Meantime: The Aesthetics of Soldiering

By Stephen Paul Register

In his debut work Meantime: The Aesthetics of Soldiering, Stephen Paul Register weaves something of beauty from dust and desert to grapple with the question: “What does it mean to be a soldier?” He writes from the depths of his experience and transports the reader from dusty Baghdad to flooded Mississippi through scenes of a soldier’s daily life. Meantime is sure to stand out from the crowd of military memoirs and will have all its readers wrestling with that same question: “What does it mean to be a soldier?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Paul Register
• Release date: Nov 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465759610

Stephen Paul Register

Stephen Paul Register has a philosopher’s mind, an artist’s heart, and a writing style that beautifully reflects a lifetime of profound experiences. From his upbringing in the American South to his ivy league graduate education at Yale University, Register has travelled the world over as a student, a nomad and a soldier. Register’s voice is Hemingwayesque in its simplicity and at other times boldly overflowing like Proust.

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MEANTIME

the aesthetics of soldiering

by Stephen P. Register

Meantime: The Aesthetics of Soldiering

Copyright 2011 by Stephen Paul Register

Published by Stephen Paul Register at Smashwords

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Forward

Costume

Touring

Theater

Performance

Afterward

Forward

When I was eighteen they gave me a gun and taught me to shoot. At people.

--Chapter 1--

Costume

Pruned

We were ordered into the Adjutant General building and lined up single file: males to the left, females to the right. The lines were long and folded down unfamiliar corridors and we were silent with our gaze fixed forward. We waited for our hair to be cut.

The walls of this particular corridor were painted beige and to my left hung print copies of realist paintings that depicted violent scenes of Army battles from past wars. Out of the corner of my eye I read the titles of the prints as the line shuffled forward: Breakthrough at Chipyong-Ni—Go For Broke—Rock of the Marne. These titles and the depictions of war-moments meant little to me; I only saw combatants pushing against and others sturdily withstanding some inundating chaos. The prints had paragraphs beneath the images too small for me to make out without turning my head—which I dared not do. Drill Sergeants were on the prowl.

My line of recruits continued to shuffle forward and, in time, the barbershop came into view. Through the door I could see three barbers clad in white smocks working steadily. They perfunctorily buzzed the heads of male recruits sitting in front of them. The recruits were stoic and received the buzz with eyes locked ahead on a conspicuously mirrorless wall.

The heavy electric clippers the barbers wielded had suction tubes hooked umbilically to each of the handles. The tubes were gray, ribbed plastic and dangled parabolas from metal fixtures in the ceiling. Clipped hair was vacuumed into these tubes and deposited somewhere into the structural bowels of the building. The barbershop floor gleamed in strange sterility, absent any wisps of hair.

There was a recruit a few places in front of me with long black hair that reached to the middle of his back (I envisioned him in his dimly lit bedroom back home surrounded by posters of Def Leppard and Poison, thrashing on his electric guitar). The eyes of the middle barber gravitated up from his current project and glued hungrily to the full head of hair. Whoa! What do we have here? he chuckled, polishing off the haircut in front of him without looking, his stare still stuck on the guitar-thrasher. "Well now, just step right up and have no fear. Bruno-the-butch… eh, I mean, Bruno-the-barber is gonna take good care of you!" His fellow barbers glanced up from their work and greedy grins crawled into their faces. The guitar-thrasher took his seat.

Fastened to the desk in front of the barbers’ chairs were plastic holsters for the clippers. Bruno unhooked the suction tube and wedged it into the holster. The tube gasped. Bruno pulled the guitar thrasher’s hair into a ponytail and began to shave from the back of the head to the front. When the clipper first encountered the mass of hair, the buzzing hum dropped an interval like a lawnmower hitting a dense patch of grass. Bruno got it moving regularly soon enough.

When he finished he held up the amputated locks for the recruit to see. Bruno waited for the instant his eyes flashed and then tossed the hair into a nearby trashcan. Then he reattached the gasping umbilical to the clippers and tidied up the recruit’s new high-and-tight. Next! Bruno announced as he finished. The recruit timidly rubbed his head and a sickened look curtained down his face. Next! Bruno said louder.

