Brief Encounters with the Enemy

A BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY

To get to the hill you have to first take the path. The path is narrow and steep and lined with trees that are so dark they could be purple, and so dense it feels as though you’re walking alongside a brick wall. You can’t see in and you hope that no one can see out.

The first time I went up the path, it was terrifying. I could barely take a full breath, let alone put one foot in front of the other. If I’d had to run, I wouldn’t have remembered how. Besides, I was loaded down with fifty pounds of equipment that clanged and banged with every step. I might as well have been carrying a refrigerator on my back. But after the first month, the fear dissipated and the path started to become fascinating, even charming. I was able to appreciate the “beauty of the surroundings”—as the brochure had said — even the trees that I was constantly bumping against. “What kind of trees are these?” I asked out loud. I wanted to learn everything I could. I wanted to get everything there was to get out of this experience.

“Christmas trees,” someone answered back. He was being funny, of course, and everyone laughed, even though we were missing Christmas.

The sergeant wanted to know what was funny. We told him nothing was funny, sir. He said that that was true — nothing was funny, that if you could get shot in the face at any moment, then nothing could be funny.

So we were quiet again, the fifty of us, we were fearful again, but that didn’t last too long, because fear can’t persist unless you have at least a little evidence to sustain it. Fascination can’t persist either. What can persist, however, is boredom. I had come all this way hoping for something groundbreaking to happen, and nothing had happened. Now twelve months had passed, and tomorrow I was flying back home.

That’s what I was thinking about when I walked up the path for the last time.

I was also thinking about Becky. “Ooh,” she had said when I told her the news. “You’re going on an adventure, Luke!” She’d clapped her hands like a little girl. “I sure am,” I said.

We’d run into each other in the lobby. She was coming down with a cigarette and I was going up with a sandwich. I hadn’t seen her since the afternoon I’d tried to casually ask her out and she’d said no, point-blank. “Do you want to get some ice cream?” I had said. I’d known her since high school, and the Mister Softee truck was parked right outside.

“No, thanks,” she’d told me. “I’m on a diet.” I couldn’t tell if that was an excuse. Her body looked fine to me.

Six months later, though, she was all smiles, standing close to me in the lobby and batting her eyelashes as the other office workers came and went around us in a big wave of suits.

I was deploying in two weeks, but I tried to make it sound as if it was no big deal. In fact, it was no big deal. Everyone thought that the war was coming to an end. Everyone thought that it was only a matter of time. We’d taken the peninsula and we’d secured the border and we’d advanced to within twenty-five miles of the capital. Any day now, everyone said. My main concern had been that I wouldn’t make it over in time to see any action.

She said, “You going to keep in touch, Luke?” And she made a pouting face, as if I’d been the one to turn down her invitation for ice cream.

“You know I will,” I said.

She had big lips and long lashes. She had a little gray in her hair, but I didn’t care about that. She’d been married and was now divorced. I didn’t care about that either. I’d just hit twenty-seven and was getting soft around the middle. I was hoping to get back in shape. “Push yourself to your physical limits,” the brochure had said.

She wrote her email address in purple ink on the bottom of my sandwich bag. When she walked off, I took a long look at her ass. She didn’t need a diet.

In the first couple of months, I made a point of emailing her. We were each allotted fifteen minutes a day at the Internet café, and I sent her updates when I could.

“What’s going on down there, Luke?” she wanted to know. “Tell me everything.” She ended her emails with “xoxo* * *.”

“What’s that mean?” I had to ask one of the guys.

“Hugs and kisses,” he said.

“But what do the asterisks mean?”

He didn’t know.

There wasn’t much to report about what was going on. The enemy had yet to make his appearance. So I told her that we had an Internet café, and a bowling alley, and a Burger King. “They have everything down here,” I wrote.

It wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t have things like boots. It was the rainy season and it rained every day. To be fair, there were ponchos, but ponchos don’t keep you from slipping and sliding when you’re going along the path on patrol in Skechers. If you got caught in a particularly bad downpour, you might as well be ice-skating, and you’d come back to base at least an hour late. The sergeant would mark this down in his blue book. He’d make sure you saw him marking it down. What happened after that was anyone’s guess. “You get ten of those, you get court-martialed,” the most paranoid among us speculated.

Boots did finally arrive. This was about three months into our tour. They came from Timberland, no less, donated free of charge so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers. Half the guys sold their boots right off; they sold them to the other half of the guys who could afford to buy them and have two pairs. Then they used the proceeds to purchase things like cigarettes and instant soup. There was a guy named Chaz who wanted to give me twenty-five dollars for my boots. He acted like he was doing me a favor. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. He sat down on my cot and took out his money. “Whaddya say?” He was trying to be chummy about it. He was trying to be down-home. He’d gone to a good college and his parents sent him money every two weeks and we had nothing in common except that we both wanted boots. He was one of those guys who had joined for all the wrong reasons. He had joined not because he believed in anything but because he wanted to put it down on his résumé and jump-start his career.

I told him, “You’re here for the wrong reasons, Chaz.”

He said, “What reasons are those?” As if he didn’t know.

He used phrases like “in the long term” regarding my boots. Twenty years from now, I’d probably see him on television, asking for my vote.

I emailed Becky to tell her that we’d gotten new boots from Timberland.

She emailed back:

But what else is going on? xoxo***

It wasn’t the rainy season now. It was the hot and dry season. No one needed boots anymore. I made it to the end of the path in fifteen minutes. I could have done it in flip-flops. I could have done it barefoot.

It was getting close to evening, and things were cooling down a bit, but the flies were buzzing and I was sweating badly because I was dressed as if I were heading into battle. I felt less like a soldier and more like I was going trick-or-treating dressed as a soldier; all I needed was a bag for my candy. Everything about me was superfluous and ridiculous — the boots but also the helmet, the jacket, and the backpack, which rattled on my back like a gumball machine. The gun was unnecessary too, but it was the lightest thing on me. That was the contradiction. It was three feet long and looked like it was made of iron, but it felt like plastic. It could have been a squirt gun, except for the fact that it had all sorts of gadgets and meters on it that told you things like the time and the temperature. Plus it could kill a man from a mile away. You hardly even had to pull the trigger. If you put your finger in the proximity of the trigger, it sensed what you wanted to do and it pulled itself. Poof went the bullet, and the gun would vibrate gently, as if you were getting a call on your cell phone.

The first time I’d ever shot a gun was when my dad had taken me and my sister down to the woods to go hunting. This was about ten years ago, when the war had just started. There were supposed to be things like deer and elk lurking around in those woods. At least that was how it had been when my dad was a kid and his dad had taken him hunting. But times had changed, and the factories were up and running for the war effort, and the woods had been dug through to make way for a new train line. Not only were there no deer or elk, there weren’t even any chipmunks. So instead of teaching us how to hunt, my dad drew a bull’s-eye on the side of a tree using a piece of chalk. Inside the bull’s-eye he drew the face of the enemy. It was a surprisingly good representation, although he exaggerated the nose and eyes and ears for comic effect.

“This is how you hold it, Luke,” he told me. “This is how you cock it. This is how you aim it.”

I remember that the gun was heavy like a brick, and when I pulled the trigger, it felt as if my right hand and ear had caught on fire. “Look what you did, Luke!” my father screamed. Sure enough, I had hit the bull’s-eye right in the center. “Try again, Luke,” he said, but I didn’t want anything more to do with it.

My sister, on the other hand, had a great time. She blasted away at the target, blam, blam, blam, pretending it was really the enemy. Most of the time she missed everything, including the tree, but she thought the experience was fun and funny. “He’s dead!” she kept saying. “The enemy’s dead!” She looked like a pro, even though she was only twelve. I threw stones in the river, waiting for the shooting to be over so I could go back home and play video games. By the time evening came and the bullets ran out, she’d blasted a hole through the tree.

