Now
I still wear my Army-issue eyeglasses when I exercise. BCGs, Birth Control Glasses, because the idea is that no one will want to sleep with you if you’re wearing them. Though usually if you’re wearing them you’re already in Basic Combat Training and, rumor goes, you’re being fed saltpeter (Potassium Nitrate, fertilizers and fireworks) through PowerAde to keep you from getting morning wood.
The frames are thick but not especially ugly. They’re just functional. The lenses are also thick. They weigh heavily on your ears if you wear them for too long without some sort of elastic band to keep them in place. Whether or not I took them off when I slept, I can’t remember.
I had the top bunk during my time in Echo Company, 30th Adjutant General Battalion, 192d Infantry Brigade. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Echo were all part of the reception battalion at Fort Benning. I started in Alpha, which should have only been a stay of about a week before heading downrange for proper Basic Combat Training. That’s where I was going to learn the fun things, the noisy, exploding, angry things.
I never got that far. I got sick, in a sense. So start with Alpha.
26 June 2007 I left Charlotte Military Entrance Processing Station, flew to Atlanta, then took a bus from Atlanta to Fort Benning.
By October that year, the United States would have 166,300 troops in Iraq – the most during the conflict. In December there would be 25,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The US lost 904 troops killed in Iraq in 2007 – the deadliest year for Americans.
The deadliest years in Afghanistan wouldn’t happen until much later, during the Obama administration.
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.
Brokedick Kids
There’s a point in Slaughterhouse-Five, in the very beginning, where Vonnegut recounts visiting an old Army buddy. Vonnegut’s hope is that his friend can help him fill in some gaps in his memory so that he can start working on the novel. Vonnegut has brought his young daughter and her friend along and they’re upstairs with the children of his Army buddy.
His buddy’s wife, Mary, is furious but Vonnegut can’t figure out why, so she finally breaks the dam of her angry silence: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs” (14).
But there’s no hope I can make anything of this narrative that sounds appealing. I’m considering calling it Brokedick. That’s what we were informally called once we reached Echo Company. That’s how we were known to Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. Brokedicks.
To be fair, though, every company drank from the same saltpetered Powerade.
No one wanted to be us. We didn’t want to be us. I’d guess that at least some of the kids from Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie have been killed or wounded in the seventeen years since that summer. But some of them might be my neighbors now: waking up before sunrise, dropping kids off at daycare, commuting to Fort Liberty with their combat patch on their arm.
The brokedicks are a small, tiny cautionary tale in the Army experience of my neighbors — if they remember us at all. We were the shipwreck in the harbor. The chagrined captain who couldn’t even get his crew out into the open sea. Some of us would be picked up by passing ships and go on out into the deadlier oceans but most of us were picked up in haphazard, embarrassed rafts and spat back onto the shore.
Other excerpts from this shitshow can be found here:
An Unhappy Consciousness 