Christian Marine

The chopper comes in hard through a fishnet of fire, pitches back landing, explodes twenty meters up, folding in half around a pair of enemy RPGs, flaming tumors bursting from its belly and flank. Halting his dash for the extraction point, the Christian Marine wastes a whole second just watching as it falls, feels the world begin to tilt. He squeezes off two bursts, turns and beats it for to the same cover he just ditched. Ducking behind their overturned LAV, he watches as his ride home slow-motion sinks to the floor of the Euphrates river valley, majestic as the titanic, churning rotors cutting tracers the whole way down.

Cheek pressed to the underside of the vehicle, he takes fire for an eternity of two, three minutes, hears the metal sing, does his best to deep breathe through the panic, pursuing emptiness. When his cheek starts to hurt, he steps back to feel it peel then tear away, burnt skin left clinging to the desert-heated metal. He searches the world around him for his future, avoids eye-contact with the two still-warm privates beside him, checks the dust storm they’d been tracking to the east. His squad dead, their mission and now rescue both failed, he closes his eyes and hugs the perfect hopelessness of his life into his heart. He gauges the shifting pitch of the enemy’s fire, thinks of 1 John 3:2, prays, “I can’t know your plan for me, Lord,” and takes off sprinting for the open terrain across the bow of the storm, crosses the broad hot plain along the bottom of the world, death and the ruined helo’s embers slow-raining through the air all around him.

Seven months later, he is home, growling and thrashing between the legs of his pretty, young wife in their marriage bed. Rachel chews his neck as he strains beneath her, chasing his own release like the enemy through a canyon until a single, awful thought enters his mind. And then he is coming.

Sobbing around her fingers in his mouth, he recalls his savior’s passion. Rachel holds his head in her hand.

“I know, sweety. Shhh, I know. You’re safe now, my love. You’re home.”

He cries himself into blissful catatonia, returns a timeless period later to find her still atop him, lips nudging the tear-puddle scar of his cheek.

“My big strong soldier man. My sweet man. My love.”

He is twenty-five years old, the youngest staff sergeant in the history of his battalion, and nervous. Tomorrow is his first day of college.

Walking sand-blind out of the desert and back onto Al Asad two days later, the Christian Marine limps dehydrated, cradling his fractured wrist, but alive.

“I need to call Rachel,” he tells the medic, drifting in and out of shock, “I need to talk to my fiance.”

Not yet. First they send him to Kuwait, then Turkey where, sitting silent on the edge of his cot, he flips through his end-of-service DD-214 along with the paperwork for several decorations and a two-inch thick stack of junk mail, mostly college postcards. Scanning the names of familiar people and places, he can’t help hallucinating the reek of diesel fumes and machine oil, BO and sand, the smell of life in the real world, a place he will likely never see again.

“I’m a Christian,” he tells the doctors, therapists, other vets in his facility who understand: “I take solace in my faith, knowing that Christ walks beside me through my hard times, especially my hard times, cuz I knows he’s been there…”

His hard times now are long, idle days, a slow, air-conditioned chore interrupted by nightmares that set the other vets to nodding as soon as he starts describing them. Together, they froth and rage, elbow each other playing basketball in the too-lit gym, sit quietly around meal tables and circles of chairs, eyes low, feet tapping.

They move him twice more, first to Italy, then Poland, a white-walled complex in the freezing, alpine dark of the High Tatras, give him email but no internet. On a chaplain’s advice, he opens a Microsoft Word document and titles it “A Marine’s Prayer Journal.”

The hardest part is missing you, he emails Rachel, that and all the empty hours. Hate feeling useless, living soft and knowing what people are dealing with out there. We had Call of Duty back on Arifjan, but no video games here. Mostly I just read, work out too much, do my time with the specialists to make sure I don’t flip out on you in the middle of the grocery store. Haha. Just kidding. I actually miss grocery stores.

