Kaely’s War
A novel. One chapter a day.
FIVE It had been nine days. Nine days of coming and going, waking and fitful sleeping, trying to eat and throwing it all back up again. Kaely still looked like she’d been in a horrific fight, and lost. She was breathing only on the strength of her stubbornness and the cotton t-shirt she’d torn into a long strip and tied snugly around her rib cage. She was limping because of a fist-sized hematoma on the inside of her left thigh. But she hadn’t missed one day of duty, and hadn’t had to make up one story about her condition.
Because no one had asked.
That first morning, when she showed up at the tower swollen and barely breathing, her captain said, “Jeez, what does the other soldier look like?” And Kaely said, “I wish I knew.”
“Well you look like a bag of smashed asshole.” Captain had said not actually making any eye contact with Kaely. In fact, he chuckled quietly at his own cleverness.
“Yessir,” she said.
At services Sunday evening, the chaplain at least noticed her injuries and Kaely wondered if he might offer to help her. She’d never admit to her mother that she went to the base church because it would make Julie think the Army had been good for Kaely, but she went every Sunday as something of a life insurance policy based on a god superstition she’d managed to bring with her from home. The 2nd Lt they called Reverend Louie-Sir, stopped her after closing prayers and said, “You don’t look good, Shooter.”
“Really?” Kaely deadpanned.
“Yeah, really.” Reverend Louie-Sir had a way of smiling that married kindness and concern in such a sincere way, Kaely almost tugged on his sleeve and asked for some privacy. But a girl in the army had to be careful, she’d been told. Sharing confidences with men who were miles from their women sometimes built a kind of trust that easily morphed into tryst. The lieutenant was young, but too old for Kaely. She imagined, for just an instant that telling the chaplain what had happened to her might be okay. But he was a little bit handsome, and that smile sometimes looked like something beyond spiritual. While Kaely stood frozen in her quandary, she heard Reverend Louie Sir say something quickly about being around if she needed to talk, and then he moved his handshaking attention on to the next soldier.
And that was it. Just as she figured — no one really cared.
Of course she was certain she had crossed paths with the criminal bullies who cornered her that night in a pitch dark strip of dirt between a supply hut and the shower pods. They were all a fairly homogenous group of Army PFC thugs, jacked up on testosterone and the porn they watched on their computers day and night — strutting as they walked, like bad boys who carried guns and had permission to use them. When Kaely saw the enlisted men now — at patrol briefings, mostly — she saw cockroaches, not soldiers. More specifically, she sought out three dodgy cockroaches. Brave and brazen when the lights were out, scrambling to become invisible by the light of day. Kaely tried to stare at each soldier long enough to tip their shallow-bodied psyches on their filthy little insect backs. She liked to imagine them — she would choose any three at random — defenseless, frantically wiggling their cockroachy legs in the air. Occasionally she’d catch a brief sideways glance from one or two men who seemed to be carrying some kind of hangdog guilt — like a rapist might. She figured those men were sizing up her injuries — which, of course, only the guilty ones would see for what they were — wondering in their rare real-people moments here in the land of-no-rules-or-decency just how badly they’d hurt her. But so far, she had identified only one soldier as part of the pack of dogs — the awful of awfuls — who criminally violated her that night. And he gave himself away.
They had passed — both alone — outside the mess hut. He’d nodded and acknowledged her, as if just passing the time of day.
“Gun Bunny,” he’d said with a tip of his finger to his hat.
Just hearing it again — Gun Bunny — almost brought Kaely to her knees in the gravel. Her eyes went completely out of focus and her upper body froze as she tried to turn around to watch Private Cockroach skitter away. She wanted to throw a rock at him or shout, “You fucking mortar maggot! Do you think you can hurt me?!” But the soldier’s mocking laughter as he drifted away into the shadows made Kaely’s stomach pitch and her head wobble. She staggered four or five steps, sat down in the gravel in front of the mess hall door, buried her head in her hands and tried desperately not to cry. She caught the edge of a jagged breath, wheezed a gasp into her still-aching rib cage, held it, and let the pain of her bruised bones sharpen her resolve to be ambivalent about those men and that night. No reason to chase him down, even if I could, Kaely thought. I’m just a piece of meat at the dog pound.
Kaely tried to stand. She tried to keep the scene out of her head. But she couldn’t move, so she surrendered to the raw replaying of the nightmare.
Her eyes had swelled to a blinding squint as the violence of the attack slowed, so she couldn’t see the face of the soldier who leaned toward the ground to spit in the words into the dirt next to her face.
