The Army I Knew: Up In Smoke

I'm jumping a bit ahead of myself here in the "Army Days" series, but I ran across this little cartoon and remembered the story that went with it and wanted to write the post before I forgot again.

OK, so last spring I left you where I had just flunked out of SF School (SFQC Phase 1, to be technical about it). I went from there to the Land of S.F. Medic Rejects; the 82nd Airborne Division.

I do want to post about my early days in Division, but that's a whole 'nother story for another time. And I've already posted SOME of those in the Sinai Stories series. But after I'd been at Bragg for some time I got levied to Panama to fill in the conversion of the sraight-leg 3/5th Infantry to an airborne infantry battalion (the 2nd Battalion of the 187th, if you must know). And I've posted some about that, too.

This post is about part of that time; one of our many deployments to Honduras where we were making scary faces at the commie Nicaraguans, the ones that invaded us in Red Dawn (the original, not the shitty remake with the Norks for bad guys).

One of the places we manned was this island in the middle of the Gulf of Fonseca, Tiger Island. We were just there to pull security for a bunch of NSA guys who were snooping on Danny Ortega's pillow talk.

It was boring as hell, and as medics the worst we had to do was pull a desultory sort of sick call (since there was no real duty to get out of other than pulling guard, which involved sitting on your ass for two hours) and burn out the barrels from the latrines.

In these Halliburtonized days of portapotties and contract cooks you may never have seen a "burnout latrine", but they are as simple as an indoor shitter can be and a big step up from the slit-trench shitholes you have to use when there's real shooting around.

What you do is build a simple plywood frame one-holer only with a trapdoor in the back that opens to a space under the seat. It's tall enough to slide half a 55-gallon drum into it, and that's what you do. That's your turd barrel.

What's critical is that Joe does NOT piss in the barrel but in the piss-tube outside. Urine in the turd barrel makes the turds wet, soggy, and hard to light.

Because that's how you dispose of that used GI chow; you burn it.

You pull the barrel full (or hopefully NOT full - if you're smart you do this every day to keep the volume down) of shit out and replace it with a "clean" one.

You drag the barrel away from the latrine, preferably to a bare spot where you won't catch anything on fire. You pour in a spicy mix of MOGAS and diesel (a blend of about 1:3 or 1:5 is preferred), light it, and then keep adding diesel until the shit burns down to a fine ash.

One hint, though; you've got to stir the turde flambe' as you saute' it because if you don't the more coherent bits, the tootsie roll-variety turd, if you will, just get kinda charred on the outside but retain a gooey center; that's not good, sanitarily speaking.

So you stand over the smoking shit barrel with a long piece of angle iron and stir. Then when the ashes cool you shake them into an empty C-rat case lined with a plastic bag. When the case is almost full you tape it shut and send it out on the supply 'Hook and it goes to the Magic Place where shit-ashes go (in other words I haven't the faintest idea what the hell the Army did with all those cardboard boxes of shit-ash; sold them to the Hondurans, probably, like we did every other fucked-up thing down there...).

And that was that.

The thing is, I didn't mind burning shit.

I didn't love it. Given the opportunity I'd rather have been eating a steak dinner or making love to a beautiful woman. But I was on Tiger Island, I was a medic, and so what I had was burning shit. So I did it.

It wasn't that noisome. The smell was not that much worse than burning diesel fuel, and I had gloves and a long steel pole. It wasn't like I had to roll the stuff up in cigarette papers and smoke it. Fuck it and drive on.

My partner, Doc Sullivan, though, HATED burning shit.

He hated the very idea of it. He hated the act itself, the aroma, the degrading nature of lighting fire to other people's wastes. He loathed every iota of the entire business and was not shy about telling me how he felt.

I don't remember what I said, but I suspect it was something like; "Whatever, deal with it. Christ, it ain't like you gotta EAT it. Ain't nothing but a thing."

Sully hated my attitude, too. So he began this whole business about me being some sort of mystic sage of shit, a zen-master of crap. He decided that my name should be "Master Poo", from the old television series Kung Fu, and made all these bad jokes about the blind man and the shit barrel. I responded by doing bad Keye Luke impressions:

Doc Sully: I fear the smell of the shit is strong.
Doc Lawes: He who conquers himself is the greatest warrior. Do what must be done with a docile heart.
Doc Sully: What the fuck does that mean, Master?
Doc Lawes: Listen for the color of the sky. Look for the sound of the hummingbirds wings. Search the air for the perfume of the shit on a hot summer’s day. If you have found these things, you will know.
Doc Sully: That makes even less fucking sense that before. Bite me, Master, I don't like to smell the goddamn shit.

I also drew this little cartoon:

And between my humor and zen-like patience, and Sully's bitching, the shit got burned.

And though it was a long time ago and far away, the memory still drifts through my mind like the smoke from a barrel of burning shit.

Because, as Master Po would have said, the same tongue which screams, also laughs.

SGT Mimms and the Midnight at the Oasis

Aina has left her Tylenol lying out and the goats have eaten it.Or at least that's what I have gotten thus far. It is plainly a complex and hilarious tale, to judge by the amount of giggling and arm-waving going on amongst the group in the shadow of the thorn tree by the front gate telling it; Aina herself, her normal attitude of cool competence somewhat askew; her little sister Salaha clearly enjoying both the situation and the opportunity to tease her usually somewhat overbearing big sis; and Solomon, the Artful Dodger of Ain Fortaga, Aina's kid brother, raconteur, adventurer, and genial host to the American soldiers temporarily posted at OP 3-2, just enjoying chaos of any sort.

The three siblings are still chuckling, scuffling and cracking wise in Arabic when I return with the small envelope with the replacement tablets inside and carefully explain to Aina (through Solomon) that the pills are for her, when she works too hard and her muscles or head ache. That they are not good for the goats, who should be discouraged from eating them.

"Pills la kwaiis for goats, afham?" draws a renewed burst of giggles from the girls and a broad grin from Solomon, who is unimpressed by my scowl and earns a repetition of the prescription in English; "She needs to understand that the pills aren't good for the goats, Solomon. They will get sick. And she will have no more medicine until the new medic comes next month."

The boy nods, forwards a burst of Arabic to his sister, who nods in turn and looks at me with her dark, dark eyes, making shooing motions with her hands.

"La anz, la anz!" she replies - "no goats" - and rises, a taller black in the shadow of the thorn tree with her envelope closed within her hand. "Shukran, duktur." she says politely before turning away to go back to work.

"Afwan, Aina." I reply, zipping up my aid bag.Wadi Watir runs 40 miles into the jagged mountains of the desert interior, from the straggling coastal village of Nuweiba almost to the monastery of St. Catherine. It is the widest and longest valley in the mountains of the eastern Sinai and has probably been a well-traveled passage for humans since prehistoric times.

