Desert Storm: Flag Ceremony

On the airplane to New Jersey, I became an enlisted solder. I left Washington Sate in July of 1989, the summer after high school. My mother had bought my soft suitcase for overnight school trips. And that was how I packed it. I carefully laid in three changes of clothes, a windbreaker, some spare socks, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s collection of short stories, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, in case there was nothing to read while I was in Basic Training. I thought I might have time to read. I shuffled through the airports with the other Washington State recruits headed for Fort Dix. We boarded the plane at Sea-Tac International Airport and started to talk. There were four of us; a black guy from Tacoma; a twee, very tall white kid from Skykomish; a preppy blonde girl from Bellevue; and me, a nerdy white guy from Renton. We talked about what we wanted to happen once we got out of the military. Tacoma wanted to open his own restaurant at home. Skykomish wanted to move to New York. Bellevue didn’t have plans. “Does it matter?” she asked. “I mean, who knows, right?” And I wanted to go to school in Walla Walla. We were all in the Army Reserves, and so the military wasn’t our full-time life. Even though we knew this, we also talked in a kind of clipped, military style because we would have to pass as military people for the next six months. The further we flew from the West Coast, the more we became absorbed in this idea of who we could become and the more we put our pasts out of our mind.

We shuffled down to the bus platform at the edge of the Newark airport. It was a cement pad with yellow lines to keep us back. We followed the directions along with the other recruits arriving from the Midwest, Northeast and South. We all filtered down to the bus dock and then, finally, to the long benches looking out over a swamp and the distant smokestack of a brewery with a neon eagle blinking, sputtering to black then finally blinking again.

A muggy, damp air lay over New Jersey and this air wouldn’t go away. It just filled the out-of-doors, a smothering presence compared to the clear, empty, air in the Pacific Northwest. Here, the air clearly had things crawling, rather than flying, in it. Under the dim, late-afternoon sky, light fell in brown streaks. The air stayed like this through the entire summer until the first week of September, my last week of training, when I waited in a holding company to get shipped to Texas.

When the bus finally arrived, we climbed aboard, exhausted by the long flight though too exited and curious to fall asleep. I looked out the windows at the passing landscape -- first at the row houses alongside the freeway, the gigantic tanks holding oil or something, and the grim, city parks full of empty benches and basketball hoops missing their nets. The streetlights came on and still the bus kept going and then the bus passed through miles and miles of dairy fields and alongside a forest. Sometimes the bus drove through a sleepy town that was only a stoplight, a gas station, a country store, and a church with a steeple, dark against the brown sky. The streetlights at these spots hung, a halo in the moist air, a point we drove toward and away from.

In the middle of the night, the bus drove down a long lane with close-cut grass on either side and stopped at a gigantic, brick structure with a flag drooping in the damp sky. A soldier staggered out of the building to lean into the bus, letting in the sound of frogs, the hum of electrical transformers, and a peculiar musty odor I would learn was the smell of Fort Dix. “Stand fast,” he said. I knew it meant something specific in military lingo, but I didn’t know what. He left to retrieve more soldiers. They ushered the bus passengers into the sulfur reek, as thick as chicken broth, and took us into a steaming military mess hall that smelled of old mops. The four us sat next to each other. We talked while we waited, drinking coffee, and joking that we could be wrong, but this looked like the place. The two soldiers came in complaining about this duty, about how late we were, and then they herded us outside in a jumble of bodies. They divided us into males and females. I followed the herd of men across an asphalt quad and into a dark city of barracks. I walked up a flight of stairs into a room and they told me to claim a locker and a bunk. I lay down. I fell asleep and later someone threw a scratchy green blanket on me. Way too early in the morning, someone banged on the side of the bed with something metal. I just heard the clanging sound of the metal and then we were outside, and it still reeked outside, but I smelled, too, from the long flight, the bus ride, and sleeping in the heat in my street clothes. I stood in the middle of a loose, fetid row of bodies. A sergeant with a brown Smokey the Bear hat stood in front. “When I call out your name, you say as loud as you can, “Here, Sergeant.” And then he said, “All you all, say ‘Yes, Sergeant. Here, Sergeant.’”

No one said anything.