“Gun Bunny in the ditch with her head split open…that’s what early patrol’s gonna find if you say a word about this, bitch…got it?” That had been the last Kaely heard before she was head kicked into a blackout. When she came to, she was on a cot inside her dark hut, wrapped up like a mummy in damp sheets, arms straight by her sides, her sniper’s rifle pressed lengthwise against her belly. She didn’t move until she was sure she could detect no breathing in the room but her own. Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and she began rocking her head up and down, back and forth, double checking every corner she could see. They had left her alone. Alive.
Her long 7.62mm bolt action Remington M24 had been carefully positioned on her stomach and squeezed to her ribs with the wrapping of the sheets. Heavy with a full five rounds of ammo that she always kept in the magazine, the gun reached crotch to chin on Kaely’s thin frame. The barrel’s end rested just under her jaw. Boot camp reflexes had her checking the weapon before she even checked to see if she could move her fingers or wiggle her toes. The gun’s scope was missing.
“Shit. Shit!” she whispered and began kicking at the bindings around her.
“Fuck them!” It was still a whisper. And then, “Fuck them!” It became an injured whine the second time she said it, and finally a screech that she was sure someone would hear as it reverberated through the camp…a lone woman’s voice: “FUCK THEM!” In truth, the sound of her anger bounced off the walls like an underinflated rubber ball, with a smack and a thud. No one heard. No one came running.
Kaely began to wiggle her way out of the damp sheets, which smelled like urine from her shoulders to her toes. More pee than one woman could make, she thought, recoiling at the sudden image she had of those jerks peeing on her concussed body, as if what they had done to her was some kind of fraternity hazing.
“Yeah. Of course. Lovely.” Kaely said as she reached, reflexively for the back of her head and grabbed her long, thick, dark brown pony tail, bringing the end to her nose so she could smell it. Her head was pounding. Sitting up made her dizzy. Her nose was throbbing, her left eye was swollen shut, and she could taste blood, still trickling into the right corner of her mouth from some place on her face. It hurt to move her arms, which she remembered had been wrenched violently behind her back during the attack. She blinked the thought of it out of her mind as quickly as she could. She could feel every breath pushing against her ribcage. Exhale hurt just as much as inhale. But all the parts were still moveable. Kaely acknowledged that bit of good news with a choppy sigh that was not relief as much as it was resignation. What next? She wondered.
Put the gun away. Turn on the light. It was as if her subconscious were giving gentle instructions to walk her to the other side of this exceptionally dark night. Obediently and carefully, like it was made of glass, Kaely lowered the rifle to the floor, then she reached for the goose-neck lamp that was attached to the metal bed frame. With only one eye open, she slowly surveyed the space. Nothing in the room seemed out of place. Ah. Home sweet home, her subconscious reassured her.
Her hut was known as the hoochie coochie. All soldiers called their living quarters the hooch, but Kaely’s quarters, the only hut on base that housed women, was called the hoochie coochie. It wasn’t derogatory slang used quietly among the lower ranks, either. In fact, it was Kaely’s CO who had delivered her to the hut when she arrived on base, saying, “Here you are soldier. Where the wild things are. AKA the hoochie coochie.” He had laughed fairly uproariously, and looked at Kaely with what seemed to be a certain expectation that she would also laugh. And so she laughed.
There were a variety of ramshackle looking buildings and tents, all varying shades of beige, that housed troops in this rocky valley where the US Army provided war sport for the mountain climbing Taliban of Afghanistan. The hoochie coochie was a cement block that had been sprayed on the outside with fading yellow foam designed to insulate it from the extremes of Afghanistan — the heat, the cold, and the Jihad Joe crazies. The interior was creatively divided into four 12x12 foot rooms. Everything from corrugated tin roofing to scarves pinned along rope had been used to erect a semblance of privacy. A first lieutenant who traveled Afghanistan working to build relationships between US troops and Afghan women was the first female Kaely met inside the hut.
“Hoochie coochie?” Kaely asked Lt. Jill Blank over a handshake.
“They’re all dicks, here,” Lt. Jill said with a matter of factness that made Kaely bristle a bit. She had not had a conversation this frank with a ranking military officer in her two years in the Army.
“Um, that was our CO…” Kaely offered her superior with some due respect and a glance toward the door.
“Yeah. He’s the biggest dick of them all,” officer Jill smirked. “Welcome to Hell.”