To have a presence in Wadi Watir is to meet, trade, converse, and, if armed, control, the movement of all these people and things that move along this ancient way; it is probably this which drew the Beduin here, hundreds or thousands of years ago, and has drawn us here today: Third Squad of A Company, 2nd Battalion (Light) (Airborne) 325th Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division, now attached to the Multinational Force and Observers, Sinai.

Their tents hunker under the small copse of trees near the wet place along the valley wall that gives Ain Fortaga its "ain" - the "well" - in its name.

Our metal trailers and hovering plastic water tank kneel on the little shelf just up the wadi, at the foot of the bare reddish rock our maps identify as Gebel Mikemin.For two weeks we have lived here, eleven of us; nine men of Third Squad and their medic, and Sergeant Mimms of the 319th Field Artillery, one of the battalion's forward artillery observers. Weaponless without his cannons, a vestigal appendage of the armed might of the division we have left half a world behind us, a masterless page of the King of Battle he has volunteered to come with us, up the winding cleft of Wadi Watir, to the wet granite gravel, the thorn trees, the trailers, and the tents that are Ain Fortaga.

The locals met us almost before the whining sound of the white deuce-and-a-halves drifted away down the wadi. First Solomon, of course, the son of the house and loud admirer of all things American. Then, more carefully, the two sisters, smiling and quiet. After the kids had vetted us and pronounced us acceptable we; SSG Howard, the squad leader, the two team leaders and I, were invited to the big black tent at the base of the cliff where old Selim the patriarch poured us dark, sweet tea out of his ancient pot and asked us polite questions through his unusually subdued teenage grandson.But most days it was just us, the OP, our rounds of housekeeping chores, and Solomon.

Suleiman, to give him his rightful name, was a cheerful little villain, idle in the energetic way of boys everywhere, passing through an unidentifiable adolescence somewhere between a very mature twelve to a thin, underfed sixteen. He had been born in a Sinai occupied by Israelis, whom he disliked ("They mean mothafokas!") but seemed to respect withal, had seen the transfer to the Egyptians he despised (I would put his opinion of his supposed countrymen here but it was not a word or phrase but rather a rude noise and a pumping motion with his fist, which seems to have translated loosely as "What a bunch of jerkoffs") before being galvanized by the arrival of the Americans.Solomon thought that America was stone-cold, flat-out, stomp-down fucking awesome. Americans were the Baddest Dudes on the planet, and America was a place full of cool cars, hot chicks, and all the Stuff in the world. Solomon had learned his English from GIs, as you can probably guess, and had picked up a miscellany of habits, mostly bad ones, from the soldiers who had preceded us. Some vindictive sonofabitch had taught him to sing a craptacular country song which he adored and sang constantly and horribly. It's hard to describe the dissonance you got standing next to an Arab youth whose appearance and attire looked like 12th Century desert chic while he wailed:

"My beeby is American Made,
Born an' bred in da U.S.AAAAAAAAA.
From her sikky (silky) long hair to her sexy long legs
My beeby is American Maaaaaaaade!"

His casual destructiveness, though, was less cultural than universal, the innocent brutality of a young man who lived all his life in a tough way in very rugged place. Other than his family, to be respected, loved, or feared, and his American idols, everything else in the world; animal, vegetable, and mineral, was a toy to be played with roughly and discarded casually when broken.

Even in generosity Solomon was a hard little bastard. One afternoon he turned up at the gate holding a juvenile hawk tied to his arm with a bit of string. He explained that he had "found" the bird and wanted to share him with us. We were bored, and a long way from home, and the hawk was very beautiful in a merciless sort of way. So we brought the two of them into the compound against all MFO regulations and standing orders and spent a half hour gingerly holding the bird and photographing it close up while Solomon sat at the picnic table and enjoyed some bug juice ("So green!" he exclaimed) and a handful of B-ration cookies.Finally the hawk-admiring and hawk-photographing was done, and SGT Turner made to undo the string and let the bird go.

"Stop! Wait!" Solomon yelped as crumbs and cup with the last green lees flew off his lap, "No let him go! I play with him!"

"Solomon, this is a wild hawk," Turner said sternly, "not a toy."

Solomon looked sulky, claiming that he had caught the hawk and he was the one to decide when to let it go. Turner merely tossed the bird into the sky and it rowed into the air, turning up the wadi and powering low over the wire and past the thorn tree down by the latrine. Solomon dashed across the helicopter pad and rounded the wire, legs pistoning and scooping up a handful of rocks which suggested that his "finding" the bird in the first place had involved hitting it with a stone.

The two of them vanished down the canyon but only one returned, a Solomon whose entire afternoon was darkened by an unaccustomed anger at all damned GIs...until SSG Howard made him a kite that banished all care and loss and occupied almost all his waking hours for the next several days.Then there was the time...

But I started out by telling you this story was going to be about SGT Mimms, didn't I?

Well, then.

The story of Leroy Mimms and Jutta began one warm afternoon that was, in respects of scenery, weather, activities, and persons entirely identical to the dozen afternoons before and after that. The guys hung out, made meals, exercised, pulled gate guard or radio watch, slept, or found something to occupy their idle time. For an hour or so Solomon, his sisters, SGT Maxwell and a couple of the guys entertained themselves throwing rocks against the blank lower wall of Gebel Mikemin.SP4 Ahlers, the squad's grenadier, got his thumb stuck in a tin can of olives and had to have it cut off (the can, not the thumb) with a P-38, and a stitch put in.

SGT Mimms was hanging out with the guys at the front gate when Jutta walked up the wadi.

OP 3-2 wasn't Checkpoint 3A, but unlike a lot of the other OPs - especially unlike the well-named Remote Site 3-5 - it entertained a random, slow, but regular drift of people passing by. We had several Egyptian civilians on unstated but unhurried business, and a hiker every other day or so. Typically these were young adult or young-middle-aged Europeans taking a wandering trip through the Levant. Many were German, a handful were French, once a pair of Spanish college women.I still fondly recall an English couple, both Royal Army, retired, handsome in the spare, elegant British upper-class way who stopped by in their dusty Land Rover. They looked and acted briskly capable, as though they were seldom surprised and never at a loss, and were clearly pleased with the world, themselves, and almost everyone they met. They were genuinely good people in a very lonely place, and all the more welcome for it.

The woman who hiked up the wadi that afternoon, however, was not particularly unusual.

She was somewhere between her late twenties and early forties, with that tireless, wind-chapped, weathered look that people who spend a good deal of time outdoors for enjoyment often seem to acquire. Dun-colored blouse and hiking shorts, well-scuffed sturdy sandals, a mane of frizzly hair stuffed under a wide-awake hat were common to the type. The peculiarities that made her Jutta were her remarkable expressive, long fingers slightly yellowed by the cigarettes she smoked aggressively, each motion of the smoking made just a little too decisively, too emphatically for a pastime; the way she tilted her head like a curious blackbird, the impression strengthened by her small, bright, dark eyes; her English, spoken with clipped energy and a rough Mitteleuropa accent.

