The tank faces my bedroom. The long stem of it, the gun, is it called?, is aimed squarely at the freshly painted upstairs guest room. It’s a memorial, the tank, non operational, one feels the need to assume, across the street from Angela’s sweet old farmhouse. Most war memorials are dense statuary on florid concrete pedestals, of soldiers on horseback or a bronzed angel of the unknown war dead, but not here. Not on the outskirts of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. This memorial appears to be a tad more functional than any romanticized heavy metal replica. It is a tank parked on the lawn beside a simple white church, as if a bunch of gunners decided at the last minute to catch the tail end of a high stakes bingo game.
This is Roseboro, North Carolina, where one passes through Roseboro in the time it takes to say that one is in Roseboro. The two lane road, bisecting tobacco and cotton fields, are occasionally punctured by small bright campaign signs urging local citizenry to vote for either Judge Hair or Hasty in the upcoming elections. Once past the few stores with indifferent hours of operation and the Food Lion, you are already halfway to the next town.
The wedding fiesta is in two days but it is largely ceremonial. The actual wedding took place back in July, a whole seven weeks after Joe met Angela at the local Triple A baseball stadium bar. She was selling and he was buying- beer, a great deal of beer. Angela’s used to selling too much beer to the Army guys. But Angela couldn’t help but notice Joe and his friends were drinking a great deal of beer, even by Triple A stadium standards, which are rather high. The men of the 82nd Airborne readily and cheerfully confess they do enjoy their drink. In fact the symbol of the 82nd, two conjoined capital As, finds itself as the butt of many an Alcoholics Anonymous joke.
Angela hadn’t even noticed Joe in particular, as he was partially obscured by louder, drunker and younger Medic Specialists. They planted themselves at a table, for an afternoon of beer pounding. Gervascio gave Tommy, a 12 year old, five dollars to tell Angela that one guy thought she was cute. When Tommy approached Angela, she asked how much they had paid him, then informed Tommy he had sold himself too cheaply. Angela asked the kid how much it would cost to find out which guy thought she was cute. Tommy replied that five dollars would let her know that it was the old guy over there, pointing at Joe’s prematurely gray hair. Angela apprised Joe and wrote down her number, gave it to the kid and let it go at that. Joe called. The rest is 82nd Airborne history.
Nick Gervascio, the architect of the match, looks far more like one might imagine Loretta Lynn’s coal miner father looked like than a yenta; but he is a dyed in the wool matchmaker. He paid Tommy to say Joe found Angela cute, even though or because Joe was too far in his cups to say much of anything. Gervascio, despite the beer or because of it, picked Angela because he knew Joe needed a good woman. And as this random paper cup pairing has crystallized into a marriage that more than makes sense, Gervascio is as proud as a preacher full of faith. He’s happily married and holds fast that everyone should be with somebody. In this case he was right about the everybody and the somebody.
Angela’s friendly, but in a skeptical, withholding-judgment-until-you-sink-yourself-kind-of-way. Her indelible, almost insistent Long Island accent, the last remaining link to her childhood in Northport, has softened with much effort. She found her Yankee honk brought swift if silent prejudice in North Carolina, so she lost it, slowly over twenty years. However, a Raspberry martini or two can coax the Carmela Soprano in Angela back to the surface. Why Nick picked her is a mystery, but everyone was soon to find that whatever it was that Joe needed, Angela could provide.
A glance at one photograph of Joe is all it takes to fathom why Angela wasn’t interested in waiting until their wedding date to get married. Joe glares at the camera, in layers of desert camo, amid tents and equipment somewhere in the red dust of Afghanistan. His Scottish skin seems furious to be in such unrelenting sun and his grey hair and blue eyes are striking, if no match for the climate. Even standing still, he seems full of a purpose that doesn’t include waiting a week to call a woman back, or mastering the perfect storm of mixed messages, or the skinny dark looks people throw each other in Los Angeles bars. It doesn’t matter how, why or what it was he did, but he sure looked good doing it. Everyone who mattered approved of their marriage, not that anyone, even those of consequence, had any say in the matter. Angie had been alone long enough, and now she wasn’t going to have to be alone anymore.
She’d been married at 19, had two kids by her Marine husband by 23 or so, and was mostly left alone while he served; raising two little kids in places called towns but with little to support that claim. She was too smart and far too young and her husband far too into being a Marine to notice or care, so the marriage collapsed under the weight of too much and not enough.
Everyone figured Angela would take the kids back to Long Island, move in with her folks and do the whole it takes a village thing that most nomadic single moms tend to do. But Angela had attended Guilford College and really liked North Carolina so she moved to a small town near Charlotte and raised her toddlers by herself. She wasn’t going back to someone else’s home- not even her parents. And that in itself was her rebellion.
Angela was raised conservatively and still holds her entrenched Republican beliefs strong and dear, to a Mary Matalin-esque degree of articulate yet passionate intelligence. Her parents were very active in the Conservative Party of Suffolk County, which they formed when Nixon blew it all to hell in the early seventies. Angela laughs recalling how she and her sister handed out buttons and urged neighbors to vote, going door to door. She might have been seven at the time, and most likely pushed into it by her parents, but politics and history were imprinted in her soul. These days, it would be easy for someone to assume Angela is liberal because she has a lot of dogs and looks creative. But if an anti-Bush joke was casually lobbed at her, a political debate would ensue that would be the verbal equivalent of Angela playing death match handball with an armless but well meaning person.
Even though Angela detests all forms of pretension, she was deeply influenced by the formal discipline of her Catholic all girls education. This duality was evident in her as early as high school, and made her a bit of an anomaly. She was difficult to classify because she was straight A and honor society, but routinely sawed through the pomp with a brutal sarcasm. Even as Angie brought her A game to the nuns’ turf, she made fun of it while she was winning. No one smart ever did that. And now that she teaches high school history, she reminisces about Sr. Catherine Well, her leather lunged Social Studies teacher, like some women might recall a fond teenage crush.
Angie was so smart she was advanced for AP History. In her handwritten homework assignments she would expound on what an asshole Alexander Hamilton really was; while less devoted students, burped on colored pencil textbook drawings, mechanically did their homework with all the imagination and commitment of taking out the trash or mowing the lawn.