That was eight months ago. Now Kaely was the only woman occupying the hoochie coochie. It was a clerical error, she was told, that had her in this marginalized isolation of what was clearly a man’s army. Women were usually assigned in pairs, but Kaely was a rare female combat camera grad with sharpshooter skills, so she had come to this Forward Operating Base alone. The other three women who had been there when Kaely arrived — a medic, a transportation coordinator, and Lt. Jill — had since been moved to safer FOBs. Some pencil pusher in Kabul had failed to see the letter “F” by Kaely’s name and dropped the ball on assigning “protective companionship.” Her captain assured Kaely she had some Fobbits — female soldiers who never left the base, the FOB, for combat — on the way.
“Yessir,” she saluted. “I’ll enjoy the quiet time until then.”
But it had been three weeks of a creepy kind of quiet. Kaely knew she was being watched at night by some of the men on base. What else did they have to do? When they tired of porn and World of Warcraft on their computers, they wandered the base. The hoochie coochie was in a relatively remote corner of the camp, located, presumably, to afford female soldiers a bit of their own space. They had a toilet of their own, and a “girls only” shower pod, which was exactly 23 paces from the door of the hooch. It was a cozy set up, and arguably the closest thing to luxury-living on the base. But it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face after the sun set. The biggest lamps in the camp were positioned to illuminate paths to vehicles, not to the hoochie coochie potty and shower. Women who had come and gone over the years had strung Christmas lights, sent from home, from doorstep to toilet to shower, but Kaely never plugged them in. She considered it just a little too much happiness for this pit of vipers. She preferred darkness. Still, she knew it was too easy to be seen in her hut at night without seeing who was looking, so she had hung two towels over every window in the hooch and a heavy blanket over the glass in the front door. She sometimes stacked books or piles of laundry in front of the unlockable door at night, then slept with an 8” bowie knife under her pillow and the loaded M24 just under her bed. To say sexual harassment was pervasive in this unit was like saying the earth revolved around the sun. It was a given.
It didn’t help that Kaely was disarmingly pretty, in spite of her valiant attempts to hide that fact. She was a natural beauty who never saw it when she looked in a mirror. What she saw was a too-tall girl of mixed ethnicity who was neither white nor brown, pretty or ugly. She stood 5’8” tall in her bare feet and weighed just a few pounds over the minimum qualifying weight for women her height in the army — 125 pounds. Even her recently acquired basic training muscle didn’t add anything to the scale. She was willowy, but no weakling. She could bench press 20 pounds more than she weighed, jog five miles carrying her fully loaded 16-pound rifle without getting winded, and could climb almost any vertical surface in heavy boots without crying about her fingernails. Still, she was surprisingly feminine when her arms were bare and her feet were in flip flops. Her lips were full and shaped in a permanent pout, the upper lip turning down at the edges toward the straight lower lip like an archer’s bow ready to receive an arrow. Her eyes were navy blue with flecks of gold that never failed to receive some form of complimentary mention. “What color are your eyes?” was the most benign and infrequent. “I want to go swimming in those eyes,” was at the other end of the spectrum. “Blue,” She would say to the first question. “They’re just eyes,” she would answer the second.
She had freckles across her latte colored nose, which seemed to confuse almost all men into thinking Kaely was the sweet girl next door type — even if her hair was bright green and the black widow spider tattoo on the back of her neck was fresh, which had been the case her last year of high school. Though a few had tried it out, the nickname Freckles or Sweet Thing had never stuck. She was always Shooter — as early as 8th grade — although the name was appropriate in her private prep school because of her accuracy on a basketball court. It has nothing to do with a gun. Or a camera.
Athletic was not something Donner women traditionally aspired to, unless it was to perfect a decent tennis serve to impress a date who you then let win the match. “Sports just aren’t very feminine,” was Beverly’s perspective. But there was no way Kaely Donner was not going to be a basketball star in 8th grade. She was already 5’8” tall, the fastest runner in the school, and fairly skilled at the long shot from the three point arc. The girls coach was salivating over her when Kaely was in 6th grade. Julie saw her daughter’s sports prowess as an opportunity for her to spend some time meeting other wives’ husbands — at practices and games — so she sold the notion to Kaely’s grandmother with pleasure.
“You know Kaely is always looking for a way to shine,” Julie told Beverly.
“She should have stayed in ballet lessons, then.”
“She likes the attention of men, too…you know, young daddy types. The coach is a great guy. Father of two little girls of his own.”
“You should have stayed married to ….what was his name…the good one?”