“There is none of that Sergeant Simon Says bullshit. When I say speak, you speak. Now get all of your asses in the front leaning rest position. Get down.”

I groveled on the asphalt quad for a long time until pebbles, fragments of broken glass, and stray green fiber had embedded themselves into my palms and sweat dripped from the neck of my t-shirt.

“Get up,” he said.

I said along with everyone else, “Yes, Sergeant. Here, Sergeant.”

As he sorted the crowd, he showed the people who said, “Here,” how to stand. “You stand that way,” he said. “If you don’t stand correctly,” he said, “I’m going to send you back.” Finally the trainees stood in a long line and then he led us to the mess hall where I’d eaten the day before. Now, clouds of grease spilled from ducts over the long lines of soldiers and entering trainees. Some already wore uniforms, some wore their hair uncut, and some wore their hair trimmed. The neatly ranked soldiers, processed, stood in an unflinching row.

For weeks, my life was reduced to a line that ran along a brick wall with waxed linoleum floors. Each square edged with chrome down a long hallway with the end light falling down the shiny hallway. The weeks of discomfort I think were essential in stripping me away my childhood. I wanted to escape, but at the same time I didn’t want to be back to where I was. I had a lot of time to think while staring into the hatband of the solider in front of me. I spent my days in the processing center in lines getting my hair cut, having uniforms handed to me, boots fitted and then worn. I spent hours in formation between the building and I wrote notes in a notebook, not about what was happening to me, but about a made-up science fiction world called Planet Doom.

One day, after two weeks of processing and waiting and getting used to a holding cell life, a Drill Sergeant came for my company. I rushed behind him in the large messy line as he took the company. Like everyone, I juggled the bags I’d brought for the trip, my blue suitcase that already seemed more like a time capsule than something to hold clothes and things I’d ever need. I juggled this suitcase and my duffel bags stuffed with new basic training gear. After racing across the training campus, we followed the sergeant into a tiny room in a barracks. I set my suitcase on the sergeant’s boot. He glanced down at his boot and at first he didn’t say anything. He just looked down there and I moved my bag, but when he looked around the room and saw that everyone was glancing at me but didn’t want to look at me, he flipped out with a professional, practiced, tired flip-out shtick. “Do not ever touch me, son, or I’ll break your skull. Do not touch my boots, or I’ll pull your feet off your legs.”



Sometime after I had been in my Army basic training unit long enough, I knew how to polish my boots until the surface held a thin, buffed glaze richer than the spay-on polish applied by the Drill Sergeants. The aerosol shine left a mucous sheen still shiny even after trail dirt and field dust coated their heels. I knew how to take my time stripping down the excess, black Kiwi wax and then applying a light touch and buffing the leather with my brush. My brush softened after hours of back and forth blows across the boots. I kept both pairs of my boots rotating on my feet unlike most of my more clever bunkmates. They kept one pair highly polished, ready-to-go. The other pair they wore. They could be instantly ready-to-go for inspection. The problem with this was that their polished, inspection ready-to-go pair remained unbroken. Their feet blistered just standing in line during inspection. And if they had to march in those boots, I didn’t want to be around when they peeled back their socks and their skin pulled away from the meat on their heels in white, fluid filled bubbles. I kept both pairs worn and ready and after some time they became more comfortable than tennis shoes. Weeks later after Basic Training when I finally put on the old pair of KEDs I’d worn to Fort Dix, the sneakers with their thin, faded canvas felt light and inconsequential, really. They were hardly on my feet compared to the bulk and weight and authority of my army boots. They felt as though I wore socks. I liked the additional height in the stacked, rubber heels of the army boots. I liked the sound they made on the crumbling cement walkway where we drilled.

