by Maura Cool
Memories rise unbidden, like stirred sand on the bottom of a river when a rock is turned over. A single moment, playing over and over, and it won’t go away; I need to write it down. To release it. The weight of it presses in at the edges of my mind, carrying with it dark realizations. My hands are shaking. My legs are trembling.
Lance Corporal O’Connor, a six-foot Viking of a man with red hair and a clumsy gait, was already sweating buckets in the hundred-and-forty-degree Persian Gulf heat. We all did, with something like ninety percent humidity in the air, but he looked like he had just crawled out of a swimming pool. I’d never seen anyone sweat so much. It was July 4, 2017. I shielded my eyes from the oppressive sun as we walked the quarter mile to the Combat Arms Loading Area, where aircraft were loaded with live ordnance. Our birds waited for us there, eight mission-ready F/A-18s.
As soon as we were out of our superior’s sight, I slipped on my sunglasses. They were bright, silver plastic things with purple lenses and the word Versace stamped on the side. Of course they weren’t really Versace; I picked them up at a local bazaar when a few of us had a chance to leave base several weeks earlier. They were the cutest, girliest, most belligerent things I could find. I called them my Hajji-saces.
I always found it peaceful out here, despite the heat. In the early afternoon, it was the only freedom we had from Staff Sergeant Ford’s gung-ho tirades. He and our NCOs were lounging in the A/C of the shop while O’Connor and I went about the daily servicing. A few aircraft sat under shaded awnings, but most were scorching in the Persian Gulf heat. Maintenance was miserable when we had to climb on top of the heated metal. Thankfully, landing gear servicing was done all on the ground.
Out of time. The memory still nags at me like a swarm of bees, compelling me to keep writing, but a college project requires my attention. I drive, but I only see fictitious faces floating before me, taunting me, keeping the suppressed memory at the fringes of my mind. I can feel some deeper revelation behind them, and it scares me. I’m not ready to analyze it, I know if I think about it now, I will be crippled.
When I arrive at campus the student union is bustling with youthful activity, and my groupmates greet me warmly as I settle at their table. They chose a table in the atrium, surrounded by towering walls of glass. The campus vistas spread out around us, rolling, green and beautiful, but all I notice is the way the glass magnifies the sun. A sweat breaks out on my brow, and it’s all too easy to be reminded of that desert heat, still so close in my mind.
An hour runs away from me, filled with math and frustration, but it doesn’t take the burning thoughts with it. What happens to us when we die? If the way of it is gruesome, or traumatic, are we stuck behind? Do we become ghosts?
These thoughts tug at the edge of my conscious, like a fish on a line as I drive home, compelling me to finish the story. If someone is killed, do they haunt their killer? What if they had three hundred and fifty killers, an entire squadron; would they vengefully rotate haunting each one of them?
Today, it feels like it is my turn.
The news trickled down to us lowly Lance Corporals after the maintenance meeting at the beginning of our shift. We usually never knew the mission details; we only knew whether or not the birds came back with ordnance. When they didn’t, Corporal Love took one of us out to paint a new bomb silhouette on the side of the jet, like tally marks. We didn’t have to ask if they’d hit their target. They never missed. This day was different, though.
“Busy flight schedule today!” Corporal Dudley announced, as he burst into the shop backdoor. “We’re blowin’ up a factory.” He set the crew leader’s book down on our plywood table.
“What?” Sergeant Adams asked, woken up by the door slamming.
“Surveillance birds found an IED factory; they’re taking vehicles and turning them into explosives,” Staff Sergeant Ford explained, walking in behind Dudley.
“Like, the ones they drive into military bases? And convoys?” O’Connor asked.
“Yeah, big for nothin.’ Don’t worry though; they don’t want your piece o’ shit,” Sergeant Crumb from another crew said, laughing at his own joke.
Dudley ignored him and carried on. “Cool, O’Connor, I need you to be extra diligent on servicing today; Ordnance is gonna be loading 4,000 pounds on all of these birds, so they’re gonna be low-ridin’.”
