Three Saints Road

February 24, 2005November 16, 2015

Letter from Baghdad

Baghdad, Iraq/ February 24, 2005

I’m on my first convoy today, where riding shotgun once again means exactly that. I wear a ballistic helmet, ballistic eye-protection, fire-proof gloves, and a flak vest designed to defeat the exact size round the enemy fires. The vest comes with a snap on groin-protector, but I’ve already decided I’m going to sit on that thing; it seems to me that I should be more concerned about a blast coming from the bottom than one from the top. I carry a Baretta 9mm pistol, with one magazine in the well and two hooked to my vest. I also carry an M16 rifle, with one magazine in the well, but with six extra magazines. In total, I have 255 rounds of ammunition. I feel equally empowered and apprehensive at the prospect of possessing so much ability to destroy. I have a client at an outlying Forward Operating Base, or FOB, and I’ve asked the unit to come pick me up at my base, about a 40-minute round trip in light traffic. It will take them three vehicles, and they’ll have to be on the road four times, but I need to see where my guy lives, and what he does, and where his misconduct supposedly took place. Each of the three vehicles coming to get me has a three-man crew: A driver, a vehicle commander, and a gunner. I don’t like them having to take extra risks just for one man, but the alternative is to bring all the witnesses to me, which would turn it into about 10-vehicle convoy. I meet the First Sergeant and his men outside my building. I’ve been in Iraq for about a week, and all my equipment is new and clean, my glasses unscratched, my weapons unfired, all in stark contrast to the men I now look upon. To most, I suspect, they would look dirty and used. To me they do look worn, but also intense, experienced, professional. They look like guys I’d want strapped to roof-top guns when I take my first ride into a hostile city. Another obvious difference between them and me is our age. Aside from the First Sergeant, a career soldier, they all appear to be in their early twenties or late teens. The young man sticking out of the turret of my ride and manning the .50 cal machine gun – as intimidating a weapon as any in our inventory – is surely outweighed by the gun he operates. I decide he must rarely need to shave. The First Sergeant salutes me, hands me another magazine of 5.56 mm, and asks if I’m ready to go. I say I am, get into the vehicle, and we’re on our way. Using his radio, he calls his home base to let them know we’re leaving through Emerald Gate, and then says to me, over his shoulder, “sir, go red.” I lock and load around into the chambers of both my rifle and my pistol, and we’re onto the streets of Baghdad.I’m on the road today because I need to interview my client and several witnesses, all of whom are located at an outlying FOB, named Camp Headhunter, or Camp Independence, or Al Istiqlal, depending on how politically correct we’re being, or whom you’re talking to.Independence (I’m going with the most optimistic) is near the volatile Al Khark district, home of Saddam’s youth and a significant number of incredibly poor Sunni Muslims, who comprise the brunt of the Insurgency. It’s also home to Haifa Street, the most dangerous road in Baghdad, and one of the most dangerous places in all of Iraq (I find out later the soldiers have taken to calling it Grenade Alley).

Camp Independence is home to two companies of 1-9 Cavalry, a mechanized infantry unit from Ft. Hood, Texas. Their greater mission is to attain stability in the area by defeating the Insurgency. They act on intelligence from sympathetic locals, intelligence gathered on previous missions or from higher headquarters, or intelligence given to them from other units. Once they get information, which usually identifies locations of a weapons stash or a particular person the unit might be looking for – also called a High Value Target, or “HVT” – the unit commander gives an operations order to one of his subordinate units to go out and conduct a patrol of the area. It could be a show of force, a recon, a raid, or a movement to contact. In its execution, it involves anywhere from 10 – 200 men loaded for bear, getting into up-armored HMMWVs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, driving to a pre-designated area, getting out of their vehicles, and conducting their mission on foot. In a nutshell, these men walk down the streets of a dangerous and densely populated neighborhood and try to get people to shoot at them.