My hair was already fairly short, which is probably why the barber seemed uninterested when I climbed into the chair. I felt the clippers systematically carving row after row, unveiling my head. The haircut did not bother me; I knew this would happen. Nonetheless, when I stared into the latrine mirror, the wan, virtually hairless head staring back at me was ghostly.

My hair was now the same length as every other male recruit in Basic Training.

1st Variation on Getting Clean

The cold air bit my flesh as I undressed; the white tile was hard and cold to the soles of my feet before I wriggled into flip-flops. I walked past the first metal shower column for the second, dog-tags clinking rhythmically. As I went I turned on every showerhead in the room with my left hand. The showerhead I went for was furthest from the entrance: it was there that the steam from all the showerheads gathered in force to keep the cold air on retreat.

The one bar of soap and razor fit neatly on the matte soap tray fixed to the shower column. The hiss of spraying water broke the silence as I rotated the lever. My hand tested the stream and it was cold. I shivered and waited for the water to warm.

Other soldiers filtered into the room as the spray turned tepid enough to start bathing. One bar of soap lathered my body, my close-cropped head, and my stubbled face. The water eventually reached the peak of heat and with my eyes ruckled shut my hands found the razor and ran it smoothly along the vee of my jaw…

When I finished shaving, just to make sure, I slid the backs of my fingernails along my cheeks and neck, slick now with soapy residue. I faced into the stream and the water rinsed me. Then for a moment I let my head fall loosely forward—writhing rivulets danced behind my ears and down the back of my neck, fell down my eyes and spurted off the end of my nose. I squinted and studied the fleeing water as it braided and whirled itself into the polished brass drain nearby. My lungs billowed the steam-cloud of shower-air.

The water rid the last layers of lather from my body and I left the shower running for the next recruit in line. All the showerheads were occupied now. Even amidst all that noise I still heard the sound of my flip-flops smacking the tile floor as I walked. I felt my dog-tags sticking wet to my chest and they did not clink. My flip-flops were general issue olive-green and we all wore them in the shower. We wore flip-flops and dog-tags and it occurred to me that we were not, in fact, naked.

My skin was pale and my head nearly hairless then as I walked past these other troops performing their own bathing rituals. All bathed quickly. I was not quite naked and walked quickly past men whom I did not know and who did not know me. They were men who were also pale, painted in harsh fluorescent light against a backdrop of white tile walls. There were no shadows in that light. A recruit passed by me, headed for the showerhead I left vacant. I knew his last name and he knew mine and we did not speak. My eyes glimpsed his dog-tags and then darted to my pile of clothes on the bench in the changing area.

The sinks were full of recruits brushing their teeth and shaving and above them the grated latrine clock told me that formation was in twelve minutes.

By Way of Bastogne

I wore my PT uniform and was ready for a workout when I swung open the front door to the 1st BCT gym. It was late March and early morning at Ft. Campbell so the air-conditioned gym did not feel noticeably different from outside. The check-in desk was just to my right as I entered and the glass door closed slowly behind me. Reflexively I began to walk over to sign in, but stopped short to have a look at the big mural painted just to the right of the check-in desk. It was a personified bulldog and stretched from floor to ceiling; that is, the mascot had a man’s figure, but the gray face of an angry, snarling bull-dog. The upper body was well built and a tight black t-shirt stretched over the beefy pectorals; the short-sleeves taught over canon-ball shoulders that tapered down into a mass of biceps and triceps around which sleeves could not hope to fit. The arms were crossed beneath the pecs, highlighting the cold gray skin of the arms, and lifting those already prominent pecs into a higher swell of masculine cleavage. The bull-dog wore BDU pants and across the left breast-pocket of the t-shirt was written Bastards of Bastogne in yellow lettering. I smiled and knew the gruesome and hard fight it took to earn that brand. It was shit-talking, pure, historical, verifiable shit-talking—the legacy of a bunch of badasses who simply refused to be beaten.

I signed in, took a towel, and entered the weight room. For a warm-up I climbed an Air Assault rope to the ceiling fast and then went straight over to the dumbbells after my descent.