I raised my hand shyly, feeling like I was about to ask a stupid question. “Can they… carry that much?”
“Nah, Cool, they’re just fuckin’ sending them out anyway,” Sergeant Crumb said.
“Actually, that’s not too far off,” Staff Sergeant Ford said. “Gunny and the warrant officer in maintenance control have been working on the calculations and getting approval for this for weeks. Four thousand pounds is outside of the structure’s tolerance limits. If they were to land with this much weight, they would break. This has never been done before. You all should be proud. We’re making history for the F/A-18 community.”
“Is there anything else?” Sergeant Adams asked.
“No, that’s it.” Dudley flipped the book closed and plopped into an empty chair. O’Connor and I nodded at each other, rising at the same time and heading out to the line.
The energy the rest of the day was a welcome reprieve from the usual, depressed I-fucking-hate-this-place-God-why-the-fuck-did-I-sign-up-for-this mentality we all shared. We worked fourteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, and two months into deployment we were already burnt out. That day, though, everyone on the flightline—the ordnancemen loading the bombs, the power plant mechanics doing their inspections, the avionics marines loading their secret-clearance crypto—was uncharacteristically cheerful. Corporal Brown, a powerliner, was wearing American flag pajama pants instead of our uniform coveralls, an American flag bandana on his bald head, and aviator sunglasses. No one gave a shit about uniform regulations when you were in the middle of nowhere, especially on a day worth celebrating. Small mercies. Tiny freedoms. He walked between the jets like he was Lady Liberty’s torch; our champion, beacon of all that is great and free. America. Morale had never been higher.
“Do you think we’ll be able to see the footage later in the Ready Room?” one of the ordnance men asked, as we approached the lines of aircraft.
“Talk about some fireworks for the fourth,” another said.
“If only we had popcorn!” I called out to them as we passed. I glanced down at our servicing log to check which jets needed our attention, before tucking it back under my arm. O’Connor and I laughed with them, enjoying the positive mood. It was a momentous event, and each of us were proud to be a part of it, excited to do our jobs. Our thoughts were with the infantrymen on the ground, calling in air strikes, faceless brothers-in-arms whom we knew our birds defended.
The aircraft were parked in two rows, facing each other, forming a neat lane down the middle where you could safely walk while their engines were turning. O’Connor and I split up, each with our own twelve-inch ruler. I checked the nitrogen levels on one side while he checked the opposite side. We met at the other end of the line. The levels were within their tolerance limits, so we ended up not needing the nitrogen cart and were done in about ten minutes. Our NCOs were expecting us to be gone for another twenty, so we relaxed on the concrete barriers that divided the Combat Arms Loading Area from the canopies. Called T-barriers, they were as tall as a house, several feet thick, and had a nice, flared base perfect for sitting on. Sometimes I would lay down, and the perfect spiral bun on the back of my head made a great pillow. Not that day, though. Too many people were moving about, preparing for the mission.
We relaxed in easy silence. O’Connor and I didn’t have much in common, but we worked well together. It was usually quiet out here in the early afternoon; the Air Force’s P-3s a quarter mile away hadn’t started up yet, and none of our support equipment was running right now. I smiled, as I often did in these moments. I hated it here, more than anything, yet I couldn’t help but admire the hellish beauty of it. The sky was clear blue, like it was every day, and the sea stretched beneath it a mere mile away from the flight line. I longed for nothing more than to dive into the cool, blue water, but a mile of sand, runway and fence stood in the way.
Eventually O’Connor stood up with a sigh and a stretch, resigning himself to our mutual fate. “Come on, Cool. Let’s go inside.”
“Maybe if we’re lucky, Ford will be at the gym with Dudley,” I said optimistically, with only a hint of sarcasm, as I rose to follow.