We were best friends at the Academy, and she made me a better student than I cared to be. She was history, I was art, her parents were strict and mine weren’t, and thirty years later the depth and length of our friendship really makes no sense. I moved restlessly between LA and New York having tortured affairs with sexually and artistically ambivalent men while she raised toddlers in the country. Not that I couldn’t relate, but I really and wholly could not. And we are politically incompatible but our friendship survived thirty years through diligent letter writing and infrequent visits. We’d lose touch for a year or so as both of us moved more times than a Gypsy caravan and between us there were more than a few marriages and name changes- but somehow we’d manage to find each other and the friendship would be revived. Then our 20th high school reunion, compounded by the invention of email, cemented our bond once and for all.
About ten years ago, she wrote a sports column for the Mudhens, a Triple A team in North Carolina. Occasionally, she’d cave into heaving affairs with beautiful boys with million dollar arms and little else to go by. The Boys were hot, fun, and heartbreaking; they arrogantly gambled their young lives on a future that might pan out in Camden Yard, but more often than not grounded out in Triple A fields across America, if their bodies didn’t crap out before they signed something big. Some of them got hurt in catastrophic ways that sent them back home bitter and unpromised, to sell cars or roofing. Angela loved the game and could write about baseball the way she could talk a Democratic New Yorker into voting for Guiliani. Twice.
Off field, Angela witnessed a great deal of Mudhen groupie activity and she tried to teach the Fence Birds (the groupies) how to play the game so as not to get burned. While most of the team changed seasonally, the Fence Birds rotation stayed the same, if one summer older. Angela tried to teach some Fence Birds how to play the game so as not to get burned. But the Fence Birds played like girls. While some ended up married, most Fence Birds failed to land a Hen. Then Angela broke one of her own rules and married one, a Cubano named Perez. When it looked like his arm was good, but not good enough, she made sure he learned something else. The marriage failed, but Perez is a successful accountant in Charlotte.
For the last few years Angela has settled in a charming fixer upper with a nice chunk of land she bought for 1,800 dollars down. Her kids are grown, 24 and 21 and living on their own. While she teaches, she studies nights and weekends for her Master’s. Hopefully she’ll be teaching her way of seeing History in a local college soon. She’s social and likes meeting people, but busy and tired what with teaching and learning. She was engaged for a year, to a younger guy, but they broke up last year. And that really hurt. She resumed dating recently, but unenthusiastically. She’d go out with a group of women, including her daughter Mary. Mary, a low key, not easily impressed knockout, draws men in a way that only twenty one year old women do. But meeting men is hardly a problem, because Angela lives on the outskirts of Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville.
Fayetteville’s got a motto and Angela’s created it- Fayetteville, Where Even Ugly Girls Can be Choosy. There are lots and lots of men here, and they are surrounded by lots and lots of other men; men ground down from training and the random cruelties of senior officers, irritated by the unyielding bureaucracy, and raging from de-sensitivity training that hews regular joes into machines who eat what’s given them, sleep where ever they can close their eyes, follow orders no matter how trivial or life-threatening and fight to the death for the man in the same uniform lying beside them.
Some thirty thousand men, and a few females – the soldiers have been trained to call the Army women females- train and work on base, and have weekends and holidays off- like most American jobs. But they are on two-hour notice from about a month after they get back from a deployment. Which means they can go away on weekends, but only as far as they can go while having to be ready within two hours to be redeployed, if necessary.
So, while Angela’s been teaching, learning and taking in every stray dog and pregnant cat, Joe’s been parachuting into Afghanistan, Baghdad and Afghanistan again. And it’s not like he’s some thrill seeking kid. He hates to jump and says it in a way that makes people who parachute for fun seem pretty stupid. Jumping isn’t just not fun to Joe; it’s extremely hard on his legs. They hurt all the time. Perhaps it’s because he jumps with 80 pound packs on, or that he jumps from 800 feet which gives landings all the impact of jumping from a two story building or maybe it’s because he’s the “old man” of the medics: Thirty-seven to the other guys’ nineteen.
He signed up after spending five days unable to leave his couch after September 11th. He had been working in a hospital in Pennsylvania, and signed up, re-enlisted, actually. The first time he joined the Army was right out of high school. This time he was out of his second marriage, the kids lived with their mom, and he signed up because he just had to. He’s done three tours since 2002. Soon after arriving in Afghanistan a kid threw a brick at his convoy and shattered his nose. But Joe denied himself medical care because he didn’t want to leave his guys.
When the 82nd jump, the whole medical clinic drops in as well. Chutes carry trucks, designed for dropping from planes, wrapped in heavy duty cardboard and easy to break wood. Sometimes the trucks’ chutes don’t deploy and the trucks land like bombs in the desert hardscape. The medics jump, with their 80 pound packs, knees and feet together, to make sure they don’t break a foot, ankle or knee upon landing- concussions sometimes happen, but the guys work through them- then they assemble the clinic, once all of its parts have landed in huge crates. While the medics have been trained to jump and set up clinics this way, they haven’t had to do it in this war- they have been able to convoy in, and for that they do seem grateful.
After Joe’s first deployment to Iraq, they came back for leave and a year at Fort Bragg. However the Reserves unit that had been called up to relieve them wasn’t ready to deploy, and even if they were, they weren’t as good as the 82nd. So, the 82nd guys went back, after only five months at home. They spent a year in Afghanistan, amid the sucking chest wounds, the catastrophic injuries of the IEDs, and the death of Christopher Michael Katzenburger, a 25 year old fellow medic specialist who went out on a convoy on August 9, 2005 and didn’t make it back. Katz was distinct for his smile. He always smiled, even when posing for his Army photo, where they tell you not to smile. Hobart calls the Army photos their death photos, as it is admittedly the single photo the Army releases to the press when someone dies. Joe, Hobart, Gervascio, Silver and North took Katz’s death very hard. Over a year later, their grief is quiet but fresh.
One significant feature of modern warfare is a great deal of down time. In Afghanistan the 82nd guys filled their down time honing medical skills on needy locals. Hobart’s first time sewing stitches into a human was a boy whose hand had been severely mauled by a dog. A man came in with a leg infected so severely that when he removed the bandages, the smell drove Hobart, who grew up on cattle farms so was rather hardy, out of the tent. Joe taught himself how to fashion a filling for an infantryman with a cavity.
Joe and his guys handed out a lot of aspirin and American candy to local families. Thanks to Joe a little boy took his first bite of chocolate but spit it out, disgusted by the taste. Skittles were much more popular among the Afghanis, and when Joe and the other medics noticed a townie coming around one too many times for Motrin, they’d hand out Skittles, telling the grubby interloper it was much better medicine.
