A serious case of the hooahs

Photo courtesy of Steven Pfeffer

This...thing...it went around while we were in Iraq.  It goes around in other parts of the world, too.  I got it in November, 2006.  The day of our 231st birthday, actually.  It's like some sort of stomach bug or something.  Like one that multiplies from an army of one to an entire brigade.  I mean, once you get it, you're done for.  Put out.  Dang near de-ass-itated.  And it takes over so fast, once it gets inside you.  It starts with a sudden trip to the head and before you know it you're lying in bed at 0200 wishing you had a bed pan.  Your sphincters are comatose.  When the little bugger attacks, it comes on strong.  Really strong, I'm telling you.  Never underestimate what an army of one can do.  By the third day I was kneeling before my rack, my glutes contracted for the life of me, praying my intestines wouldn't fall out from down under.  Because everything else was just...falling out.  Busting through the perimeter.  I had absolutely no control over these ambushes.  None whatsoever. I'm telling you, this thing is no joke.  And you never know.  I could happen to you too.  Just wait.  You'll be lying in your rack at night and suddenly wake up wishing you had fallen asleep in a port-a-shitter.  Because at that moment, when you awake, the wire is already being breached.  By the time you jump down from your rack and grab your rifle to make a run for the head, it's too late.  You've just dropped a hooah.  Or at least a good portion of one.

Anyway.  I just thought you should know.  So you can, you know.  Be prepared.  Worse than a serious case of the hooahs is not having any clean underwear on standby...

Broken Things

In the basement of his mother’s house, his bedroom is cool and damp.  It smells like a mixture of poison with the faintest trace of expensive cologne.  The ceiling light is almost completely blacked out with duct tape.  Clothing is strewn across the stained and matted Berber carpet: dingy white undershirts, beaters, crumpled socks - shirts and jeans he didn’t pay for with his own money.

His money, when he has it, is dirty like his bedroom floor, like his closet, like his hands.  Dirty like his teeth and the demons that plague him.  The blankets on his bed lie in a heap, untouched for weeks, forgotten.  His pillows lie on the floor, one under his bed and the other under a pile of greasy clothes next to a laundry basket full of wires and unfamiliar electronic devices.

His mother doesn’t ask questions anymore.  Holes bigger than her fist scar the walls in her son’s bedroom.  There is a hole kicked through the bedroom door from the inside out.  She keeps it closed, and the front door upstairs locked.  And she waits.

In his bedroom closet downstairs there is a collection of sterling silver treasures: a velvet-lined jewelry box, polished serving bowls, and a platter.  There is a tribal pipe with resin in it, made from the horn of an animal, decorated in leather lacing and feathers.  Inside a pair of ostrich skin boots next to the dresser, there is a little burgundy drawstring bag.  In it, a handful of precious stones, including diamonds.

His mother doesn’t know about the small metal box in the back of his closet.  It hides behind a large red tool box on the second shelf.  The red box is empty, with the exception of a few photographs of the mountains in Arizona.  The small metal box once held a variety of screw drivers, but now it contains a different set of tools: long pointy tweezers, a lighter, a lone insulin needle with white residue frozen on the tip.  Next to the boxes is a piece from a broken incandescent light bulb.  The inside is caked with pale yellow-white crystals.

A black braided belt lies on the concrete floor in the closet, broken.  One end of an extension cord, torn into two, is wrapped tightly around a wooden support beam nailed into the rafters overhead.  The remainder of the cord lies on the floor next to the frayed belt.  He was too heavy.

Upstairs, above the broken belt and cord and dreams – his mother waits, broken like the things in her basement.  Too many things to fix in this little house.  Too many things are broken. 

His mother doesn’t look at it, the mess of broken things.  She keeps the door to the hazardous room in her basement closed.  She doesn’t dare rummage through his dirty bedroom.  The Lincoln logs and hot wheels and army guys once all over the floor have become prisoners of war.

He calls home, collect, and his mother accepts.  Her heart pounds through her chest and the oxygen is sucked from her lungs.  He asks for a few personal items and for money to buy snacks.  He can’t leave to go home and do his laundry, so she washes it for him, afraid to empty his pockets.  A lighter.  A wallet.  A stranger’s credit card.  She doesn’t ask questions anymore because she knows the answers.

He is broken, like the belt and the extension cord and his mother’s house.  Like the light bulb and the walls and his bedroom door.  His mother marks the date of his hearing on the calendar, and waits.  She keeps his door shut.

He calls home collect again.  Tells his mother he’s been reading the bible and he quotes his favorite passages.  Says he’s going to group meetings and that he’s done with the bullshit and ready to be a man.  For good this time.  He says he’s done breaking things, like the doors, the walls, his mother’s heart.  Himself.  That he wants to fix it all for his son.  His mother bails him out and drives him home. 

And it starts all over again.

She closes her eyes and prays at night.  Her only son left at fourteen and hasn’t found his way home.  Over a decade has passed.  She keeps the light on outside in case he comes back, and she raises the flag in front of her house.  She isn’t ready to surrender.  Her daughter is out there too, in a different kind of war, over there.  Her daughter wouldn’t surrender.  So she flies Old Glory for her little girl and waits for her to come home, too.

She closes her eyes and prays for her kids to come home.  That her son will stop breaking things and that her daughter will return to the States in one piece, unbroken.  Because there are already far too many things that need to be fixed.