Redeployment(19)

I told her, “What’s done is done.” It made me feel like a tough guy from a movie.

Even still, we stayed together through boot camp. She wrote me letters while I was there, even sent me naked photos of herself. A few weeks earlier another guy’d gotten a package like that and the DIs had put the photos up in the bathroom stalls. The guy’s girlfriend had worn a cheerleading uniform and stripped it off picture by picture. I remember thinking how glad I was that Rachel wasn’t the kind of girl to send me something like that.

Mail call in boot camp works like this. One of the DIs stands at the front of the squad bay with all the platoon’s mail while the platoon stands at attention in front of their racks. The DI calls out names one by one, and recruits run up and take their mail. If it’s a package or an envelope that feels suspicious, the DI makes him open it right there. So when I opened Rachel’s letter it was in front of the whole platoon and with Sergeant Kuba, my kill hat, glaring at me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to open a letter with him watching. My parents had sent me photos of their vacation to Lakeside. That was no big deal, and I hadn’t been worried. I didn’t think my parents would send me naked photos. Rachel’s name on the envelope, though, terrified me. I opened it slowly, trying to come up with a plan if the photos turned out to be contraband.

The envelope had three glossy four-by-six prints that Rachel had developed herself in our high school’s darkroom. When I pulled them out and saw her thin, pale, and very naked body, I didn’t even look up for Sergeant Kuba’s reaction. I stuffed the prints into my mouth, closed my eyes, and hoped for the best.

It’s impossible to swallow three photographs at once, especially if you’ve only got two seconds before your kill hat has one hand on your face and the other on your throat while he screams and sprays spit at you.

The senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Kerwin, came running and broke us up. When Sergeant Kuba released my neck, I spat the pictures on the floor. Staff Sergeant Kerwin looked at me and said, “You must be f*cking crazy, and I must be on the Marine Corps shit list if they give me a worthless f*ck like you to turn into a Marine.” Then he leaned in close and said, “Maybe I’ll just kill you instead.”

He told me to pick up the photos. It was hard because I was shaking and because all the other DIs were screaming at me. I tried to hold them so my hands covered Rachel’s body. Only her face stared out, and her face in the photo seemed scared. She often looked like that in photos, because she didn’t like how she looked when she smiled. There’s no way she’d ever taken shots like that before.

“Rip them up,” he said. It was a kindness.

I tore them, slowly, into smaller and smaller pieces, twisting and tearing them, making sure no one could put them back together. When they were in shreds, he turned and walked away, leaving me to the other DIs.

I had to eat the torn pieces while Sergeant Kuba delivered a lecture to all of us on how a true Marine wouldn’t just share naked photos of his girlfriend with his platoon, but would let them run a train on her as well. Then he told them they were all f*cked up if they’d tolerate an individual like me in their platoon, somebody who thought he was special, and he took them out back and thrashed them for a good twenty minutes while I stood at the position of attention and watched. Every night that week, he made me stand at the mirror and scream, “I’m not crazy, you are!” at my reflection for a half hour, and he hated me from then on and thrashed me pretty much continuously while I was there.

The next time I saw Rachel was after I graduated from boot camp. I showed up at her parents’ place in my uniform. Dress blues are supposed to get you laid, but she started crying. She told me she didn’t think she could stay with me if I went on a deployment, and I asked her to give me at least until I went to Iraq. She said yes. Ten months later, I was heading out. They’d given me the opportunity to deploy if I deployed with Mortuary Affairs, and I took it.

Rachel came to see me off. She gave me a sad little blow job the night before and told me we were done. In the military, the thing women are supposed to do if they love you is stay with you at least through deployment. Maybe divorce you a few months after you get back, but not before. Which meant, to my simple little mind, that she didn’t love me. That she’d never loved me and that everything I’d felt so strongly about in high school was just me being childish. Which was okay, because I was going somewhere that would definitely make me a man.

Except what happened in Iraq was just what happened, nothing more. I don’t think it made me any better than anyone else. It was months and months of awful. And the first weekend back we got a ninety-six, and Corporal G convinced me to go with him to Las Vegas.