Joe brought back a few beautiful rugs, and one not so beautiful 2 by 4 foot rug with a rudimentary plane crashing into a low pile knotted wool Twin Towers. Stick people with arms outstretched fall out of the beige sky. American words, misspelled and none seemingly understood, tattoo the rug which depicts the historical event that changed more lives over there than it changed lives over here. America, Aerplane, commercial, financial, Trade, Terrorists float like smoke and debris around the fire, smoke and falling bodies. Joe doesn’t display it, nor will he sell it, he doesn’t want to profit from the eerie kitsch factor. One can almost feel the historical anguish of whoever made it. The rug is garish and inappropriate in its childish crudity, but is a far more expressive memento than the commemorative Twin Tower refrigerator magnets still for sale at Ground Zero.
He also brought back a half dozen commendations for his valor, which he hides and Angela displays, and a nose that didn’t heal properly after the close encounter with the brick. His nose had to be re-broken and operated on, but a hole in his septum hasn’t healed and he’s gearing up for another operation. Because his legs hurt he’s gained some weight, but since he’s been married to Angela, he’s lost ten. If he makes weight he’ll get promoted, but he doesn’t seem overly ambitious, to lose the weight or get promoted. They have to weigh in and get measured and are chastised and threatened for being over weight, not unlike Rockettes. The guys don’t worry about being over their weight because they know they are desperately needed. And if Joe were to get promoted, he’d have to give more time to the Army, and that is no incentive. He is quietly reverent about what he has done, and the friends he has made are friends for life, but when his time is up, he won’t be coming back. He is not career Army.
Everyone at the wedding party comments on how much Joe has changed since meeting Angela. He’s lighter, funnier and his voice is soft to the point of not hearing him as much as overhearing him. Gervascio’s wife, Kathleen, savors her first sighting of Joe Lockerby. He was drinking a beer, wearing a kilt, and reading The Hundred Most Evil People in History. Another romance had ended badly- she stopped returning his calls while he was in Baghdad. He was legendary for his bad moods, and everyone knew not to look in his general direction in the morning. His humor was dark and inappropriate at best, which kept his friends loyal and his enemies frequent. While on patrol in Afghanistan Joe had to kill someone. He shot a Talibani and it haunts him.
He has a hard time falling asleep, and when asleep, a harder time not having nightmares that he’s back there, killing the man who would have killed him first. It seems that the men who do not kill frequently are forced to kill them over and over again, in their memories, in their subconscious, in their sleep. He takes Vitamin Z, which is what they call Zoloft and sounds like they prescribe by the truckload to the guys smart enough to know they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and man enough to admit they need help. And while the men are encouraged to ask for help, they are written up, stigmatized and mocked if they do. Joe talks to a chaplain he trusts when things get too bad. And Angela is there for everything else. She’s his salvation, and he’s hers. So, it’s tidy.
The guys all have varying degrees of PTSD and that’s why they drink – it’s a socially acceptable form of self-medication. It’s how they diminish their shared traumas and it helps them digest the ridiculous orders they must obey on base while waiting for the next tour. So they drink and laugh and jaw about how retarded the Army is. And to a man, they have all re enlisted. Some more than twice.
When they come back to Fort Bragg, they have buckets of combat pay and they buy big loud things; king sized TVs and massive La-Z-Boy chairs; X Boxes, Playstations and war games that let them shoot things that die (which they play obsessively, as their wives wearily attest); Harleys or the biggest American made trucks ever seen. No one in Fayetteville drives a Prius. Hobart bought a Harley and he takes her out on long weekend getaways like she is his girlfriend.
The fact that Joe and Angela met, fell in love and married in seven weeks is not that big of a deal in Fort Bragg. Unusual marriages, biracial marriages, age- and size- defiant marriages are situation normal marriages in a wartime Fort town. “Why wait?” seems to be the motto. Time is a luxury here that the eternal singles of New York and Los Angeles can all too well afford. When a person has given the next seven years of their life to the Army, they don’t trip themselves up by wondering if they could do better or if they are stooping, slumming, or if their partner really gets them, on a deep, cellular level. Pitfalls do exist. While some local women swear off military men altogether, others are intent on landing themselves a career Army man with an eye on advancement. More than a few Fayetteville women are well aware of the pay scales attached to each rank and date strategically. And while everyone respects the 82nd Airborne guys, the Barracks Betties steer clear- they just don’t earn enough.
But Joe and Angela’s baggage matched, so they got hitched. They managed to get a good size crowd to the courthouse on pretty short notice. Gervascio was there with Kathleen. She’s 44 and has a child from a previous marriage. Gervascio is 24, looks 20 and Kathleen fell for him at first sight. Actually, it was at first song. They were both at a political event, and when everyone was singing the Star Spangled Banner, Kathleen’s eyes fell on Gervascio. The passion he was giving to our national song made her determined to speak to him before the night was over. They talked all night, and were essentially married from that moment onward. He was a virgin when they met, she was a divorcee with a child. Twice people have mistaken her husband for her son, and his parents were a little alarmed by the point spread, but the couple knows what they have and they don’t explain or defend it. Kathleen, the daughter of a CIA operative killed undercover when she was an infant, knows and understands the risks of marrying a military man, and she tries to appear as unflinching in the unknowable future of her marriage as her husband is.
Getting hitched must be pretty good business in this part of North Carolina, in fact, just down the road from Angela is a flower shop/wedding chapel/reception room. The proprietress cheerfully figures she can either sell you the flowers, the ceremony or the whole nine yards. And when the Army’s on two-hour notice and the countries invaded aren’t cooperating with their liberators, she does pretty well with the whole, fuck-it-let’s-get-married-spirit of things.
Of course not all the marriages last, as Louis, the 22 year old who works in Intel- which one of the medics defines with a sneer as a glorified desk job- but drinks like he’s been there, attests. He’s getting divorced. Joe’s on number three, so is Angela, and everyone admits that in a war town, divorce is just as big business as marriage, especially during wartime. Marriage and the military don’t always go together.
Not that he was defending them, but after that strange rash of men returned from Iraq and murdered their wives, the untold story was how the young, bored, lonely wives had been stepping out while their husbands were serving. Joe and Hobart met some nice friendly ladies at a bar one Friday and after they got cozy over a couple of beers, one of the girls let slip that their husbands were in Iraq. Joe and Hobart got up from the table and left without saying a word. And it goes double for the men. They hate the base guys who prey on the women left behind to wait, worry and feel neglected if their man doesn’t check in on a more than regular basis. It’s not a good situation for any of them, the war at home. But some guys have standards, and Angela nabbed one of those.