“They’re all dead,” she said.

Ten years later, it was the sergeant asking us if we wanted to end up dead. No sir, we said. He had us at target practice two hours a day. Lying on our bellies, crawling through the mud. We were training like mad because we thought we were going to be doing some real fighting. One week after we arrived, the war had taken a turn for the worse, just like that, and there was no longer a chance that it was going to be ending anytime soon. We had lost the peninsula and we had mishandled the border and we had been forced back from the capital. Each day the reports would come through listing the number of casualties. It always seemed to fall somewhere between two and two hundred, and by the time word spread around the base, no one could be sure if the numbers were being exaggerated up or down. It was anyone’s guess how many we were losing. I say “we,” but we had nothing to do with it. We had landed on the other side of the country, far from the fighting, and we hadn’t lost anything — it was the poor bastards a thousand miles away, trying to push back toward the capital, who had something to worry about.

I wrote to Becky a few times: “Can you tell me what is happening, please?” When her email came back, it would be almost entirely redacted:

According to my state-of-the-art gun, it was now 6:02 and eighty-five degrees. Back home, it was twelve hours earlier and sixty degrees colder. Tomorrow morning we were flying home, and we didn’t care that we were going back to cold weather. We were flying home on American Airlines, which had donated the plane free of charge. “Traveling in style,” the guys said. They said that it was the least American Airlines could do. The fact was that twelve months had passed and we hadn’t done much of anything. Our main accomplishment might have been the bridge that I was walking across. My boots echoed in the valley. It was sturdy, the bridge, and it was steel, and it would no doubt be here, sitting at the end of the path, in ten thousand years, when the war was finally over. We had built the bridge in order to get across the valley. We had to get across the valley so we could get up the hill. The hill was the goal. The hill was where the enemy was waiting for us.

“Eight hundred and eighty hiding,” our sergeant had told us. How he’d come up with that number, we didn’t know. It was so specific, we thought it must be true.

Ten hours a day we worked on that bridge. We’d wake up in the morning when it was dark, and we’d eat our powdered eggs in darkness, and by the time we walked up the path and reached the valley, the sun would just be rising, and the light would seem to be emanating upward from the valley, golden and warm, with traces of pinks and reds. One of the guys, who worked at a used-car dealership, said that if he was going to make a car commercial, he’d use the valley as a backdrop to portray things like power and eternity, and everyone said that was right, that they’d buy that car for sure.

But the truth was that no one really wanted to get the bridge built, because no one wanted to get over the hill. We didn’t say this out loud; instead, we worked as slowly as possible, and as incompetently. We accidentally dropped tools into the valley. I once dropped my blowtorch. It slipped from my hands like a bar of soap and bounced down the cliff until it took flight into the abyss.

“Do you know how much that blowtorch cost?” my sergeant screamed. He screamed like the money was coming out of his own pocket. He screamed like I had dropped his daughter in the valley. He stared at me for so long, one inch from my face, breathing like he’d run a race, his breath smelling like powdered eggs, that I thought he was actually asking if I knew how much it cost.

“A hundred and thirty-five dollars?” I guessed.

This caught him by surprise. “It cost forty dollars,” he said.

That didn’t seem like all that much.

“I should drop you in the valley,” he said. He made me do push-ups, right then and there, thirty push-ups. I got down on the ground, but I couldn’t do them. He told me to take my backpack off and try again, but I still couldn’t do them. This pissed him off even more. He put me to work cleaning the bathrooms, which was fine by me. I could have scrubbed toilets for the rest of my tour and been perfectly content. I could have scrubbed toilets for the rest of my life. Anything not to get over that hill and find eight hundred and eighty enemy waiting. But the next day I was back working on the bridge, bright and early. He needed all the help he could get. His superiors were probably screaming at him an inch from his face. Their superiors were screaming at them, and so on and so forth, until you got all the way up to the president screaming and panting as if he’d just run a race. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the casualties were mounting.