She stopped by the gate and asked if we could refill her water bottles.We weren't supposed to, of course, being agents of the ponderous majesty of the Camp David peace treaty and all, but I loafed down from the TOC trailer with a jerrycan and filled her bottles up as we always did, politely refused a smoke, and stayed to chat with the guys at the gate while she made small talk with Sergeant Mimms.

It wasn't until later that evening that I looked down to the gate as I passed between the trailers and noticed that although the next guard relief was on the gate, Leroy and the German visitor were still there, talking and sitting in the long shadows by the gate tree. Leroy Mimms, while a nice guy, was usually not the chattiest cathy in the dollhouse. I wondered what the heck this brand-new couple was finding to talk about, so I casually strolled down to the gate as if savoring the Ain Fortaga twilight, cadged a chicklet off of Ahlers, asked about his owie thumb, and carefully listened in to Jutta and Leroy talking.

What Jutta and Leroy were talking about was sex.

Not crudely. Not a blatent, obvious, fancy-a-bit-of-the-rumpy-bumpy, "lets get into the bushes and have one off now" sort of conversation. She was asking him about himself, what he did, what he liked, where he lived. But you could hear the invitation in her questions, and the growing eagerness in his replies, that made me kinda skeevy to listen in; it felt like listening to pillow talk.

So I bid the guards good evening, said goodbye to Jutta (assuming she would be gone in the morning as were most of our passersby) and waved to SGT Mimms, who might have been penguin hunting in Antarctica for all I was standing next to him. The man was raptured.

I brushed my teeth, read a few chapters of my paperback novel, and lay down for a nap before my midnight-to-six radio watch thinking nothing more about them.I was shaken awake at quarter of twelve, shuffled into my shower shoes and across the little courtyard between the trailers to relieve SGT Turner, drew a cup of coffee from the Silex and stood in the open door of the trailer to survey my domain, my charge for the next six hours.

The little outpost looked almost lovely in the moonlight; all stark whites and depthless blacks. The sheepish faded daytime cheapness of the trailers, the scruffy gear and the ugly utility of the place were cleaned and sharpened by the monochrome of night. The coffee tasted rich and earthy, the night silent and chill; I felt calm, alert but calm. I felt like I could make myself so motionless and still that I could actually feel the stars wheeling overhead, cold pricks of light in the dark sky, feel the earth turning under me, feel the weight of space and time both pressing down and lifting me up. I felt like I was on the verge of knowing some great thing.


And just then Jutta's high, clear voice floated down from the night sky, down from the palm grove just up the wadi, down in crystal-hard clarity.

"Ach, mein Leroy!" she insisted, "Reit me, mein Leroy, reit me so like a desert stallion!"

The impossibly clear desert air carried along with her voice the sounds of a scuffle, a muffled flurry, like a clumsy work crew trying to stuff a small but vigorous animal into a gunnysack and beat it to death with their hands.

"Ja! Ja! Mein tiger! Mein general!" continued Jutta remorselessly, "Plunder me! Oh, ja, das ist unglaublich! Das ist unmoglich!

When the keening began I honestly wasn't sure who was wailing and whether it was joy, or agony, or both.

I went inside the TOC trailer, closed the door, and turned up the shortwave. It was Warsaw Pact pop music night on Radio Moscow and you haven't heard rock until you've heard Lithuanian Young Pioneer rock.


Everything was quiet when I turned in at dawn, and although I mentioned to several of my cronies that they might let SGT Mimms sleep in that morning since his new girlfriend had kept him up pretty much all night no one thought much of it until Jutta turned up at the gate at midmorning and Leroy Mimms did not.

When I awoke around noon Jutta was still there, squatting under the gate thorn tree smoking irritably. SGT Mimms was still not visible, although someone said they thought he might have gone to the latrine before dawn but not returned. I followed the whitewashed-cobble pathway down to the jakes and, on a hunch, ducked into the sandbagged bunker that overwatched the up-wadi approach and surprised a crouched, Caliban-like Mimms shoving a C-Rat cracker into his cakehole.

"So, good afternoon, oh mighty lover of women." I smiled, "How come your girlfriend is all alone out front?"

Mimms jumped like a man goosed with a cattle prod, one hand going protectively towards his crotch.

"She still there? Oh, fuck me. I'm starved, I ain't got no crackers left, and she get me if I come out before she gone."

This was a development, and I leaned against the opening of the bunker and eyed the cowering artilleryman carefully. He did have a twitchy sort of expression and a hunted look which didn't seem to fit with the passionate cries of the night before.

"Are you joking, man? You managed to get laid, here, in the fucking womanless Sinai, here where there is a woman behind every tree and there are eight fucking trees in the entire goddam peninsula? You may well be the only GI to EVER get laid at OP 3-fucking-2, the only line dog to bury his boner in the history of the OP, and you're hiding in a damn bunker? Think of the history you two made last night! Think of the humanity! Think of getting some more! Where's your pride, man?"

Mimms seemed to shrink a little.

"You don't know, doc," he whimpered, "Jutta, she crazy. She bite me, she tug my stuff, she don't never let me sleep or leave me alone. She want to just keep doin' it, doin' it, all the time, and she hit me when I try to stop. She say if I don't keep going she bite it off. I was afraid to sleep with her."

"Sounded to me like you already did that, sergeant."

"No, doc, I mean sleep-sleep. I came back here when she gave up last night 'cause with her jumpin' on me, pokin' me, lickin' me I was wore out. Fuck me, doc, I feel like a used otter pop."

I thought about this for a minute.

"Well, I feel like a traitor to my gender, but hows about I try to get her to move on, hey?"

"Oh, man, you a pal, doc."

So I loped over the little compound and found the Teutonic Titwillow still squatting in the shade. She was inclined to be brusque, and was plainly frustrated at being denied her new paramour, but eventually rose, butted her smoke and shouldered her backpack.

"You say gootbye to the sergeant, yes? You tell him I be back three, four days, we meet here, I show him good hike in wadi, ja?"

I agreed to carry the message, she nodded sharply and moved off up the wadi but moving with something missing in her step, her usual jerky energy muted as if by some vague but lingering regret.

Sergeant Mimms took his meals in the trailer for the next week, emerging only for brief, furtive dashes to the latrine or the shower. Even the squad hard men complained that his paranoia was making everyone goofy, and we were all relieved when a passerby from battalion (since the story was too good to withhold, both Jutta and her stallion were unit-wide celebrities for the next couple of weeks or so) reported seeing her hitchhiking north on the MSR just outside Taba, looking irked.

Solomon dutifully reported his observations to me that Saturday evening as we hung out by the wire and I waited for my radio shift.

"Sarn't Mimms, he went with that lady into the bushes but then she no can find him, she looked everywhere, asked me if I seen him, she got real mad! That some crazy shit, hunh, doc!"

