Omubbi

by Jason Arment

The more pedestrian posts on larger bases in Iraq were stood by private contractors—mercenaries. The posts requiring fluent English were stood by young men from India, and the posts requiring fighting prowess were manned by Ugandans. Unlike mercenaries from the West, who seemed to take themselves too seriously, with dour dispositions, the Ugandans were outwardly friendly. They were quick to joke, laughing easily and often. During the day, those not on post could be found sleeping in hammocks, or on patio furniture around their barracks, unphased by the desert heat. 

Marines took to the Ugandans, asking them about their experiences with war and about their homeland. The Ugandans had stories of civil war back home, and bullet wounds and scars as visual aids. As a group, they seemed to be more collectively minded than Westerners, and didn’t hesitate to write messages on the walls with spray paint to form a kind of collective thought. One message appeared again and again around the base, especially near their barracks. 

“BEWARE OF OMUBBI!”

It struck us as odd that men so easygoing in nature but fierce in battle would fear any man. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and I asked.

“This Omubbi, who is he? And why are you so afraid of him?” I asked a Ugandan standing post at the chow hall. “To rate written warnings all over the base, he must be one bad motherfucker.”

“No, no. Omubbi is not a man,” the guard answered with a thick accent.

I nodded gravely.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Is Omubbi some sort of evil spirit?”

The Ugandan’s dark face split by the white teeth of his smile, and he shook his head.

“Omubbi is a type of person who takes what is not theirs,” his brow furrowed as he searched for the right word. “Thief! Omubbi is a thief!” 

As I sat and ate in the chow hall, I thought about Omubbi. How, when Echo Company had first arrived in country and moved to live briefly at Camp Habbaniyah, myself and other Marines had left our barracks at night to explore the base. Any gear that wasn’t bolted down, we pilfered. In the Marine Corps there was a saying: “Gear adrift is a gift.” There was also the saying, “Marines are heart breakers and life takers.” Although the Ugandan mercenaries had a great deal in common with Marines, they seemed to carry an innocence with them, something that made Marines like them but also realize they were fundamentally different. 

The Ugandan mercenaries were thrust into war against their own people at an early age, then carried on with soldiering as a profession. Marines chose to join the Corp, the hardest and most elite branch of the military that wasn’t special forces, voluntarily separating from their people to live by the sword.

As I left the chow hall and stepped back out into the desert of the Al Anbar province, a brewing sandstorm colored the air a brown tinge. As I passed the chow hall entrance, I waved to the Ugandan guard. I wondered if the Ugandans realized that Omubbi wasn’t one or two people, but every single Marine who walked among them. We were there to take, be it take ground back from extremists or the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people or the Ugandan’s gear or the lives of our enemies.

The walk back to Echo’s barracks I tried to keep my breathing shallow with a scarf around my face to avoid taking in too much of the desert’s sands; sandstorms could cause respiratory and intestinal infections. I wondered how the Ugandans managed to keep a hold of their innocence through it all, how they still managed to greet every man as a brother. I realized a big part of why I was drawn to them was how they reminded me of something good I’d left behind years ago. 

After this, I stayed away from the Ugandans. 

---

“War doesn’t only tear people apart, it also brings people together.” —Jason Arment 

Jason Arment served in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a Machine Gunner in the USMC. He’s earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, ESPN, the 2017 Best American Essays, and The New York Times, among other publications. His memoir about the war in Iraq, Musalaheen, stands in stark contrast to other narratives about Iraq in both content and quality. Much of his writing can be found at jasonarment.com.

The Birth of Courage

by Brecht De Poortere

On 17 December 2010, a young man, doused in petrol and despair, sets himself on fire in front of the police station of Sidi Bouzid. He had been stripped of his livelihood and karama—his dignity. The authorities try to extinguish the flames with censorship. The story is a footnote in the international press. Everyone is certain it will blow over. This is Tunisia, after all: an island of stability. An economic miracle. 

But courage is born out of humiliation. 

The fire smoulders and protests spread. I sit at an ironing board and check the news while having supper. I have recently moved to Tunisia, so I have no furniture. My marble-floored living room is so large the echoes take a while to travel and the sounds are distorted—much like the truth in this country. Many websites are blocked. Error 404. Ammar 404. The authorities don’t want you to know what is going on. 

But courage is born out of deceit. 

Social media are ablaze. Hashtag Sidi Bouzid. Protests spread to Menzel Bouzaiane, Al Ragab, Meknassi. People shout “Bread and water, no to Ben Ali”. The police respond with bullets. There are casualties in Thala, Regueb, Feriana, Kasserine. A sacrifice of children to the chief deity of Carthage. But each funeral sparks new protests, resulting in more deaths, and more bodies to be buried. This is not just another “bread riot”. This is Tunisia’s Bloody Sunday.  

And courage is born out of bloodshed. 

I start my new job in a country full of unemployed. But focusing on work is impossible. I check the news incessantly—ctrl R over and over again. Expats are urged to leave the country. Embassies and foreign companies shut down. My employer wants me to keep calm and carry on—until tear gas shrouds the building and guns are fired in the street behind. I flag a taxi and rush home (I can’t believe taxis are still working). I try to stock up on groceries on the way (I’m surprised the shops are still open). 

But courage is born out of necessity. 

Fahim tukum, Ben Ali announces on television. I have understood you. He sacks people from his inner circle. Releases prisoners. Promises free press. Shortly after his speech, cars honk in the streets. There appear to be celebrations. Is the revolution over? But something’s fishy. There is meant to be a curfew. The cars honking have blue and white license plates: they are hire cars. The celebrations are fake, staged. Yes, YouTube is now uncensored—but is that what people have died for?

Courage is born out of contempt. 

I sleep on a mattress on the floor and I am woken in the middle of the night by helicopters and gunshots. The presidential palace is a stone’s throw away from my house and it’s clear: there is trouble in the gardens of Hamilcar. Daughters of Dido. Sons of Hannibal. They’ve had enough. A wind of change is blowing through Carthage. 

Courage is born out of legends. 

January 14th. Avenue Bourguiba, the Tunisian Champs Élysées, sees the largest gathering of people it has ever seen. Rayes Lebled, Mr President, what are you scared off? The people have no weapons, but the flags they wave, the signs they brandish, and the songs they chant. Ben Ali ala barra—Ben Ali get out. The people are not scared, because they have nothing to lose. The people have nothing, but each other.

And courage is born out of unity. 

That night, Ben Ali flees to Jeddah, tail between his legs. Headless, the country descends into chaos. Villas are plundered, supermarkets burnt down. I decide it’s safer to stay with friends. We make a modest meal out of our limited supplies and, from the balcony of their apartment, we watch the sun set. The sky turns the colour of harissa, the colour of the Tunisian flag, the colour of martyrs’ blood. In the street below, the neighbours build barricades to keep the looters out. Women bring meals to the men who will spend the night defending their homes. 

Courage is born out of solidarity. 

The next day, I head toward the airport. The roads are deserted, shops boarded up. Then a scene I will never forget. A young man in black jeans, leather jacket, trainers, places a ladder against a gigantic poster of Ben Ali. He climbs up. He looks miniscule in comparison to the head of the president. It’s David versus Goliath. Then he grabs a corner of the poster and pulls, and a huge tear appears across the smile of Ben Ali. His whitened grin ruined forever. 

Courage is born out of anger. 

The airport is packed and chaos reigns. Flights are delayed or cancelled. When our plane finally takes off, I am relieved that I will soon be reunited with my wife and children back in London. I watch Tunis get smaller through the porthole—the white sand of its beaches, the sky-blue water. Winter will soon turn into spring. Baʿal Qarnaim, the Lord of Two Horns, will make the jasmine bloom. A fresh breeze, nessma, will carry the seed of revolution to neighbouring lands, to Egypt and to Libya, and sow an Arab Spring. 

Because courage is contagious. 

---

“I arrived in Tunis a few weeks before what became known as the Jasmine Revolution which brought an end to president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship. In this short piece, I tried to capture some of my emotions and experiences of that time but, above all, I wanted to bring an ode to the brave people who led this revolution.” —Brecht De Poortere

Brecht De Poortere was born in Belgium and grew up in Africa. He currently lives in Paris, France. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Grain, Consequence, X-R-A-Y and The Baltimore Review, amongst others, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He is a reader for Consequence journal. You can follow him on Twitter @brecht_dp or visit his website, www.brechtdepoortere.com.

Hover

by Andy Flaherty

I arrive just in time to be taunted by the sun’s disappearance. A flight of kestrels playfully chitter above the entrance. The building itself, set back into a copse of trees, reminds me of a child’s pinwheel. I enter the nucleus where the nurses gather and from there four wings extend out to provide space for ten large rooms; five on each side of the hallway and spaced for privacy. 

Dad was moved here from a hideous rehabilitation center. We are relieved, despite the truth that this hospice decision reveals. Each wing has a private garden ready to burst with golden daffodils and green vines heavy with yet to be identified progeny. His room is a reluctant yellow khaki and filled with uninspired paintings. There is a sitting area to the right framed by large windows opening onto a hillside of slowly awakening flowers where I make my temporary home.

The ambient noises abate with the sun. A cardiac machine commands the space just as the brass Fanfare of German marches in the corner of our living room. This monotonous sound references the potential absence of the lub-dub, the vital first movement of a heart’s contraction. And now, in the corner not twenty feet from his mechanical bed, I sit listening to the retreating pulse of my old man as I fall asleep. 

“Hey, little roo. When did you get here?” he mumbles.

“Last night about seven,” I mumble back through the fog of awakening.

“Sorry to bring you all the way up here from Chicago for this. Where’s your mom?”

“I told her to go home to get some sleep, that I would be okay with you.”

“Nice. Glad you did that. She blames herself you know. Since you found me on top of her when I fell off the toilet, she blames herself for not being able to take care of me on her own.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say in a growing storm of anxiety.

The short walk across the room takes 40 years. Each footstep a weight lifted. Finally, I grab his arm. He makes no fist to hit, nor does he turn in silence. 

My mind races, my breathing—like a pilot light on a stove that will not ignite—is full of fits. I think back to six months earlier, how his femur snapped, and I knew. We have not yet reached his end, but we are circling the runway.

Our faces meet.

“Hey Dad, would you like a shave?” 

“I guess so,” he says, folding the newspaper he holds despite the fact he can no longer concentrate.

“Let me check the bathroom for supplies and I’ll be right back.”

The bathroom has a sterile shine. Like antibiotics that eradicate without discrimination the good and bad, the disinfected is stripped of personality. I feel so alone, so empty, so absorbed that I begin to smell vinegar in the morphine drip, then crave its numbing effects to relieve my sadness. The mirror startles me, but I reach for the razor and shave cream anyway. I muster a false face, grab a towel, and return to Dad’s bedside.

“Here we go. Let’s get you sitting up in bed,” I instruct while pushing the button to raise the headboard.

“You are going to have to pull me up on the bed,” he begs, as I notice his head now slumped over his chest. The words “Got it, Dad,” leave my mouth, but I am relieved when the attending nurse comes in and shifts my father’s head for comfort.

The room darkens from the obstruction of clouds. I reach for the side table light, but it is loose and there is a delay. When it alights, the boyish handsomeness of my father, the air force major, my family’s navigator, has disappeared. His hands are his mom’s, mangled with arthritis, his head is his father’s, bald with scaly patches of lichen-like spots, and his face is disappearing in the forest of gray stubble. His eyes are partly cloudy.

His breath is sour as I rub my hands to make peace with the menthol before applying it to his fragile face. He jumps despite my efforts but then relaxes into a smile. I slowly scrape; with each scrape, a painful memory falls. His hollow cheeks make me afraid I will rip him apart. 

To be speechless after years of having too much to say is unnerving. Talking had been a way to soundproof my brain from his judgment. Now, I want to hear him again. Hear him maybe for the first time. Want him to open up the pages of his life: they matter. I sputter, but manage to say, “Dad, can you tell me that story again about you and John going up in your Cessna from Truax to Superior?”

“You don’t want to hear that old story again.”

“Yes, yes I do, please!” I blurt out.

I continue his shave, wiping the blade between each swipe. After clearing his voice, Dad begins, and we lift off together in the single-engine Cessna I have always refused to ride in.

“We were cleared for take-off at 6:55am, just before sunrise. John and I had made this trip to Superior about a hundred times. The take-off was good, I applied the right amount of pressure to raise the nose and the pitch of the plane. Since the air traffic was going to be at a minimum, I decided not to ascend immediately to thirty-six thousand feet. With the wings expanded, the lift force set us in motion, and we broke from the pull of the earth.” 

His tale has barely taken off before it stalls. A long pause ensues as I move the razor up the left side of his cheek. In his silence, the blade glides. As I wipe the clippings, Dad leans toward me with a whisper. 

“I can’t really remember.”

