5

Woke from a dream where K__ and I go on the solo backpacking trip I’d planned for after this deployment. They were simple scenes: eating at a restaurant, cycling, hiking, depending on each other’s company the same way we had throughout the deployment.
The dream seemed to be making a point, because suddenly a scene with him became difficult, the friendship on edge. At the point where we argued, the dream showed the argument twice.
The first time was honest, genuine, and went well, I did and said everything on impulse instead of on purpose, and mine and K__’s friendship became impressive.
The second time the scene played out, I was overly polite and overly-professional in dealing with him, which ruined it. The dream seemed to be insisting that if I wasn’t fake, all my problems would be resolved.
I lay there, going over what the dream could’ve meant, feeling its point but having little ability to articulate it. All day it affected me.
Actual freedom -- like my savings -- and personal honesty, have gone hand in hand in my life. I’ve been doing it all my life: making the best of things because I had no choice, but never really being happy, never allowing myself to feel my true unhappiness.
Like how the closer the end of deployment gets, the more I allow myself to acknowledge how bad the deployment was. It’s what people do, that’s what people do to get through the sh-t they’re in. I stay hidden, in order to not be honest, I find excuses for staying hidden.
One way I do that is to find ways to dislike others, to distrust others. I know that much is true. It’s meanness, the scenarios I create. It’s because I got mad, then I tell the story that the other person got mad first, and the scenario is supposed to be my evidence of that. That’s how my crimes become his crimes. That’s what I did to K__: he made me angry, I got distrustful, then created the situation where he has to defend himself while I never show my anger, never show my cards.
When I like someone I’m honest. People haven’t been honest with me much. People haven’t liked me much. When there has been honesty, though: like SFC T___ that one time, W___, K___ .. I’ve been playing games, mental games, self-distractions. It’s like I’ve been making the story fit into some vague untrue context, one I’ve known since I was born, one that was insane.
I force my feelings to fit in it also. Like the way soldiers here insist on warping their experiences here so that they will fit within what they’ve learned from Hollywood movies about the Military.
Anger and Sexuality are still what I pretend to not be able to feel bur really I ignore.
The honesty started out with an obvious requirement: written words. Seems like now it’s insisting on more.
I honestly thought I was honest before, now I see how much time I’ve wasted -- all the time with the over politeness, the graciousness, all fake. As I thought about the dream it wasn’t long before I could feel myself as the boy, as if nothing’s changed after all these years -- no distance between me and the House, no distance between me and the boy.
The day ended with me awaiting a convoy in the middle of the night out on a desolate corner of the FOB. After writing down my life as it happens to me, I’m starting to think that stories aren’t something that just happens to people, I’m starting to think that I have a certain amount of power in creating the story.
I’ve got to take care of myself, I thought to myself. A good life isn’t just going to happen to me. I’ve got to get real about this. It goes back to the boy, when I’m honest, I go back to the boy.

__________

　
House__, standing outside my duty station, waiting on the forklift, said to me about W___:
_Can’t stand him, never could. Total fag._
A lot of people dislike W__, because he’s so confident and assertive, bur also critical of others, and difficult to see as human.
W__ and I talked for a long time over dinner. Each of the three dining rooms of the chow hall were mostly deserted. I stepped into one in order to get a particular flavor of Gatorade, and saw the back of his head. I almost said hi, but he didn’t quite see me, then I didn’t know if maybe he had seen me, but was just trying not to be awkward.
I never trust that people like me. I went back into the other dining room and sat down in front of my food. A minute later W__ sat himself in front of me and started talking to me. W__ is half Filipino and half caucasion, so he ended up with unique eyes; he knows all he has to do is smile at someone and it’s like his eye will twinkle -- he can win anybody over.
Conversing wasn’t as hard this time; I understood that W__ didn’t have to pick up his plate of food and move into another dining room, he did it because he wanted to. I felt like there was plenty of time now, I don’t have to somehow tell him everything, because I’ll see him again, just like it used to be.
We talked about our days in artillery, of nights where we had snuck out of the field and went drinking. I tried to imply a distinction between who he was back then, and who is now. He described himself as unfocused, wild, and on edge back then.
_But I liked you back then._ I said.