"Yeah, Solomon, well, you know how people like to do crazy stuff, hunh."

"That no shit, Doc."

I finished the sweet tea old Selim had poured for me a little earlier. Solomon drifted away to play frisbee with Ahlers. SGT Turner and SSG Howard were lifting weights. SGT Mimms loitered outside the TOC trailer, looking relieved and just a tiny bit dissatisfied.

"Mein tiger..." I murmured.

It was time for my shift, I had a fresh pot of coffee, and it was Arabic pop music night on Radio Moscow and you haven't heard bubblegum pop until you've heard Lebanese Druze bubblegum pop.And the sun went down behind the mountains to the west.

Doc Mogart and the Minions of M&M

His given name was Maurice, but he said that nobody called him "Maurice" after infancy. His older brother apparently shortened it to "Little Mo", and by the time he was in elementary school it was just "Mo". By the time his testicles descended I'm not sure he remembered his real name.

His family name was Hogart, though, and the stress of repeating the "oh" sound twice - "Mo Hogart" - was excessive for the grade schoolers in whatever little flyover town he grew up in. By high school his two names had become one all-purpose "Mogart", and it is as Mogart I remember him, standing atop an orange-and-white drum at the barricaded entrance to Sector Control North.Mogart worked for the battalion Supply and Transport (S&T) platoon, the small contingent of logistics specialists tasked with pushing supplies forward from our brigade out to the line companies. Officially he worked with me in Headquarters Company, tossed into the jumble with us medics, the cooks in the mess hall, the clerks in the Battalion PAC, all of us ash and trash that kept the battalion running.

Ask any line dog and he'll tell you that the Headquarters Company is full of more nuts and fruits than a Harry and David gift basket. And if I were to be honest, I'd have to say that we DID have our share of eccentrics, including my alcoholic old boss Monty Harder and the staff sergeant we called "Sergeant Jambo" because he spoke some sort of unintelligible Carolina barrier island dialect which, to our ignorant ears, sounded like something out of a Jungle Jim movie. Nobody in the company could comprehend anything he said including the First Sergeant, who eventually transferred him somewhere at the other end of post. COSCOM, I think.

I should add that this gomer also had a full length portrait of himself in uniform.

Painted on black velvet.So.

Mogart wasn't exactly the standout character in our Headquarters Company. But he was certainly in the running. The announcement of his entry into the HHC "Serious Sinai Freak" contest was probably Fluffy the Flatcat.

Our billet buildings in South Base had a small clowder of feral cats living somewhere inside, probably in one of the exterior stairs or under the building itself. These fugitive creatures were typically seen only at night, by the guys on Charge of Quarters or battalion Staff Duty, or by the night bakers interrupting their lightless raids on the mess hall dumpsters.

Every so often one of these cats would meet with a predictable mishap on one of the camp roads. This was where Fluffy the Flatcat and Mogart made their acquaintance.

Mogart was returning from an evening's amusement at the EOD Club; Fluffy had met his steel-belted destiny some days before and had been baked to a leathery consistency on the arid asphalt by the merciless Sinai sun. Mogart said he had seen the unusual lump from a distance and had ambled over to investigate; those who knew him better suspected that he had tripped on the thing and had practically pissed himself when he fetched up next to Fluffy's petrified snarl.

For whatever reason he peeled the flattened critter off the pavement and toted it back to his billet, carefully depositing it on a picnic table outside the main door. Fluffy was waiting for him there the next morning, and that was the beginning of the brief reign of terror of the Fear of a Black Cat.Because through Mogart's agency Fluffy began turning up everywhere. He perched grinning down from above the orderly room door and gloried in a brief - roughly five minutes, from the time Mogart tied him there until the commander noticed him - elevation to hood ornament on the Battalion Commander's quarter-ton jeep.

Perhaps the most terrifying Fluffy appearance was tied crotch-high to one of the piss-tubes up at Sector Control after dark, where he confronted an sleepy Australian helicopter pilot who came to full awakening at the sight of what appeared to be a vicious animal poised to bite down upon his unprotected and fully occupied penis.

His screams brought the duty squad tumbling out of the TOC trailer wide-eyed and fumbling for their single taped-closed magazine, his frantic evasive action sprayed the piss tube, Fluffy and his trousers with equal thoroughness, and the ensuing international hard words brought a quick and surreptitious burial for Fluffy, who passed from undead catness into legend.Mogart was distraught at the loss of his furry friend. Several of the other guys from S&T accused him of then trying to lure the Shithead from 3A into the road with meat-like food from a C-ration (or more likely an MRE - we were just beginning to get them in the early Eighties) to procure an even larger flat pet.

(Have I mentioned the Shitheads yet in Tales from the Sinai? No?

Well, the Shitheads were supposedly the brainstorm of some psychological genius from DA, who, after spending quite a lot of the government's money, determined that having "companion animals" was good for the boys' morale. Said animals, typically a sort of rangy greyhound-y looking mutt, were apparently obtained at very low prices from a nearby source - probably Israeli, since the Egyptians like most Arabs are not generally dog fanciers - and imported to their new homes to spend their doggie lives warming the hearts of the lonely boys in uniform.

There these poor lads immediately dubbed them individually and collectively "Shithead" and spent what time they didn't ignore them booting them around and cursing their uncleanliness, uselessness, relentless mooching and usual expression of morose self-pity. Which, given the attitude they met, was hardly unreasonable.

When more specific identification was needed, the shithead would be surnamed by its location.

"You hear about that Shithead got run over yesterday up on the MSR near Eilat?"

"Well, damn, that sucks. Shithead there was a cool Shithead. You mean the Checkpoint 3 Alpha Shithead?"

"Nah, he's fine. It was the OP3-1 Shithead."

"Well, there you go, then. That fuckin' Shithead was dumber the the goddamn Sergeant Major. No wonder he got his doggie ass run over."

"Dude, that's harsh. Dog's dead, you're insulting him by comparing him to the Sergeant Major..?"

"Sorry, man..."

My only other Shithead experience came during the Force change-of-command, when the new MFO Commander flew into OP 3-11 and proceeded to ignore all of our military cleanliness and knowledge-of-our-standing-orders sort of brass-shining we'd gotten up for him and instead asked the squad leader about the OP Shithead, of which we knew nothing other than his infuriating habit of crapping in people's unguarded boots.

Anyway, that was the Shitheads)

I went out into sector [a wonderful time and a story I'll have to tell another day, of Sergeant Howard's squad and our adventures as Wadi Ain El Fortaga; Leroy and Jutta, the camels in the wire, Suleman's kite, Old Selim, Sala and Salaha, and the ascent of Gebel Mikemin. But that's for another day] right after this; there was quite a bit of speculation about the effect the loss of his necrotic feline friend would have on Mogart."Fucker's going to really go Asiatic," warned several would-be China hands, "better watch out for him when we get back."

