that’s some travesty

You’ve probably already read “The Permanent Scars of Iraq” and “Betrayed by the Game”, two not entirely unrelated stories in the NYTimes Magazine.
They reminded me of Lt. R. Rojas. About three months ago, I was at a bar, celebrating my friend’s birthday, when two soldiers, wearing full camouflage, sidled up to our table. They were stationed at Ft. Lewis, Washington, in Portland for their weekend because “Seattle sucks,” and they meant to join us for potential drinks, or? But Rojas’ trying to run game on me landed him in a pool of my own curiosity. As such, while his friend spilled Rolling Rock on Katie and gave her sloppy knee grabs under the table, Rojas and I spent three hours talking about Iraq.
Rojas was about to be deployed there. His friend was going to S. Korea. A month earlier, they’d both received their vaccine shots for Anthrax and Smallpox, and showed us the scars: quarter-sized scabs marring their upper arms. Rojas said the whole unit puked for the first couple weeks, but eventually the nausea subsided and the wound stopped spreading. The puking, he said, didn’t excuse them from their daily duties. They still got up at dawn, did their laps, did their chores. Par for the course but with side effects.
Rojas was 22, and he wasn’t cocksure or bombastic like his older, higher-ranked friend; he was quiet and sweet, infinitely polite, and of course didn’t fit into my stereotypical notion of what the Army does to somebody’s personality. (Keep in mind I grew up in Cheyenne, WY, home of FE Warren Air Force Base, where cocky young Strats trolled all the high school hangouts in hopes of landing unsuspecting tenderonis. I can’t tell you how many girls in my graduating class got pregnant or married or sometimes both, to boys from the Base.)
Rojas grew up in Cocoa Beach, FL, and said he never felt passionate about anything. After graduation, his sole hobbies were smoking pot and playing video games. He joined the Army because he didn’t want to spend his life “as a loser,” and he didn’t love it but straightened him out, got him off drugs. He didn’t know what else to do, or feel like he had any other options.
When I asked him if he was scared to go to Iraq, he seemed resigned to the idea, talking matter-of-factly about “if I die over there” and that he’d left everything in his will to his little brother, who is eight, and looks up to his every move. He writes him letters and tells him never to join the army, and to try to do well in school.
I asked him if he would stay in the Army upon his return, because he didn’t seem as gung-ho Armed Forces as a lot of other people I’ve known. “What else will I do when I get back?” he answered. “The only things I can do are drive a tank and shoot planes out of the air.”