Brief Encounters with the Enemy (13 page)

“A hundred and thirty-five dollars?” I guessed.

This caught him by surprise. “It cost forty dollars,” he said.

That didn’t seem like all that much.

“I should drop
you
in the valley,” he said. He made me do push-ups, right then and there, thirty push-ups. I got down on the ground, but I couldn’t do them. He told me to take my backpack off and try again, but I still couldn’t do them. This pissed him off even more. He put me to work cleaning the bathrooms, which was fine by me. I could have scrubbed toilets for the rest of my tour and been perfectly content. I could have scrubbed toilets for the rest of my life. Anything not to get over that hill and find eight hundred and eighty enemy waiting. But the next day I was back working on the bridge, bright and early. He needed all the help he could get. His superiors were probably screaming at him an inch from his face. Their superiors were screaming at them, and so on and so forth, until you got all the way up to the president screaming and panting as if he’d just run a race. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the casualties were mounting.

Day after day, we hammered and welded. Fifty guys pounding at the same time. The sounds echoed through the valley from morning to night, so that if the enemy didn’t know we were coming, they knew now.

One night, one of the guys said that we should go on strike. He was a farm boy from Iowa or Idaho, big and pink. Half the guys were farm boys. The other half were black boys. There was a smattering of others, like me and the future politician, but those were the basic demographics.

“Put down the tools of your trade, men,” the farm boy said. He’d heard that somewhere.

“I’m not putting a damn thing down,” one of the black boys said. “I’m trying to learn a skill.” Then he whispered to
everyone, “I pay attention. I ask questions. I watch everything.” He made it sound as if he were planning to rob a bank. Which, I suppose, is how you feel when you’ve joined the army not because you have beliefs but because you want a job.

So we spent the better part of four months working on that bridge, but even when you work slowly and incompetently, you make progress. And when we arrived at the other side of the valley, we couldn’t help but have a twisted feeling of pride. Yet the moment we stepped off the bridge and faced the hill, we knew we had entered no-man’s-land. We had colluded in our own demise.

The hill wasn’t like the path. It was rocky and gray with no growth and no place to hide. It looked like a giant bowl of uncooked oatmeal. It looked like a place you could easily bury fifty bodies and no one would know.

“No time like the present,” the sergeant said. And we put our backpacks on and our visors down and we raised our guns and started up.

The truth was that none of us had joined for the right reasons. I might have thought I had in the very beginning, when I’d gone to the Career Center to sign the papers and take the physical and get the brochure that promised a “life-altering experience” and showed half a dozen young men in uniform standing on a beach and looking like they were having the time of their lives. It was easy to delude myself because everyone was congratulating me for living up to my ideals. Who would want to argue with that? There were three hundred people at my going-away party at work, chanting, “Luke!
Luke! Luke! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” There were people there who had never said a word to me, who had never so much as looked at me in the hallway, including the managing director. Now they were acting like they’d known my name all along, like I was a movie star making a guest appearance at their company. All the guys were shaking my hand, and all the girls were kissing my cheek. The managing director gave an impromptu speech about “men like Luke,” and about how my job would be there when I got back in a year, because that was company policy. It was the most boring job in the world, and I didn’t want it to still be there when I got back. I was sure that something miraculous was going to happen to change my situation and make me into someone new. All I did was sit in a cubicle eight hours a day, five days a week, staring at a computer as I filled in the little empty blocks on a spreadsheet.
Click, drag, drop. Click, drag, drop
. Half the time there wasn’t anything to do, and I would sit there staring at the blank screen, pretending that I was working and wishing I could go online and look at porn.
Click, drag, drop
. This is what happens when you have an associate’s degree.

But at my going-away party, I soaked up the applause. I thanked the managing director for all his support. I thanked everyone for coming. They stood around smiling and waiting for me to say something special, something profound. Three hundred people staring at me with my face covered in strawberry lipstick. Then someone in the back yelled, “Shoot some of those motherfuckers for me, Luke!” That broke the ice and made everyone laugh, and we sliced up the big red-white-and-blue cake they had all chipped in for.