In the sixth week of training we had a surprise inspection. After examining us, our Drill Sergeant marched our company to some massive, inexplicable ceremony. By the third week any real memory of our civilian lives had faded away, and by the sixth week even the memory of this memory had begun to fade. I came from Washington State, from Seattle, but I regarded this fact as something that I had escaped, as an excessive lack of control over myself. I had not intended to be born in Seattle to the parents to which I had been born. It took until I was sixteen to realize there was anything I could do about it. In the Army, I followed orders, but I agreed to follow orders and to obey the example set by the Drill Sergeants with the understanding that one day -- one day soon -- I would be able to properly conduct myself. I listened to the crush of gravel and the skitter of the loose fragments under our feet as we left and left marched between our barracks and into the vast parade grounds. Our entire brigade moved in formation toward a single spot where soldiers assembled and prepared an American flag. Other brigades from the other side of the base moved toward the field. We all moved down the lanes marked by the neatly ranked sycamores under the cooling, late August sky. Massive anvil-headed clouds rolled toward the West. The snap of the snare drum tumbled across the grass far enough away that the tap didn’t align with the flash of the stick on the drum’s white face. The soldiers unfolded the flag in a precise turn of their hands. The flag came out. It went up, and the breeze caught it and the entire flag billowed out and undulated over the field, casting a shadow not quite as black and dark as the thin slash of the flagpole. I could feel the twinge of patriotism as the flag lay against the blue and white sky hanging over the green fields edged with the thick, heavily toped sycamore trees. I winced in the nearly silent ceremony with almost four thousand solders assembled in tight, neat lines around the flag. The ritual's purpose seemed obscure and private. There weren’t any witness to it, just the participating soldiers and this spectacle that provide a kind of quiet order and dignity but also mystery since it happened without explanation. Our Drill Sergeant didn’t even explain what would happen. He said we’d best be prepared for inspection even though he didn’t inspect us very thoroughly. I knew the clever soldiers wearing their polished, and new boots had cut deep blisters into their feet after marching across the base to this field. Around me, I could hear all of those soldiers in their ready-to-go dress inspection boots moaning as inaudibly as possible. We followed orders, and one right one left one forward command after another to find ourselves in this quiet field with the wind snapping the flag and rustling the tree leaves, the clouds way above us moving at a brisk pace West. More than the staged sense of patriotism, I felt an aligned, precise order to the world.

The Drill Sergeant instructed my platoon how to take a shower. “You get down into those private parts, and you scrub. You move things out of the way if they are in your way, soldiers, and you scrub.” The military in its complete domination required soldiers to at once conform to the dress code and the military culture, but also to find their own way of removing themselves from it. At the same time, he told us that he never forgot his Drill Sergeant. “I don’t remember my high school teachers, but I remember my Drill.” I thought this was optimistic of him, and now, I hardly remember anything about my Drill Sergeant, except that when he wasn’t performing the rote tasks of punishing us or showing us how to hold a rifle, he seemed kind of tired and bored by the entire routine and how could he not, since every minute of the eight week training had been performed using the same script for the last hundred years?

We acquired nicknames lifted from the basic training movies we’d seen. The entire experience was mitigated by the movies we’d seen -- Biloxi Blues and Stripes and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket -- there was a guy named Hollywood. Of course there was a guy named Hollywood, and someone named Moose, and Horse, and Hoss. We’d all seen the same movies. Hollywood had tinted glasses with metal frames. He came from California and even though he had ingrown hair on his face, he held himself with a smooth, steady gait and had a flat, TV-ready West Coat accent compared to the accents of the black guys from South Chicago or the suburbs of Atlanta. Our Drill Sergeant, from Georgia, spoke in a taciturn drawl when he did speak. He never said anything except what he had to say and so everything he said was something he’d already said before. Hollywood made tired jokes, like “Hey I like those pants? Do you know where I can get a pair?” But with things like this, it was all in the timing, so no one else made any jokes. We laughed. But Hollywood was always late. He was the last solider to arrive in my platoon and his lateness sometimes caused us all to become even later because we’d get punished and drop to the ground to do our penance. When we stood, everyone cussed out Hollywood but that just made him later the next time. He climbed into his bunk earlier than anyone else. The rest of sat on the floor and talked and complained about the Drill Sergeant before falling asleep -- but Hollywood turned to the wall and waited until it was over. From his jokes, for his manner he made it known, he wouldn’t change anything about himself to fit into the military. I admired his stubbornness and every time I sang one of the corny marching songs, like “Jody,” I sang it loud and out of tune, but I still sang.