Friday was spent gathering supplies, picking out pinatas and the treats to stuff them with at the 99 Cent store and Party America. It was payday at the base, so men in desert fatigues were all over Wal-Mart. Even little boys had the military crew cut- just like their daddies. Some guys sport the complete shave, while others have a fine layer of fuzz, and every so often a guy parades around in the three fingers of death, which is basically a closely cropped Mohawk- three fingers wide. It takes getting used to seeing so many nearly naked skulls, which lends a vulnerability to the facial features and especially the tender looking back of the skull as it slopes down to the neck. But it’s unlikely to imagine ever getting used to thumping cantaloupes next to a baby faced man in desert camo who carefully pops the pacifier back in the mouth of his infant as his wife grabs a sack of potatoes for the weekend’s cooking.
Lunch was at Elizabeth’s Italian cafe, where Angela and Joe had their courthouse wedding reception in the back room. Angela was in the rest room and missed the waitress but Joe requests her sweet tea with lemon on the side with the calm authority of a man who knows exactly what his wife wants. Joe is easy to talk to if one is good at talking to people who don’t like to talk much. I’m good at that. Perhaps being raised in an Irish Catholic angry drinking family has contributed to that skill.
After lunch, we stop at Joe’s apartment for a change of clothes. As much as Angela adores her husband’s friends and roommates, she rarely goes inside their apartment, preferring to wait in the car while Joe runs in to change out of his camouflage. Joe doesn’t understand how it is mildly uncomfortable for women to enter a purely male space. It’s like there is a testosterone force field wrapped like Saran Wrap across the open front door. Also, the strange way that military men live, when they live alone, is very particular- to men.
Only after Joe insists does Angela enter the apartment. The living room is bare save an extra large La-Z-Boy chair, a large poker set, an oversized TV, and many cockroaches in varying stages of death. The roaches die like soap opera actors, with a great deal of walking, staring off into space and jerking helplessly before collapsing onto their backs.
Gervascio and Hobart are mystified by the pervasion of the cockroaches as there is never food in the fridge. A former New Yorker, Angela deduces that the apartment next door must have fumigated, and the roaches have pilgrimaged here to die. Hobart repeatedly apologizes for the roaches and Gervascio apologizes every time he swears, but Angela is unfazed by swearing and dying bugs. Until they are found climbing on the cottage cheese ceiling above her head. Then it’s time to go.
Friday was all about cleaning, cooking and sprucing. In the kitchen Angela made pounds and pounds of ziti and meatballs for hours, but she sounded happy, singing along to every song on the classic rock station. Joe was hanging pictures and flags in his room.
Joe was quietly anxious about his mother coming from Pennsylvania. His father is a goner- gone at first when Joe and his twin brother Jonathan were four, followed by nothing for twelve years, not even a birthday card. Then the dad surfaced from nowhere to show an interest in his almost teenage boys. They spent some time with him, but were so thoroughly indoctrinated by their mom as to what a no good hateful loser he was, he lived up to the hype. And that was the end of that. Joe doesn’t know if his father is alive, and doesn’t seem to need to know.
While Joe’s mom lives a few hundred miles away in Pennsylvania, she’s never visited Joe after any of his three tours of duty. But he was looking forward to seeing his brother Jonathan, who manages a hair salon in D.C. and shares a brownstone with his partner of nine years, Leon, a city planner in Arlington. Jonathan and Leon were driving down the next day with Joe’s mom and a few other friends. Joe knew that Angela and Jonathan would get on, that wasn’t going to be a problem.
But they both were wondering and worrying how Angela’s mother Mary would get on with Elizabeth, Joe’s mom. While it seemed apparent that the mothers would cooperate and behave, their children fretted and imagined the best and the worst as they cleaned and cooked and primped their home in anticipation of being examined. The dogs seemed apprehensive about the cleaning, as if it portended some imminent change that wasn’t going to be good for them. The cats loitered, falling asleep while waiting for something to look at.
Saturday, the tent came first thing in the morning. A swap meet of sorts was set up around the tank across the way. Around ten am, Travis, an impossibly young looking boy with beautiful blue eyes knocked on the screen door asking after Mary. Travis had just returned from a year in South Korea and he knew it wasn’t anything to talk about. The boys who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan actually have something to talk about, but they don’t like to talk about it either. The guys who do talk about being over there only do so to get something from it, like sex, or sympathy, or sympathy sex. So no one does a lot of talking and everyone does a lot of drinking. So, Joe went out and got a full keg and many bags of ice.
Right before the guests came, work was abandoned and everyone got washed and dressed and decorated the tent. Taping loads of crepe paper were Mary, her best friend Nick who is 21 and just got back from Iraq, his friend Louis, of Intel and the quickie divorce, and Louis’ friend Kendall, who didn’t know anyone but got very chatty once the keg was pumped. While the girls twisted and hung crepe paper, Louis and Nick boasted about the hundred proof vodka and Jagermeister they had brought, as if getting as hammered a humanly possible without dying of alcohol poisoning was the point of any and every party they were invited to attend.
Louis and Nick start doing shots before the sun has set. They’ll be the kind of drunk soon that inevitably ends with someone vomiting in someone else’s mother’s kitchen sink. Louis comes from Texas trailer trash, he informs me. His full name is Louis Jolliett, and his family can be traced back to Versailles, which he pronounces with two Ls. He fancies himself quite the dandy, and wears ninety-five dollar jeans and a sixty dollar shirt. Kendall marvels at how much he spends on clothes and adds that he took longer than she did to get ready for tonight. They don’t know each other so they revel in the few facts they do have on each other, as if that in itself defines them as a couple. Louis talks about himself with an urgent bravado, as if he has to get his story across the border before someone takes him out.
The moms arrive. Joe’s mom is first. She piles out of the minivan with Chris, Stuart, Leon, and Jonathan. They look surprisingly good and happy after a seven hour drive, with a stop for lunch. Joe appears with his first beer. Everyone is introduced and tentative hugs are exchanged. Jonathan, with very blond summer highlights, is happy to see his brother, who hugs him tight, his glass of beer held out from his body so as to not spill any.