Julie sighed. “Mama, Kaely just wants to make us proud. She knows she’ll be the last Donner girl to attend Mason Prep, and she wants her name on every single trophy and plaque. That’s all.”
Beverly never missed a game. Aunt Elaine never missed a game. Julie sometimes made a game.
But no one at home ever called Kaely Shooter. Which made her love it all the more when she picked up the nickname again in the US Army.
<>
A military career was as far from Kaely’s family and personal profile as Kandahar was from North Dallas. She was born to a teen-aged, unwed mother into a family of well-to-do women who buzzed around Kaely her entire life — as much to protect themselves and their own reputations as to nurture and protect Kaely. It was no secret that she was a source of family shame that had been dealt with the way the Donner family dealt with all unpleasant things — silently, manicured, and dressed to perfection.
“Ladies never sweat,” was one of her Gram’s favorite sayings. And Donner women never, ever left the house with a bead of sweat on their brow, a wing feather ruffled, or an eyebrow unplucked. Much to their constant dismay, their style had never been Kaely’s style. She was more the I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-better girl, who didn’t care to be the kind of lady who knew how to stuff her feelings, flatter her enemies, or moisturize her cuticles. Ever. Even her devoted Aunt Elaine waffled when it came to Kaely’s determination to be different from the rest of the Donner harem.
“I get it, sweetie, I really do,” Elaine told her when a purple crewcut got Kaely kicked out of her mother’s house temporarily during Kaely’s freshman year.
“God knows I get it. I am the family outlier, you know…the wild-eyed, barefooted, make-up casual, diamond-hating liberal.”
“It seems you’d like some company.”
Elaine laughed. “You can run from it, sweet Kaely. But your people are really no less flawed than everyone else in the world.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to be like them,” Kaely had whined.
“You will always be more like them than you’ll ever be willing to admit,” Elaine fluffed the purple pile on her niece’s head. “It won’t take you long to figure out what’s negotiable and what’s not.”
But the truth was hard for Kaely to reconcile; her future as a Donner socialite seemed ordained. She was a privileged young woman from politically conservative and socially correct stock. There was a prescribed path to college, marriage, and charity work meant to be walked with only the slightest move to the left or right. Aunt Elaine had made a breakout run when she went to California for law school. Kaely had never understood why Aunt Ellie and Jeff decided to practice law in Texas, close to the people who — by her aunt’s own admission — had pushed her to the edge of the family circle. Apparently a break from the Donner Destiny required some a brand of DNA superpower Kaely imagined had been supplied by her father.
To her knowledge, there had never been a member of the Donner clan — never mind a female member — in the armed services. Kaely had absolutely no desire to fight or kill or be killed. She didn’t need the Army’s money for college, wasn’t dodging the law, and didn’t need the military’s famous discipline to grow up. She had been a grown up most of her life. Kaely joined the army, quite simply, to spite her mother.
In Julia’s mind, she had worked selflessly to put Kaely on the Donner women’s post-high school path to SMU and the sorority house of Pi Beta Phi. Somehow Julie seemed to have missed seeing how much her daughter hated every plan she ever made for her, and how much Kaely loved seizing every opportunity she had to dash Julia’s hopes.
“Have you sent in your applications to SMU?” Julie started asking her daughter in September of her senior year.
“Yep.” Kaely learned at a very young age to respond to her mother’s questions with the answer she knew Julia wanted to hear. There would never be any follow up. She answered the same way every time her mother asked. “Yep.”
Kaely enlisted in the US Army two days after graduating in the top 10% of her preppie, well-heeled high school class, but she intentionally forgot to tell her mother about it until she was sure she was on a Direct Ship list, which meant she was within days of leaving for basic training. At some level, Kaely imagined Julie might be proud of her for taking initiative, finding her way through a tough recruiting system, securing a job in army communications, possibly as a combat correspondent. Hadn’t her mother always told her she should try writing for a living?
“You have just the right amount of mommy angst to be a Sylvia Plath or Christina Crawford,” she once said to Kaely. When Kaely read The Bell Jar and Mommy Dearest, she was pretty sure Julie never had. Still, in a weird way, Kaely had taken the comment from her mother as a tiny hint of evidence that she did understand who her daughter really was.
The young Army recruiter had told Kaely she’d have a cushy deal with the military and a high paying career as a journalist on the other side of her service, as well as all-expenses-paid college. Wouldn’t that be good news to her mother?
