Off Into the Night

Camp Leatherneck, Helmand Province, late November, 2011.

During the days, it got up to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit there in Helmand Province. Sitting out on the wooden deck those Marines had built for the Education Center as a volunteer project, you could bask in the sun if you buttoned up your jacket and maybe thrust your hands in your pockets. All the fine silt wafting in the air turned the sun a creamy yellow-orange, and even during the days, the clouds swirled pale pink and azure and apricot.

We’d gone on a little expedition to Bastion to break up the monotony of our days. There was Seth, the Central Texas rep, and Tammy and Amber from my school, UMUC. We’d been promised a tour of the K-9 compound next door to our Ed Center tents, but, when we’d walked up to knock on the door, a sleepy, tousled dog handler answered the door in his underwear, asking us if we could come back another time. They’d had a late callout the night before. We didn’t ask any questions, since he probably couldn’t have answered them anyway. On the scale of Need to Know, we Ed Center contractors pretty much didn’t Need and didn’t Know either. It was almost reassuring, our total unimportance in the scheme of things there on the base. Sure, we provided testing and learning opportunities that the troops wanted. It was hard, though, to get the Marines to commit to class in the first place. It was also hard to keep them, what with the junior enlisted always getting called out to escort convoys running up and down the highway lifeline, bringing us our equipment, food, and other supplies. The young guys wanted to learn, but they wanted to make their bones outside the wire, too. As a result, I was doing a Basic Skills English class that term that had essentially split into two cohorts. The junior marines would get extra tutorials whenever they came back from the convoys. Sometimes, they’d pull out their smartphones and show me video clips of their engagements.

“See here, Miss Joanna?” Andy from Alabama said. They all called me “Miss Joanna,” their baby faces looking up at me like I was their kindergarten teacher.

“Miss Joanna, this right here is us returning fire after those Taliban engaged us from behind those rocks.”

“Hey, show her the one you got of the guy fucking that goat when we rolled past that village!”

“Ortiz you fucker I am NOT going to show that to Miss Joanna. Are you out of your fucking mind? Don’t you listen to that fool, ma’am. Look—here’s a much nicer video. That’s one of ours hitting an IED. Don’t worry, though—nobody got killed. On that one.”

Sometimes they’d come back from convoy duty so tired and they’d fall asleep in their metal folding chairs, snuggled up into each other with no trace of shame or self-consciousness. I knew I should wake them, then, to get the lessons done, but sometimes I waited a bit, and I let them sleep.

It looked like they could use it.

“After we get through at the British PX, let’s go to their coffee shop,” Seth said. “I’m sick of the one over here. Plus, their coffee’s better. I’m gonna be hella lazy today since we’ve got the afternoon off for the holiday.”

Oh, that’s right, I thought to myself. It’s Thanksgiving, today. We usually worked seven days a week, and didn’t stop for holidays, but our ESO had decided on an act of largesse.

“They’ve got a big dinner planned, and just wait till you see the food art,” Tammy said.

Food art? I had no idea what that meant.

Amber and I flipped through gossip mags.

“They say Prince Harry might redeploy to Afghanistan,” I said, pointing to his shiny picture. “Do you think he’ll come here to Bastion?”

“If he does, I sure as hell hope I’m not here to see it,” Amber replied. “If the Taliban find out he’s come back? Every one of us’ll walk around here with big targets on our backs. Bigger than the ones we got right now.”

“It says he was out here in Helmand in secret before, but they pulled him out when some Australian newspaper leaked it.”

“Let him play Army Man all he wants to, but don’t get me killed along the way!”

We agreed that, although it would be something else to line up for chow next to Prince Harry, it really wasn’t worth the extra chance of getting killed.

Tammy and Amber hadn’t been kidding about the food art. It was, literally, art made out of food. The mostly Filipino kitchen staff had made fantastical alligators, llamas, unicorns, elephants, and fishes out of bread rolls, sculpting all the scales, horns, and tufts of wool. They’d carved watermelons and cantaloupes into lotus blossoms and intricate pagodas. They’d even made a replica of the Tun Tavern, birthplace of the Marines, out of bread, picking out the details in what looked like olives and radishes. There was a huge cake with an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor picked out on it in different colors of frosting, and the base commander was indeed manning the serving line and sawing away at an enormous turkey, a giant fluted chef’s hat perched on top of his head. It was all endearing, surreal, touching—and a little frightening, as I recalled my students and their video clips. I imagined the firefights conducted over, around and through the jingle trucks loaded with our pumpkin pies, turkey, and shrimp cocktail, out there on the long highway through enemy territory.