I’m visiting Charlie Company, or “Crazywolf,” and they’ve had a particularly rough go of the Haifa Street area. Of the 130 men in the company, more than 80 have received Purple Hearts. All but 16 returned to duty after receiving their injuries. Of those, 13 had injuries too serious to stay in country, and 3 were killed in action. My client saw one of the thirteen lose his legs when an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) went off next to him; he saw one of the 3, a soldier who was also his roommate, take a Rocket Propelled Grenade first through the front windshield of his HMMWV, then through his head. He tells me that in the past year he’s been shot at, has had grenades thrown at him, has gone door-to-door, at night, in a huge city apartment building in search of armed men meaning to hurt him, has been near IEDs and car bombs as they exploded, and felt the collapse of air around his head that follows an RPG as it flies by. He talks the language of a soldier, acronyms in abundance – RPG, IED, VBED, CO, PL, ATL, ING, FISTER – the form so familiar and easy to me, even if some of the words are new. It’s also peppered with so many variances of “fuck” that I can’t help but smile.

We sit outside, about 150 yards from the front gate, the Bad Guys purportedly just on the other side of the wall. As I ask questions, and he answers, I hear the familiar “pop pop” of rifles, though with a rhythm and cadence I’m not used to.

“So it was about midnight when this happened?,” I ask.

“I think so,” he answers. Pop, pa-pop, I hear. The sounds are close.

“Uh hum. And you were supposed to be on guard duty?” “Roger,” he says, “me and Smith were up in the nest, when we heard the argument.” Pop pop pop pop pop.

I say, as coolly as I can muster, “Is that a gunfight?” “Roger, sir,” he says. Brrp. Pa-pop pop. Yelling. “Um hum.” I continue.

“So what did you and Smith do after you heard the arguing?” Pop pop. Brrrrrpp. Lots of yelling.

“I sent Smith down the stairs to the SOG, to see if he could find out what the fuck was going on.” Pop pa-pop. Pop pop pop. I too would like to find out what the fuck is going on. “Is that right outside the front gate?” I ask.

“Roger sir,” he says. Another soldier walks by, my client knows him, and he calls out to him. “Hey Gonzalez, you slut!” Gonzalez smiles, they exchange a touch of their closed fists, and Gonzalez continues on his way. Neither Gonzalez nor my client seem particularly concerned by the potentiality of men dying yards from where we sit, and I learn that this is, in fact, perfectly normal for the men of 1-9 Cav. Also normal are stray rounds (the camp doc was hit in the calf by a stray AK 47 round), mortars, and rockets. Less common is the occasional gate crasher-cum-suicide bomber in the form of a “VBIED”, or “Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device.” This, I realize, is a way of life for these men, and has been for the past year. They deal with it individually, but clearly share something through the commonality of their constant danger.

I spend the day conducting interviews, visiting the scene, learning what life is like for my client and his fellow soldiers. I eat in his dining facility, where lunch is a self-serve buffet of white bread, mayonnaise and mustard packets, roast beef or turkey, cheese, fruit, and bags of potato chips. I ask a soldier sitting next to me if this is what he eats everyday. “No sir,” he answers, “we get hamburgers on Tuesday and Thursday.” Shortly after lunch I’m told that a platoon of soldiers, acting on a tip that an insurgent has moved into a neighborhood friendly to American soldiers, will conduct a recon to check the veracity of the information. I want to see them when they come back, so I wait outside their living quarters. Around 1500 they return, dismounting from their vehicles once they enter the gate. I meet the NCO in charge of the patrol – the same one who told me they were going out on the mission – and I ask him about the tip.

“Roger,” he says, “the guy wasn’t there, but we talked to some neighbors. They said that there was a terrorist living there, that he wasn’t home right now, but that they were going to kill him when he got back.”

As I talk to the NCO, I watch the other soldiers as they file by. They all wear protective helmets and vests adorned with ammo pouches, flash lights, snap-links, first-aid packs – collectively known as “full battle rattle” – and dark sunglasses. Despite the relatively cool day, I can see most are sweaty as they walk by me, on their way to unwind however it is they unwind when they come back from a combat mission. Almost all are quiet, some patting my client on the shoulder as they walk by, some softly saying his name, some touching knuckles with him. Many have told me that my client, in some way or another, has saved their lives in the past year.

Time slips by quickly, and dusk is on the way. The unit is supposed to drive me back home, but they still have to turn around and come back to their own base. I remember being briefed that the roads are most dangerous early in the morning and late in the day, when insurgents have had the opportunity to emplace IEDs. I tell the First Sergeant that I’m ready to head back; he quickly and concisely gives orders to get the convoy ready. I get back into my gear and climb in the back seat of the HMMWV, but we’re momentarily held up while the First Sergeant and Platoon Leader check for a new route – two suicide bombers, both within the past 2 hours, have temporarily closed our primary and alternate routes back to my base. I get out, take off my helmet, and lean against the front hood of my HMMWV, listening to the remaining four soldiers talk as we all wait for the route check. All four of them have been here 11 months, three are from Texas, and three have had their twenty-frist birthday since they’ve been here in Iraq. The fourth is nineteen.