I complained about the way our squad leader divided tasks out in my squad, because I think I wanted to get the guy in trouble. I was sick of drawing Command Quarters at two o’clock in the morning. The soft-spoken Drill Sergeant looked at me and said, “You can be the squad leader.” He relieved the current squad leader of his purple armband and said, “This Private thinks he can do a better job,” and he left it at that. He said these things the way he said everything, as something he’d said too many times in the past and he was too bored by it to even think of a fresh way to say it. I didn’t want this to happen. Instead of being angry, the old squad leader was relieved that he was free of this duty. The problem with being a squad leader was that you were in charge of the eight soldiers in your squad. This seemed a small thing when I was one of the trainees falling in on time. You had to make sure they stood in formation on time and that they had their gear ready -- you were baby sitting the soldiers and there weren’t any corresponding benefits, like a dollar an hour pay and free food in the fridge, although the recruitment videos did say I could put it on my resume: Leadership experience.

If anyone in my squad did anything wrong, then they were punished and so was I. This was in the middle of the fifth week, White Phase.

I would stick my leg straight out, locking my knee, as I stepped off while marching in a kind of, Monty Python burlesque of marching, a personal reference to my step father’s pseudo-military obsessions. It didn’t occur to me that John Cleese was really parodying the Nazi goosestep and that, in a unit full of Mexican soldiers from Texas, California, and Arizona, and black guys from Chicago and Alabama that my goosesteps wouldn’t refer to Monty Python but could only refer to Hitler and Aryan Supremacy. Never mind that I was of Irish stock and not Germanic. My stepfather was Irish and that didn’t stop him from worship of The Third Reich. The other platoon leader pulled me aside a couple of days after I was made squad leader. “You keep doing it,” he said. “What in the fuck do you mean by that shit?” he asked me. “That fucking German bullshit.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I think he thought I was playing dumb so I could keep doing it.

One morning, I was short one man. It was the same as if I hadn’t bothered to show up myself. Only, I was there to hear about it. Hollywood was missing. I went inside to search for him while my squad did push ups until I returned. I thought maybe he’d gone AWOL. My squad would be outside for a couple of hours until their arm collapsed like telescopes. And to be honest, I wasn’t looking too rapidly because I wanted them to suffer for what they always put me through.

I thought Hollywood might be at that moment running across the airfield or hiding in a ditch, getting ready to hitchhike back to LA. I found him wedged into the back of a closet. He had his head turned away -- turned into the back of the closet -- as if he had his eyes hidden, he’d be hidden. “Hollywood,” I said. “Get your ass outside before they fucking flip out on me.”

Hollywood didn’t budge. His neck shook slightly with each breath. I grabbed him and carried him outside. He hardly struggled and just went limp in my arms.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Hollywood?” I asked him. I had adopted the general military hard-ass voice. I don’t know where it came from or when I began to speak this way -- probably right at the moment that the Drill Sergeant pinned the purple squad leader armband to my bicep. The sound came out of my head with its own authority. I felt kind of like Hollywood, too, I was trapped in this routine. Even though I understood he was afraid and tired and sick of this, I grabbed him and I was pissed off he was putting me through this -- this was my feeling -- that by his pissing and moaning he was making my life difficult on purpose, that he was making everyone’s life difficult. I knew what motions my positions required. I had the vocabulary down. I knew what to say and so I did what was required and said what would be said in this situation -- “My name,” Hollywood said, “is Reginald. I am called Reginald.”

Another platoon’s Green Beret Drill Sergeant met us at the door. A killing machine Drill, his platoon lived on the floor below us. This Drill Sergeant always dropped and did the push ups alongside his unit, and laughed when they stopped moving up and down and just sort of hung in a painful, forward rest position. He met us at the door. “What took you so long, son?”

“This Army bullshit isn’t for me. I want to go home,” Reginald said.

“I’m sure you’d like to go right back to Sunset Strip,” the Drill said.

“Come on, Private,” I said.

“I got him. Don’t wait up for us,” the killer sergeant said. “You go on now, Private.”

He grabbed Reginald by the back of the neck and tossed him down the hallway. Hollywood went home after that, I think, or they sent him back to start all over again with a different platoon. This was their threat, that if we were trouble, we’d just start over again until we came out right. If we had trouble resulting from our nurturing parents, if we had trouble with our genetic backgrounds, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything that a little discipline couldn’t set right.