“God bless that man.” Corporal Dudley had taken one for the team, becoming best friends with Staff Sergeant Ford and going to the gym for two hours, twice in every shift—it did wonders for keeping him off the rest of our backs. I don’t think Dudley did it on purpose, he kind of just got sucked under the division chief’s wing and remained trapped there. Before the deployment, I was the only one in the whole shop who didn’t hate Staff Sergeant Ford, but that had quickly changed. It was hard to like someone who restricted his troops to only two days off a month, while the rest of the squadron adopted a weekly rotation.
“Is Staff Sergeant at the gym?” O’Connor asked when we entered the shop.
“Yeah, they just left,” Sergeant Adams said.
“Cool,” I said, immediately relaxing. While they were gone, we all bided our time in our own way. I read a book, Sergeant Adams took a nap, and O’Connor disappeared to another shop.
Dudley and Staff Sergeant didn’t reappear until the sun began to descend. The flight schedule was always set for the early evening, so the sunset had become our queue to head to the line. All necessary personnel (and a lot of unnecessary paper pushers feeling motivated by the holiday) made their way en masse. It usually involved a lot of standing around, but today there was an electric excitement in the air. Corporal Brown, acting as plane captain, was still wearing his prideful get up; standing before one of the jets at parade rest waiting for its pilots to walk. O’Connor and I stood at the end of the flight line, our hydraulic servicing unit resting between us.
In their own time, smiling like the truest of American heroes, all six pilots came striding toward us. We always had two flyers per jet; with two aircraft flying the mission and a turning spare, should the flyers experience a mechanical failure—a common occurrence when your jets are thirty-some years old.
As the pilots came into view around the T-barriers, Captain Hendricks, the officer in command of the Airframes Division, tipped his cowboy hat at the lineup of mechanics waiting for their arrival. Many people clapped, someone whistled. He placed it on his head with a good-natured grin. O’Connor and I didn’t laugh, though. The hat was a hazard. A foreign object on the flightline. Staff Sergeant stood waiting at the aircraft, Captain Henricks passed the hat off to him, and he handed it off to us.
“It’s your turn, today,” I said with no great cheer. “I think I went last time.”
O’Connor sighed with a nod, took the hat, and broke off at a dead sprint back to the shop. We both knew what would happen if we didn’t make it back before jets started turning. Breaking ourselves off in the sprint was better.
I watched him disappear around the barriers, the far end of the flightline growing hazy in the evening light, before turning my attention to the events around me. The pilots were conducting their preflight walk-arounds, inspecting their aircraft before boarding. The sun had descended past the horizon over the water when Staff Sergeant Ford walked up to me.
“You hear that?” Ford asked. I listened intently, then nodded. The Islamic Call to Prayer echoed faintly over the desert. The sound so far away, it was only audible when everything else was silent, giving it a haunting effect. “Somewhere right now, the factory workers are getting ready to pray with their families. And when they’re done, they’ll sit down with their children to eat the dinner their wives have made. And they don’t know it, but it will be their last meal.”
I can’t write anymore. I tell myself that’s it, that’s all I needed, I can walk away now.
A friend waits on my back deck, so I rise to join him, feeling fragile and dazed. I sit down, waiting for the feeling of dread to leave me. The guilt isn’t dissipating.
I feel unreal, dissociated. I am teetering on the precipice of some great revelation, but I cannot nudge myself over the edge. Something is missing.
“Can I tell you what I was writing about?” My friend listens silently. I recount my tale, regurgitating what I have written, and as I speak, I can feel the truth of my words settling into me, even as I feel entirely detached from my own voice. I can hear it rising into a panicked shakiness, but I can’t stop it. My voice cracks and shakes, and a shudder starts in my limbs. I can feel a viscous sob rising in my throat, but I choke it down to finish the story. I wonder vaguely if my neighbors will hear me. My friend tries to soothe me or stop me, shushing and cooing, but once the words have begun there is no halting them. This is what I needed. “And they don’t know it, but it will be their last meal.” The words tumble out of my mouth.