Under the tent guests discuss how best to set up the buffet. Many theories are floated about where the plates and napkins should be set up, and Jonathan is assigned the task of attaching the balloon bouquet to the cherry tree near the road- to inform people that this is the place. Two balloons pop against the branches of the tree, making Jonathan yelp. The tank is aimed directly at him and his bouquet of balloons as he wonders how best to attach them to the tree without popping any more of them. The keg quickly becomes the watercooler of the night, the locus of chatter.
Jonathan and his friends are significantly gay; they drink, smoke and chat very easily with everyone and comfortably josh and tease each other. There is about seven of them, and they seem to betray no concern for where they are. Louis, of the expensive jeans, talks and drinks with equal devotion to both. The sun is not down, but he is lit up like a circus tent. Stuart, a very well groomed gay man with grey hair, blue eyes, and chic little cufflinks, listens politely as Louis confesses how much more sophisticated he is than his trailer trash father. When people check out his room in his apartment, they think he’s had a decorator in, because that’s how stylish he is, despite being Army Intel. Once Kendall is out of earshot Louis confides that he likes to go to gay bars.
Stuart listens, betraying no emotion. His restraint only makes Louis talk as if he is arguing his point. As opposed to actually outing himself, Louis seems more intent to be whatever he thinks the person he is talking to wants him to be. He’s one of those shape shifters that young, confused people become after a few drinks. The need to connect overrides whatever fixed personality actually exists, and the person can and will, without really knowing why, try to belong, to merge with his listener if only for the length of the conversation. Maybe that’s what brought Louis to the Army, the need be subsumed and defined by something larger. If you don’t get a definition for yourself in the Army then you are beyond definition.
Stuart’s polite but guarded response makes it seem clear that many gay men hear drunken, exploratory confessions from confused or curious or just drunken straight boys. Or perhaps Stuart remembers what it’s like to be twenty, where even a bad or wrong impression is welcome- there is no such thing as bad publicity, for as long as folks are talking about you, you exist.
Then Mary and Lisa arrive. Angela’s mother and sister, who flew down from New York and had gone to their hotel room to clean up for the party. Everyone marvels at how much everyone still looks like themselves after many years of not seeing each other. The power to identify, to remember the face of someone not seen in 25 years is fairly remarkable. Even though it was almost impossible to recall any of her features before she got out of the car, once Mary emerged she was as recognizable as my own mother.
Catch up talk and getting to know you talk is exhausting, and wine can only help. Everyone drinks. On the edges of the tent Louis and Kendall hold up Nick, who was sober and bragging about alcohol only an hour before. The other 82nd men show up seemingly at once, standing just beyond the tent, in a manly clump, separate from the gay men and the younger, drunker ones.
A family arrives, Chuck, and his wife Trina and their three kids. Chuck is the medics’ Sergeant, but seems younger and more insecure than his men. He’s already rather sloppy, and it must be concluded that he started drinking at home. His wife Trina is small, with long black hair she can sit on. Their five year old daughter, Syerra wears a denim skirt and a pink top that spells out “drama queen” in rhinestone studs. Syerra climbs on the lap of whoever talks to her, bonding instantly like a tiny tube of crazy glue. Trina can only watch, bemused, shaking her head. Her kid is a pistol and her mother is already bracing herself for the future.
In the stroller is Jaxon, 12 weeks old but with the face of an old man, wise beyond his weeks of existence. Jaxon sleeps, fists clenched in the Black Panther power salute, under his hand-made baby blanket, crocheted in desert camouflage colors. Their 12 year old son, Tommy, who first approached Angela about Joe back at the stadium, appears to have had a previous father. The 82nd guys drink and surmise the crowd, murmuring under their hats about the gays under the tent, and making jokes about spanking the monkey pinata. No one is well oiled enough to really mix yet. It’s not a tension, like the dance in the gym, it’s just more like separate recipe ingredients that haven’t been mixed yet.
A report wafts outside that Nick is vomiting in the kitchen, which does not sit well with Angela, who is finally out of the kitchen, drinking a Razzletini, which is like a slightly higher end raspberry wine cooler. Angela’s relaxed now. She’s met his mom, and he’s met hers, and while nothing cataclysmic has occurred, they both appear shaken and wiped out, the expectation and concurrent let down of having mothers peer into your life is both over- and under-whelming at the same time.
Corky shows up. Corky is from Long Island too, the Islip area. He’s an ex-Hell’s Angel, and he’s got the long grey ponytail and the sleeve tattoos to prove it. He’s with his old lady, one is tempted to call her, but that’s too easy a cliche. The name she has given herself is Sam. Her given name, Martha, is just not who she is. Her parents actually named her and her brother George and Martha, which either betrays an unwise patriotism, a strange sense of humor, or just a vivid lack of imagination. Sam has a gravelly voice and her own Harley. Corky runs a chop shop, which is well attended by the boys in and around the base, when they come home with combat pay and want something loud and proud.
Corky has brought a large aluminum tray of Waldorf salad, which is light green Jell-O mixed with grapes, coconut and marshmallow. Joe thinks Corky’s sweet on Angela, but they just look out for each other in good neighborly ways. Corky is a Southerner by choice, he’s never going back to New York and his confidence in knowing where his home is, is enviable.
Trina, Chuck and Jaxon watch Tommy perform magic tricks. Trina is from Riverside California, where Tommy’s dad lives, but she doesn’t go back much, because Chuck doesn’t like California. All he will say is that when he went to California some man tried to pick him up, which turned him off of the whole state.
Jaxon is a preternaturally still and quiet baby. Chuck proudly describes him as one serious badass motherfucker, which seems like strong words for a ten pound infant. But, in fact, the newborn is a tough little customer, as Trina’s car was hit by a drunk driver when she was almost eight months pregnant. The violence of the impact made the other car flip over three times and sent Trina into labor. Jaxon was born almost a month early, at five pounds. Chuck and Trina are proud of their unusual spelling choices for their children’s names, as if spelling Jaxon with an X instead of a CKS will ensure him his own badass individuality. Seems to have already worked for Syerra, who climbs all over the gay men as they drink and smoke.
By this point folks are pretty well oiled. Everyone who is going to eat has eaten, and the leftovers will last a month easy. Syerra has been eagerly waiting all night to hit the Curious George pinata. She jumps and yells for a baseball bat, which is produced. Without much ceremony, everyone watches as she pounds the holy hell out of the piƱata. Even after the body separates from the head and the discount candy spills out, Syerra kicks and steps on every last piece of Curious George. She pounds papier mache into paste in the grass with her little cowboy boots, without anger, but with as strong a purposeful intent if it was her well paying job to remove the existence of this pinata from the face of the earth.
