Another Out

Cordova sat on the general-issue mattress, laughing into the TV screen. Dumb laughs, like giggles from a Deadhead who’d crossed to the other side too many times and never made it back. The two empty bottles of Glenlivet in his trash can hadn’t been there the week before.

I sat across the barracks room staring into my laptop. If Google hadn’t existed, I never would have known the difference between synthetic and down-fill sleeping bags. Or of the culinary versatility of the nine-inch, titanium backpacking spoon.

The first weeks home had been celebratory, but they’d quickly taken on a self-destructive arc. There was a darkness that partying couldn’t shake. No one said anything about it because no one knew what it was.

Ambien and alcohol were popular. Valium and Percocet pills, crushed and snorted.

We’d turned from motivated, bloodthirsty teenagers to shell-shocked cynics in one trip across the globe. We’d seen what happens when humanity turns.

Cordova had the frame of a fighter, all right angles and sharp lines. His gray eyes cut deep, and he always had an amused way about him, raising his eyebrows and laughing at me when he’d realize that I questioned his excessive drinking. I had seen him chew a cell phone to pieces and drive off base with half a fifth under his belt. It only pointed in one direction. But, fuck it. We each needed our own way out.

I completely dissociated. I stayed present enough to fill a pair of boots and make it to the occasional medical screening. Otherwise, I was gone. Where? The hills of Appalachia. The frozen tundra of Alaska. All the time I’d spent overseas with my head in adventure books had shaped my inner world. The stories helped me escape a version of reality that I constantly struggled to keep tucked neatly into a coherent context. Eventually, it just became easier to give that up. The making sense of things.

There was a tragic innocence to it. The boy lives in the adventurer’s world, a world where the intrepid never know what’s around the next bend. This is preferable to his real world, a place where he knew it didn’t matter what was around the next bend. A place where EFPs melted through engine blocks as easily as they did bodies.

Cordova threw his Xbox controller onto the ground, sending it crashing across the tile in a half dozen pieces. He had infantile sensibilities but gorilla-like strength, and giggled when he’d saw what he’d done.

“Oh Ooooooh,” he cried, standing up before throwing himself face first onto the bed.

I did a sort of eagle-like screech in response. We’d long ago devolved to communicating without words. What was the point?

We didn’t socialize anymore, either. Our Friday nights were better spent in the surreal funhouse-ambiance of the barracks than in the post-deployment drama enveloping the greater Fort Riley area. We’d tried to blend in with the civilian population at first, wearing their clothes and frequenting their businesses. But we couldn’t help but feel like wolves draped in lambskins, ten feet tall and covered in blood.

The locals had heard the rumors. They’d overheard drunken conversations of decapitations and brain matter. Of torture houses with skinning tables and bloody drill bits, fragments of skull matter and grizzle dried to antique metal shanks. They’d heard of the fields of decomposing corpses, hands bound and shot execution-style, glowing white-hot under the gaze of infrared lenses.

They’d read in the local papers that we’d taken casualties, whispering amongst themselves that we’d come home with ninety-three less than we’d left. That in an EFP attack, the wounded were considered the unlucky ones—well-placed shrapnel viewed as preferable to the slow roast of flames. And that after enough time, the tragic repetition of combat would cast a bleak pall over even the hardiest soldier’s eyes.

“God, I’m such a fuck up,” Cordova said, slamming his head into the pillow.

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied, not bothering to make the distinction between the broken controller and his life.

He laughed a muffled laugh, wrapping the pillow over his head and kicking his legs like a toddler in a tantrum.

Suddenly, the door creaked open. I turned to see Specialist Connelly slip into the room with a drink in his hand.

“Heeeeeey, buddy,” he said, standing behind me while rubbing my chest. Get the fuck away from me, I thought.

He’d been a dumb ass since he first got to the unit and now his dumb ass life was falling apart. Wife, custody, and money problems; a married man crashing in the barracks’ rec room until he could make sense of it.

I didn’t respond. He knew he was a piece of shit in my eyes.

“Hey, Cordova, buddy,” he said, walking to the far side of the room. Even the contradiction of his rushed Florida drawl made him sound like a dumb ass. “Man, why don’t we get fucked up tonight? Go clubbin’ and try to meet us some of the local talent. Whattya think?”

Cordova screeched into the pillow and laughed his dumb laugh. A clear, nope, my life is already too messed up.

“Well, fine. Fuck ya’ll two anyways,” Connelly said, slurring a bit. “Course none of it’s gon’ matter with all the pills I just took.”

I looked up and he smiled at me from behind tearful eyes. A sheepish smile, not the cocksure look I’d been accustomed to. His face went soft. “Just need a place to crash so building security won’t find me.”

“Well, fuck,” I said, let down by reality again, “there’s a nice cool floor right there.” I pointed to the tile next to my bunk.

“Well, alright then,” he said, nodding at the realization that he was right, nobody loved him and the world would be a better place without his dumb ass. He set his Jack and Coke on top of my locker and took off his glasses.

Cordova lifted his head and studied Connelly. Then he studied me, grinning in anticipation and disbelief.

Specialist Connelly lay down on the floor, exhaling deeply to dig for the courage. “Can I at least get a blanket?” he mumbled, his speech already regressing.

Fine. I stood up and pulled a fleece blanket off my bunk, dropping the pilled fabric on his head. A dying man deserves a final kindness. Even in my state, I felt that to be true.

I sat down and went back to my computer, back into the safety of my inner world. According to the forum at whiteblaze.net, the cumulative elevation gain of an Appalachian Trail thru-hike is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest sixteen times. Fifteen minutes passed by.

And, maybe even more staggering, a thru-hiker has to take an average of five million steps to make it from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin, Maine. Thirty minutes. 

Forty.

 “Oh Ooooooh!” Cordova called from the other side of the room, rocking back and forth, giggling, but this time real nervous. He raised his eyebrows when our eyes locked. “Think we should do something?” he asked.

Probably, sure, I thought. But fuck it. Connelly’s out made as much sense as anything.