He's sitting on the back of a cargo bed in a POV that's against regulations to even bring on the range, but he's good with most weapon systems and he knows his shit and thus the commanders know better than to fuck with him. He's also sporting an OD-green T-shirt over tan 5.11 pants and civilian hiking boots, trapped in the girth of a man ten years his elder, and wearing that outfit is about as non-uniform as a uniform can get. The disregard is deliberate, a public declaration of open derision: no one fucks with Quags.
"When did we go to an OD shirt, Quags?" someone behind me taunts, but Quagmire is steady of hand and furrowed of brow, examining a Leupold scope on his M-4 that probably cost him the equivalent of three months' pay. Even with a daughter married and living somewhere in Japan, even divorced twice himself, everyone wonders what trailer park he must live in to afford the rest of his money on that expensive shit just because the company wouldn't buy it for him on an official-use budget. Some guys are obsessed that way.
"The fucking shirt? THE FUCKING SHIRT? I get paid to teach you all the dark art of death!" he shouts randomly, then reaches into his bag of fried pork skins and munches down before wiping his hands on the tail of said shirt and going back to focusing his scope. It's a beauty, he told us when we started drifting onto the range and he was already there, speaking to no one in particular but more to himself as a kind of prayer, toiling like a kid with a new tinker toy. ACOG-green sight true and bright as the light from your momma's ass-crack on the day you shitheads were born.
No one is impressed with Quag's poetry, but he could give a shit what impresses anyone. He's what we call a "senior," a veteran troop in our unit with so much time in that he is virtually untouchable for all but the most heinous international incidents or assorted acts of Congress. He's also our range officer, and we've been slow-roasting our skin to a golden brown, waiting around to qualify so we can be done with this shit and hit the road back to wherever we came from. Lordsburg, Anthony, Deming, Pilot Point, Beeville, Lake Calcasieu, whichever corner they originally spat us out to all those years ago, when no one in our region or at HQ knew what the fuck they were doing. That was our golden age. The newbies getting hired on are under mobility agreements, told to pack their shit and report PCS in thirty days on the slightest itch of whims to newer and more distinct hellholes, so none of us old-timers these days gripe about traveling three to five hours just to watch Quags fuck around for a while.
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| Photo courtesy LTJG Matthew Stroup: FOB Farah (Wikimedia Commons: public domain) |
"You gonna outshoot everyone again, Johnny Utah?" Quags finally calls down to me, not even looking away from the scope, and I'm wondering just how long it's going to take him to zero in that fucking thing. I want to shoot and I want to get the fuck out of here, same as every other range day. For some reason, no one thought it was too much trouble to give me the nickname of Johnny Utah or to pronounce it. It was certainly longer than my real name, my Christian name, the name everyone else used to a point of reckless abandon on the road and in the halls. The story of how I got it was lost to oral history, a misunderstanding so boring that even thinking about it made my head hurt. Did I mind? What the fuck would it matter if I did?
"I don't shoot," I say to Quags, "I think of God, and God shoots through me."
Opie and Bungie Boy behind me are chuckling and waiting to see if Quags is going to bat it back to me, another round of pointless dialogue passing for entertainment in an afternoon far better spent hunting or fishing or just trekking through the wilderness surrounding us. Opie is about as crew-cut apple-pie as troops can get, plucked straight out of a Mayberry-like utopia and dropped into a Byzantine operation like ours that would have corrupted lesser men as it had corrupted me. But he was doing just fine, all smiles and good-natured joking even as he put in the same years I had, and for more than just a few measured moments I wondered what it was like to be that normal.
I look around to see where Old Man Paulie is lumbering about. Maybe walking off his gout because he thinks that's a thing, or possibly just taking a piss in the converted mobile home tucked behind the range office.
Old Man Paulie outranks us all, even Quags, by longevity if not by reputation. Take a map of the CONUS and point to a spot, and chances are wherever your finger lands, the Old Man had been within fifty miles of it during his forty-plus years of service, seeing some shit and pushing it back. He told stories with that grizzled, laconic lilt of his voice, a combination of a deep-throated pronunciation of vowels and a sort of half-hissing, fricative set of consonants that gave every spoken narrative an endearing, masculine musicality. When he talked, everyone listened, even Quags. The stories themselves were not necessarily important, no life lessons to be weaned, no vital illustration of a meaning. We listened to them and understood him, how he handled things, and in so doing we understood ourselves. Even if he didn't know he was teaching; and even if we thought we already knew the lessons.
Quags warns us to get our asses on the line like we've been languishing of our own volition, and because there's a bunch of crazy assholes wandering the environs like nomads of the hinterland, waving around guns and deigning themselves sovereign whatevers. We call them nutcases and put them in a box and deal with them in accordance with a very specific sequence of actions, and we move on. "Hank up in the office says that old coot is still out there," Quags intones with the baritone seriousness of Odin himself. "Says this property was stolen from his granddaddy."
Bungie Boy, who crawled out of the moonshine stills of backwoods Georgia and narrowly avoided burning crosses in Darien like his own granddaddy had done back in the day, chuckled and said, "Where I come from, possession's ten-tenths of the law, ain't no turnabout." Next to me, Bungie Boy is an excellent shot. Then again, most of our area shot expert on qual day, so I really had no bragging points to rack up on my abacus.