While I’d feel like a liar if I didn’t admit to having some reservations about coming home, life with you ain’t one of em. They say a vet’s support system is the biggest deciding factor in his transition back. But I told them I wasn’t worried about any of that because my Rach is the best support system I could ask for.

Then, in his prayer journal:

You are my hiding place, Lord; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.

And:

My soul finds rest in you, Lord; my salvation comes from you. You alone are my rock and my salvation; you are my fortress, I will never be shaken.

And also:

You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your right hand supported me, and your gentleness made me great.

And of course:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Between core requirements and the 101s for his Economics major, Philosophy 250 (he tested out of Intro) is the one class he’s actually looking forward to, the least utilitarian and, hopefully, a genuine pleasure. The professor, a young man, limps spryly around the room on a cane, hands out surveys the first day, cutesy get-to-know-you questions ending with Who is your favorite philosopher? The Christian Marine smiles, spins his pen between his fingers; he considers Hegel or even John Locke, but knows he would feel a fraud if he denied the truth in his heart.

“David Hume…” reads the professor aloud, flipping through them, “…Nietzsche…ha, Nietzsche again…Immanuel Kant…Judith Butler (nice)…christ, Nietzsche again…”

He laughs in surprise reading one, nearly giggles, looks straight up into the Christian Marine’s already-watching eyes. “Jesus Christ,” the professor says, smiles to the the class holding it up. “First one this year.” To some laughter.

The Christian Marine says nothing, neither flinches nor looks away, pen still spinning between his fingers, perfect, without pause or interruption.

“But I know I know him,” he says, repeats it mumbling beside Rachel in their booth at Applebee’s, his favorite and her surprise after his first big day. “Can’t say where, but… ”

He sits coiled in his still-new civilian clothes, gaze distant, Rachel watching him in her bank teller’s outfit.

“Well, I hate him already,” she says. “What a prick. I mean seriously, what year is this—what country is this? This is the respect you get to come home to?”

He frowns around his milkshake straw, can still see the professor’s face, his blue eyes dancing beneath the fluorescent lights. He chases those eyes back through his mind, brow furrowing.

“I mean, it’s your first day! You were just being honest. It just makes me furious! You were so excited! You were so…what? What, what is it?”

Country music plays in the Applebee’s, modern country, God-fearing songs about America and war, long drives and young love, tableaus stolen from their lives, whole cloth and without apology.

It happens again when they have sex that night. Erection fading, he drifts lost in the dark until hearing the wind pick up outside, the sound of it twisting a passion inside of him, transforming their lovemaking into something else: wrestlers maneuvering for the upper hand, but frustrated, each hold collapsing only into the next. Rachel giggles, enjoying herself, and the sound finds him as distant, mocking laughter, stokes a fire hot inside him. The sheets and their bodies grow warm.

Later, as she showers, he scours the room in a cold sweat, checks her purse, bedside table, underwear drawers, cannot name what he prays he will not find.

“Whooee,” she calls, grinning in the mirror at the scratches up her back. “What got into you tonight?”

Rachel drives them into town weekday mornings, drops him off at school before continuing on to her job. His tendency toward watchful silence on these drives, on any drive longer than five minutes, freaks her out and prompts her to suggest he try reading to her on their commutes if he’s just going to just sit there. Annoyed, then ashamed, then finally grateful, he scans their bookshelf in the morning, decides on the one book he doesn’t have time to read anymore. He starts at the beginning.

“In the beginning,” he reads, “when God created the heavens and the earth—and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…”

He excels in all his classes, yet feels isolated, sure that his haircut, physique, and stubborn seat in the back corner mark him transparently for what he is. But a special, tragic dread he reserves for Philosophy. Devouring the readings, planning his papers with care and excitement, he still never feels less than haunted in the physical presence of his professor those Monday-Wednesday-Fridays. Shuffling their rows as he lectures, the professor’s gaze seems always to find the Christian Marine’s too quickly, too confidently, anticipating his raised hand and addressing him always as “Staff Sergeant,” words tilting with a smirk that the Christian Marine can’t be sure he isn’t imagining.