“Dude, I’m lead vehicle on the way back!” the rear gunner calls out to the front. “Fine,” says the front gunner, “but I get your Play Station if you die on the way home.” They all laugh. The front gunner asks me if BIAP (Baghdad International Airport) is “that way;” I say no and point the correct direction. The rear gunner, now out of his turret and sitting cross-legged on the hood of the HMMWV, asks me if I have a Leatherman. I do, and pull the utility tool from my belt and hand it to him. He proceeds to dig a piece of shrapnel out of the grill. The front gunner watches, still asking about BIAP. I live at a base near there, with a Burger King and a pizza shop, a big Post Exchange, and many other amenities in relative comfort and safety in comparison to these kids’ surroundings.

As the sun falls behind a grove of date palms, the First Sergeant returns from the Operations Center with a third route planned. He seems to be a bit more nervous than when he went in the building. I want to offer to stay the night, so they can bring me back in the morning, but the soldiers seem excited to go to the Burger King, and I don’t want to seem like I’m questioning the First Sergeant’s judgment. I remain silent and tentative.

We leave the base, going through the same ritual of “going red,” the soldiers now wearing clear-lens ballistic eyeglasses. All cars make an extra effort to give us the right of way. I ask the First Sergeant about this, and he says most of the people are used to us being here, and have learned to always give us the right of way. I suspect it’s also partly due to the placard attached to the back of the rear vehicle, proclaiming, in Iraqi-Arabic, “STAY BACK. I HAVE AUTHORITY TO KILL YOU.” From the backseat, I strain my eyes around each corner, down each alley, on each overpass, and into every vehicle we pass, looking for anything suspicious, whatever that may be.

We make it to my base without incident, though the rear gunner tells me that someone took a pot-shot at him about ten minutes after we left his FOB. For my part, I am internally frantic the entire ride home, and remain so after the convoy drops me off at my own operations center. I scramble to find them phone numbers to check the original routes, a better map, water – anything to somehow make up for getting them home so late. Despite my twelve years in the Army, I’ve made a rookie move, and I feel sick for doing so. These young men have put their lives in danger – twice – simply to get me from one base to another. I have contributed nothing except to place them at greater risk. I resolve to never do so again, and when I get back to my office I practically yell at my own attorneys to ensure they never make the same mistake.

The next morning I will email the First Sergeant and Platoon Leader my sincerest apologies, and ensure them that though it is unlikely they will need to drive me again, I will never make the same mistake with other units. I get an immediate response from both. They tell me not to worry about it, that they made it home safely, and that they are happy to do anything they can to make it easier for me to do my job, to help one of their soldiers, one of their men, one of their brothers. Despite their circumstances – away from their family and loved ones, austere living conditions, Spartan lunches, and the constant possibility of killing or being killed – despite this, it boils down to this one thing for these men: I will do my job.

For many of them, especially the young soldiers far closer to my little sister’s age than mine – kids, really – they know no politics, or global strategy, or hyper-power, or at least pretend they don’t know and don’t care. Inconsequential is the difference between Sunni and Shiite, Allawi and al Sistani, contemporary Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld circa-1983. All they know is I will do my job, and then I will go home back to Texas and so will my buddy on the .50 cal on the rear vehicle and then he can keep his own Play Station. They will do their job, and so, I promise myself, I will do mine.

November 26, 2002November 17, 2015

Putting Things in Perspective

Tongduchon, South Korea/November 26, 2002

I went to visit one of the victim’s fathers last night – me, CPT Kim, a translator, and two people from Civil/Military Affairs (one an overweight U.S. Army Major, the other a Korean civilian employee). It’s about a thirty minute drive, down dark and narrow roads, both highway and backwoods. There are no sidewalks the entire way, no guard rails, no streetlights, and people walking all over the place. I imagine making the same trip in a 12′ wide, 60-ton tank.

