Chapter 8

When he checked out of the Turquoise Towers, Stacy left a carved message in the head post of the bed.

It read: Iraq - Class of 2005.

Iraq was his higher education. Going there taught him much about human nature, just as going to college did, but in a global way. He learned about the limits of humans- how much pain they could suffer before they inflicted it on others. About situational ethics -how some things in life had no right or wrong answers no matter how many essays you wrote about them. About literature- the poetry of the war, inscribed on the walls of houses emptied, blood stained. Lines left by soldiers fighting a war they didn’t and could never understand, who crammed for tests in the battlefield.

Unlike college, they didn’t get to pick a major in the war. Edicts, decrees, orders, political machinations ruled their daily lives, told them what they would major in, where to eat, where to shave, where to stand, when to leave, what to wear and how to comport oneself while doing it all. In the end, graduation was merely the act of leaving and many returned for more credits, known as tours of duty. Some came back three, four times and received more than a doctorate in war.

Stacy really couldn’t come up with a name for that degree of education in Iraq.

He shut the door of the room with his cane behind him, remembering the passage in the Bible about kicking dust off one’s shoes as he passed the surly clerk in the lobby.

“The key?” the clerk yelled to him.

“On the dresser,” Stacy muttered, hoisting his backpack to the midsection of his back for better balance.

Clean laundry. Check. Banking done. Check. Snack bars for dry periods. Check. All the amenities taken care of so easily here, back in the States, where you could walk in and just get what you need, product or service. All it took was money and he had that from his account.

When he went to the bank, he worried that Rick had placed a hold on his account somehow, had gone to court and declared him incompetent. Stacy left the bank in a much better mood, realizing that neither of his parents had done anything about his disappearance, except perhaps to file a missing person’s report – if that. He remembered how much they worried about what people would think and realized that they might not say anything to anyone, except to cancel his appointments at the Vet’s Hospital for physical therapy.

What would they say? “Stacy’s on an extended vacation.” “Stacy is not in the building.” Or this one: “Stacy will not report for duty.”

Duty. A word he grew to loathe over the time he was in the service. It was thrown in his face in boot camp when he refused to do something, to follow a rule. “It’s your duty now,” he was told. Later, after he deployed, fellow Marines said it to each other, a reminder that this or that was their duty. Stacy learned not to argue with anyone about the word, but secretly he thought of the way he used it in his youth, when his dog went out to do his duty. A dirty form of duty, not the esteemed duty the military talked about.

“Scout’s done his duty?” Rick would ask him, since it was his job to walk Scout and make sure he took a crap or peed before they went to bed. He would nod without looing up. Scout was emptied for the night. No duty to do.

Stacy wondered if that was why he felt empty every day. Not only had he done his duty, some of which had felt dirty, but there was no one around him to remind him to do his duty any more, which probably meant he was now officially a civilian and there was no duty expected of him. He was relieved of his duty. Injured. Disabled. Not quite up to the task.

At the edge of the parking lot of Turqoise Towers, he turned and peered at the hotel. It didn’t remind him of his high school days now, but of the past two weeks. Since his return to the States he was hyper alert, constantly scanning where he was coming from and where he was going. It was a cruel twist when he had no destination because Stacy Mack was, he realized, relieved of duty.

He couldn’t pick a direction so he just stood there for an hour or so by the side of the road. Once he saw the desk clerk glance out at him, so he began to walk. He was reading news stories lately about Iraq vets who came home and were arrested for various crimes. Shootings. Robberies. Murder. He knew why. They , too, were relieved of duty and were seeking ways to use the skills they learned in their higher education. They were scanning the environment and some of them couldn’t stand what they saw and got an idea in their head that using a gun, a knife or other weapon might solve the situation. It might accomplish the mission. Since no one told them what the mission was, they figured they could come up with their own. It wasn’t always sound, it wasn’t always right, but it certainly was an extension of their learning process. Perhaps one could think of it like a seminar or workshop for extra credit.

He was walking toward the food store, but he didn’t want to go there again. So he turned around and then he was walking toward the library. Stacy passed it, noticing that there was a stray dog panting near the bicycle stand. He looked thirsty, so Stacy found a discarded cup, filled it with water from the library restroom and held it while the dog slurped from it. He patted the black lab’s head, looked for a collar and, finding nothing, continued to walk down the tree lined block.

The dog followed him.

There were dogs in Iraq too. They had jobs to do like everyone else. Duties, not just their duty. Guys got really attached to them and wanted to bring them home, but it was against the rules. Sometimes it was hard to watch what happened when they knew they were going to never see their dog again.

But Stacy didn’t want a big black thirsty hungry smelly dog following him around because he wasn’t sure where he was going. He shooed the animal, then he tried to chase it away by waving his cane at him. The dog fell back a bit, but continued to follow him.

“If you feed it, it will keep coming back,” Rick told him when he was a kid and fed a stray cat. The cat was run over by a car the next day so Stacy never found out if that was true, but he thought of it now.

He stopped and the dog caught up with him, his eyes beseechingly landing on Stacy’s. No, he thought, I’m reading into this. The dog is a dog and he is just following me because I gave him water. He’s scared and doesn’t know where he’s going.

He bent down, patted the dog’s head and said “Okay, if you’re going to come with me, there’s only one name for you, pal. I’ll call you Seeker.”

Marines with two arms and two legs intact left on missions and came back blown up by IED’s on the roads. It happened like this: you got into a truck and the driver determined where the truck went.

It was all about fate he was told. So before he got into the truck for the first time, Stacy prayed “Dear God, please let me come back with all four limbs so I can go back out again”. The truck in front of them hit an IED and he began to shake. He came back intact, counting his limbs and those with him like parents counted a newborn’s toes. Then he threw up and that didn’t’ stop for two days.

When he went back out on a truck, he prayed this prayer: “Dear God, please let me live and if I have to lose any limbs, please make it be just one”. He realized there were worse things than losing a limb. Like being afraid to get up every day because you might die.

A human being just can’t sustain that level of fear, so Stacy learned other ways to damp it down. He played video war games with his buddies, joked about the dangers around them and joined in pranks that bordered on hazings from hell. Anything not to think about the fact that he had a commute where he had to get into a truck and could be blown to bits.

He had a distinct dislike now for getting into vehicles, although he noticed them all the time. When he watched a car go down the street, he wondered if it would suddenly set off an explosion. If he saw a series of cars on the highways tucked together in packs, he cringed, thinking of all the carnage there might be.

He could sit on a bus. That felt safe because it was so different than a truck, but he kept watching the sides of the streets and when it stopped, he began to shake. If it made a noise that resembled the truck sounds, he felt the nausea creeping back and usually got off at the next stop. Mass transit really was therefore a limited way for him to travel now. He thought about getting a scooter, but as he stared at the dog, he realized that a sidecar wouldn’t work. Besides, his balance probably wouldn’t hold up.

Stacy stood up and saw a sign for a camp ground not far away. Suddenly, he knew where to go. “C’mon, boy,” he said to Seeker and they both plodded down the road.

Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan