I
A dog walks up to the guard post with half its face stuck full of porcupine quills. We hear it stumbling in the gravel behind us. Blount gasps when the red light of his moonbeam finds the black-and-white quills in the side of the dog’s face. All I can think in the moment is this: I am not a compassionate person. I didn’t come here to help, not people and not dogs. The needles are twice the length of a pencil, clustered hideously across the side of a furry white face. Some of the quills have barely missed an eye. Then a cloud of flies swarms into the guard post. They buzz and whine in our ears. We’re used to the flies here, but this is more than usual. Blount raises a gloved hand and swats them out of his face. I hold my M16 steady with one hand and use the other to swat flies away. This is our first night on duty in Kajaki.
The dog looks from me to Blount and then back to me as if there’s still something we could do to help. But if we weren’t getting attacked by bugs right now, it’s not like we have a vet hospital here. FOB Z, where we live, doesn’t have a clinic for hurt dogs. Most FOBs don’t, probably not even Camp Leatherneck or Delaram II. And you don’t get medals for saving dogs anyway. People shoot them sometimes, and it’s not always out of necessity. The white dog moseys around the guard post and watches us. We must look like idiots as we try to avoid the porcupine quills and swat at the flies buzzing around our helmets. Then for no reason the dog walks away, through the space between the back gate and the wall, and out along the dirt road ahead of the guard post and into the dark. Blount clicks off his moonbeam after the dog leaves. The road from the back gate leads all the way to the Green Zone, but I doubt the dog will walk that far. The Green Zone is where the Royal Marines go to fight the terrorists.
The flies scatter once the dog is gone and then a pack of jackals begins howling near the old barracks that sits abandoned along the road. I’ve been watching that old concrete building out there from the moment we started our shift. I figure it’s an old barracks because of all the windows, and it’s plain and rectangular, designed for efficiency, a place where enlisted people used to live. Blount and I had only been on post a few minutes before the barracks seemed to materialize from the shadows, as if it had not been there a moment sooner. Or at least that’s how my eyes tricked me as they adjusted in the dark.
“Goddamn,” Blount says after the flies clear out and the jackals’ howling dies back down. “Scorpions in our house, hornets as big as crawdads, screaming jackals, and giant porcupines.” Blount’s a tall, goofy motherfucker, and I don’t know him very well yet. Someone in the platoon told me his grandfather owns a chain of grocery stores in the South, but I haven’t asked him about that. He whistles a weird catcall to himself and I know I’m supposed to tell him not to make noise on duty, but I’m distracted too. I’m just as freaked out as he is. I’ve never seen shit like that dog before. When I was a kid, my family took our dog to the vet to put her down. There was another dog at the clinic with quills in its muzzle, but they were small. Nothing like the ones tonight. How were we supposed to know there were giant porcupines here?
“Giant porcupines,” I say. “Another thing we weren’t ready for.” We’ve been in this war almost nine years and we still don’t know what we’re doing. We weren’t prepared for Kajaki. On our first night here earlier this week, we carried our gear to an empty house within the walls of FOB Z. The Soviets used it in the eighties and now it’s our turn. We found graffiti all over the walls and scorpions skittering around on the floor. We spent the night clearing all the rooms of scorpions as if we were going door-to-door clearing out terrorist strongholds. We brushed the scorpions into a bucket and flung them over the wall in the backyard, sending them down the hill towards the river. No one will miss them. This place is crawling with bugs, overflowing with them. The next morning, Blount and Vargas found these big hornets flying laps around the house like they were practicing for an insect Indy 500. Johnson says they might not actually be hornets. Who cares if they’re not hornets? I just know I don’t want them crawling on me.
“What’s next?” Blount says.
I look up at him and I say, “Dinosaurs,” because this place feels like prehistoric times compared to our homes in the States, back in a city or in a newly built subdivision next to some cornfields like where I grew up. The whole place is after you here, not just the Taliban. If it’s not some kind of poisonous bite that gets you sent down to Camp Leatherneck on a medevac, then it’s the desolation of the land itself, the very ground we’re on. You die if you get lost in the desert. We never had anything like this to worry about back home.
“So that’s it,” Blount says, and then, “Wonder what a five-five-six would do to a dinosaur.”
“Probably nothing,” I say. I don’t really know how to imagine a dinosaur. I’m not that creative. I imagine what a five-five-six would do to a dog, and if it’s worse than what the local porcupines are capable of. I didn’t come to this country to worry about dogs, though. I didn’t come to this country to shoot dogs either, but I definitely didn’t come here to worry about them. Sorting out the reasons why I came here feels like a waste of time, even when all we have is time to waste. There’s nothing to do but stand here and think about the past. I know I didn’t come here to stand firewatch like this, that’s for sure. No one wants firewatch.
It’s so dark out it’s nearly impossible for us to see anything without NVGs, even with our eyes adjusted to the dark. The Brits are watching from observation posts on the mountaintop next to the back gate. They have to be using NVGs at the OP up there, which would make the two of us obsolete down here, which would make what we’re doing busy work. We’re just poges, personnel other than grunts, marines who aren’t infantry. So what the fuck are we doing on post to begin with? Goddamnit. I try not to yawn. I don’t want to set a bad example.