So it was with some anticipation that I looked over the white-painted siderail of the whining deuce-and-a-half as we rolled out of the mountains, crossed the MSR towards the Sector Control wire. My curiosity wasn't long unsated. For there, perched atop one of the empty drums at the main gate, was the man himself.

It was only after I spent a moment wondering what the hell he was playing at that I noticed his worshipers.These consisted of a raggedy swarm of fifteen of so assorted "Bedouin" kids. These weren't the genuine deep-desert Bedu, the like of which we had supped with the preceding two weeks. These were the scaff and raff of the seedy little settlement nearby; town Arabs, drifters, fellahin, really. And there were more than a dozen of these clustered in a sort of half-circle in the dusty waste outside the gate, ranging from borderline-lean just-past-toddlers to underfed-borderline-starvation-thin mid-teens. They were all gazing up at Mogart as if he was a baked chicken, Ramadan, Christmas, New Years and the second coming of Muhammad Ali all in a set of chocolate-chip fatigues.

As we grew closer to the gate, we could tell that the kids were watching Mogart for some sort of signal; this he gave, in the form of a sort of little jump or hop that included bringing his hands together over his head.

The response was immediate and explosive; suddenly fifteen little Egyptians were doing frantic jumping jacks - "sidestraddle hops", in Army terms - their little bodies jigging, spinning, and bounding with the frenzied motion, like jumping jacks performed by spastic methamphetamine users.

Mogart lowered his arms to shoulder height, pointing both index fingers at the ground, which was the signal for his little minions to drop to the bare soil and begin doing pushups. These were more energetic than efficient - most of the kids couldn't keep their backs straight and the resulting sine wave was pretty silly looking. The little toddler types just rolled around on the ground.

And then Mogart raised and spread his arms triumphantly, at which signal his followers jumped to their feet bowing at the waist like so many toy drinking birds. Even over the blat and whine of the trucks we could hear their little voices crying

"Hail Mogart! Hail, oh mighty Mogart! Hail Mogart! Oh mighty Mogart!"

And then the entire scene dissolved into scrambling, kicking, grabbing chaos, because their king scattered largesse among his people in the form of peanut M&Ms. The resulting riot was not pretty to watch, as the older kids snatched and clubbed with brutal efficiency. While the god of the steel drum looked down benignly and raised his arms again. The chanting returned as we rolled through the gate; hail, Mogart, oh mighty Mogart, hail...I don't think anyone said a word for the next mile, until from up near the cab, a low voice opined;

"Well. He's gonna burn in Hell for THAT shit..."

All there agreed that deserved as it was it was unlikely, since Hell was empty and the Devil Mogart was here.

And the sun went down behind the mountains to the west.

Doc Lawes and the L Word

Young men are foolish.

This is the reason for much of the world's domestic violence, about half of its wars and nearly all its venereal disease. It is also the reason for much of its great romantic poetry, a tremendous amount of its art and music and at least one great opera. The foolishness of young men is both the tender shoot and the dung it grows from.

I was no less foolish than any other young man.

For one, I thought I was immortal. Or, at least, I thought I was too smart and too tough to kill easily, not really understanding that high explosive and high-velocity metal had no way of detecting intelligence and toughness. This meant that they would, as Bill Mauldin said of artillery shells, "kill the smart soldier hiding in his foxhole as quickly as the dumb one standing on top of a knoll". Which explained why at the rollicking age of 27 I was sitting with a dozen other paratroopers in a dingy and rather worn deuce-and-a-half rattling down the MSR towards South Base Camp.The Sinai burned around us; the arid mountains to the right marking the edge of the central massif, the coastal strip curving asymptotically before and behind us down to the blinding glitter of the Gulf of Sinai. Dusty black, the asphalt terminator of the coast highroad divided land from sea, deserted save for our convoy and the occasional frightening Egyptian bus. These, rocketing past in their frantic haste to leave the vast nothing behind them and get to the nowhere up the road ahead, looked like the restless rolling dead of rural Alabama coach routes, battered fenders and paint scars testimony to past victories in Egyptian traffic.

We had come 5,000 miles to this place, involuntary tourists in one of the great wastelands of human history, to show the flag and maintain the peace between Egypt and Israel, a peace that both sides publicly tolerated while secretly loathed and embraced. We were ambassadors for the United States, a visible commitment to World Peace - our opinions on thin thighs were not solicited. We were hostages, of a sort, expected to die in place rather than tolerate trucebreaking. We were "soldiers for peace", the Salvation Army but with a more lethal range of persuasion.We reacted to this with the respectful discipline that American footsoldiers have always been known for; that is to say we mocked the land and its people, speculated endlessly on the chance of acquiring intoxicating spirits, the merits of various popular musics, and the carnal versatility of the female of our species actual, hypothetical, and fantastical.

We passed through the land where the Pharaohs and the Israelites passed, where history was made, where madmen and visionaries and millions of common men just like us had come and gone. And we made crude jokes about the black-robed Bedu women and spat sunflower seeds out into the desert.

For another, I was in love.

Actually, I was in the midst of love, congeries. I was actually in...ummm..."loves". I felt blessed, despite my recent geographic celibacy, with a largesse of girlfriends, an embarras de richesses of inamoratas, an absolute harem of sweethearts. Not to mention the sultanesque prospects of concupiscent rapture! We were talking a sheriff's posse of poontang, a smack-down, pure-D torrent of tail, a plethora of the sweet poozle.

I had three girlfriends. Three young women who professed to each delight in me, were complete strangers to each other, and were so distant geographically that the possibility of my getting busted was mathematically incalculable.

I was a happy Specialist Fourth Class sitting that long ride back to South Camp.

Along with the usual dissipations of sunbathing, hot chow (or as hot as was tolerable in the alkaline sauna that was the edge of the Gulf), sunbathing, endless games of hearts and dominoes, scuba diving along the coral strand, sunbathing and working out there were the closest thing to home we had: the MARS radio-satellite telephones that allowed you to call back to the States.

During the returns to South Camp between periods "in sector" this normally meant a pleasant afternoon exchanging romantic nothings seriatim with my trio of houris. Given that I had little to say other than unobservant observations on the general desert-y quality of the desert and the peculiarities of my squaddies, and they had little more than the inanities of badly-educated, self-absorbed young American adults, the three conversations total contained about enough mental and emotional content of what I would come to realize later was one genuinely adult conversation. But they were all I had at the time, and I felt smug about them.

You see, I had been an awkward, socially inept child and adolescent, and my experience with women was still limited to an overmastering interest in them as possessors of genitalia designed to accommodate my own and the beginnings of a vague sort of appreciation for women as individuals, many of whose tastes and temperaments seemed delightfully different, and as a gender whose form and features seemed designed to please the male mind and eye. The notion that one woman, let alone three, would express a willingness to spend time in my company was an unaccustomed delight. I hugged my little trio of girlfriends to my ego like a little drake with his first ducks. I felt like Casanova, like Don Juan, like Mark Sanford would one day feel "hiking the Appalachian Trail" all the way to Buenos Aires...I felt fiendishly naughty.