Day after day, we hammered and welded. Fifty guys pounding at the same time. The sounds echoed through the valley from morning to night, so that if the enemy didn’t know we were coming, they knew now.

One night, one of the guys said that we should go on strike. He was a farm boy from Iowa or Idaho, big and pink. Half the guys were farm boys. The other half were black boys. There was a smattering of others, like me and the future politician, but those were the basic demographics.

“Put down the tools of your trade, men,” the farm boy said. He’d heard that somewhere.

“I’m not putting a damn thing down,” one of the black boys said. “I’m trying to learn a skill.” Then he whispered to everyone, “I pay attention. I ask questions. I watch everything.” He made it sound as if he were planning to rob a bank. Which, I suppose, is how you feel when you’ve joined the army not because you have beliefs but because you want a job.

So we spent the better part of four months working on that bridge, but even when you work slowly and incompetently, you make progress. And when we arrived at the other side of the valley, we couldn’t help but have a twisted feeling of pride. Yet the moment we stepped off the bridge and faced the hill, we knew we had entered no-man’s-land. We had colluded in our own demise.

The hill wasn’t like the path. It was rocky and gray with no growth and no place to hide. It looked like a giant bowl of uncooked oatmeal. It looked like a place you could easily bury fifty bodies and no one would know.

“No time like the present,” the sergeant said. And we put our backpacks on and our visors down and we raised our guns and started up.

The truth was that none of us had joined for the right reasons. I might have thought I had in the very beginning, when I’d gone to the Career Center to sign the papers and take the physical and get the brochure that promised a “life-altering experience” and showed half a dozen young men in uniform standing on a beach and looking like they were having the time of their lives. It was easy to delude myself because everyone was congratulating me for living up to my ideals. Who would want to argue with that? There were three hundred people at my going-away party at work, chanting, “Luke! Luke! Luke! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” There were people there who had never said a word to me, who had never so much as looked at me in the hallway, including the managing director. Now they were acting like they’d known my name all along, like I was a movie star making a guest appearance at their company. All the guys were shaking my hand, and all the girls were kissing my cheek. The managing director gave an impromptu speech about “men like Luke,” and about how my job would be there when I got back in a year, because that was company policy. It was the most boring job in the world, and I didn’t want it to still be there when I got back. I was sure that something miraculous was going to happen to change my situation and make me into someone new. All I did was sit in a cubicle eight hours a day, five days a week, staring at a computer as I filled in the little empty blocks on a spreadsheet. Click, drag, drop. Click, drag, drop. Half the time there wasn’t anything to do, and I would sit there staring at the blank screen, pretending that I was working and wishing I could go online and look at porn. Click, drag, drop. This is what happens when you have an associate’s degree.

But at my going-away party, I soaked up the applause. I thanked the managing director for all his support. I thanked everyone for coming. They stood around smiling and waiting for me to say something special, something profound. Three hundred people staring at me with my face covered in strawberry lipstick. Then someone in the back yelled, “Shoot some of those motherfuckers for me, Luke!” That broke the ice and made everyone laugh, and we sliced up the big red-white-and-blue cake they had all chipped in for.

It wasn’t until the moment when we started up that hill that I understood I’d come here for all the wrong reasons. Vanity and pride topped the list. Girls too — if I was being completely honest. In other words, ideals were very low. Staring at a hilltop that was getting closer and closer, I would have traded all of it never to have to see what was on the other side.

When we got to the top, the sergeant at our rear, we peered over like scared little boys, our heads low and our eyes half closed, and that was when we realized there was no one there. Not a soul. All that existed was a wide-open space, a prairie almost, bordered on one side by a lake and on the other by more prairie. It surprised everyone, this desolation, including the sergeant, who wanted to move up front and commanded us to follow him into the great unknown where there was no sign of life.