“Ontological proofs are fine as a thought exercise,” complains Big Sideburns two rows over, “but look at the company you keep when you use them to argue for the existence of a god: St. Anselm? Dinesh D’Souza?!”

“So we’re debating ideas based on their supporters now, instead of their merits?” asks the professor.

“It’s a useful shorthand,” says Sideburns, “I mean, how long is this class?”

“Fair enough. Anyone care to pop this balloon for us? A name even, lest we move on too hastily: a priori arguments for the existence of a creator deity?”

It’s bait and the Christian Marine knows it, the professor’s very phrasing mirroring that of Descartes’ Fifth Meditation, daring him to do it. The professor knows Sideburns is a prick and that anyone with the ammunition would be happy to take the shot, but already he can feel the professor’s eyes lingering on him and him alone, his go-to whenever the discussion turns to matters of faith.

“Anyone? Anyone at all?”

Silence. The professor leans on his cane, clears his throat.

“Staff Sergeant?”

Straight back against the wall, he feels sweat pool cold beneath his arms, spins his pen faster and avoids eye-contact. Sideburns looks quickly from the Christian Marine to the professor and, when he finally can’t take it anymore, raises both his hands in exasperation.

“What’s going on here? What are we waiting for?”

“‘What are we waiting for?’” the professor says, laughs, and turns finally to Sideburns, raising his free hand in mockery. “Why, nothing short of divine intervention!”

“Have you thought about maybe scheduling some one-on-one time with the guy?” asks the VA shrink. “Professors usually have office hours when they’re free to meet you outside of class.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” says Rachel driving home. “We can check online tonight. If he has times after four, I could even come with you.”

But this suggestion horrifies him worse even than the idea of going alone.

He waits and signs up on the clipboard outside his office, picks a slot the next day, but then erases it, signs up for a week later.

Without really meaning to, he finds himself noting the professor’s comings and goings, his smoking schedule between classes, one-and-a-half American Spirits outside the humanities building, learns that he drives a Prius and parks it in one of three handicap spaces in the south lot.

“Ha, a fucking Prius,” laugh his vet friends at the vet bar. “God, seriously, who is this guy?”

“Greetings, Staff Sergeant. Enter, please. Have a seat.”

An adjunct, the philosophy professor’s office is small and unwindowed, bare beyond a laptop, a stack of mail, his cane, and a potted black dragon coleus thriving impossibly in the fluorescent-lit tomb.

“Got your proposal and outline here,” he says, waves the papers at him. “Augustine. Nice.”

“Yes sir.”

“‘Yes sir’ yourself, Staff Sergeant. This looks good. In fact—and I hope this is clear—I’ve really enjoyed your work so far this semester. Your confidence with Plotinus, this New Platonism stuff, you’ve obviously done a lot of reading beyond just our class material. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you actually liked Philosophy, Staff Sergeant.”

“I do, that’s correct,” he says, hands flexing. His eyes prowl the empty office.

“Looking for something?”

“I…no sir, it’s just—”

“I actually teach across town as well. My office there looks a bit more lived in. I guess this one’s kind of bare, huh?”

“I like it bare,” says the Christian Marine, smiling before he realizes it. “Reminds me of an old room I had, in Poland. My paper,” he says, “sounds like my Augustine paper is good-to-go, then?”

“I’m excited to read it,” familiar grin breaking across his face. “I’m serious. I think you have a real aptitude for this material.”

“Thanks,” he says. But then they both just sit there, smiles staling.

“But that isn’t what you wanted to talk about?” asks the professor.

The Christian Marine still looks around. “Well, no sir, not exactly. Frankly,” he says, “frankly I’m not sure why I’m here. It’s more of a feeling, I guess, a hunch. I don’t know how this is gonna sound sir, but…sometimes I feel uncomfortable in your class. And I wanted to talk to you about it.”