Elizabeth, Joe’s mother, comfortably regales listeners with her survival story, which she recites with a practiced gusto. Having told it many times, she knows where the money shots are. She was born a few generations too late to really benefit from the feminist revolution, but she is clearly proud of her career trajectory. When she was raising her sons, most women didn’t have careers, they had jobs to supplement the low paying jobs their husbands had.
So, saddled with two small boys and no child support she worked her way up through hospital administration to what sounds like a hospital administration pinnacle. Fifteen years ago she saw an opening when a hospital she worked at offered a free Infectious Control training seminar and no one else from the office signed up. Elizabeth got certified in Infectious Disease Control long before anyone else anticipated the age of pandemics was looming. Now Infectious Disease Control is sexy and Elizabeth Lockerby is in a bit of a catbird seat. A number of hospitals are pretty much in a bidding war over her; she’s hoping for San Diego, but Phoenix will do. She seems very game, saucy and popular with the gay men, smoking long cigarettes and introducing herself to everyone who walks by. She spends a significant amount of time talking with Mary, Angela’s mother and they seem to get along as well as two mothers of adults who wed after forty five days of knowing each other can get along.
Mary Marco is a delicate beauty, tastefully wrinkled, and although she is slight, bird-like and soft-spoken, there is a ribbon of titanium running the length of her. She’s grown into her age- 25 years ago she dressed and groomed herself so conservatively that she seemed sixty when she was forty. So, now she looks young and chic for 75. Angela’s dad left her two days after their last child graduated from high school. Mary Marco never married again.
She moved into the Nathan Hale apartments across from St. Patrick’s church in Huntington, Long Island and her life is full with church and Republican interests. Angela’s father, who is not at the wedding fiesta, had worked at Grumman. He’s remarried to Joyce, and they live in La Jolla, where he struggles with poor health. Mary and her daughter Lisa chat with Elizabeth and eat cake. Syerra climbs all over all of them, then leaves when more new people show up.
Elizabeth asks Mary what she would have gone into as a career if she hadn’t had children. Mary smiles and murmurs ”Politics.” Elizabeth is surprised that someone so demure and soft spoken would be interested in politics, but Mary just sips her tea and smiles. Her conservative, catholic beliefs are such innate parts of her that she doesn’t need to display them. Her email address is Sojourner and she is that; a voracious reader with a chronic article-clipping and high-lighting of pertinent quotes addiction. The title of her autobiography might be, “I Thought This Might Be of Interest”.
She and Angela have become closer since Angela grew up and moved out of the house. Mary was a strict mother and had the rules to back it up. Angela couldn’t go on dates or to parties, she really had to do her homework, and wasn’t allowed to watch TV except two hours a week. Angela worked at the mall on weekends and gave her mother her entire salary, no questions asked.
When Angela moved in with her sister, into a two bedroom apartment in Queens, Angela asked her mother for her old single bed which was sitting empty in her old room. Mary countered that she would sell it to her, and deliberated a while over how much to charge Angela for the bed she grew up sleeping in. Angela doesn’t find this the slightest bit odd, and respects her mother for having the solitary courage to live up to her own dearly held convictions. In any case, not having a husband, living completely alone for 20 years and having adults for children seems to suit Mary Marco just fine.
Mary extends herself to every conversational enclave, and her spirits seem good. In fact, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves with everyone else at the party. Angela is clearly popular with her daughter’s friends; they drink Razzletinis and Jager shots and rank on each other expertly.
Hobart comes over with his Captain Morgan and coke, watching Tommy and other kids play cards. Trina holds Jaxon but he squirms impatiently, seeming to want to sit down and play cards and maybe have some beer. Hobart’s from Iowa and his accent is the accent of someone raised without ever hearing anyone else speaking English. The astonishing part of his accent is that there just isn’t one.
Hobart’s balder than every one else thanks to what must be a daily visit from an eight blade razor. He has what might be dark hair if it were more than just a shadow; a round, sweet face punctuated with surprising eyewear. They are vintage Ray-Bans, Elvis Costello-like nerd/cool, boxy and black. Their very individuality makes them suspect in the Army. His C.O. yelled point blank into Hobart’s face that he didn’t care for the look of Hobart’s glasses. But Hobart still wears them, off duty. While on duty he wears what he calls BCG- or birth control glasses- because they are that unflattering. He always smiles, even or especially when talking.
Hobart, Silver, North and Gervascio were enlisted with alcohol to paint Angela’s guest room, which Angela has fixed up beautifully on a dime. They clearly got drunk by the time they reached the window frames. But these are stand up guys, they do things for each other on the weekends, like painting rooms for new wives, and they have an easy camaraderie, almost like a twin secret language formed from all they have been through together.
Hobart, or Michael Hobart, is 29. He enlisted four years ago, when his youth counseling job just wasn’t covering his student loans. He had a BA in criminal justice, and the recruiters just loved him. A straight A college graduate with no drug or criminal history he was a choice pick for the Army. And for the recruiters, Hobart was more than that; signing him got them home two months sooner. He played pennywhistle and mandolin in an Irish band, and participated in French and Indian War re-enactments on the weekends.
He would have been a clear slamdunk for the Army, except that he was a big boy, as he cheerfully calls it. He weighed 300 pounds when he first entered the recruitment office. He had to lose 85 pounds before he could enlist. The recruiters gave him a three day diet that is so strict that it comes with serious health warnings. After eight months of no fast food, a great deal of beets and daily runs, he weighed in at 215 and he could enlist.
Even though he has nothing nice to say about the Army, he thought his recruiters were really nice guys. They would check in with him frequently and encourage him in his weight loss process. And after he signed up, for his first stint, the recruiters showed him and the other new recruits “Full Metal Jacket” as an indication of what to expect in basic training- the first half of the film anyway. They didn’t bother showing the recruits the war scenes of the film, because when Hobart signed up, four years ago, there was no war. Only in Afghanistan, but that was hardly a war.