That first day we explored and came up empty. The next day twenty-five guys went back to discover nothing. After that, fifteen guys went, then ten, then it was decided the exploration was a waste of time and energy, that the reconnaissance had been wrong and the enemy was nowhere around, and all we needed was one guy to go along the path and over the bridge and up the hill once a day to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Which was what I was doing that last day as I neared the top of the hill. It was 6:43. It was still eighty-five degrees.

After we’d discovered nothing was when the boredom set in. Excruciating boredom. We’d eat, we’d shower, we’d clean, we’d train. In that order. Then we stopped training, because there was no point. That was about the fifth month.

During the sixth month, I went to the movie theater almost every day. Something had gotten mixed up in the supplies, though, and the theater had only two movies, both Indiana Jones, one of which was dubbed in Spanish. I watched them over and over, even the Spanish one, and then I never went back. A couple of the guys asked the sergeant if we’d be getting any more movies, and his response was “You’re worried about movies when our boys are being killed a thousand miles away?” He had a point.

The days dragged on. Instead of getting in shape, I started to get fatter. If I ever let myself reflect on matters of spirit or psyche, I reflected that at the end of my tour, all I would have to show for my effort was that I was one year older. In short, I was going to get out of the army and be exactly the same person I was before I joined. I was going to go back to that same cubicle with those same spreadsheets. At night I dreamed of fantastic adventures, full of action, shot in vivid color, not unlike the Indiana Jones movies. I dreamed of being possessed by exceptional courage and heroism. I dreamed of confronting the enemy. In the morning I’d wake with disappointment, eat, shower, clean the dorm, and then go bowling. My bowling improved.

Becky would send emails saying that she was worried about me, wanting to know what was going on, wanting to know if I was okay. Eighty percent of her messages would be redacted. For a while I fanned her concern by responding with ambiguous statements like “We’ll just have to wait and see.” Soon her concern started to make me feel foolish, and I stopped going to the Internet café as often. When I did go, I would use my fifteen minutes to look at porn.

About the only thing we could do for the war effort was cheer for the planes that flew overhead on their way to drop their payload on the other side of the country. They sounded like thunder when they appeared, always around noon, two dozen or so, their bellies silver and red. We’d jump up and down, fifty of us guys, screaming at them, waving our arms as if we were on a desert island, hoping the pilots would give a signal that they’d seen us. In the evening they’d pass back going the other way, flying faster because they were lighter.

One day our sergeant said, “What are you waving at them for? There’s no one in those planes. Those are drones.”

I came to the top of the hill. It was 7:12, according to my gun. It was starting to get dusky and gray. I stood and surveyed the great expanse of nothingness. North to south, as I had been trained. Then east to west. The water, the prairie. Nothing.

It was silent up there on the hill, except for the occasional buzzing of the flies. It was always silent, but today even more so. I had a surge of nostalgia: this was the last time I would be standing here. It was similar to the phenomenon that prisoners experience, becoming nostalgic for their cells the moment they are released.

I unzipped my backpack and took out my meal, which came in a little plastic container with an American flag. It was dinnertime, but I hadn’t eaten my lunch yet. Today it was ham and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Yesterday it had been turkey and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Tomorrow I would be making my own lunch. Two days after that, I’d be back at the office in a cubicle looking at spreadsheets. I sat down on a rock and ate my sandwich. The flies buzzed. I felt nostalgic for the army lunches.

And it was then that I saw him. At first I had no idea what I was seeing. At first I thought it might be an animal. All I could detect was some faint movement way out in the prairie, maybe a mile away, a rustling of the grass. It’s just the breeze, I thought. But as I continued to watch, I saw the unmistakable shape of a human head appear above the tall grass. I put down my sandwich and picked up my backpack. My hands were shaking as I took out my binoculars, and I had to clamp my elbows together to steady my gaze. Sure enough, there he was. A tall, bald, fat man, maybe fifty, maybe younger: the enemy.