The professor’s smile remains, but already his eyes are different, brighter. He cocks his head. “Staff Sergeant?”

“Well, now, you see?” he says, voice picking up. “That right there, for starters. You’ve called me ‘Staff Sergeant’ from day-one of this class, from the moment I turned in that little survey of yours. And sometimes I wonder if you’re not being, you know, ironic or something. I mean, you must have taken the time to look it up in my file, right? How else would you even know my rank? I guess I’m wondering if you have a problem with my service, sir.”

Still smiling, an even longer pause now. The professor slides the outline across his desk, points to the heading on the first page.
“This ‘SSgt’ here before your name—isn’t that ‘Staff Sergeant?’ This is how you’ve headed every assignment you’ve handed in to me. Even the survey you mention—”

And suddenly this document too is present, conjured in his hand from beneath the desk.

“Yeah, it…okay. Jeeze. Okay. But how about that survey then? That look you gave me. I know you know what I mean. Your comment…” pointing at the survey, “‘Jesus Christ…’” he says.

“Jesus Christ,” echoes the professor, still smiling. The Christian Marine cannot believe he is still smiling.

“Yeah—yes. Exactly,” says the Christian Marine. “Jesus Christ is my lord and savior, professor. I don’t need to apologize for stating that on your survey there, and I don’t need to be mocked for it either.”

“Am I mocking you, Staff Sergeant?”

“Goddamn it, you did—and you’re doing right now, with your dumb grin, your dumb look! I don’t like the way you look at me, professor. Now I’ve talked to my counselor about this—I’ve even talked it over with my wife—and I don’t think I’m making this up. If you aren’t willing to work with me here, I’m prepared to file a complaint with the head of your department. I’m prepared—”

“Ah yes, your wife. Rachel. How is she?”

And now the office is silent. The Christian Marine breathes deeply, turns over in his mind what he has just heard, what no paper heading nor survey pulled magically from the ether could have indicated. The philosophy professor watches this, watches him understand, seems to even take some pleasure in it, his Prius-driving, American Spirit-smoking philosophy professor, junk-mail from the ACLU skidding across his desk, obvious as a crucifix, this cripple grinning at him here, alone. Without witnesses. The Christian Marine sees it in his eyes, the eyes that gave him away. From the first day. The cane was a coincidence, but the eyes were what gave him away.

“I knew it was you,” he tells the professor. “My gut knew, but I didn’t trust it. They train us to trust our gut.”

The professor nods, smiles bemused up to the ceiling, then back. “Did you bring a gun with you today by chance, Staff Sergeant?”

“I don’t need a gun.”

The black dragon coleus throbs and stretches in its pot, is knocked to the ground in their struggle. Outside, the wind picks up, rubs audible against the fortress-like walls of the humanities building. When security arrives, one guard is not enough and they have to call for more.

At the vet bar the next night, one of his new friends is talking, a corporal fresh from two tours, one in Iraq, the other Afghanistan, in the wooded Nuristan Province, just south of the Hindu Kush valley.

“The difference is Desert Life vs. Forest Life,” explains the corporal. “Forest Life: you don’t know what’s waiting for you around the corner, up the trail, behind that tree. Is that a waterfall I hear? Well shit, it is, but now you’re boots-deep in it. Desert Life’s the opposite. Desert Life, it’s all about seeing everything that’s coming at you when it’s still about a million miles off. That column of smoke four klicks out: is it bad guys? Goat herders? Funeral for the kid you killed yesterday? Maybe all three, but you’re just gonna have to wait and see, aren’t you? You ever sit and watch a haboob come in off the plain, not knowing which way it’s gonna go, how long it’s gonna last? Ain’t nothing you can do about it but tie shit down, wrap the birds, suit up, and sit tight. That’s the desert for you.”

Hand raised like it’s class, “Been in a habub,” says the Christian Marine, words slurring as the table turns to face him. “—a haboo—a hab—fuckin sandstorm,” he says. “Been in one of those. Fucking haboob. Saved my life.”

