Our Last Days in Country

Everyone was named Katie here. The girl in leggings grinding on Overberg’s lap, the one Trumble was standing behind with a poolstick, the ones holding weak drinks and dancing with each other. The girls were around eighteen—the same as me—and they wore brightly colored American clothes. Jeans with rips, shirts with cleavage, short dresses that ended in shadow between their legs. And they smiled, with big straight teeth. They brushed their black hair from their faces and tipped back their heads and laughed. Everyone except the old woman behind the counter, who stood hunched and never smiled and snapped a towel between her fists. Jason Aldean was playing over loudspeakers, and even the guys from Maine started talking with a drawl. Everyone was a cowboy in South Korea.

I leaned my forehead against a smudged window and looked out at the little shops clustered along the broken brick street. The owners covered the corrugated steel siding with colorful, handpainted signs with Korean lettering. In the middle of the road, vendors formed a median beneath parasols. I watched them pack up their stainless silver and zirconium-studded belt buckles that said things like Bullrider and Winner. There were stands displaying imitation Ray-Bans and sword canes and folding knives. I’d found a leather shop in one alley where they sold wallets and handmade boots. I bought an English-style flatcap and put it on, and Clutch called me a fag. It was okay, coming from him.

The town was Shanty, where American soldiers earned their stripes or popped their cherries, received poor tattoos, happy ending massages, and treatable STDs. Nearby was an Air Force base, built to stay. I was here with Marine combat engineers. We were assigned to build small shelters and train South Koreans how to better kill North Koreans, if it ever came to that. It was the fall of 2011. We’d been here a month, and we were leaving the country the next day.

uring the deployment, we spent most of our time on an outpost called Story Warrior Base, two miles from the Demilitarized Zone at the border with North Korea. Our first morning in country, we went on a motivational jog around the base. First Sergeant Bonkin led from the front, singing cadences. We ran down dusty roads, then outside Story, past its razor fences where the dirt path became mud and then grass. We passed a sign that said, CAUTION: MINES. We continued to run. The base grew small behind us. People