOLD ON THE BLACK MARKET. WHEN HE GOT HIT YOU COULD DO NOTHING TO HELP HIM. YOUR BATTLE BUDDY IS DEAD AND IT IS YOUR FAULT. YOU HAVE JUST KILLED YOUR BATTLE BUDDY, WARRIOR MEDIC. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO TELL HIS FAMILY?”
He had me do push-ups till I reached muscle failure. It didn’t take three minutes to get there. Still I did a lot of push-ups. I was good at them. Most of us could do push-ups. And were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Brooke Army Medical Center, BAMC, was the hospital on Fort Sam. It treated civilians as well as military. The floors were very clean. It was a nice hospital. We did clinicals there, two weeks. We were supposed to go to BAMC and act like we knew what we were doing. There were five us on the floor I was on, five trainees. They split us up. We each made our rounds.
There was a guy who had been in a motorcycle wreck. His leg was broken. His wife was there in the room. I put the BP cuff on inside out, and it blew up like a life raft when I turned the machine on. He was cool about it, but his wife thought I was a total asshole. I kept on with my rounds. A man had been stabbed up in some kind of hobo war. The smell of his body was overpowering. I was to give him a sponge bath. I lifted up his balls and everything. I was storing treasure in heaven, where no thief can get to it.
One of the patients was a soft man in his 30s who had been run over by a car while crossing a street. The car had snatched off his penis and left him no-bullshit retarded. His mother was at his bedside, and her grief was so intense that to look at her was like to stare into the sun. I was glad to have the blood pressure cuff figured out by then because they were nice people, and I’d have hated myself were I to give them any more cause for sorrow.
At the end of one of the corridors was a sealed room with a kid who’d been burned up in Iraq. A soldier, a kid: no difference. The room was off-limits because his burns made him ultravulnerable to infection. But there was a window that looked in on him, so you could see him in there, where his whole life had led him to.
* * *
—
I GOT through clinicals without accidentally murdering anyone. And I guess I was proud of myself. The feeling lasted well into Friday evening, up till the moment my balls died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I had got punched in the balls.
As a joke.
An Army joke.
I knew something was wrong, but I waited till my balls had swollen up real bad before I told the cadre. I went back to BAMC, this time as a patient. They took X-rays in the ER. The doctor said some shit about an inguinal hernia. I didn’t know what that was. He said I wouldn’t need surgery, at least not as far as he could tell. Still there was the swelling and my balls hurt like a motherfucker.
I was laid out on a gurney in the ER, and the hospital staff wheeled in a guy who’d been picked up off the street. The guy was beat up pretty bad and sobbing. They put him next to me. Through the curtain I heard the nurses talking. They said the guy was concussed and he’d swallowed some teeth and he had broken ribs and somebody had poured bleach in his eyes.
They called his mother.
His mother got there.
She wouldn’t stop talking.
“Who did this to you, honey?…Honey, did they take your billfold?…Did they take your billfold? They did? Honey, did they take your billfold?”
Jesus.