We arrive at Mr. Shin’s house. He is a rice farmer, but also has cows and pigs. CPT Kim says it stinks; to me it reeks only of nostalgia – the place smells like my house in my youth on a downwind-from-the-dairy day. We’re all wearing jackets and ties, and we take off our shoes as we enter the house. I notice, with restrained horror, that CPT Kim is wearing white tube socks under her business suit. Mr. Shin’s small house is sparsely furnished and I see no closets – only clothes hanging on a wheeled-rack. The floor and ceiling alike covered with a thin layer of yellowed vinyl, and there are, I notice, no pictures of his daughter. A Korean Army Sergeant Major shows up, and we all sit in a cross-legged circle on the floor. The fat major asks B-movie questions (“I trust you have put in a hard day’s work Mr. Shin,“); the translator relays in Hangul, and Mr. Shin answers with a wave of his hand and a series of grunts. I’m in a modern-day tepee negotiation.

Mr. Shin’s son makes an appearance. I guess him to be about eight years old, obviously curious about this delegation planted on his living room floor. He pulls up a soccer ball and sits right next to me, and I can feel his eyes bearing in on my nose (the little bastard). He has a monumental cowlick eerily similar to the one I looked at on a daily basis from the age of six until my recent discovery of hair products. Mr. Shin tells his son to go study, waving his hand for emphasis, and the youth disappears. I notice the father’s hands – he’s a small man, probably 5’5″, about 150 pounds – but his hands are enormous, giving him a stick-figure look. They’re all knuckles and muscle, and I have no doubt the answer to the fat-Major’s original question was a resounding yes.

But we’re here for a reason, unpleasant as it may be, and we have to get down to business. We need Mr. Shin to testify at a court-martial. If a soldier is found guilty of driving his armored bridge-laying tank – a tracked vehicle with a giant metal ten-foot by four-foot bar blocking his field of vision from all but straight ahead at eye-level and directly to his left – in a manner that demonstrates a lack of care for the safety of others which a reasonably careful person would have used under the same or similar circumstances, if that soldier is found guilty, then we need Mr. Shin to tell the world about his 13-year old daughter. We need him to talk about her hopes, her dreams, her friends, her hobbies, how she helped out her mother around the house, how she helped out her dad on the farm, her little brother with his homework. We need him to tell the panel – the jury – about her desires to be a doctor, or a teacher, or whatever it was that she wanted to be. We need him to tell the panel about how she used to wave to the American soldiers whenever they drove by her on these narrow roads, and how they would wave back, or blow their horns, or smile and nod whenever they saw her, right up to the day when one of them didn’t see her. Right up to the day when she was walking on the right side of one of those sidewalk-less, guardrail-less roads, head down, hands over ears, on the way to a birthday party; right up to the day when she didn’t wave, didn’t even look back at the 60-ton behemoth rumbling up the road towards her; right up to the moment when that poor, cursed soldier drove his tank up and over her back, first crushing her and then crushing her friend in front of her, squeezing them like a tube of toothpaste, all of their blood and guts literally causing their 13-year old heads to explode, spilling their brains on to the pavement in front of them. Mr. Shin saw his daughter in that condition, he had to identify her distorted and disfigured body, relying not on his memory of her face, or hair, or particular birthmark on her cheek; but on the fact that she was wearing a red shirt when she left the house that morning, and yes, I’m certain those are her tennis shoes.

This is how I prepare myself for my meeting with the dead girl’s father, this is what I am thinking as I am asking him to testify about his daughter, asking him to tell a jury of American soldiers about his first child, destroyed by a tank not of his country and not of his army, driven by a man that didn’t look like him, or talk like him, or eat like him; driven by a foreigner in a country whose purpose for him ran out with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the surreptitious socialization of China.

Mr. Shin speaks to the translator in a language I do not understand and for which I will never get a feel. His words are blunt and pointed; Hangul is a staccato blast of starts and stops, accented with flying spittle and dramatic hand and arm gestures. The room is quiet as Mr. Shin speaks, four knowing exactly what he is saying, two having a general idea, and only I not having a clue.

Mr. Shin’s answer, I find, is irreconcilable with the events since this horrible accident occurred; the riots, assaults, and terrible, terrible press coverage of American soldiers in Korea; the student protests outside Army camp gates, Molotov cocktails, and dramatic measures US Army officers and politicos – both Korean and American – have taken to appease the seismic shift in Korean-American relations, all in the name of the families of the two girls. All in the name of Mr. Shin, whom I realize has never been asked, up to this point, this eleventh hour for two American soldiers, how he feels.