It wasn’t until the moment when we started up that hill
that I understood I’d come here for all the wrong reasons. Vanity and pride topped the list. Girls too—if I was being completely honest. In other words, ideals were very low. Staring at a hilltop that was getting closer and closer, I would have traded all of it never to have to see what was on the other side.

When we got to the top, the sergeant at our rear, we peered over like scared little boys, our heads low and our eyes half closed, and that was when we realized there was no one there. Not a soul. All that existed was a wide-open space, a prairie almost, bordered on one side by a lake and on the other by more prairie. It surprised everyone, this desolation, including the sergeant, who wanted to move up front and commanded us to follow him into the great unknown where there was no sign of life.

That first day we explored and came up empty. The next day twenty-five guys went back to discover nothing. After that, fifteen guys went, then ten, then it was decided the exploration was a waste of time and energy, that the reconnaissance had been wrong and the enemy was nowhere around, and all we needed was one guy to go along the path and over the bridge and up the hill once a day to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Which was what I was doing that last day as I neared the top of the hill. It was 6:43. It was still eighty-five degrees.

After we’d discovered nothing was when the boredom set in. Excruciating boredom. We’d eat, we’d shower, we’d clean, we’d train. In that order. Then we stopped training, because there was no point. That was about the fifth month.

During the sixth month, I went to the movie theater almost every day. Something had gotten mixed up in the supplies, though, and the theater had only two movies, both
Indiana Jones
, one of which was dubbed in Spanish. I watched them over and over, even the Spanish one, and then I never went back. A couple of the guys asked the sergeant if we’d be getting any more movies, and his response was “You’re worried about movies when our boys are being killed a thousand miles away?” He had a point.

The days dragged on. Instead of getting in shape, I started to get fatter. If I ever let myself reflect on matters of spirit or psyche, I reflected that at the end of my tour, all I would have to show for my effort was that I was one year older. In short, I was going to get out of the army and be exactly the same person I was before I joined. I was going to go back to that same cubicle with those same spreadsheets. At night I dreamed of fantastic adventures, full of action, shot in vivid color, not unlike the
Indiana Jones
movies. I dreamed of being possessed by exceptional courage and heroism. I dreamed of confronting the enemy. In the morning I’d wake with disappointment, eat, shower, clean the dorm, and then go bowling. My bowling improved.

Becky would send emails saying that she was worried about me, wanting to know what was going on, wanting to know if I was okay. Eighty percent of her messages would be redacted. For a while I fanned her concern by responding with ambiguous statements like “We’ll just have to wait and see.” Soon her concern started to make me feel foolish, and I stopped going to the Internet café as often. When I did go, I would use my fifteen minutes to look at porn.

About the only thing we could do for the war effort was cheer for the planes that flew overhead on their way to drop their payload on the other side of the country. They sounded like thunder when they appeared, always around noon, two dozen or so, their bellies silver and red. We’d jump up and down, fifty of us guys, screaming at them, waving our arms as if we were on a desert island, hoping the pilots would give a signal that they’d seen us. In the evening they’d pass back going the other way, flying faster because they were lighter.

One day our sergeant said, “What are you waving at them for? There’s no one in those planes. Those are drones.”

I came to the top of the hill. It was 7:12, according to my gun. It was starting to get dusky and gray. I stood and surveyed the great expanse of nothingness. North to south, as I had been trained. Then east to west. The water, the prairie. Nothing.

It was silent up there on the hill, except for the occasional buzzing of the flies. It was always silent, but today even more so. I had a surge of nostalgia: this was the last time I would be standing here. It was similar to the phenomenon that prisoners experience, becoming nostalgic for their cells the moment they are released.