“Yeah? How’s that, marine?”

He speaks, gesturing wearily, story spilling before him, “Fucking…retreat…whole squad…mission fucked…extraction…just fucking…and then these two guys with RPGs…”

The faces round the table listen, do not rush him, do their best to make a whole from the pieces he provides. They nod. He runs his hands through his hair, picks his itching scar, feels the weather in his wrist.

The sun is low now in the desert, the wind bad and getting worse. Following protocol, he sets his pack and tarp up against the leeward side of the highest dune, facing west and the fast-approaching wall of sand. In three hours, he has succeeded in confounding the enemy’s pursuit only by hard-running three kilometers wide around the thing, crossing the path of the advancing storm to put it between himself and the extraction point, what remains of it. Now he just has to live through the storm. He adjusts his goggles around his bandanna, guesses the middle of it at about twenty minutes out. Sand fouls his raw-burned cheek. Lord… he prays, begins the same prayer several times, can’t get past the first word.

Lord…

He pulls the second tarp like a blanket over his head, wind howling now, temperature dropping.

Hear me, Lord: I have faith in your plan for me, and trust in your guiding hand. But I’m scared. People who counted on me are dead and now I’m probably about to die myself. I feel lost, far away from you, from Rachel, but I know you must be with me still. Protect me, Lord. See me through this storm. I am ashamed, but I do not want to die. Please, Lord. Not yet. Please.

I place my faith in you, he prays. Amen.

For a long time there is nothing, the less-than-nothing of the wind and it growing louder. But then:

“Greetings!” As though from far away. Or perhaps closer. The wind. Then again, incredibly, impossibly, “Greetings! Is anyone there?”

The Christian Marine is still, poised beneath the tarp as his ears scour the storm around him. The first greeting was obviously just a trick, a hallucination. But the second is undeniable. Then a third.

“Greetings I say!”

Now he is on his stomach, heart pounding in his ears, sidearm drawn and pointed from beneath the tarp and into the anonymous chaos beyond, twilight and dust.

“Who’s there?” he shouts into the thickest part of it. “Who’s there? Announce yourself!”

Nothing. Wind. The scratch of a step twenty meters off. Maybe closer. More wind.

“Hello?”

And then it is upon him: long-limbed, tall and strong, the stranger is suddenly everywhere, his embrace overwhelming. Knotted bodies hot in the desert cold, they roll wrestling entwined across the dune-face and down into the wash where all there is to breath is sandpaper, the dust accumulating like water in a bath. The Christian Marine leads with his sidearm but the stranger anticipates this, seizes his gun-hand’s wrist and squeezes it until he feels the small bones strain, then break. The hand goes numb and his sidearm is gone.

Disarmed, they grapple nearly as equals now. Doing his best to ignore his wrist, the Christian Marine waits on then seizes an opportunity to pin the stranger low in the wash, holds him there just long enough for the accumulating sand to cover his leg. Exploiting this moment of leverage, he locks his own leg around the stranger’s, grabs him firmly under his arm, twists, and pops his hip out of joint.

The stranger roars.

“Who are you?” begs the Christian Marine, their faces inches apart. He smells the stranger’s smoker’s breath. “Tell me who you are!”

Teeth set with pain, grimace approaching a smile, the stranger’s eyes dance before him: unmistakably, he is the philosophy professor.

“Your wife, Staff Sergeant,” he says, grinning, “your fiance, Rachel, I’ve been fucking her since you left. I fuck her every night for hours in your bed. And she loves it. You ought to hear her, Staff Sergeant. She cries my name and begs for more.”

His voice seems to merge with the wind itself, words filling the desert, the world, roaring:

“Your life is a joke, Staff Sergeant, a joke that your wife and I laugh about as she comes on my cock in your bed.”

