Neil Shea

Christmas Day

---

Christmas morning and I stumble out of the plywood man cave in which I live with its crickets and its stink and its tiny blinking tree into warm, blinding light. The first conversation of the day—the first time words actually make sense—is with a short, broad soldier who in his other life is a rodeo clown. He is nearly bald, enormous, drawling out of the Midwest. He sits eating cocoa puffs.

“It’s all about controlling the bull, sir,” he says. “They caint turn good. They can charge straight, sure, but turn? Naw.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

He looks around. Beside him is a large machine gun.

“Yeah,” he says.“But so’s this place.”

—————

I take my coffee cup and walk toward headquarters. A skinny sergeant comes running out of the barracks wearing a Santa hat, shorts, and gray socks pulled up to his knees.

“It’s Christmas!” he shouts. He turns the corner around the blast wall and he sees all the mountains lined up to greet him and he says “Fuck! I’m still in Afghanistan.”

—————

It’s Friday, a Muslim prayer day, so the little town near the outpost is still and quiet. Morning is light and birdsong and the clink of softball bats as 3rd platoon warms up for today’s tournament. Soon the teams get bored warming up and they just start to play. Batters swing for the razor-wire fences, talking shit and spitting. There is the soft thud-slap of the ball, the scratch of men chasing as it tears through the dirt, throwing up dust like a tiny white comet. The first baseman smokes a cigar, the ump wears a pistol, as though to settle disputes. Fly ball to right field and helicopter pad, line drive to left and machine gun nest. No one clears the Gray Monster of blast barriers. Dagger Company wins it, uncontested, though when I ask no one really knows the score.

—————

I sit on a pile of sandbags, reading, when suddenly I hear rifle shots near the chow hall. A soldier near me swings his rifle off his shoulder and runs toward the noise, me following. We find a lieutenant and a corporal hunting along the western wall, shooting stray dogs that haunt the base. They’re grinning, laughing, as they stalk through the tall, dry grass inspecting their kills. A Big Hunt, a combat zone Safari; three dogs down. One of the animals kicks a little and the corporal dispatches it like a gangland executioner.

The men drag the bodies out of the brush and drive them over to the burn pit, a large gash in the earth that glows all through the day and night with smoldering trash. It’s right beside the plywood man cave and I’ve learned to enjoy the scent of it—burning batteries, plastic, toilet paper. The dogs are enormous. Thick, dirty coats, tongues like wet ribbons. Heads covered in scars. Ears chewed into leather flaps.

“You have to do it,” the lieutenant says. “These things get on base and they start breeding, and they carry diseases. Sometimes they attack people.”

A few days earlier I might have called bullshit. But several times already, when I’ve stumbled out to piss in the oil dark night, I’ve heard the dogs growling at me from beneath the wooden barracks, heard them chasing and nipping, coming closer. Can you run from dogs and piss at the same time?

The men heave the dogs onto the fire and I realize as the breeze catches what I’ll be smelling in my bunk all night.

“That was fun, sir,” the corporal says.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant replies. “It was.”

—————

In the evening, in the chow hall, the tables are full with men playing poker, dominoes, and spades. In a corner, on a large flatscreen TV, other men play a tournament on the combat simulator, otherwise known as the video game Call of Duty 2. The click of poker chips, hands of dominoes slammed down. Along the wall, the dessert table—pies, cakes, cookies, and an ice sculpture of a militant eagle—is faring well despite repeated attacks. Plastic tablecloths decorated with holly prints. A cardboard string of snowflakes runs the room. Empty bottles of Welch’s sparkling grape juice, red and white, lined up in green rows. I eat two more pieces of pie (that makes four, y’all) and then it happens: that overfed holiday feeling, a coma coming on. A Freedom Coma.

—————

Just before turning in, I sit in the headquarters listening to some of the weirder stories the lieutenants tell. There are the local characters, men like the Douchebag of the Watapoor, an elder who treats the American soldiers “like they’re a Walmart,” and who hoards donated cement for projects known only to Allah. Then there are local criminals, like Aziz the Rapist, who lurks by the road and stops cars—by waving a knife—and then steals cell phones. Oh, and also he sometimes rapes men. And finally there are utter mysteries, like the case of the disappearing Afghan Police station. You can visit the rubble where it once stood. No one knows what happened, but the policeman say they fought valiantly, against ... something ... before the station blew up. Somehow all the cops escaped unharmed.

But my favorite tale begins with an odd looking man at a bazaar. One of the lieutenants noticed him “because he just looked really fucked up. More fucked up than usual.” The soldier passed by without speaking and his platoon crossed the only bridge spanning the river. Suddenly, the man was there, watching them, on the other side. The lieutenant was puzzled—how the fuck did he get here?—but said nothing and walked on. A short while later, his platoon came up to one of the countless graveyards scattered through the valley, the blank headstones poking up like broken teeth. The man was standing there, waiting. He approached the lieutenant.

“We need a retaining wall here,” he said.

The lieutenant looked around. There was no field, no irrigation channel, no obvious need for a wall.

“Why do you need a wall?” he asked.

The man waved a hand at the graveyard.

“Well, because the ghosts are getting out and bothering the villagers.”

—————

Christmas day is done. Dogs roast in the burn pit, crickets wander in my sleeping bag, and the stars in the sky above the mountains are more than I can count, though for a few minutes I give it a try.