_Oh, as in you don’t like me now._ he replied, jokingly, almost.
_No, I like you now, I just mean. Not everyone liked you back then_
_Who didn‘t like me back then?_
If it had actually been back then, he would’ve said he didn’t give a f-ck. But now he seemed genuinely surprised and uneasy about it.
_I just mean that you seemed to always be around me back then._
_Well yeah, you were the only one in our unit who wasn’t a total dou-che bag._
_Why did I attract so much crazy back then? You were the only sane person I knew._
_You’ve got that trusting face._
_I’m incredibly distrustful.. You even know that._
_You’ve got that trustful face is what I meant to say,_ he said.
_I felt like there was a lot of bromancing going on.,_ W___ said a few minutes later, concerning our old artillery unit.
I was afraid he meant me, but actually I was his haven from that.
_You were the only normal one,_ he said.
It’s true that I end up in close friendships because they’re so safely platonic. Then I would realize that’s not what I really want in my life, then I would wonder if I’m gay, then I would remember that I come from seventeen years of extreme child abuse and things are complicated.
We were the last ones in the chow hall, so finally one of its staff told us we had to leave so they could close up.
Outside, walking through the pitch dark because we‘re on what‘s called a Dark FOB, I led him through the conversations I wanted to have, I wanted him to catch me up as far as how and why he’s changed.
He seemed to get the hint, and he told the stories, how once he found a career he liked, and a woman he loved, he simply focused in on both.
He told me about his deployment, how it wasn’t like his first one, where he had more people he trusted, more friends to bul-sh-t with. He stayed to himself for the most part here. He didn’t have a K___ this deployment, no battle buddy, no second storyline, just this deployment’s day to day work and missions.
I told him I had tried to give him space, but now I wished we had had more to do with each other, I even apologized for not being around. I told him I had had a hard deployment, but that I couldn’t tell the story where we could be overheard.
While I knew every inch of the FOB well, especially at night, W__ hadn’t seen the farther parts. He showed me one of the towers, as we tried to climb it, he told me about how during his first deployment that was where they had to pull guard duty for twelve hour shifts.
He told me about how big the FOB was, how it was coed, how it had a swimming pool, how when he got his dear john letter he began dating an air force chick.
I liked climbing the old concrete tower, hearing W__‘s stories in the dark, because it was the deployment I had missed out on, I always felt like I should’ve been there.
Finally we found a tower we thought might be suitable for hanging out in. We climbed to the top as I began my own story. We were black sillouettes under a dark blue sky almost bright with starts.
Turns out the old tower was occupied by Ugandans who were actually using the tower to guard from. I talked my way out of it. They seemed to believe I really did go all the way out there just to check on them.
Then I went back to the story I was trying to tell W__, how I had taken on a first sergeant and his buddies, how they had turned out to be criminals, how they had tried to Mace__ and god knows who else and how I had managed to get out of it, and in the end the true bad guys were charged.
It took over an hour to tell the story, as we sat in one of the bunkers intended to shield soldiers from incoming mortar. W__’s silhouette was all I could see, and I felt relieved that during the difficult story all he could see of me was my own.
Maybe I impressed him with my deployment story, I don’t know, but I let him make the moves.
We walked back to his tent. He said he wanted me to come back, he wanted me to stop by his tent and go to chow with him tomorrow.
I had taken a break from seeing him, thinking it was his turn and I didn’t want to be that annoying guy in an uneven friendship, but he is making the moves.
I think we might be friends again. I still wondered in the back of my mind why he left back then, and so suddenly.
Days when work validates my qualities, and W__ and K___ treat me well, are good days, they have been some of my best days here, because it means things have not been for naught.
I’m not a failure, I’m a capable person, with good friends, good experiences.

__________