Always he awakes, doused in sweat, Rachel frightened and squirming in his his steel-cable arms, hard-on throbbing between his legs. Ashamed and horrified, he thrusts her from him and makes for the bathroom, crawls desperate on all-fours, locks the door behind him.

“Baby, wait! Wait, it’s okay! Let me—”

Through the door, over the sound of the wind, her voice is often far away, times he hears it at all.

It’s basically 24-7 on my mind now, all the time. But especially when we have sex, he writes to the VA shrink. I can’t get off without thinking about it, without imagining her in this guy’s arms. Sometimes I’m tied up, forced to watch, other times it’s like I’m outside and watching them through a window, looking in. And it’s been this way since I came home.

I know it’s a sin, he writes, it feels so wrong that it’s got to be at least some kind of weird adultery. It’s a burden and I need help.

He writes him on their laptop in bed beside her. When she asks him what he’s doing, he says, “homework” and switches tabs.

“How did your meeting with your professor go?” she asks.

I pray every day for the strength to be a good man, he writes. I pray to God and I beg for his mercy.

His friends get him a job with a shipping company in town, mostly just warehouse stuff, but it’s a schedule that let’s him keep his commutes with Rachel, time together that they both cherish.

Reading aloud as she drives: “The man then said, ‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ ‘What is your name?’ the man asked. And he answered, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be named Jacob, but Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed…’”

“I personally believe in Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, but I’m also a killer,” explains the two-tour corporal to their table in the back of the vet bar. “I’ve killed a lot. And if I need to, I’ll kill a whole bunch more. If you don’t want to get killed, don’t show up in front of me, it’s that simple. I have no problem with it,” he says. “God did not raise me to be a coward.”

The others nod but try not to encourage him. He speaks into the middle distance, eyes blackout drunk nowhere, always the first to get like this.

The Christian Marine is there as well, spirits high with the labor of planning and preparation, map of the city smoothed open between them, mail addressed to the philosophy professor’s home (swiped during the “assault”) pushed to the side. Comfortable in their fraternity, they walk through the details of the Christian Marine’s plan, a plan of revenge he shares with them, a gift. They speak casually, excited, talk over one another, share ideas and suggest hardware store purchases, smile, familiar with this work and this life.

Attempting to ease the Christian Marine’s shame over his nightmare-fantasies, the VA shrink has explained to him in earnest that his predilections are far from unique, that many enlisted men, forced to spend time away from their loved ones, share his experience—regular, honest guys. “They even make porno about it,” he laughs, pornography the Christian Marine now consumes nights sat up with his laptop, exhausted, afraid to sleep. He prays to God every morning to deliver him from this affliction.

Later, as their bar planning dissolves into more impassioned monologues, oaths and testimonials aflame with a sincerity so bright it nearly lights the bar, the Christian Marine rises and shuffles unsteady for the lone, single-occupancy restroom in the back. Closing the door behind him, he finds the bulb inside burned out, stands in darkness.

Dick out but too drunk to piss, he sways there quiet and not unhappy, pleased with the dark and the peace, isolated from the storm outside. A knock sounds.

“Just a minute,” he says.

And again.

“Just a min—”

The door opens—a blinding shock of light—closes again twice as fast. And then he is no longer alone in the bathroom.

Already upon him, the Christian Marine has no time to interrogate the intruder, to arrange any defense. He feels hands embrace and hold him, limbs caress him, feels a leg braid impassioned with his own. And then lips, thick, hungry lover’s lips, lips that kiss him in the warm, black damp of the bar bathroom.

Reeling drunk, he is soon as quickly cast aside and—in another open-close flash of the door—the stranger departs and he is left once more alone. Moving slowly, he struggles to right himself, pulls his pants up feeling for the door.

“Hello?” he calls out from the dark, trying to button his fly. “Is anyone there?”

Finding the knob, he stumbles out, nearly overturns a table, is caught and held up by his friends who understand. “Who’s there?” he mumbles. “Who was it?”

The world is blinding bright and deafening, a whirl of voice and glass. It is a very mysterious place.