Silhouettes

The pop-up targets we use for rifle qualification are silhouettes. They represent enemy soldiers. They are green, heavy plastic, and shaped like people. Sometimes we get up close to them when we police the ranges and can distinguish the sculpted outline of a helmet, a rifle. On the firing line, though, they appear only as shadows, as green silhouettes.

Align the rear sight with the front sight post. Float front sight post over center mass. Breathe. Squeeze. Explosive thud filters instantaneously through your orange earplugs. Silhouette falls. Next target. Repeat.

These green silhouettes are the enemy. Any enemy. Silhouettes because we don’t know who the enemy will be until we are at war with them. The enemy requires war just as war requires the enemy. He has worn Nazi boots, carried Vietcong AKs, hoisted the Hinomaru above his head as he charged. We have called him Kraut and Gook and Jap. Johnny Reb and Billy Yank were names assigned to the enemy.

The Bible says that if you get angry with someone in your heart then you have committed murder. But what if you kill without anger, without emotion altogether, as a reflex? What if you are riding along in a Humvee with your rifle sticking out the window—reminded, maybe, by the bright sunlight, of a vacation you took to the white beach as a child—and then suddenly an enemy silhouette. And you’ve shot—as a reflex?

Journal Entry: 24 January 2002

Cold last night—wind incessant, excoriating. We did a fifteen mile road march to the field training site. The ruck on my back during the march weighed thirty-three pounds, same as every other ruck in the company. My rifle was clean and I carried it low—at the ready, low. It has a red blank adapter fastened to the end of it. My rifle’s name is Artemis. My platoon called that name gay and gave theirs (almost) equestrian names like The Donkey Cock and Cyclops the Medieval Death Blinker.

It was cold but I still sweated during the march. At the bivouac they gave us time to change into a fresh t-shirt and long underwear and those kept me much warmer.

When we arrived at the FTX site they assigned us foxhole positions. I set my rifle aside (near) and dug my foxhole: the entrenching tool bit the earth as a single fang and repeated. Beneath the first few frozen inches there was good soil that smelled like damp earth (it froze too within the hour). The foxhole is two feet deep and longer than my body so I can fit in it and fight out of it. This fighting position is not only a vantage from which to gauge and engage my sector of fire. It is home. The foot of my foxhole and my battle-buddy’s converge to form a vee. When we are in our foxholes at the same time we overlap the ankles of our inside legs. This way one can sleep and the other watch—if the guy that’s awake hears something then he can wake the sleeper up with a tug on the ankle.

At night it was thirteen degrees and the wind infernal. A cold front swept the air and the night sky was the clearest I had ever seen. The march took us fifteen miles away from any electric light and I stared out into an unobstructed view of our galaxy. It’s hard to be modest when you belong to the Milky Way—I read that somewhere. There was little moonlight and no murky light pollution and I wondered if that is what the stars looked like when Jesus was tempted in the desert.

Coyotes howled all night. The first time I have ever heard coyotes. They were far away, I think, but still eerie. In the middle of listening to these howls I almost lost it when a pair of A10 Warthogs suddenly went screaming just above the trees over my head. They sounded like demons as they passed and I learned soon enough that they were zooming toward a nearby Air Force shooting range. I had to listen to there practice of tank-busting and person-killing all night. Bombs detonated on targets and chain-guns hummed fiery breath that sounded like giants ripping cardboard.

I should have been in the prone position but I lay on my back almost all night looking at the stars. My cheeks got numb and I wiggled my fingers against the sting. Was concerned most of the night that I would not know frostbite when I felt it. In Tennessee it never gets this cold—well, when the temperature gets this cold I don’t stay out in it. I tried to sit up out of my foxhole this morning and my jacket was frozen to the bottom—had to peel myself out.

It was the coldest I have ever been and the stars the brightest I had ever seen. Coyotes howled, not-distant Warthogs practiced uncontested air-superiority, and our own firing line occasionally burst into volleys as Drill Sergeants commanding select squads of guerilla recruits probed our perimeter. All night the acrid smell of incinerated gunpowder drifted in the air and I cannot for the life of me understand why they didn’t issue us better cold-weather gear.

