I steer her to El Dorm and try to get her to my room without running into any admins, but we run straight into Tucker. It’s okay—Tucker understands how I work. I let him know with my eyes that I got this under control, but this girl’s his favorite, so he watches me close as I walk her past.
Once we’re in my room, I sit her down on my bed and look into her face. Her eyes are streaming tears from the negative fifty-degree wind, and her pupils look like pinpoints. I could take her to Hard Truth, but I ain’t done that to anyone yet. The quickest way to get NPQ stamped on your dossier is a trip to Doc Carla. No one, not even the weak ones, wants that. But she looks only half here. Lucky for her, I’m all here. This is my quarter. I can bring them back. Done it a million times. Only sane one left on the mortuary team after we cleaned up the crash at Erebus in ’79. Tourist flight from New Zealand—TE-901. They’d been running them over Antarctica for years—cocktails-and-cameras type of thing. The plane crashed in sector whiteout conditions. Two hundred fifty-seven on board, all dead on impact. They called us in from Fort Lee to help the Kiwis’ recovery mission, the only army unit in a navy operation, and we spent a week camped in tents at the crash site. Body parts everywhere, no telling how the legs got separated, and sometimes even the feet, cut clean away. The human grease turned our parkas black. It soaked through wool gloves. I was eighteen, just enlisted, practically still a blue-head. First place they sent me was Antarctica. Figures. It was my first time on the ice. I didn’t want to leave.
I can smell the alcohol on her breath. “You take any scratch with that booze?” I ask.
“I took all three pills, but don’t take me to Doc Carla,” she says. “She’ll be mad. And I don’t want to go home.” Her wound is leaking—my bandanna is done for—so I pull out my supply kit. Pole docs get supplied like they was going on a Girl Scout trip, so I bring my own shit. I have hydrogen peroxide, two irrigation syringes, dental filling mixture, glucose paste, hydrocodone, antibiotic ointment, gauze, and four three-inch elastic bandages with hook and loop strips. I keep my own hospital, because someone’s always getting scratched up at the site.
I crouch in front of her and unwrap my bandanna from her hand. She winces, but doesn’t say anything. The wound’s opened up. Looks like it’s breathing. I see the finger’s been cut off down to the proximal phalanx—a little beyond, because the joint’s gone. There’s lint and shit stuck to it, so I tell her I’m gonna wash the wound site, that it’s gonna sting, and before she can say no, I pour the hydrogen peroxide over it in a good steady stream. It soaks my pants leg, but I don’t mind. Cupcake, though, she’s almost levitating. I tell her to stop moving. “Makes it worse.” I want to tell her that after the deep frost of the burn will come a kind of clean feeling, but I don’t know how to explain it right so I keep my mouth shut. As I work, I see she’s looking at me, as if she’s seeing me for the first time. Her eyes touch on every part of my face—mouth, nose, eyebrows.
I smear about a pound of ointment on the gauze, and wrap her back up. I ask her what she was doing out there. She doesn’t say anything at first, so I ask her again, and she says, “You ever feel like pulling a Titus?”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“The guy in the Scott expedition. The one who walked out without his shoes on to save the others. Do you ever feel like walking out into a blizzard and never coming back?”
“Impossible,” I tell her. “It don’t snow at Pole.” The snow here comes in on the wind from the coasts. To a Fingy it might look like a blizzard but it ain’t. It’s just snow on the wind.
Possible, she tells me. Been done.
“Not here it ain’t.” You can die a million ways here, but not by “pulling a Titus,” the fuck that means. She looks at me like she wants a medal for not walking into a blizzard. She doesn’t know about life. Example: It would mean nothing to her to learn that a soldier could win a Bronze Star without stepping foot on the battlefield, that all you had to do was bring coffee to a four-star general sitting in a cool underground bunker in the desert, where the air is filtered and smells sweet as spring hay. You would not win shit for a search-and-rescue mission for an F-16 pilot who’d been hit by Iraqi gunfire and who put the plane nose-first into the sand at 130 knots. If you were honorably discharged because you were an old fuck like me, you would, however, get a job with the defense contractor responsible for cleaning up the shit left behind by the three thousand Abrams main battle tanks, the Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and whatever crackerjack bullshit Ali Baba used during Operation Desert Storm. That’s what I did. I’m no good at serving coffee, but I am damn fine at cleaning up. Example: Kuwait City. The sky was dark at noon with smoke from the oil fires. The power grids were shot—Hussein had destroyed the transmission lines and distribution centers. Floyd, who’d been moved off a secret project laying DEW lines in Canada, was working at Shuwaikh, trying to get the grids back online. I’d met him at the Defense Reconstruction Assistance Office, where he’d been pitching a fit over a newbie Corps engineer assigned to his team. All his bluster told me was that he was tender as a newborn babe and had no business being in a war zone. He was a mess for the first few weeks, and the suits almost sent him home. I took him under my wing, and though he acts like he don’t need me, he’s followed me to every godforsaken outpost I’ve been assigned ever since.
One day, about a week after the U.S. military sent Hussein packing, I get the call to escort some Kuwaiti sheik from the Plaza Hotel to the airport so he could catch a flight to Ta’if, where all the other sheiks were running the country out of a Sheraton ballroom. I get to the eighteenth floor and see the door’s open already. He’s standing on the balcony, smoking. When he sees me, he tells me to come in. So I do, but he wants me on the balcony. As soon as I step next to him, the hair on the back of my neck is up. This guy ain’t happy.
“Look at this,” he says, pointing his cigarette at the city below us. It’s sooty and dark. I see the same abandoned vehicles I saw on my way in, the same Iraqi tanks lying on their sides, the same sea of broken glass I’d walked across to get here, and the same Jawas standing guard at the door, except now there’s a shavetail with them, pointing at something beyond the smoldering skyscraper across the street. In the distance, the oil fires glow.