I unzipped my backpack and took out my meal, which came in a little plastic container with an American flag. It was dinnertime, but I hadn’t eaten my lunch yet. Today it was ham and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Yesterday it had been turkey and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Tomorrow I would be making my own lunch. Two days after that, I’d be back at the office in a cubicle looking at spreadsheets. I sat
down on a rock and ate my sandwich. The flies buzzed. I felt nostalgic for the army lunches.

And it was then that I saw him. At first I had no idea what I was seeing. At first I thought it might be an animal. All I could detect was some faint movement way out in the prairie, maybe a mile away, a rustling of the grass. It’s just the breeze, I thought. But as I continued to watch, I saw the unmistakable shape of a human head appear above the tall grass. I put down my sandwich and picked up my backpack. My hands were shaking as I took out my binoculars, and I had to clamp my elbows together to steady my gaze. Sure enough, there he was. A tall, bald, fat man, maybe fifty, maybe younger: the enemy.

He was walking with something, a sheep or a goat, I guessed, although I could scarcely see it in the grass. I imagined that he was moving stealthily, the man, that he was trying to keep himself concealed, but when the grass parted, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. It was as if he had gone out for an afternoon stroll. His nonchalance irritated me. It flew in the face of my boredom. Everything I had done for the past twelve months had been in relation to this man’s existence—or nonexistence—and now here he was, seemingly unperturbed by what lay beyond the hill on which I was sitting. He didn’t even know we had built a bridge.

He was moving toward the water, perhaps bringing the goat or sheep to drink. I watched the man carefully through my binoculars. It felt slightly invasive to be watching him so closely, slightly pathetic. Years ago, I had made the discovery that a window in the hallway of my apartment building faced the bedroom window in a neighboring apartment. I was probably about ten years old and had just grown tall enough to be
able to peer over the high window ledge. The bedroom belonged to a woman, and I remember that she was rather disappointingly plain, and that she had long plain brown hair, dishwater hair, and she dressed always in baggy pajamas, sacklike, that revealed nothing. All she did was lie in bed and read. For hours she read. For hours I would stand there in the hallway watching her, hoping she would do something exciting, like take off her clothes and masturbate. But she read, and I watched. And then around ten o’clock she would put her book down on her nightstand and turn her light off and I would go back to our apartment, where my father would ask me what I’d been doing for the last two or three hours in the hallway.

“Nothing, Dad,” I’d say. Which was true—I’d done nothing.

Standing there now on the crest of the hill, I did something: I picked up my gun and released the safety. I hadn’t handled the gun in a while and it felt strangely heavy, unwieldy even, as if I were trying to hoist a manhole cover with my bare hands. It pressed down painfully on my shoulder as I peered through the sights. The man was standing at the edge of the lake, and he was peeing. He had his hand on his hip and he was leaning backward in a posture of bliss, and his face was not all that different from the face my father drew on that tree years ago.

I observed the man in the crosshairs. He was 1.1 miles away. He was five feet ten inches tall. He jiggled himself dry, buttoned up, and started to walk leisurely along the edge of the lake back toward the prairie. Soon he was 1.2 miles away.
Then he turned in toward the plains, toward the high grass, and just when he was about to disappear for good, I put my finger in the proximity of the trigger.
Poof
. The gun vibrated gently with its message.

He stumbled and fell face-first onto the ground. It happened so quickly that I thought he must have tripped over something. Surely it couldn’t have been because of me. But no, a small pool of blood began to form under him as he lay there.

The sheep or goat that had been by his side was not a sheep or a goat after all but a little boy. He darted around in a panicked circle. I watched him through the crosshairs. His mania increased until it looked as if he might actually begin to dig a hole in the ground with his feet. He disappeared into the high grass, only to return a moment later to lift the man’s arm and try to drag him off. He couldn’t, of course, and for a moment I had the thought that I would run down the hill and help the boy. I would help the boy and then I would send an email to Becky telling her what I had done. “Dear Becky, Today I helped one of the local boys.”