Brokedick: A Memoir Excerpt, Part II

Part I can be found here.

“Runner!”

He hadn’t intended to run. He was just standing outside the door of the barracks on the stoop where all of us sometimes, when we felt brave, stood and watched our little slice of Georgia. But they decided to make like they were going to run him down.

“Fucking get him! Runner! Dirtbag’s a runner!”

So he took off down the stairs and they followed him. Now that he was running they would be justified in chasing him. Hunting him. They could claim he was trying to go AWOL in broad daylight. A couple of them brushed past me as they clattered down the metal steps. Gonzalez, standing beside me, looked tempted to join them.

“Fucking don’t, goddammit,” I said. “Fucking don’t.”

“Don’t you wanna see?”

“Goddammit no, fucking idiots.”

Gonzalez stood still beside me but watched the corner of the building for their return. All we could hear was the tormented barking of our comrades as they caught up to their prey.

The drill sergeants were conspicuously absent when Dirtbag, as he was called, was dragged back up the stairs a few minutes later. Later, they would tell him that he should be more careful when running up and down stairs.

The soldiers had caught him at the treeline and beat the shit out of him. The kid had always had a head that looked like an overripe tomato but now he was bloody, transformed. They’d put their best effort into fucking him up.

Yes he was annoying at times. He railed on and on about how he hated preppy kids. Even in his uniform he slouched like a goth.

He was seventeen so I had to forgive some of that: he was just a kid, anyway, but so were they, and in a confusion of boredom, patriotism, camaraderie, and hormones they’d hunted him and pulped up his face.

That I couldn’t forgive.