Staff Sergeant Rynker, the advance party senior enlisted in charge, the higher-up who put us on the back-gate duty roster, doesn’t understand that we have other shit to do, shit related to our actual MOS as landing support specialists, the shit that we trained to do in our job school, the shit we prepared to do during our pre-deployment workup exercises. I’ve only met Staff Sergeant Rynker in person once, and briefly, but I know enough not to like him. I try to keep myself and my marines away from him, out of sight, out of mind as they say. He came here with us as part of the advance party in order to make preparations for the arrival of the inbound US Marine artillery battery and its command element. For now, he’s in charge of running base operations, so he’s the type to find busy work for people who don’t look busy. He wouldn’t be putting our names on the duty roster if he understood or cared about what we’re accountable for.
We’ve still got about an hour left before anyone comes to relieve us, so we stand quietly in the Helmand night and wait. You’re doing good as long as you can stay awake. There’s nowhere on FOB Z to get a shot of espresso before going on post at zero dark thirty, but if I wanted I could chew on the coffee grounds packaged in an MRE to stay awake. I know enough people who do that for real. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t at some point, and if I said it didn’t work wonders to keep me awake. It always helps if you’re desperate. How could anyone fall asleep with a mouthful of coffee grounds? Fuck. I would chew on coffee tonight if I had some. Blount’s the only one who has an extra MRE though. I guess if he’s carrying it in his daypack right now then I could just tell him to give me the coffee grounds and maybe he would listen, but whatever.
My eyes are dry as hell. The old barracks flickers in and out of focus with each blink. I notice a window on the side of the building we’re facing, but when I blink again there’s only a blank wall in its place. I need more sleep, which is typical. It’s practically by design that we don’t get enough sleep, like some kind of unwritten rule.
“Why’d you join the Marines,” I ask Blount, because you pass the time by talking about dumb shit like that, plus I haven’t gotten to know him that well and you’re supposed to know your marines. It’s one of the leadership principles on our official list, but it’s not like I had to study for a test when I got promoted. If it really is a leadership principle, it’s one that most leaders don’t follow very well. I guess it’s on me to change it if I’m going to call out other leaders. Blount and I have been in the same platoon since I transferred during workup training, but we haven’t worked at the same FOB until now.
He reflects on my question for a moment and finally says, “Army office was closed,” but, he doesn’t laugh. I don’t know if I should take it as a joke. He could be making it up. He could be telling the truth. He might be serious. Nothing much surprises me anymore. I try my best not to laugh, but I can’t help it. It’s too dark to see if Blount is smiling.
“What about you, Corporal?” asks Blount. For a moment, I can’t decide whether or not to tell him the truth about my brother Bryce or to make up some bullshit. I don’t like thinking about my brother, let alone talking about any of that.
“College sucks,” I say. “I mean, not always. But a lot of the time. Yeah.” My answer doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. I was only in school a couple years, and even then it’s too easy to remember the good things while forgetting all the shit I hated or the experiences that made me feel terrible. But even worse than college is the Marines. I thought enlisting was an escape from all the bullshit you have to put up with in college. Waking up early, studying, dressing up for job fairs, you name it. Turns out the Marine Corps isn’t a great place to go if you want to escape bullshit.
“Don’t be cool,” says Blount. “Stay out of school.”
“Exactly,” I say. Then for a while I say nothing. We wait silently except when answering the radio checks.
“Radio check, over,” says a fuzzy voice through the radio speaker, calling to us from the COC, the most important building on base, where the higher-ups conduct tactical and operational planning. It’s best not to be there if you don’t have to be.
“You do it,” I say to Blount.
“Kill,” he says. He picks up the hand receiver and holds it near his face, stretching out the spiral cord connecting it to the olive drab radio. “Lima charlie, over,” says Blount into the hand receiver.
“Roger, out,” says the fuzzy voice, and that’s it.
Eventually, a couple lance corporals from the artillery advance party walk up to relieve us and take over the guard post. We don’t know either of them and I am not interested in getting to know either of them at the moment, so we don’t introduce ourselves. Blount tells them to be on the lookout for big old porcupines. They look at us but neither of them answers. I know I wouldn’t know what to say if someone told me some shit about porcupines. I would tell him to fuck off if I said anything at all.
We walk back to our scorpion-free house, which sits down the road from the back gate in a row of abandoned houses. There’s no door on any doorframe, no glass to seal the windows. We simply walk across the open threshold at the front doorstep and then we’re inside. Vargas and Johnson are sound asleep on their cots, Vargas in the front room where Blount and I sleep, Johnson in a room by himself on the other side of our house. The butt stock of Vargas’s M16 lies next to his face, the rest of the rifle hidden inside his green sleeping bag. I walk out back to brush my teeth outside, then I get undressed and climb into my own sleeping bag on the floor, but I do not bring the M16 inside the sleeping bag with me.
Vargas talks in his sleep. He whispers at night. I noticed it before we came here, when we were still at Delaram II. I heard him from the other side of our tent back then, and he’s doing it again now, whispering from his spot in the corner. But I can’t understand him. I try to keep my eyes open, despite how tired I am. There’s a drawing of a boat and a stick figure on the wall next to my cot. When I close my eyes, I see the white dog looking up at us in the red light, waiting for us to do anything to help, the side of its head stuck with a cluster of the biggest porcupine quills I’ve ever seen. And we’re just standing there watching it suffer, acting like we’re not responsible for anything because we’re farther from home than we’ve ever been.
Copyright © 2023 by John Milas