This salacious anticipation lasted until we cleared the front gate and rolled up through the cheap metal buildings to the mobile homes that were our company area. There I climbed down and slapped the dust off my "chocolate-chip" uniform, slung my ruck into the sterile rectangle that served as my billet, showered and mooched up to the HQ Company orderly room to check my mail.

The first sign that something was wrong was no letters from Kissy.

Kissy was the Japanese-American girl I had been dating off and on since college, a plumptiously curvaceous nineteen-year-old with a helium giggle and the sultriest sloe eyes I had ever lost myself in. Of the three I was perhaps the fondest of her, because she seemed like the most genuinely loving and kind of the three, because she was built along the lines of an Asian Dolly Parton, and because her mom made the best shrimp-and-vegetable tempura this side of the Ginza.

Beauty won't 'elp when your rations is cold, mate.

She was the longest-running of my then-girlfriends, and she was also a manic letter-writer, filling pages of awful high-school-writing-class glurge that seemed to flow from her in a completely unfiltered fashion. In the Sinai I had received letters from her that kept me entertained for days simply jiggling the puzzle-box of her mind trying to figure out how french fries, sheet music, her period, kissing, her brother's skateboard and step-dancing related to one another.

But there were no letters.

(I didn't know it but this was the beginning of the longest "off" period of out off-and-on dating. She simply drifted off without animus but without any real explanation. We would reunite briefly a year later and then part for good without ever really understanding each other. She eventually did pop up in perhaps the single most peculiar incident in my entire life; literally running into my bride-of-one-day at a restaurant on our way to Europe for our honeymoon. We exchanged rather stunned greetings, I introduced my wife, and she said all the right, conventional things. But after my parents and bride had gone on ahead, she stopped me and asked, apparently seriously, why we had never gotten married. Because, I reminded her, she had never even evidenced any interest in having carnal knowledge of me, let alone marriage. That was because I was waiting for you to MAKE me sleep with you, she said conversationally, eyeing me with the fizzing coolness that had always been her way, and her charm. For a moment - just a moment - I felt the regret that I had missed her signal. But then I shook myself angrily.

That's called rape, darlin', I said to her, and people go to jail for it, and I passed her on after my family and never saw her again.)

But I think I knew, standing there in the noisy sunlight outside the orderly room, that my trio was now a duet.

Ah. Well.

Time to call Lizbeth.

The most recent and most passionate of my beloveds, Lizbeth was a local girl out of Carolina. We had met when she had come to Fayetteville with her friend, my friend Woodus' ex-wife. Minta and my pal had a professionally bizarre relationship. Woodus was a real good ol' boy. He liked drinking, he liked shooting things, and he liked fucking, in that order. Minta, a steel and kudzu Southern doll with ambition like a carbide-tipped ripping tooth, realized within moments of their marriage vows that if she didn't crave the life of a perpetually-pregnant slattern that she would have to drop Woodus and all his works like a live grenade.

She did so, but with enough remnant affection for the good ol' boy that several times a year she'd return to the piney woods of North Carolina from Atlanta or Charlotte or where ever it was she was trying to sack some corporate fortress, show up at my friend's door and within moments would have them horizontal, unclothed and indecent. This connubial gluttony would last the weekend with breaks for food, drink, and cigarettes and then she would leave. Woodus would sober up, swear never to take her back again, and the entire business would reoccur in a hundred days or so.

Lizbeth was her wingman; smaller, plainer, less...well, less everything than sleek Minta. She was a small-town girl from Dunn and enjoyed being a small-town girl from Dunn. She worked the night shift in the packaging plant there and lived in a shoddy second-floor apartment with a roommate who smoked clove cigarettes and liked stock-car racing and whose lover used to call for her by driving up to the front of the rental and throwing whatever debris was in the front seat of his car up at the windows. Since this was largely fast food rubbish the entire facade above the central door looked as if a large bird roosted on the eave above and shat ketchup, mayonnaise, french fry bits and hamburger condiments down the front wall.

Any Southerner would have pegged her in a glance: po' white trash.

But she was a bright, passionate young woman who wanted, or at least thought she wanted, to be more than a small-town girl from Dunn. We liked each other from the first, progressed to hand-holding and kissing and within two weeks I was staying over at her little rat-trap in Dunn. We ate dinners with her parents, a frightened little man and his awful wife, still holding some newlywed failure of his over him, we walked or jogged together, read, even went riding at some sort of local livery stable thing. She seemed like a good woman, and I really wanted to know her better.

Before I left for the Sinai I asked her if she would come live with me in Fayetteville. She didn't seem thrilled, and we had left it up in the air when I trudged up the boarding stairs to the charter jet to Ras Nasrani...but after about three weeks in-country I got a letter from her.

She was as poor a letter-writer as you can imagine the product of a bad Southern public school system to be. It took me a bit to decipher the message, but the gist was that she didn't want to wait - she wanted to get married. Now. Today. As soon as I came home. Whichever came first.

To say I was shocked would not be overstating the case. I was shocked. I wrote back, suggesting that I was open to the idea and that we should talk about it as soon as we could, over the phone or when I got home. Since then I had tried to call her several times when I got back in from sector but had missed her every time.

Perhaps now was a good time.

I plodded down to the battalion headquarters building through the heat I was already beginning to learn to ignore. The line for the phones wasn't long on a weekday afternoon, and I was soon seated in the spartan metal cubicle listening to the peculiar clicks, hums and buzzes that preceded the telephone connection to the United States, presumably as the electronic signal passed from antenna to satellite to antenna to undersea cable to transmitter to receiver to junction box to telephone.

But once again I didn't talk to Lizbeth. The person who answered the phone was her mother.

Not just her mother, but her mother in tears, almost hysterical, sobbing and moaning like a fundamentalist preacher getting worked up about the Day of Judgment.

I had never really known what to say to her mother, a hard-eyed slab of sagging muscle that I considered as mean as an adder and less trustworthy. I usually approached her emotionally armed and was utterly helpless to deal with the woman as a wretched mess.

My immediate thought was that something awful had happened to Lizbeth. She was a bad driver of legend, disregarding traffic rules and her own safety magnificently. But the heaving cries did not contain the words "killed" or "dead", so I settled myself in to try and untangle the emotional mess on the other end of the long, long line.

After a lot of soothing and coaxing - imagine soothing and coaxing some large, frightening beast that you are not confident won't attack you once you've got it down out of the tree it's stuck in and you get some idea of both the process and my enjoyment of it - mom's sobs subsided enough for me to start getting some sense of her.

"She...she's run off...off...with that...that..." barked Mom. I cursed silently. Well, shit, I've been dumped. Oldest story in the world. Goddam it. I wonder if it was that guy Kevin she used to see..?