In Angela’s kitchen, Hobart, Leon and Stuart chat over Captain Morgan’s Spiced rum and coke. Hobart, despite or maybe because of the spiced rum, seems quite comfortable with the homosexuals. Perhaps it’s because of his father. Hobart’s parents split up when he was four. He never really knew why until he was ten, when his older sister blurted out that their dad was a gay. In fact, after Hobart’s dad came out to his wife, he moved out of the house and embraced a gay lifestyle so pronounced in their small Iowan town that Hobart’s mom moved her two children to Arizona for a few years and another doomed marriage. When Hobart’s gay dad moved to Palm Beach and became an interior decorator, Hobart’s mom returned to Iowa. By this time Hobart was an angry, depressed teen, who wore braces for three long resentful years.
Hobart visited his dad and while he knew his dad had a roommate, he never knew his dad to have one special serious relationship. Then Hobart’s dad’s roommate got sick and died from AIDS. Then Hobart’s dad got sick. Hobart and his sister visited their dad a lot, and near the end, moved him up to Illinois, so he could be near his family. Hobart’s dad was 46 when he died. Hobart was nineteen and hasn’t been in a church since the funeral.
His mom, who was an elementary school principal, after working her way up through the school system, met someone else in Arizona and remarried. And she was happy for a time, but then her second husband turned out to be bipolar, which he medicated with alcohol and drugs. Hobart reluctantly admits, with a chagrined laugh, that after two rough years of marriage, the step dad killed himself with a gun, while Hobart, his mom and sister were in the house. Hobart’s mom got the kids out of the house and they slept at a shelter until the police removed the grisly evidence. Then she moved her kids back to Iowa.
Hobart’s very close to him mom. She hates to fly, so she drove from Iowa to Fayetteville when he came back from Iraq. She had to wait until Hobart completed a sort of exit interview. Each returning soldier must answer a psych questionnaire designed to gauge severity of PTSD. The questions - Do you feel angry and resentful all the time?- Do you want to hurt people?- appear to be designed to weed out the potentially explosively deranged returning soldier. The worst Hobart felt was that after a year in Afghanistan he couldn’t seem to keep a single thought in his head. For two months he was unable to think clearly or focus. Then the well worn intricacies of his mind slowly came back.
It’s two am or so, and the mothers have long left the party. As people say good night on the porch the sounds of two men drunkenly yelling and grappling with each other is heard. Mary, Angela’s daughter smokes on the porch with a girlfriend. “It’s Nick and Louis. Nick got drunk and is freaking out. Louis is trying to get the car keys away from Nick.” She seems to have experienced this side of her friend Nick before.
The boys lie in the dark, in the taller grass, grappling, panting and yelling things like, “You are here Nick, you are here! Tell me you know where you are!” And Nick only responds with guttural yelling, wrenching sounds of trying to get away, and the occasional, “You don’t know! Get offa me! No, it’s not!” It sounds like bad homoerotic movie dialogue. No one seems particularly concerned. Even to the 24 year olds who have seen years of action and have lost buddies, a 21 year old with an alcoholically induced PTSD episode is just that much more of an amateur.
The older, wiser guys don’t indulge their PTSD; they make jokes about it and just try and live with it; but it sneaks out in two mean ways; while asleep or while drunk- which is ironic, because the given reason for the drinking is to medicate and placate the PTSD, but it usually just ends up metastasizing the condition.
One night they were all out- Kathleen and Gervascio, Silver, Angela and Joe- they were drinking and jawing and eating. Gervascio nodded off for a moment before he woke up with a sudden jolt, frozen with fear. He was convinced he was back in Iraq- he can see with his open eyes he’s in a Fayetteville bar, but he can’t make his mind understand it. The guys hustled him outside and talked him down. It took longer than one might think- almost an hour. Kathleen quietly watched with a cigarette. Angela had never really seen this kind of episode and wondered if it happens often. Kathleen calmly said that it does.
Under the fiesta tent, Syerra, festooned in spider rings and candy bracelets from her pinata conquest, does another victory lap with every remaining guest. Even though she is five she acts like the consummate party hostess, making sure everyone gets a little festive piece of her. Tommy and two other kids play cards with Nick and Silver.
Chuck, the Sergeant is in the kitchen watching Jonathan refresh their drinks. It seems like most of the hard liquor drinkers have hidden their bottles around the kitchen, so that no one wipes out their Absolut or Captain Morgan stash. Chuck solemnly explains to Jonathan that he has no real problem with the gays as long as they keep it in their pants and don’t try to fuck him. Jonathan nods and tells Chuck not to worry, as he didn’t think any of the gays were recruiting that night. Chuck laughs, and they leave, drinks refilled, arms around each other- and in fact, a recruitment has happened, just not what Chuck thought it might be.
In the backyard, many stars are visible. Angela has let the dogs go free. Hobart talks about how his enjoyment of the French and Indian war re-enactments he used to love participating in, have been ruined by real war. Not that he even played a soldier or an Indian. He was always the fife player. But after Baghdad, he was in Iowa on leave and his friends talked him into a re-enactment. After a rainy weekend in a tent on the cold wet ground, Hobart couldn’t do it any more. He totally understands that enduring extreme physical discomfort is part of his de-sensitivity training, but it has ruined him when he is free.
They all have their stories- Joe, after a week of all nighters, fell asleep on the hood of a Humvee- slept without moving for six hours through a blistering sun that burned the hell out of his broken nose. Hobart reviles the military planes that carry the men long distances in cramped quarters with their 80 pound packs on. He hates to jump but after being stuck in the belly of a military plane for five hours or so without seats and crammed together like sardines, they jump eagerly, just to be able to straighten their legs. Hobart recently completed a twelve mile march with forty pound packs on. He was mad at himself for not taping up his feet first, because the skin on his heels fell off in raw bloody sheets.
Hobart seems far too anti-authority for the Army and he is counting the days till he can go home- but in the next breath admits that he re-enlisted. Joe did too. And the reason why is each other. They are in it together, all of them. None of them speaks of the war in political terms, in terms of good guys, bad guys, or even about George Bush. The war is simply their job, and they laugh and complain about it as if they worked in car manufacturing or in advertising. The politics of war is left to those who don’t fight it, those who clean up after it.
It’s coming on three am. Kendall, who hasn’t been seen in hours, limps up the front stairs, missing a flip flop and her cell phone. She is drunk, pale and has turned her ankle badly. Hobart orders her to lay down on the couch, elevate her foot and he puts a Ziploc bag of ice on her ankle. She frets about her missing flip flop and her missing cell phone and wonders how she’ll get home now that Louis is so drunk and still wrestling Nick in the tall dark grass on the side of the house.