“It just isn’t done this way, Kaely,” Julia said in a measured seethe-and-slur tone — the kind of response Kaely always got when she made her mother mad during cocktail hour.
“You don’t just tell your mother you’re ditching college for the Army and start packing your bags.” Julie went on, putting her martini down on the counter behind her with a sloshing clank of glass to marble. “These are the kinds of decisions that families discuss.”
Kaely stood staring at her mother with the confidence of an 18-year old who had a signed, non-negotiable contract with the US Army. Julie reached for the vodka to top off her drink, sighed and said, “We’ll just go down there tomorrow and put an end to this thing.”
“I’m going, mom. No turning back.”
“You are not joining the army, Kaely. You’re a woman and there’s a war on in case you hadn’t heard.”
“It’s done.” Kaely said walking toward her mother, whose voice had escalated to a dramatic wail as the words “there’s a war on” came out of her mouth. She patted Julia on the shoulder and said, “I enlisted. I have a contract. I leave in three days for Georgia.”
Julie looked up at Kaely with what seemed like genuine horror in her eyes. “How long?” she choked, swallowed, pushed a piece of hair off her forehead and posed as non-chalantly as she possibly could.
“Four years active duty, then another four on active or reserve.”
“Eight years, Kaely? Eight years?” Julie was pitching into one of her famous moments of emotional gasping and sighing. “You’ll be –what? Twenty-six years old and just starting…”
“The army is my start, mom.” Kaely had rehearsed this part and felt strong when she said it. “I’m starting at 18.”
“Oh this is going to kill your Aunt Elaine,” Julie wandered quickly away from Kaely’s confident reasoning.
“I told Aunt El already, she’s good.”
Julie’s head snapped to attention and she glared at Kaely.
“You told your Aunt before you told ME?!” Now came the rage Kaely had been expecting. I should have known she’d blow up about the never ending sister-to-sister competition, and not about me, she thought.
“Don’t freak out, mom.” Kaely had stepped around this pile of manure many times with her mother. Aunt Elaine was the closest thing she had to a confidant in the Donner family. Kaely didn’t tell her everything, but she told her most things. She knew, of course, that her aunt was passionately opposed to violence of any kind — and a vocal opponent to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Elaine was the family outlier — a liberal. She also felt certain Aunt El would be supportive of her choice, and probably understand her need to completely redefine her place in the world.
“I had lunch scheduled with Aunt Ellie Tuesday, right after I signed my contract at the recruiting office…and just came out. It was not big deal.” Kaely was not trying very hard to be convincing. She could see her mother was already inconsolable on the subject. Julie was actually beginning to cry. And Julia Donner did not cry.
“This is what’s wrong with this family,” she began, but stopped when her eyes landed on her daughter’s face. Her whimper quickly became a gushing sob. She slid from her stool, wobbled a bit, held onto her daughter with all her might and cried, “Oh Kaely, promise me you’re not going to die. Promise me. Promise me.”
Kaely was surprised her mother caved so quickly. No bargaining, bribing, threatening, foot-stomping, door-slamming, or phoning a higher authority (Gram).
“It’s going to be okay, mom. I’m just going to stay stateside and be a writer. A war correspondent. It’s okay.”
Kaely hugged Julie and released a long, quiet sigh of relief as she pretended to care that her mother was pretending to be upset. Their relationship, to say the least, was complicated.
It was her mother’s feigned desperation that clamored to the front of her awareness now as she stood from her cot, dragged the wet sheet to a corner, and caught the first glimpse of her face in the mirror. Don’t die, Kaely. Don’t die, Kaely. She froze, dumfounded, looking at the bruised and bloodied person staring back at her. “Well, mom,” she said aloud, “I didn’t die.”
She continued to study the reflected image without touching any raised contusion or cut. She didn’t move in for a closer look — just made a distant study. Her eyes scanned the image slowly — from wet curls at the top of her head, down her bare chest and shoulders to her hands and back up again. Eventually, her gaze wandered a quarter of an inch, and she noticed something out of place behind her. She turned to see her scope, tied to the top of the stacked wire baskets she used as a kind of dresser. It was pointed into her underwear drawer.
“The desperate assholes needed a $3,000 scope to see some panties?” Kaely would have laughed if she hadn’t known it would hurt, so she just shook her head and said, “That’s funny. Really funny.”
Really funny kept repeating in her head, a ludicrous mantra of calm, as she pulled her baggy combat uniform on over her injuries, picked up her M9 pistol and her Camels and headed for the door — ready to kill or be killed.
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