"...that...that lezzie slut bitch Rondalee from her shift at work!" wailed mom from the Hell that gapes only for conservative Southern Christian women fall whose only daughters hook up with out butch lesbians.At that second I had two thoughts: one, that I had been dumped for a woman, and, two, that the woman in question was the sexiest woman in Dunn (admittedly, not a deep gene pool, but still...) and I'd have dumped Lizbeth for her, too. God, I was a fool.

After that we didn't have much to say - we never had, really - and I hung up, rather rueful rather than angry, depressed or grieving. My main concern was getting my stuff back from her place. The first hint that things would not be that easy was at the staff duty desk on the way outside.

"Damn, Doc, tough luck..." commented the staff duty runner, a guy from B Company I barely knew named Horner. "At least you know that you're still the last man in her life..."

"Unh...what?" was all I could think of to say. Apparently Lizbeth's mom's voice had been louder than I had thought. A couple of the hangers-on waiting for the phones smirked in an unpleasantly superior fashion. I stomped out in my shorts and flip-flops, a particularly unmilitary and indignified exit.

By the time I made it back to the HHC company area the news had fled before me like winged Rumor, full of tongues. Three of the loudest mouths in the medical platoon met me at the steps of the billets.

"Heard your old lady dumped you, man." said one.

"Damn, that sucks, dude." commented another.

"Well, I guess at least you can say that when ol' Doc has a woman she never wants another man..." said the first, whereupon they all shouted;

"...SHE WANTS A WOMAN!"

I slunk away to the messhall, but not before checking to see whether the Egyptian hired messboys weren't hanging out by the fly-aerodrome trash bins to taunt me with my apparent ability to turn formerly douce heterosexual women into ravenous, rug-munching lesbians.

It would not have surprised me a bit to encounter a Bedouin hawking camel rides outside the perimeter fence who would greet me with the universal tongue-between-finger-vee gesture of oral-genital contact and the falsetto crow "'Ey, Doc! You woman, she like woman, yes? No like you man, no?"



For a day I was the butt of everyone's joke. I heard the Ten Thousand Names for Cunnilingus, and was roundly and loudly applauded as the Most Throughly Dumped trooper in the battalion. I was angry, and spend a lot of time in the gym working that off, and was foolishly surprised, as young men often are, that my infamy was the merest of passing entertainments and was forgotten within a sunset, replaced by newer news and fresher gossip. The hothouse innuendo about our Headquarters Company commander and his slavering lust for the lady lawyer from the AG detachment was a particular crowd-pleaser...And I had the last of my scattered trio of girlfriends, and another two weeks in sector coming, and young men to doctor, and the empty Sinai to explore, and a slightly wiser appreciation for the vagarities of life and love. Somewhat to my surprise, my foolish life went on pretty much as foolishly as before.

And the sun went down behind the mountains to the west.

Doc Luna and the Mountains of Madness

Introductory Note: I feel like storytelling tonight; this is the third in the "Tales from the Sinai" series. If you are confused by the setting or the nature of this post, you might look here for an introduction and explanation. The second story, "Doc Nelscott and the Obscure Object of Desire", is here.From the first day he came through the door into the battalion aid station his cramped, pointed-toe walk made Doc Luna seem like a stranger even among a whole group of strangers.We’d been pulled in from all over Division – from all over Fort Bragg – to fill the battalion for the Sinai deployment. I’d volunteered from my first outfit over in Third Brigade; we had medics from the Army hospital over across post and medics from other units we’d never heard of over on Smoke Bomb Hill and even from distant COSCOM, a place a fabled as CloudCuckooLand, where we’d heard of the “Cosmonites”, weird, Army-like hominids that were said to inhabit dwellings they never left, like the so-called “civilians” we were said to be defending, who thought of trees as landscape instead of a combination of dwelling and fortification and dirt as walkway instead of home and building materials.

Most of us had met less than a month before, and had barely learned each other’s names.

But Doc Luna was different.

He was almost silent, for one thing, in a group of medics.

Monosyllabic, at best. Practically mute

Most grunts will tell you that medics chatter like starlings but in truth, starlings are the mimes of the medical trade. Army medics, generally speaking, have never left a person or a place unimproved by talking. Stories, jokes, lies, gossip, and imprecation: there is almost nothing that a medic won’t talk about. Boasting is considered gauche, which means that war stories and sex stories usually have to be edited for time and content, but pretty much any- and everything else is jaw fodder.

But not for Luna.

And it was more than just reticence. Within days a couple of us had encountered the touchy, prideful, almost angry side he hid behind the impassive face. Misheard words became insults; casual avoidance was taken as slight. Before he had the chance to find his place among us he became a figure of mild amusement, then distaste, then distain.

He arrived at the airstrip at Ras Nasrani a man alone in a uniformed crowd.

He idled through the transition period bored and irritable as the rest of us. His personal peculiarities were lost amid the new strangeness of place and people. We forgot to ignore him as we goggled at the distanceless desert that stretched an infinity between the mountainous highlands to the impossibly blue Gulf of Aqaba, at the black tents of the bedu with their begging and herds of scrubby goats,at the dribble of passersby and tourists that transited the Sinai in the winter; the British officer and his wife, tanned and somehow managing to be horsey even mounted in a dirty Land Rover, the German girls reeking of friendly sex and cigarettes, the odd Eurowhatsit with his Chitrali cap and battered bicycle and ajima-load of bedrolls and bundles.

So it wasn’t until we were parceled out to out first OPs that we got reminder of the oddity that we’d wondered at a bit at first.

Every OP – “observation post” – was a tiny island of humanity in the midst of one of the world’s great rocky deserts. A ring of sharp concertina wire enclosing sandbagged bunkers used typically only by camel spiders and scorpions, a pair of aluminum trailers (one for a dwelling, the other combination kitchen and commo shack), a water tower over a shower stall, a one-hole burn-out latrine.Each one had a distinct character. The Checkpoints; One-Alpha, Two-Alpha and Three-Alpha, were bustling, busy places full of traffic and activity along the Main Supply Route or “MSR” that ran along the eastern littoral of the peninsula. Others, like OP3-2, were along large wadis that formed the passageways through into the interior and were often visited, or even tenanted by, the Bedouin of the Sinai. Others, like OP3-11 on Tiran Island and Remote Site 3-5 were as isolated as men could be in an age of radio and aircraft; fragile specks of human business in a land of rock and heat and stillness, cold and light and dark and wind.

