you?”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Then why are you just sitting there?”
“What am I going to do about it? You tell me that and I just might consider it. Meanwhile, I’m oiling this rifle so if I ever need it, it doesn’t jam.”
Le Roy ran off to find someone more excitable to talk to. When Betts emerged dripping and the water sound abruptly stopped, Danny tried to sustain the daydream—wet dream, he thought—ha! That brought to mind his girlfriend Dolly, who was waiting for him at home just the way Emmie was waiting for Pig Eye and E’Laine was waiting for Le Roy and someone was waiting for all of them: girlfriends and parents and wives.
Or not waiting. The women back home were always posting pictures of the fun they were having on Facebook, where anyone could see them in their low-cut dresses, raising their glasses and blowing kisses (“This one’s for you, honey!”), which made the men crazy because it was hard to tell the difference between passing-the-time-’til-you’re-home-baby prowling and a full-bore, cat’s-away, see-ya-later-buster hunt, and anyway, what were they going to do about it here?
Danny wiped his fingerprints off the barrel with a ragged chamois cloth, the sweaty skin of his massive forearms shining more brightly than the metal of the gun, and then he ambled around the corner into the yard just in time to see Corporal Joe Kelly climb up on the hood of a Toyota flatbed pickup and bow his head as if in prayer. But something about how Kelly’s muscles were twitching told Danny that prayer was the last thing on his mind. Even when Pig Eye climbed up beside him, Kelly faced ahead and slightly down, not turning the way Pig Eye turned to check on who was watching and not smiling or catching anyone’s eye before ramming his fist into the bone-dry air just as Captain Sinclair opened the sagging canvas door of his office and stepped out into the yard, followed by Velcro, whereupon both men jumped down, but not before a television crew that was passing through camp on its way to Tikrit caught the incident on tape and afterward went around asking the soldiers what the stop-loss orders meant for them.
Having an audience fired Le Roy up again, and he repeated his incendiary message into the microphone and also to a truckload of new recruits who drove up looking both shocked and optimistic. But by dinnertime, the furor was dying down and the men trooped off to eat, anger already giving way to resignation.
Danny watched the scene unfold from a corner of the yard, trying to remember the last lines of a Shelley poem that might sum up what he was feeling, if a creeping sense of desolation and inadequacy shot through with a deeply percolating anger was even subject to summation. He knew that most anger was born of misunderstanding, and he wanted to understand. More than that, he wanted to fit in. But he had never fit in, not in school, where he had wanted to study literature, and not in the army, which was why he had been transferred to the logistics unit and why, if he had asked Kelly the proper technique and thrust his own fist into the air and called him and Pig Eye “brother” or whatever the proper word was in order to let them know he shared their disappointment, they would have stared at him without a speck of comprehension. He understood that their identity in a funny way depended on his, and his was alien to them, which was just the way they wanted it. Men like Kelly wanted solidarity and separateness at the same time. It would have filled him with sadness if it hadn’t first filled him with other things, one of which was anger, but another of which was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“It’s not good enough to be an American anymore,” he said to Harraday, who was standing near him.
“What?” asked Harraday. “I’m with them. This stop-loss bullshit really sucks.”
Harraday spat and walked off, and Danny would have given anything to have an exclusive hand gesture
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Then why are you just sitting there?”
“What am I going to do about it? You tell me that and I just might consider it. Meanwhile, I’m oiling this rifle so if I ever need it, it doesn’t jam.”
Le Roy ran off to find someone more excitable to talk to. When Betts emerged dripping and the water sound abruptly stopped, Danny tried to sustain the daydream—wet dream, he thought—ha! That brought to mind his girlfriend Dolly, who was waiting for him at home just the way Emmie was waiting for Pig Eye and E’Laine was waiting for Le Roy and someone was waiting for all of them: girlfriends and parents and wives.
Or not waiting. The women back home were always posting pictures of the fun they were having on Facebook, where anyone could see them in their low-cut dresses, raising their glasses and blowing kisses (“This one’s for you, honey!”), which made the men crazy because it was hard to tell the difference between passing-the-time-’til-you’re-home-baby prowling and a full-bore, cat’s-away, see-ya-later-buster hunt, and anyway, what were they going to do about it here?
Danny wiped his fingerprints off the barrel with a ragged chamois cloth, the sweaty skin of his massive forearms shining more brightly than the metal of the gun, and then he ambled around the corner into the yard just in time to see Corporal Joe Kelly climb up on the hood of a Toyota flatbed pickup and bow his head as if in prayer. But something about how Kelly’s muscles were twitching told Danny that prayer was the last thing on his mind. Even when Pig Eye climbed up beside him, Kelly faced ahead and slightly down, not turning the way Pig Eye turned to check on who was watching and not smiling or catching anyone’s eye before ramming his fist into the bone-dry air just as Captain Sinclair opened the sagging canvas door of his office and stepped out into the yard, followed by Velcro, whereupon both men jumped down, but not before a television crew that was passing through camp on its way to Tikrit caught the incident on tape and afterward went around asking the soldiers what the stop-loss orders meant for them.
Having an audience fired Le Roy up again, and he repeated his incendiary message into the microphone and also to a truckload of new recruits who drove up looking both shocked and optimistic. But by dinnertime, the furor was dying down and the men trooped off to eat, anger already giving way to resignation.
Danny watched the scene unfold from a corner of the yard, trying to remember the last lines of a Shelley poem that might sum up what he was feeling, if a creeping sense of desolation and inadequacy shot through with a deeply percolating anger was even subject to summation. He knew that most anger was born of misunderstanding, and he wanted to understand. More than that, he wanted to fit in. But he had never fit in, not in school, where he had wanted to study literature, and not in the army, which was why he had been transferred to the logistics unit and why, if he had asked Kelly the proper technique and thrust his own fist into the air and called him and Pig Eye “brother” or whatever the proper word was in order to let them know he shared their disappointment, they would have stared at him without a speck of comprehension. He understood that their identity in a funny way depended on his, and his was alien to them, which was just the way they wanted it. Men like Kelly wanted solidarity and separateness at the same time. It would have filled him with sadness if it hadn’t first filled him with other things, one of which was anger, but another of which was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“It’s not good enough to be an American anymore,” he said to Harraday, who was standing near him.
“What?” asked Harraday. “I’m with them. This stop-loss bullshit really sucks.”
Harraday spat and walked off, and Danny would have given anything to have an exclusive hand gesture
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