He was walking with something, a sheep or a goat, I guessed, although I could scarcely see it in the grass. I imagined that he was moving stealthily, the man, that he was trying to keep himself concealed, but when the grass parted, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. It was as if he had gone out for an afternoon stroll. His nonchalance irritated me. It flew in the face of my boredom. Everything I had done for the past twelve months had been in relation to this man’s existence — or nonexistence — and now here he was, seemingly unperturbed by what lay beyond the hill on which I was sitting. He didn’t even know we had built a bridge.

He was moving toward the water, perhaps bringing the goat or sheep to drink. I watched the man carefully through my binoculars. It felt slightly invasive to be watching him so closely, slightly pathetic. Years ago, I had made the discovery that a window in the hallway of my apartment building faced the bedroom window in a neighboring apartment. I was probably about ten years old and had just grown tall enough to be able to peer over the high window ledge. The bedroom belonged to a woman, and I remember that she was rather disappointingly plain, and that she had long plain brown hair, dishwater hair, and she dressed always in baggy pajamas, sacklike, that revealed nothing. All she did was lie in bed and read. For hours she read. For hours I would stand there in the hallway watching her, hoping she would do something exciting, like take off her clothes and masturbate. But she read, and I watched. And then around ten o’clock she would put her book down on her nightstand and turn her light off and I would go back to our apartment, where my father would ask me what I’d been doing for the last two or three hours in the hallway.

“Nothing, Dad,” I’d say. Which was true — I’d done nothing.

Standing there now on the crest of the hill, I did something: I picked up my gun and released the safety. I hadn’t handled the gun in a while and it felt strangely heavy, unwieldy even, as if I were trying to hoist a manhole cover with my bare hands. It pressed down painfully on my shoulder as I peered through the sights. The man was standing at the edge of the lake, and he was peeing. He had his hand on his hip and he was leaning backward in a posture of bliss, and his face was not all that different from the face my father drew on that tree years ago.

I observed the man in the crosshairs. He was 1.1 miles away. He was five feet ten inches tall. He jiggled himself dry, buttoned up, and started to walk leisurely along the edge of the lake back toward the prairie. Soon he was 1.2 miles away. Then he turned in toward the plains, toward the high grass, and just when he was about to disappear for good, I put my finger in the proximity of the trigger. Poof. The gun vibrated gently with its message.

He stumbled and fell face-first onto the ground. It happened so quickly that I thought he must have tripped over something. Surely it couldn’t have been because of me. But no, a small pool of blood began to form under him as he lay there.

The sheep or goat that had been by his side was not a sheep or a goat after all but a little boy. He darted around in a panicked circle. I watched him through the crosshairs. His mania increased until it looked as if he might actually begin to dig a hole in the ground with his feet. He disappeared into the high grass, only to return a moment later to lift the man’s arm and try to drag him off. He couldn’t, of course, and for a moment I had the thought that I would run down the hill and help the boy. I would help the boy and then I would send an email to Becky telling her what I had done. “Dear Becky, Today I helped one of the local boys.”

Poof.

The boy fell right where he stood, he fell straight down as if he were melting into the ground in a puddle of blood. Once he’d fallen, he didn’t stir. Only the man was moving now, struggling to push himself up, but it was obvious that he had no strength. Eventually he stopped altogether and just lay on the ground as if he were napping. The pool of blood spread out and ran into the high grass.

I stood there for a while. It was beginning to get dark. It was 7:53. Back home, it was the other 7:53. A few minutes later, the prairie was immersed in a dark gray light and I could hardly see anything. The only sound was the buzzing of the flies.

I turned and went back down the hill, the last time I’d be going down the hill, and then I went across the bridge and along the path. My gun and backpack banged against the solid wall of trees. It was almost completely dark, and in the dark I could hear my father saying, over and over, “What have you been doing, Luke? What have you been doing for the last two or three hours?”

Nothing. I’ve done nothing.

The next day we flew back home in style, just like we’d been promised.