"Summon the Lord," Quags tells me as he passes behind me forming up on the line. "I want to see nothing less than a 248, Johnny Utah." I'm personally insulted that he thinks I could dip that low, but I shrug it off, deferring not so much out of personality and more because in another year I'll need his recommendation to get a spot at FI school. Just then, Old Man comes up behind us as if he's been there all along, saying, "Les' see how we gonna shoo' today, maybe this dog got some tricks lef'," in that trademark singsong hissing.
We pull on our eye and ear protection and hear the range commands and we've done this a thousand times, it's easy shit now. Quags starts us off on the one-and-a-half and we don't hear him anymore, we know the spots and how to walk out the yardage and what the tap, rack and reload drills are. We hear Quags just barely over the din of our own joking and snickering, the most unprofessional, lazy-ass casualness permeating the holiest of acts, on qual day no less, jokes about getting drunk or wrecking vehicles but mostly about what we love to do, which is piss off our commanders. We finish at the 25 and holster up, and hear a distinct popping of someone still taking shots somewhere up in the looming hills, and we look around playing the game of Name That Caliber.
"That sounds like a thirty-ought," said Opie.
"Shit," said Bungie Boy, "that's an old-school M-1 probably. Not loud enough for a thirty-ought."
Quags stepped into our line at that point, his eyes searching ahead of him, and he seems to be listening with us. We wait for his pronouncement, and it takes forever, until we wonder just how focused he must be on that sound, which has already dissipated and taken our collective interest with it. He turns slightly to his right, then stops and switches to a slow turn to his left, looking directly at me. His face has changed into one of confusion, grasping at something indefinable and elusive all the same, as hard as it is to try to find something that is not clear, an answer, a way out, whatnot. What I do get is a sense of movement of internal imagery behind his eyes, alive and grasping, and not understanding. Didn't he do everything right? How could something like this happen? It was a lost look, the kind I got sometimes from the people I handcuffed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in their shitty lives and now they're taking a ride where the nature of how they fucked up will be documented on an official opinion that will follow them for the rest of their natural lives.
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| Photo courtesy LTJG Matthew Stroup; FOB Farah (Wikimedia Commons: public domain) |
Quags falls to his knees, and I barely grab him before he pitches face-forward into me.
* * *
Quags died that evening. Hiskins, our commander in the area that day, had tried to get in touch with his daughter but never was able to reach her. The doctors had a fancy name for the myocardial infarction; I forgot what it was. I forgot it because nothing went according to script on the day Quags died. You expect crying, cathartic releases of anger against God, declarations of unfairness, somber, manly hugs and gruff attestations of the goodness of the deceased's character, solid as oak and replete with promises kept. I saw none of that shit go down.
Instead, Quags' ex-wife sat on the waiting room sofa with eyes as dry as an ancient river bed in Death Valley, and she smiled, she fucking smiled when anyone walked up to her and gave her their condolences. I wanted to walk over and shake her and say, What the fuck are you smiling about you dumb bitch, the man you used to love is dead. The father of a daughter he adored got his ticket punched; how about you emote a little more?
Hiskins had made it into the waiting area but then walked down the hall to talk to his bosses about an entirely different pseudo-crisis involving overtime and travel for another one of us in a different city. Because even in the face of personal calamity, the bureaucratic beast growled and wanted to be fed its routinized, apportioned sustenance of meaningless bullshit.
I spent part of the time standing around and watching a little boy play with a plastic toy that he kept throwing behind furniture and waiting for his mother to tell him to stop. Down another corridor, an old man laughed with a doctor and a nurse as they pushed him out of a room. I remember the smell of the corridors and waiting areas. They smelled of an antiseptic, indescribably pungent cleaning fluid.
Life was moving on without Quags, and nothing about what was left in the wake of his space-occupation and atomic movement was especially memorable or defining. He slipped in and out of a series of moments that had been coded for everyone else's daisy-chain. He was supposed to have mattered to this loose circle of a few, and apparently he didn't, not memorably enough, anyway. And now, selfishly, all I could gather for consideration was who would truly forget me when I was gone. How unmemorable I would be, based on the tapestry of pitifully outlined non-reactions rolling out before me this evening.
And I came to understand in that flip-book moment just why everyone hates to go to funerals, or give condolences. It's a practice run for your own, and you understand just how shitty they are all going to be, how skewed and uncoordinated, how misdirected and bland. There is a sense that things were rushed, never completed as they should have been, and now never will be. It's the way of things that pass and it can get your head wrapped around the axle pretty fucking fast.
I wish I could describe Quag's funeral, but I decided not to go. It happened at the last minute. I showed up and stopped at a local eatery to have breakfast, and I was staring at a Coors Light poster that looked really old, depicting a cowboy in a Jeep CJ, and it reminded me of one I had seen in my dad's garage when I was a kid. And I just whiled away the minutes contemplating the nothingness of its implications until it was too late to finish the drive to the cemetery, just filled my mind with this emptiness that went nowhere and had nowhere to arrive.
I don't know why I backed out at the last minute. The poetic part of my brain wanted to say something about remembering him in his final moments of awareness on this planet, the last look in his eyes before he collapsed. But mostly I think I just got chickenshit. Instead, at the precise point when they were lowering him into the dirt, I think I stopped at a gas station and bought a pack of M&Ms. If I was worried about finding a moment in Quag's life, or death, that would be laden with meaning and import, I had just consigned it to an epitaph of meaninglessness that apparently importuned no more.
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