Nick has broken free of Louis and lurches to his oversized truck. Louis runs up behind him and they bang hard into the bed of the truck. Hobart walks over to them, still smiling, holding his liquor and confident he can get the keys away from two silly boys. After a moment’s quiet exchange he asks me to get Silver and Gervascio.
Under the tent where Silver and Gervascio play cards with Tommy and his friend. Syerra is now on Corky’s lap. Gervascio and Silver make faces when I ask if they wouldn’t mind helping Hobart get the keys from the drunk boys. Gervascio really doesn’t want to leave his card game. But being medics, Gervascio and Silver drop their cards, order the boys to not cheat and go help Hobart get the keys away from the drunks.
Angela’s daughter Mary and her girlfriends smoke and watch the boys grapple and bawl as if they were calmly grilling a tri-tip in the shank of the afternoon. The women of men in the military have to deal with what comes home- the new normal of a man who has been systematically desensitized, but is returned to humanity and somehow expected to blend in. it cannot be easy to have a husband or son come home looking like the person you saw leave, but changed in ways that emerge in the heat of emergencies, or when cars backfire, or during war movies, or while drinking. If the drunk men act like frantic little boys, the girls watch and sigh like old, worn out women.
Nick’s once pristine striped shirt hangs off his impressive body in strips. After ramming each other into the bed of Nick’s large truck they fall back to the ground. Louis gets on top of Nick, holds him down and screams into his face. Nick is still and a horrific rattle emerges fro his throat. It sounds more like a vacuum cleaner when the belt comes loose than like a sound a human body can or should make.
Hobart, Silver and Gervascio spring into well trained action. Suddenly they are on the ground, pry Louis off of Nick, which takes two of them to do, and Gervascio checks Nick’s vitals. Nick yells at the girls to call 911. Mary grabs a phone and calls 911. She waits what seems like a long time for someone to pick up the phone. Gervascio, nothing if not a very cool customer, screams at her to call 911. Mary, sobbing, no longer her own version of a cool customer, screams back that she is. The operator finally answers, sounding sleepy and bored. The 911 Operator keeps Mary on the phone, trying to gauge if it is in fact a true medical emergency, and sounds a little skeptical when Mary screams that Gervascio is screaming that Nick’s heart has stopped. The guys work on him. Louis lies in the grass, baying and howling at his fallen buddy, held down by the other medics. Mary cries, screaming that Nick is her best friend in the world- is he dead? The medics work on him, and most of the party wafts over, yellow plastic cups of beer in hand. But the wives and mothers stay in the tent and sternly keep their kids with them.
As the medics struggle to hold Louis down, and try to keep Nick alive, some folks wonder if Louis accidentally choked Nick. Suddenly the screen door slams open, and Kendall, a drunken Laura Wingfield, limps out, weeping at the state of her glass menagerie and her missing flip flop and cell phone and lies on top of Louis. Louis doesn’t notice her or anyone, he just keep screaming for Nick. The medics get Nick breathing again. As he wakes up, his hysteria resumes and now all the medics are involved, holding down the two boys, who scream and yell for each other. Nick grabs at the grass, fistfuls of it, as he screams and tries to fight the medics off him. Joe lies on top of Nick calmly, and Hobart smokes a cigarette while sitting on Nick’s legs. They seem way too used to this; which makes one wonder how much worse things they have seen.
Finally the ambulance comes. A very weathered EMT, a woman in her fifties, with the thousand yard stare of an ex bartended, climbs out of the driver’s seat, lights a smoke and wearily asks just what the hell is going on. The medics help her strap Nick, who is still acting like a bucking bull, to a gurney and they get him in the ambulance. There will be a report filed and his commanding officers will be notified. Nick will get into trouble, and most likely will not get any help at all. But from this night forward he will be called dead Nick. Because there are too many Nicks around, this is his new nickname.
People refresh their drinks and sit on the front porch, not wanting to leave the wedding event on a down note. Since Dead Nick will be more or less okay, the conviviality of the night slowly returns. Sometime around four am, as sobering people say their good byes, a new car pulls up. Judy has finally arrived.
Judy and her husband helped Angela out immensely when she was raising the children on her own. Judy is older and eccentric, but Angela is fiercely devoted to her. Judy slowly extracts herself from her car, having driven six or seven hours straight. Using her open driver’s side door as a wind break, Judy painstakingly lights a candelabra, then walks gingerly to the front door singing a Peruvian wedding song. Her tiny flames barely survive the damp night air.
Drunk people on the porch watch Judy sing and walk, one hand cupped around the meager flames. But Angela isn’t there. Judy looks up after her song to a sea of faces she doesn’t know. She curses and blows out her candles, then marches inside, yelling for Angela. The 82nd guys look around, shrug and resume drinking. The night is far from over. Some of them will stay awake until the mothers return in a few hours for Sunday brunch and wedding gifts.
Trina firmly and quietly convinces Chuck to go home. As she carries a sleeping Syerra, Trina shares her rules of home engagement. On Friday afternoons, she buys Chuck one twelve pack of Bud Ice, which has more alcohol than regular beer. It’s cold and waiting for him when he gets home from work. And if it’s gone by Saturday, then that’s it for the weekend. So, Chuck has learned to pace himself. That’s the drinking rule at home. So far she hasn’t been able to place limits on his World of Warfare gaming. That will be another negotiation, another stage in the peace process of life back at home.
Joe and Angela survive the wedding celebration and the first merging of their two families. Then she will go back to teaching and learning and he will go back to the base, back to the jumps that concuss his entire skeleton, in preparation for his next tour, to Iraq, which looms large. He will be gone for a year, he may be leaving as soon as March. At night, he comes home to her and her ten dogs and ten cats, and they resume getting to know each other. And this time, they both prepare for his next tour of duty, because this time someone is going to be waiting for him when he comes home.
But to a man, they all prefer being over there. Hobart and Joe both say it- they’d rather be in Afghanistan or Iraq, working, doing their jobs, then cooling their heels back at the base, practicing and doing 24 hour shifts just because the Army dictates it and is paying them. At least in Iraq, Hobart isn’t ordered to mow the massive lawns of the base, and when the row hedger breaks, ordered to trim the edges with a small pair of scissors. It’s the capriciousness of life and work at the base, and the waiting and training that grinds them down, not the actual deployment. These are men who prefer to be of use.