On the Way to Najaf

Brakes screeched plaintively as heavy armored vehicles ground abruptly to a standstill—the vehicles rocked and swayed and marked a dissipation of momentum. Halted (halted) in the middle of some nowhere town. The convoy’s cooling fans and exhaust fumes churned and huffed idling rhythms and our progress was suspended. The SOP was to move fast and to keep moving—to keep it fast so they could not fix a bead. SOP aside, we knew we were never supposed to stop. Yet we sat there, brake lights flared. The way from Baghdad to Najaf was not as straight forward as our lead-vehicle was supposed to have made it seem.

We were lodged in the very narrow main street of this town. Tattered cloth awnings stretched out over old shop fronts and vegetable stands. The buildings on either side were close—too close and twice as tall as the cab of the 5-ton Tappas and I were in. Scenes of insurgents with RPGs appearing on rooftops and from behind building corners flooded my imagination. This is what the fish feel like, I thought, in the barrel. Citizens stared at us and pulled their kids inside shop fronts to keep them from playing. The street and people and buildings loomed around and above us, near us, and claustrophobia ran deep in my bones. I saw and heard everything clearly and felt my heart out-pacing the 5-ton’s angry pistons. The engine rattled loudly, sent shudders through the floorboards, the dashboard, my seat. The tattered awnings whipped and quivered in the hot wind. The rolling tremors of the engine felt like a speedboat slapping through choppy water. My rifle was unsteady as I pointed it at the faces of citizen after citizen. I did not know if we would soon be in a fight.

My rifle muzzle bounced from child to woman to man with indiscretion, ready for a silhouette to pop. I scanned for a pistol, an AK, someone fucking with a cell-phone on a balcony, in the ally. The townspeople seethed and stared and my ballistic eyewear kept our eyes from meeting. Peripherally I saw the turret-gunner of the Humvee ahead of me swiveling around like a confused compass. The 5-ton engine growled deep and furious and Tappas shouted obscenities in Spanish. The turret gunner in front of us spun like a clock gone haywire and my heart beat a drum-roll beneath my IBA. Citizens stared at us—cold, mean, unwavering—just stared. Thirty-round magazine in the rifle, two magazines in ammo pouches, two magazines sizzling on the dashboard, full combat load—has to be enough, I thought. My thumb clicked the selector lever through SAFE and SEMI to BURST. I tried to keep my aim level and waited to see if it would all go to hell.

The brake lights on the Humvee ahead of us flickered and then went dim: the convoy was moving. We crept forward and there had been no shots fired. No explosions. We had not been attacked and the convoy slowly hulked and wormed itself free from the village. We were let loose and my armored, supply-laden 5-ton got up to speed and charged down the highway like a pissed off rhino.

We ran wide open and the wind through the window poured up my sleeve and against my face. I breathed relief. The convoy went strong now and a small river paralleled the highway on our right. Amongst the river grass there were small groups of people; some washed clothes, others took tea in the shadow of palm trees against the mid-morning sun. My gaze settled on a woman in a hijab washing an orange and red garment in the murmuring river water. I noticed her only because of her bright laundry, otherwise she was everyone else.

The IED blast shook my heart and lungs and eardrums before I knew there had been an explosion. I was lifting my head back up to look in the side-mirror before I realized that I had ducked. In the mirror I saw the tall dusty cloud of the explosion breaking up into the air beside the palm-trees. My truck was not hit. It had blown three vehicles behind ours. Tappas hurled Spanish obscenities all over the cab and I pointed my rifle out the window looking for someone to shoot. But there was nobody. Just the little river and the desert beyond—even the palm trees were behind us now. The crowd of people we passed had all looked the same, save the one washing some little girl’s bright clothes. We had not seen the enemy.

The SOP was to keep driving if the convoy got hit. To get out of the kill-zone. We pushed forward hard and our SINGARS piped frenzied voices:

Knight 1: Everyone keep moving, keep moving! Somebody give me a SITREP!

Knight 13: "Still going! Vehicle in tact! We’re still rolling,

convoy integrity in tact"—break—Call Medivac. Repeat, Medivac: Co-driver is hit… We’re still rolling…

After about three miles the convoy halted and hundreds of troops dismounted and spread into a defensive perimeter. Hearsay about the incident made its way down the perimeter line.