“Mr. Shin,” the translator begins, “thanks you for coming to his home and talking with him. He wants you to know he is grateful and amazed for all the hard work that you and all the other American soldiers do here. He sympathizes with you for having to leave your families and your country for such a long time, and he is thankful you are here helping to defend his country. Mr. Shin says that the two men in the tank did not intend to hurt his daughter or his family, and he will not have any part of punishing the two soldiers.”

How simple this all could have been; how careless we – and every Korean who beat the nationalist drum in the name of this man’s dead daughter – have been with the lives of this man and his family, and with the career and well-being of an unfortunate American soldier, far from home, defending his own country in a land not his own, where people don’t talk like him, or look like him, or eat like him.

My co-counsel begins to explain to Mr. Shin that this isn’t about intent, this is about simple negligence, about the responsibility to act in a manner that demonstrates an amount of care for the safety of others which a reasonably careful person would have used under the same or similar circumstances. I wonder if she is as equally abrasive and inappropriate in the Korean culture as she is in the American. I wonder why there are no professional requirements for common sense.

We sit for another thirty minutes with Mr. Shin and his Alfalfa-esque son. His wife serves coffee, and apple and persimmon slices on a tray. We talk about his rice harvest, and how helpful the Korean Sergeant Major and the American liaison officer have been throughout the ordeal. We extend to him the opportunity to watch the trial, in a secluded room with an interpreter and an American JAG officer to explain the trial. He says thank you, I will consider it, and we unfold ourselves from his vinyl floor, shake hands, and bow to one another.

Tomorrow, as part of my own job, as part of my own sense of duty and obligation to the defense of my own country, I will prosecute the soldier that was driving that vehicle. As we are driving away, as my co-counsel is on her cell phone complaining to her equally un-impressive fiancé that she has no sentencing case, I wonder why it can’t be more simple.

August 9, 2001

The Little Sister Interlude

Chicago, Illinois/August 9, 2001

My fourteen year-old sister occupies the passenger seat next to me. My traveling companion for the next nine days, she is five feet eight inches of legs and eyeballs, one hundred per cent self-assuredness. My plan is to mold her, to show her parts of the country she has never seen, to show her the things she can have if she continues to do the things she is doing. I will show her cities, art, monuments, untamed wilderness. I will show her baseball. I will show her things that come with an education, with sophistication, with worldliness. I will impress her with my knowledge of all things not small-town Nevada. I will prepare her for life.

We drive out of Denver, and I am already a little cautious. A college friend has spoken of strippers and Amsterdam hash bars. I want her to be worldly, but this is too much! Does she know what a stripper is? Does she know they are all “working their way through college,” but that none have actually ever graduated? Does she know many have suffered abuse of some sort during their childhood, and that their own children are also likely to be affected? I want to tell her these things, but then I wonder if she’ll ask me how much money they make. She has been asking me this question with regards to my friends and their professions. If she asks, I must answer honestly. She is mature, going into high school, and she deserves the truth.

“A good Las Vegas stripper,” I would answer, “can make six figures, and working just half the year. However, benefits are pretty much non-existent. Unless, of course, you’re looking for good coke.” Six figures for a half year’s work, and free drugs? This sounds pretty good to me. I opt not to broach the stripper and Amsterdam issue. I instead worry about her becoming a stripper. I worry about her going to college and having a bad sexual experience. I worry about her getting accidentally pregnant and ruining her young life. This is a valid concern. My family breeds like it’s free sex at a polygamy festival. I want to ensure my little sister is aware of the breeding process. I want her to know that contraception is spelled with a “tra” in the middle of it. I want her to be prepared.“So Erin,” I ask, “whadda ya hear about the fallopian tube?” She shrieks. She brings her legs up to her chest, leans away from me, curls into a fetal position. Her hands cover her ears. “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” she says. I suspect she doesn’t want to talk about this. “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS,” she says. She is fourteen. We drive on.