Release. I’ve said it aloud, and with the final utterance of my Staff Sergeant’s words, with this friend bearing witness, I feel my conscience snap back into place firmly within my body. Finally, the reality of it abandons the place I’d suppressed it to so that it may sink into my bones. No more hiding, no more ignoring. Five years. They’ve been dead for five years. I’ve been living, thriving, fucking, writing, and they’ve been dead for five years. Their families have been broken for five years. Real people, with mothers, sisters, wives, children. These people existed in the world, and I helped end them.
I looked at him for several moments, processing his baffling words, before I gazed over the desert and tried to focus on the song. I turned to him once more, my eyes asking a silent question, and he simply nodded. At that moment, the deafening sound of a jet’s auxiliary power unit roared across the flightline. Everyone turned away from their idle conversations and donned their hearing protection. Nonessential personnel, here to gawk, made their way to the sidelines, while Staff Sergeant Ford did his cross-armed “I was a drill instructor and you should be scared of me” meandering walk of importance, leaving me alone with the heaviness of his words.
Right now.
The lilting, haunting music could no longer be heard over the roar of the engines, but I imagined it still played in the background.
Right now.
Faces floated through my mind. The civilians who worked on base, the local air force men who manned the gates, and who we occasionally saw towing their own outdated aircraft down the flightline. These weren’t the factory workers, of course, but they were the only Middle Eastern men I’d ever seen. Crouching behind the servicing unit, I watched the plane captains run their pilots through the pre-flight operational checks. Nothing about this was any different, but it was suddenly so heavy.
Right now.
I sat there, braced against the hydraulic unit, knowing I was one of the least significant people out there, and feeling weighed down by the dread and guilt settling over me. I imagined it wasn’t red hydraulic fluid sloshing around in my unit, but the blood of the hundreds of people my aircraft would kill, and with every single pump I made to top off a reservoir, I would seal their fates.
Right now.
I felt stupid, maybe dramatic even, for feeling so burdened. Why was I so upset when it was the pilots who would drop the bombs? When it was our operations commander who had planned the mission? When our NCOs had signed off every maintenance task? How had I never truly thought about this before?
Right. Now.
My thoughts drifted to the stabilator servo-cylinder O’Connor and I had changed the day before. We had been so excited; a stab servo! Those were so uncommon. Sergeant Adams sat out there with us, guiding us through the process. And now that jet was flying today. I’d never felt so aware of both my replaceability and the impact of my presence as I was in that moment, watching everything be carried out so routinely. We’d always been told—never in the same breath—that we were replaceable; the military didn’t care about us. But also, that each of us was so important; it cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars just to get one of us through training. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for me to be kneeling here, wondering how many people would be killed tonight. Revelations and ideas ricocheted in my mind, all pinwheeling around that one basic thought.
Right now.
I watched, and I waited to be called to fill reservoirs, helpless to do anything but try to shut out the wave of thoughts crashing over me, and longing for the ignorance I’d previously allowed myself.
Feeling subverts thinking, but when the emotion subsides, I can see that ignoring the guilt only made it grow. After all, I am responsible for my own complicity. I understood the military’s purpose when I chose to enlist. I don’t know how to not regret my responsibility for these lives. I do not value them more than the soldiers we saved, but how can I value them less? I won’t choose ignorance any longer, yet acceptance and forgiveness feel no more attainable.
It has been one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-seven days.
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With a love of literature stemming all the way back into the years of her early childhood, Maura Cool has found a way to shape her own life and military experience into a gripping narrative that captures both the outward hardship and the inward struggle of events in a way that brings value to a diversified audience. In addition to writing, she enjoys working on her century home and spending time with her friends, loved ones, and her border collie Weave. She is an AYA Integrated Language Arts major at the University of Akron, and upon graduation, she plans to pursue an MFA in creative writing from the University of Akron in the NEOMFA program.
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