I hope it was just bad luck that the first OP Doc Luna was sent to was RS 3-5. I’d hate to think that there was a Plan behind that, because to believe that would be to suspect that the Calvinists were right and that we are, indeed, all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Because the remote Remote Site was not kind to Doc Luna.I liked the Remote Site, liked it's barrenness and the echoing clatter of stones in its canyons, the fossils of oysters and squid telling of the ocean that had once bathed this desolate place. We returned with tales of all-night card games and patrols sneaking down tortured wadis to find Bedu fires years dead.The squad that came in from RS 3-5 brought with them some disturbing stories. Stories about their medic muttering to himself, glaring at some of the other soldiers, and shouting and fighting in his sleep. Disappearing at random times and then turning up in odd places like inside the food storage bins or inside a vacant bunker. Arguing with the squad leader and refusing some of his orders.

Sergeant Ramon, the medical platoon sergeant, called Luna in and tried to talk to him. The result of the meeting was not promising; Luna accused several of the squad’s soldiers of improbable maliciousness, and spoke bitterly of a secret plot against him. SFC Ramon asked Luna if he wanted to see the commander but received only a shake of the head. Both men parted unsatisfied.

The next deployment in sector passed quietly; Luna was sent to busy Checkpoint 3-Alpha, where he got on well enough. His squad leader returned with only the observation that Luna seemed a trifle over-concerned with the chlorination of the water supply, not a real problem since the checkpoint had an external water source.On the more distant OPs the potability of the water WAS a real hazard. In many places the water resupply truck visited no more than once or twice a month, and in the black plastic tanks the chance for bacteria to flourish between fillings was ever-present.

The medics’ two most constant tasks on those outlying OPs was to burn out the used Army chow in the half-barrel under the latrine, and to check the chlorine content of the water daily and to add the chemical whenever the level grew riskily low. It was a repetitive chore of delicate brutality, fiddling with tablets and water and the plastic gadget with its color wheel and testing cells, dumping the eye-searing pool chlorine into that hot, echoing black vault. Too much and the GIs wouldn’t drink, no matter how brutal the heat. Too little and the possibility of gut sickness and panicked flight to the reeking latrine was a fear buried in the quiet place of all of our heads.

For all the blister lancing and sunburn anointing, our management of the water was the most constant influence we exerted on the other soldiers with us on the OPs. We were the sommeliers of water; sipping, measuring, testing, judging. Which level of chlorine will go with tonight’s Chili Mac? Should we add a pinch more for a robust “L’eau d’Esther Guillaumes” to accompany the morning’s dried egg omelettes? What flavor of water “carries” well on a long patrol, as opposed to one which “sits” for a more sedentary gate guard lifestyle..?I spent the next two weeks out on OP 3-11 on “the island” of Jazirat Tiran watching seabirds soar over the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aqaba and patrolling the uninhabited rock with my squaddies wearing nothing but hat, boots, rifle and LBE equipment harness. I heard nothing from the rest of the battalion until I returned to the mainland.

While I was clutching and encouraging the shimmying old Huey to make it out to Tiran Island, Doc Luna rode out with his squad up the wadi to OP 3-3. The troopers said that he seemed no different than ever, perhaps a little more withdrawn, perhaps a little less relaxed, but no one really cared for him, so no one really bothered to notice. He was just there, ol’ Doc Luna, the oddball medic. He scuffed around the OP the first few days with the rest of the guys, squinted into the sun, looked on as the others complained their now-familiar complaints about the heat, the dust and the wind. Ate alone, and in silence.The third or fourth day several of the squaddies complained about the water. It was nasty, full of chlorine, like pool water, they said. One of the team leaders drew a cup from the tank and reported to his squad leader that the men were right; the water was so chlorinated as to be practically undrinkable.

The squad leader, a soft-spoken young sergeant, found Luna in the bunk-trailer and instructed him to open the tank lid and burn off the chlorine; Luna’s response was a grunt and a glare. The next day the water tasted worse, if anything. The staff sergeant brought one of his team leaders to witness the order he gave to Doc Luna: bring down the chlorine level immediately. No excuses.

What happened next was described to me as a delighted garble of reportage, inference and innuendo. Some of the soldiers claimed that Luna growled like an animal, snapping and shaking his head, muttering curses and threats to the noncommissioned officers and all the soldiers. Others said that he remained impassive but seemed to swell in the threateningly reptilian way. A third group described his face as staring, eyes fixed and jaw clenched as he moved through the OP like a badly-played marionette, ignoring the soldiers idling the hot afternoon away.

What everyone agreed on was that he had gone to the water tank and drawn a 5-gallon jerrycan full of the awful pool water. After filling this, they said that he had taken the chlorine test kit out to the edge of the open helicopter landing area and had carefully laid every cheap plastic piece out on the stones before thoroughly splintering them with one of the orange border boulders. Private Ahlers solemnly reported that the largest single fragment was no bigger than his pinky toe. I could only agree, having no wish to see Ahler’s pinky toe.Everyone then said that Luna had then clutched his jerrycan to him and stalked back to the billet trailer, where he crawled into his bunk with the can and the K-bar knife he had carried on his LBE. Any and every attempt to address him was met with weird yowls and cries and curses and jabbings of the knife. At last the squad retreated to the TOC trailer to call the sector control and report that their medic had gone ape, gonzo, bugnuts, batshit crazy and cry for help.Everyone there on OP 3-3 that day had a different picture of the scene when the Dutch military police arrived with the battalion surgeon, the provost marshal and some sort of psychiatric fellow from Al Gorah. I heard of wild struggles, crazed rants and long, babbling soliloquies from the tormented Luna, whispered conversations, hasty conferences until finally the MPs crashed into his bunk and extracted the thrashing, screaming madman in a flurry of arms and legs and fists. Everyone agreed that Luna was finally securely strapped into the white jeep, silent, defeated, head down but his jerrycan still beside him for the journey down to sector control, and from there to the troop medical clinic at South Camp. Rumor went wild from there; he had bitten one of the doctors in the face, he had been “put in one of them Hannibal Lector mask things” as Specialist Goines described it, he had been flown out of the Sinai that very night. Rumor also had other, even more impressive tales that most of us, while agreeing were probably bullshit, were all secretly hoping were true. The madness of one of our fellows had an eerie delight to us, novelty in the midst of boredom, a fearsome but distant danger like a firefight seen from a hilltop far away.

What was true fact is that we never saw Luna again.

I remember sitting at the park bench outside the cheap modular building that Luna and I had shared a fortnight previously and wondering what had happened, why he had come to this time and this place to disintegrate so utterly, who the man had been inside that silent face. Had he always been somehow flawed, fractured inside, just waiting for the wrong combination of people and things and surroundings to fall to pieces? Or was he just like all of us, was his fall the fall that could overcome any of us any time for no reason at all…just the relentless, hopeless erosion of self and sanity, the loss of reason; quick and hopeless, or frantically scrabbling to keep the shattering pieces of his person together?I had no answer from the evening noise of South Camp, the generators’ humming clatter and the sound of Egyptian pop music from the mess hall kitchen down the other end of the camp. The answer was locked inside the head of the beaten man who flew away, high and northwards in the night sky over the Mediterranean, as the sun went down over the mountains to the west.