At Mt. Rushmore, we take a gondola ride to an elevated view of the monument. From our perspective, only three presidents are visible. “I thought there were four,” she says. I tell her they take one down every other month to give it a good cleaning. She eyes me suspiciously. At the foot of the monument itself, she sees that there actually are four. “Ha!” She says. “I told you. What are their names?” I can see she doesn’t know. “The left one,” I say, “is Samuel L. Jackson. Then John Elway, Will Ferrell, and George W. Bush.” She does not believe me. “You’re such a liar!” she says. “The one with the beard is Abraham Lincoln.” She is fourteen.

We drive through the great expanse that is South Dakota. I want her to look around, to absorb the Great Plains and all of its history. I want her to know the misfortune of the millions of Native Americans at the hands of white settlers and the United States Army. I want her to know about the great bison herds. I continue to point things out to her. Laura Ingall Wilder’s childhood home. The Badlands. The acres and acres of wheat and corn. At each of my observations, she gives me a token “uh-huh,” barely looking up from her Nintendo Game-boy. I am exasperated. “Erin,” I finally say. “I want to know what you think about all of this. Look around you! This is America! What do you say?” She stares at me, inquisitively. Reflectively. “I think,” she says, “you pick your nose almost as much as Kimberley.” She is, I remind myself, fourteen.

In a restaurant in South Dakota, a young male takes our order. After he leaves, Erin states that she believes he is gay. “Erin!” I furrow my brow and drop my voice an octave. “Why do you think that?” “Because,” she says, “he has a lisp. And his finger nails are long and polished.” I begin: “Do you know anyone who is gay? Have you ever met a gay man?” She admits she has not. “Then you are basing your opinion on stereotypes acquired from television and movies,” I state. “You are basing your opinion on misperception, and your generalization perpetuates the incorrect and unfair portrayal of gay men. Until you have solid knowledge based on first-hand experiences acquired over time, you are only showing your ignorance by making such a statement.” She is sufficiently embarrassed. I have shown her the path to open-mindedness.

In Chicago, we go to a party given for a friend and her peers, graduates of a PhD program for clinical psychology. The host of the party is also my friend’s mentor and supervisor. My friend tells us her mentor is sort of peculiar, but very nice and entertaining. He is also, she says, gay. He greets us at the door. Erin stands behind me, obviously curious to meet her first gay man. Bernie is slender, with slightly balding hair slicked down on top of his head. He has a pencil-thin mustache, and wears a gray polo tucked into his belted black slacks. His shoes are highly polished. His partner is an Austrian named Hans. Bernie’s fingernails are long and polished, and Bernie has, of course, a lisp. It is all Erin can do to contain herself. She is throwing me kidney shots, each one a connecting “I told you so!” She does not punch like a fourteen year-old.

Our trip together is over. Erin begins high school on Monday. She is on the dance team, she is in Honors English Composition, she is her freshman class president. Still, I find myself worrying about her. We drive together to the airport, silently. I hope that she has had a good time, that she has learned something new, that she has seen what can be hers if she keeps doing the things she is doing. In the end, however, it is I that am taught. It is I that am impressed. It is I that worry that I annoyed her too much, that I embarrassed her. I think she is a superstar, and I tell her so. She looks me in the eye, pauses, and says “thank you.” Clearly, confidently, appreciatively.

I miss her already.

July 10, 2001November 20, 2015

Smells Like Home

The Great Basin/July 10, 2001

It starts when you cross over Hoover Dam. The stars seem to get brighter, the night sky darker. You can smell hints of it: sagebrush and afternoon thunderstorms, freshly-cut alfalfa, the dairy if the wind is blowing the right way. You can picture the vast, comforting emptiness of the Great Basin, despite the darkness of the night and the interruption of Las Vegas. It doesn’t really hit you – that you’re home – until you’re well north of Las Vegas and its neon dreams. Vegas is merely a facade of Nevada. Ask someone from Las Vegas where they’re from, and they’ll tell you Las Vegas. Ask someone from Reno where they’re from, they’ll tell you Nevada. Someone from Carson City? Nevada will be their answer. Jackpot, Ely, Wendover, Austin, Gabbs, Dayton. All crappy little Nevada towns that you don’t care about, that no one really cares about, and if you’re from one of those places, you know it’s a place no one really cares about. So you tell them you’re from Nevada. If you press them, you will get the real answer (“small ranching community approximately 80 miles south of Reno“). Same if you disparage their crappy little town, or any other crappy little town in Nevada. Outside of Las Vegas, Nevada is a tie that binds. Wide-open spaces; hours, not minutes, between towns; half the town your relation.

