I write my name on a sign-in form at the reception desk, but when the receptionist sees that I’m a walk-in patient she shakes one long glittery purple fingernail at me. “It’s better to have an appointment.” Her accent is Jamaican, or possibly Haitian. “But have a seat”—she looks at the sign-in sheet—“Travis Stephenson, and I will call you as soon as someone is available.”
I sit in a red molded plastic chair in a waiting room filled with people who aren’t anything like me. There are a couple of regular-looking guys, but they’re probably in their thirties or forties. One of them has a prosthetic leg. Straight across the aisle is a wrinkled old veteran in a red Wind-breaker with a USS Saratoga ball cap and a metal cane. He’s thumbing through an old copy of Newsweek. His mothball breath blasts across the aisle whenever he coughs. Two seats over from me is a skinny, sketchy-looking guy maybe five years older than me who can’t hold still. His knee keeps jittering, shaking the whole row of chairs, and he’s missing a couple of teeth.
“You Army?” he asks me, but doesn’t wait for my reply. “I was Special Forces. They picked me right out of basic because I already had a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu, so I didn’t need much training.”
“Hey, good for you, bro,” I say, and pick up a back copy of a news magazine that promises an article about the war in Afghanistan, hoping he’ll get the hint that I don’t want to chat.
“Yeah,” he continues. “I led my guys on a whole bunch of covert missions in Africa, and you know when they captured Saddam Hussein? That was us.”
“Sure, dude, whatever.”
“I’d still be in, but I broke my back on a helo jump,” he says. “They weren’t sure if I’d ever walk again, but I fought it, you know? The doctors are having trouble getting my meds right, though, because I have to take, like, six pills at once for the pain to even go away.”
“Uh-huh.” I’m not calling him a liar, but nobody gets picked for Special Forces right out of basic training and he doesn’t look old enough to have done everything he claims.
I turn a page in the magazine and discover a series of photos of my own company, taken by a photographer who’d embedded with us for a few weeks. They’re from the beginning of our mission, when we were first deployed and still fairly clean. From when the other guys called Charlie and Kevlar and me FNG—fucking new guy—and Boot. It seems like it was years ago, instead of months.
There’s a picture of Kevlar and Charlie waist-deep in a poppy field. The caption only says US Marines under fire in Helmand Province and it looks like it could be a picture of any Marines, but I would recognize them anywhere. I turn to the next page and the full-page photo there is of a Marine squatting down on a dusty road, talking to a little Afghan girl who has a tear trickling down her cheek.
It’s me.
That day, we were out on patrol and we got mobbed with kids. Little boys mostly, but there was this tiny girl who was knocked down in the stampede. Their grubby, greedy hands waving at me, I pushed my way through the boys to the girl. She was crying—and I hate to see little girls cry. Women, too, but little girls just kill me. When I squatted down, her eyes went huge and afraid, like I was going to hurt her. I guess I can see how she might have thought so, considering I was holding an M16, but instead I gave her a beanbag giraffe. She cradled it in her arms as if I had given her a real live baby, and when she smiled at me, she had a missing front tooth.
The caption turns me into the poster boy for winning the hearts and minds of the local population, but it doesn’t talk about how the Taliban would spread flyers in the night threatening to kill the people if they helped us. Or that a lot of the local population was Taliban. The caption makes it look like we made a difference, when I’m not sure that we did.
I’m staring at the picture of myself when the nurse at the checkin desk says my name. “Stephenson? Travis Stephenson.”
That Marine right there in the magazine doesn’t belong here—at a veterans’ clinic with old guys and liars addicted to prescription painkillers. That Marine is hard. That Marine is tough. That Marine is not crazy.
I don’t want to sit in some counselor’s office every week and talk about how I feel, and if Staff Sergeant Leonard, my platoon sergeant, were here right now, he’d tell me to unfuck myself and get over it. Guys coming home from France and Germany after World War II, guys coming home from Vietnam… they didn’t talk about their wars. They didn’t see therapists. They filed it away in some tiny, dark corner of their brains and moved on with their lives.
I don’t need this.
I roll up the magazine, tuck it into my back pocket, and walk out of the building. Behind me, I hear the receptionist calling my name.
“So, Trav.” Eddie takes the AK-47 from its case and a feeling of cold dread crawls up my spine, freezing me where I stand. I know with every rational bone in my body that my friend is not going to shoot me with that rifle, but my palms are damp and my pulse is racing. My fingers curl into fists, in case I need to punch him, and I wish I had my M16. “I hear you’ve been hooking up with Harper Gray.”
The dread drains away, leaving me nothing but aggravated—at myself for panicking and at Eddie for saying such a stupid thing. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Paige told me you tried to pick up Harper at the Shamrock,” Ryan says. “And I saw her come pick you up the other night.”
I shrug. “We’re friends.”
Michalski laughs his big dumb laugh and sticks his face over my shoulder. “Well, she is a very friendly girl.” He pumps his fist in front of his mouth, simulating a blow job, and I jab my elbow back into his gut. He doubles over, coughing. “Jesus, man, what was that for?”
“Your mouth,” I say as Eddie clips a loaded magazine into the rifle and flips the catch. “Keep it shut.”
“What is your problem?” Ryan complains. “Everyone knows Harper is a—”
“A what?” My tone is knife sharp, and there is no good answer.
“You ladies mind if I go first?” Eddie interrupts, leaving my brother and me glaring at each other. Ryan’s fists bunch as if he wants to hit me. As if I’d let him. “I haven’t had a chance to fire it yet.”
“It’s all you,” I say.
With Michalski as a buffer between my brother and me, we give Eddie room at the shooting table. I watch through a pair of binoculars as he fires half a magazine at a man-shaped paper target set on a stand about a hundred yards away. Crack. Crack. Crack. The sound—sharp and distinctive—is one I heard day after day in Afghanistan and I have to remind myself again that no one is shooting at me.
No one is shooting at me.
Out of fifteen shots, maybe six hit the paper, mostly at the edges. Nothing that would do any permanent damage.
“Damn.” Eddie hands the gun to Michalski. “I’ve heard these things aren’t very accurate, but that’s just crazy.”
I don’t point out that it’s probably operator error. The insurgent who put a bullet in my best friend didn’t seem to have trouble with the accuracy of an AK-47.
Michalski steps up for a turn and empties the remaining fifteen rounds in the magazine, hitting the target only a handful of times. Wounding shots at best. Definitely no fatalities.
“It gets easier,” I offer, taking the AK from him. I unclip the empty magazine and replace it with a new one. Ryan flashes me a dirty look, like I’m showing off or something. Like shooting people isn’t my job.
“So what’s it like?” Eddie asks. “In Afghanistan, I mean.”
“Hot and dirty in the summer, cold and dirty in the winter.” I can’t tell them the things they really want to know. How it feels to kill someone. It’s different for everyone, but I felt a rush of adrenaline. A fleeting triumph. And later, in the night when it was quiet, the guilt hit like a sucker punch. Because, even though he was trying to kill me, I’d taken someone’s life. These are things I’ve tried to leave in Afghanistan. Otherwise, how am I ever going to live with myself? “It’s a never-ending camping trip from hell.”
“Do the chicks really go around completely covered up?” Michalski asks.
We didn’t see many women out on the streets, but when we did, they were usually covered in those blue chadris that made them look like ghosts. “Pretty much.”