Culture . 04/10/2008 09:44 AM . Christopher Newgent

My cousin has a bullet in his leg. He says the jacket didn’t rupture, so there’s no worry of lead poisoning, and it’d do more damage to try to remove than to just let it stay in there.

He says they washed out the sand and other debris that had gathered around the wound, sewed him up, and that was that. I guess the sand over there gets in everything, cakes to anything liquid—canteen condensation, licked lips, open eyes. He’s home now, with a bullet and a medal. He laughs a lot for a veteran, compared to all of the stories you hear of veterans. He says the best part is, when someone asks, being able to say, “Yeah, man. I’ve been in the sh**.”

•

The reason I never joined the military? Maps.

Let me explain.

I could look at them for hours. I can still get lost in their latitudes and longitudes, any kind of map—relief maps, political maps, historical maps. When I was a kid, riding along in the car to whatever destination: family vacation in the Carolinas, a reunion the next state over, to my father’s house from my mother’s house: I’d simply follow our progress with a finger against the page of an atlas.

I’m pretty sure somewhere in my life, my father explained war as shifting lines on a map. I remember once, he showed me two maps, side by side: Europe in 1914, and Europe in 1920. I don’t remember the exact lesson, or if it was meant to be a lesson at all. Maybe he didn’t do this to explain war to me. Maybe he just thought they’d be of interest to me, all the changes in four years of fighting. The redrawing of lines. The fall of empires. The renaming of countries.

A couple years later, in fourth grade, my lessons over multiplication tables, basic human anatomy, and history had a terrifying intermingling. I learned, almost simultaneously, how to multiply, how much blood the average human male has in their body, and the numbers for WWI—how many men it took to shove a line on a map a mile either direction, the citizens of great egos rolling through bullets and mud and hedges of razor and trip wire.

Just so you know: 19,000,000.

Five quarts a man times 19,000,000.

In fourth grade, I did the math on a sheet of notebook paper and stared, horrified, at the line of zeroes. I started crying uncontrollably at my desk. Nothing the teacher said made anything any better.

World War I was an ocean.

•

Shortly after 9/11, everyone was going home to see their families. The dorms were empty, and at that time, no one wanted to be alone. There was a hush that had settled on everything then. There was no shouting or raucous laughter, out of grief or reverence or fear maybe. I don’t think anyone knew anything then, especially about themselves. Everyone spoke in inside voices everywhere, a quiet murmuring of uncertainties and vague patriotisms that made me nervous. I went home for the weekend, whether to be with family, or to simply not be alone, I’m still not sure.
I found my brother sitting at his computer in the dark, playing some one-man shooter game, that tinny sound of fake gunfire, that bright flickering of fake muzzle blasts. Around him was scattered a handful of pamphlets about different branches of the armed forces. I picked up one that looked particularly adventurous, a man in full fatigues piling out of an airplane, his fellow soldiers already opening parachutes below him.

“Did you know they call their clothes ‘fatigues’ in the service?” I said.

My brother looked away from his computer screen at me, then at the brochure in my hand, and then back to the computer screen.

“Don’t you find that discomforting at all—that they call their clothing exhaustion?”
This is usually my brother’s cue to say, “You think too much,” but we evidently weren’t working with the same script.

“So you’re really thinking about it?” I said after another moment.

He didn’t take his eyes from the screen. He shrugged. Imagine Atlas.

“Why not? We’ll probably get drafted anyway. You should sign up with me. We could kill some terrorists together.”

To illustrate the key difference between myself and my brother, he laughed as he said this; I winced. For some reason, this didn’t strike me as the mentality you should have going into war. Maybe, that’s why I was never cut out for the job.

•

My cousin has a bullet in his leg. My other cousin was an admiral’s personal body guard. Another was a cook on the USS Enterprise during Desert Storm, where he met his wife. He showed me how to crack an egg with one hand; this is a necessary skill to have when cooking for a carrier crew of 5,000. Another is a sharpshooter in the Marines. They’re all decorated in some way or another, all have the demeanor that comes from boot camp and deployment, quieter, standing a little taller, pride or habit or both.

My brother never joined, though he got a steak dinner from an Army recruiter who almost talked him into it. Out of my generation, at least on my mother’s side, my brother and I are the only males who never went into the service. This always sat on me a little funny, but I don’t know that my brother ever thought much of it.

Last Christmas, I slouched at the table and gnawed at my lips while my cousin, the one with the bullet, spoke about marching into the skirmish that captured Hussien’s sons. I poked my fork around my plate, shoved some corn into the mashed potatoes, prodded a dry piece of turkey. I listened, and even had a sense of pride in him, but mostly, I was glad he was home.

“Where was the raid?” I asked.

“Near Mosul, in northern Iraq,” he said.

That night, I pulled the world atlas from my shelf—a weathered, clunky hardback complete with theoretical representations of Pangaea, topographies of the oceans, even star charts. I opened it to a large relief of Iraq and found Mosul. I put my finger to the paper and waited for a sign, a mile marker, an exit ramp, anything to show where we were going, where to point next. It’s all I knew to do.

Christopher Newgent lives as a writer in Indianapolis. His work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry East, and other journals.


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