And so it begins, 100 miles north of Las Vegas. Lights and tourists and artificial everything behind you, nothing but space and eye-blink towns in front. Human form in the Great Basin is a hiccup; it appears without warning, and is a memory before you know it. Towns so small your mind can’t grasp that they are anything but transient, desert gypsies. Cinder blocks under their mobile homes give them away, however; they are here for good. No one out here really travels. There is too much distance between you and what is next, and it’s too damn hot to do anything about it anyway. Nothing moves when it is this hot. A herd of wild burros so still I momentarily mistake them for iron sculptures. But they are real. Anything here not sculpted by the elements is an invasion, an optical distraction that steals from the overwhelming desolation of it all and focuses your eye on one particular object, and that’s not how this desert should be viewed. The Great Basin and its literally hundreds of mountain ranges are best spied from the valley floors. The closest ranges blended pinks, oranges, and whites, barren and scarred by hundred-year old switchbacks leading to some long-forgotten mineral deposit; the furthest ranges sparsely covered with pinon pine and shaded the same gray as the patched concrete roads stretching through the desert. Nothing is here that doesn’t belong. The things that are here fit, and the things that don’t fit are driving like hell to get out. The roads escort invaders to the exit: long stretches of open highway that present oncoming traffic from miles and miles away. Anyone can pass here, it’s just a matter of gauging the distance through the heat waves rising from the pavement. Telephone lines announce any confluence of dirt road with the highway; the poles, with their mid-slung cross beams and upright insulators, reminders of the giant Saguaros I just left behind. Or lonely grave markers for all those who came long before me, but failed to make it through this tired beauty. The roads, too, are lonely. So empty that if you’re not from here, you constantly question the map, straining to remember if you took a wrong turn somewhere despite the fact that the road hasn’t given you that option in a hundred miles.

I come upon a beat up old Ford, four shades of primer gray with knobbed-hands gripping the bus-sized steering wheel. He is from here, I can tell; he drives too slowly to be going anywhere else. There is an oxygen tank standing in the bed of the truck, and a small tube runs over the bed railing and into the open driver’s side window. As I pass, I see the opposite end of the tube wrapped around the driver’s head and inserted up each nostril. He turns and makes eye contact with me; wrinkled face and mouth toothless and open. He is a dead-ringer for Munch’s The Scream. He belongs here, as does his truck. So too the hundreds of species of sagebrush, the turkey-vultures, wild burros, rocks, ghost towns, and ten-thousand foot snow capped peaks.

I am home. I am going home, and I find myself driving like hell to get there.

February 10, 2000November 22, 2015

A Desert Revision

She gave the red Ford Falcon one last push from behind the car door and then jumped behind the wheel. Her sister was already in the passenger seat next to her, holding the sleeping, chubby baby. As she turned on the head lights she glimpsed into her rearview mirror to see the look of semi-confusion on her daughter’s face. Someday they would know, or maybe they would never know. Now it did not matter. The car gained speed as it rolled down the hill. As she passed the white stucco house on the left, the one with the porch swing she loved so much, she turned the ignition and started the car. The engine revved and broke the tense silence that surrounded them all. Still neither she nor her sister said a word to each other or the children. She could not say anything right now, did not want to say anything, did not know what to say if she had wanted to. The stillness spoke. Quiet relief. Tentative joy. Fear. They looked straight ahead, afraid of the noise that would come from turning their head or moving in their seat. She was afraid to push the pedal too hard, afraid of the increase in noise from the engine. The night did not cooperate. There were no clouds to absorb noise, no moon rays to run towards, no people to melt into. The trees did not whisper. Only the stars stared down, staring only at them, inquiring: Where are you running to? What are you running from? She wanted to answer, running from him, running from this, but she did not. She did not trust the stars.

Three boys in a faded blue truck dutifully stepped out of the cab and took off their jackets. They emptied their pockets and one man took a bag from a boy, the tallest one, with jet black hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve like James Dean, and emptied it out on the ground. Another man took a bottle of tequila from behind the seat of the truck. The guard took the bottle from him and one boy tucked his shirt in his pants and toed the dirt in front of him while another stood with his hands in his back pockets. He spit on the ground as the man motioned for the boys to get back in the truck. They got in and started to pull away and the boy farthest on the right, the James Dean with jet black hair, put his arm along the back of the seat behind the boy in the middle. They were Luckies.