With the feast concluded, it was time to head for home. In our case, that meant our new quarters over in what the Leatherneck denizens called “the ghetto.” We’d had better quarters, closer to the main drag and under awnings to keep off the worst of the relentless summer sun, but a new rotation had come through and decided that we were getting ideas and perks above our station. Gone was the free wifi at the Education Center. Gone were our old connexes in the nice neighborhood. We had to walk about twice as far to get to the American PX. our Ed Center worksite, and the Greenbeans coffee shop. Well, what were you going to do? We were there on sufferance, after all. New command flexing at our expense was just part of the cost of doing business.

The only real drag here in the new place was the stark anonymity of our rows of connexes. Without the cheerful awnings, state flags, football banners, and other identifying markers back on the “quality” side, it was hard to find your way around, especially in the dark when you had to grope your way to the portajohn in the freezing night air.

When the sun went down, what took its place was a night sky terrible in its encroaching nothingness, in the sheer weight of its black emptiness. Standing by your door in the feeble flickering of your little porch light, you could be forgiven for digging your toes into the silt, for tightening your grip on the door handle, for clinging to anything you could to keep from tumbling into the void.

But the altitude, even here in Helmand Province, would not stand for queasy stargazing. Up here, the water squeezed out of your cells by our position so high above sea level, you’d awaken two or three times a night, sometimes, desperate for relief. Staggering back from the bathroom half asleep, hunched over, hands tucked in my armpits for warmth, frozen breath leaving a vaporous trail in my wake, I realized I had no idea where I was. What I thought was my room wasn’t my room; the key didn’t fit. What I thought was my row of connexes wasn’t my row; surely that pair of old boots had been on the left side of the aisle, not the right?

At first I was just annoyed. How stupid, I thought. Can’t even find your own way home. Jesus, it’s cold.

After a couple more loops around a couple more rows of identical connexes, I started getting worried.

Don’t be silly, I scolded myself. It’s not like you’re the only person on this base. Sooner or later, you’ll run into somebody. Sooner or later, the sun’s going to come up. No way this lasts forever.

But there was something in this cold night that didn’t respect the rational, that had no time for common sense.

You will be here forever, that voice whispered, wandering alone in the dark. This is all you will ever see.

And then—there it was, a square of bright fluorescent light punching its way out through the black. Leatherneck wasn’t a blackout FOB—we could have lights on in the night—but they were always dim and sputtery. What made this light so…visceral? Like some kind of tsunami breaking over you?

As I got closer, I could see why.

One of the connexes had its blinds raked all the way up and the overhead lights on. You could see everything in the little trailer—the bunk beds, the low, plain table and chair. At first glance, the room looked just like all the others, just like ours even.

But something was different. Maybe it was because of the late hour, or my own preoccupations, but it took me a moment to grasp what the source of that difference was.

The bunk beds had no blankets or other linens. The mattresses were stripped bare. There were no Marine-issue duffels or personal effects of any kind.

And the young man sitting alone there in the brightly lit room had nothing with him at all—just the uniform on his back. There was another soldier standing by the door. This soldier had a rifle slung over his shoulder and the slightly deflated look of someone who’d been in the throes of boredom and discomfort for a very long time.

“So…what’s going on here?” I asked, just to say something, even though I already knew the answer.

Suicide watch.

“Nothing you need to worry about, ma’am,” the guard said, seeming amiable enough now that he’d been distracted by someone to talk to. “Young man in here’s headed back to Germany in the morning, and we’re set to watch him and escort him to the PAX terminal. Suicidal thoughts, don’t you know. Gonna get him to the VA hospital.”

“Do you think he stands a chance of staying in?”

He paused for a second, then another.

“No ma’am, I don’t think so. I expect he’s probably through. Probably discharge him, medical grounds. He won’t be coming back. What you doing out here anyway, ma’am? You get lost coming back from the restroom?”

“I certainly did,” I replied. “Can you point me towards 3-130?”

“Let my buddy here walk you over,” the guard said. “You’re almost there. It gets real spooky out here in the cold in the middle of the night.”

Tell me about it, I thought to myself, following the guard’s battle buddy, who’d just come back from the bathroom himself. As we passed the open window, I couldn’t help but glance inside. The boy was sitting in the chair, staring out at us.

What will happen to you, I wondered. Where will the next few hours, days, months, years carry you? And in my mind, that “you” opened out, out, out. The dog handlers, Prince Harry, the Filipino food artists, my exhausted students, this kid on suicide watch, myself. None of us had any way of knowing—not me, not the guards, and especially not the defeated boy in his crumpled uniform, staring out into the black.