Together they watched the blue truck pull away, and then the man motioned her forward and she put the red Ford into first gear and slowly released the clutch and slowly pressed down on the gas pedal. The car rolled forward smoothly, no lurch. She had practiced for two months in the field behind the house. He grudgingly bought her the car, the one she always wanted, but He bought it with a manual transmission. She said she only knew how to drive an automatic and that He knew it. Then the car will sit He said. He told her she could not drive her car. He would not teach her, so she would teach herself, driving the car in circles every day, sometimes in figure-eights, cutting a hotwalker path the width of the Falcon and sometimes getting the car going as fast as thirty miles an hour so she could put the car through all three gears, all in the tight little field next to the house. Every day when she finished, she would wash the car so He would not see the dirt and would not know she had been teaching herself to drive. She would do it when the girl was not home so that she wouldn’t accidentally say something when He was around. The girl saw though, one day, and she had to tell her it was surprise for daddy so she could not say anything, not a word. Keep a secret.

She released the gas and pushed in the clutch and applied pressure to the brake. The car stopped and the man put his arm on the roof of the car and leaned down so his face was in the window, his eyes hidden behind mirrored glasses, her own eyes instead reflected back at her, distorted like in a fun house mirror.

American she said. He looked at her, or at least she thought he looked at her, and then moved his head to see her passengers. Everyone was sleeping. He stood up and dropped his hand down to rest on the handle of the pistol on his belt and he made a motion with his other arm to wave her through. She pushed in the clutch, put the car in first gear and pushed on the gas and released the clutch. The car jerked three or four times and then leaned forward, gaining speed. She looked into her rearview mirror and the man was bending down again, this time into the window of a small white car, one of those Asian ones, and he did not look her way. She wished she had a Lucky.

The noise that came from the back seat was the little girl waking. As she sat up she pushed the blue blanket that had been covering her onto the seat next to her. She rubbed her eyes, her mouth and lips clenched in a woke-too-early frown. The mid-morning sun came in through the window on her right and made her hair show highlights of red, or auburn. She sat in the middle of the back seat, not behind her aunt and not behind her mother, and her feet, safe in the bottoms of a pair of pink one-piece pajamas, did not touch the floor. She rested her head slightly towards the sun and against the seat back behind her and let her hands lay, palms up, at her sides. Slowly she un-squinted her eyes, her pupils contracting to shed light, the smell of sage in her nose and the taste of a restful night on her tongue. The girl’s gaze locked with her mother’s in the rearview mirror of the car. It shifted, without blinking, as a bug on this Arizona highway impacted on the windshield. The girl had never been alone in the car without her father, but here was her mother behind the wheel and her aunt also in the front seat, brother in her lap. The girl scratched her foot and folded her arms.

Her sister came because she asked her to. No questions or protests, she just said yes and she came. She was young, still in high school, with a temper more appropriate for a Dublin street-fighter than for a young small town girl, and she had an appetite for adventure. And she hated Him. So she flew in to see her sister and her niece and her new nephew whom she had never seen. She brought bags for a week but she would only stay a day. They met at the airport and hugged and cried and left some things unsaid, relayed instead by a knowing look or a certain grasp. She shook His hand and looked into His eyes but once. She rode in the back seat on the way to the house with her niece on the seat next to her, close, the big baby in his mother’s arms and Him driving. They arrived home and sat on the porch and drank iced teas and watched the girl play with the little wiener dog. They stayed up until after the news and then He said its time for bed. For her sister she spread clean sheets on the couch, tucked behind the cushions with a blanket on top and one over the arm, and the girl begged to stay with her aunt and her mother let her. He said nothing. They went to sleep and sometime after midnight, the same time as every night for the past two weeks, she got up and said I hear the baby crying. Tonight, as with many others, the baby wasn’t crying, tonight he would not cry, because she had spiked his milk with a touch of Vodka: she slipped her baby a mickey. She met her sister in the living room and gave her the boy. The bags were already in the car as she stepped onto her porch with no porch swing, her daughter in her arms and her son in her sister’s. The dog was in the yard and she stopped and looked at him, him with his head cocked to one side, and she apologized under her breath but hesitated no longer. They put the children in the car and pushed it down the road and drove it across the border and through the desert, always through the desert.