“It’s okay Dad, I can try and help. You always say next that you decided to try to replicate… ” 

“Yeah, that’s right,” he proceeds cautiously. “…It was an old maneuver I learned when goof balling around on Okinawa in 1945. I used the engine forward thrust and the wings’ lift to hover like the hawks and kestrels. That is when the miracle occurred. As the Cessna settled into a hover, from out of nowhere a kettle of hawks appeared and flew with us in tandem for what seemed like miles moving up and through the cumulus and stratus as we flew into the violet sunrise. For a brief moment, we were free…”

“Yes, you were free!” I interrupt with relief and quiet tears.  

This telling has exhausted him, and Dad is out of gas. I stand watch. His labored breath is punctuated with small shaky eruptions. There is a combination of raspy efforts followed by long periods of silence. Here on death’s front line, I cannot reconcile Dad’s freedom flight with John and the story we never spoke of. The time Dad was shot down and had to parachute out of a C-47 with a silk map that floated until he was saved. He never spoke about the Distinguished Flying Cross. Stories find their way into our lives in so many different ways.

As Dad slips into sleep, our reflections mingle on the expansive windows. There is an urgency now in my desire to make sense of his passion for all things that fly. How his life had been informed by words of reason and beauty. A need to alphabetize the beloved books that reveal who he strove to be. Ways to capture the awe of the “roll and glide” and “wheel and spin” of his in-flight poetry. When I free him from time, Dad makes clear sense; past histories taught lessons and future explorations prophesied innovation. I sit silently and hope that he has read Marinetti’s Manifesto: 

In an airplane, seated on a cylinder of gasoline, I felt the ridiculous absurdity of the old syntax inherited by Homer. A furious need to liberate words, liberating them from the prison of the Latin sentence… This is what the propeller told me as I flew at two hundred meters over the powerful smokestacks of Milan.

Dad was ordered to respect authority and he demanded it of me. When I didn’t, we collided. It was always a game of sinking the battleship with us, father and son. We were constantly fighting a war that could not be won. If only we had been freed from that struggle. But in those days, I was his Icarus, a boy ignoring the advice of his father. A child who did not pay attention to words because they felt too confining.

My resentments, like our reflections, fade. His books will be forgotten, but not the quotes. Those slips of paper he glued inside their covers write their own prescient stories. I think of one. 

Anthology of William Shakespeare
February 13, 1968
Montgomery Alabama
High 65, clear skies
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” Winston Churchill

While I am staring at his increasingly vacant face, a flicker of feathers behind me leads me to turn as a hawk dives to desecrate a mouse; Dad was both the soldier protagonist charged with greatness and the Shakespearean antagonist whose ambitions could be ruthless. As much as he loved words, he knew that words were often a foil for the deceptive and sinister. His bi-cameral mind collapsed when he discovered that his beloved words were merely approximations; that ambition and responsibility were not always conscious of each other. 

But that was then, and this is now. The unexpected challenges of our lives no longer provide sufficient force to feed my transgressions. Our torn relationship fuses like a hope muscle and only the essential remains. 

I am awakened from midnight’s darkness. The room is without air. My bed, the gray couch where I attempt to sleep, is damp from thrashing. I hear the nurse’s feet pad the halls, a shuffling reminder of the palliative care to come. An occasional phone rings, an anonymous voice attempts to comfort some absent family members. I start to spin but my finger finds a tear in the fabric, a cord-like thread that I pull in the sky of silence. I listen to his sleep, for signs it is not death. What comes surprises me, and I muster the courage to parachute into his dream.

“What’s that hammering, Mom?” Dad blurts from the bed.

“I thought they might be building over on Briar. It must be a new house.”

“Hey Mom, I am in the backyard. Bud said he would come by and we are going to walk over to the river.”

“I already told Pop. He’s in the garage working on that shelf you wanted for the side door entrance.”

The room is extremely still. Dad and I are copiloting the plane and we begin to glide.  

“Love you, Billy. You are a bright, beautiful boy. Be careful,” I add as if I was his mom. 

Maybe it is true that dreams signify ambitions. It is infinitely clear that his papers have arrived. The next mission signified by his half-opened eyes and the matt gray of his skin. If only I could pour him a brandy just to hear the ice cubes clinking again in the glass; to toast a life well lived rather than his stubborn refusal to listen. I cross the room and pull the chair as close to his bed as possible. He is already floating in the sea of sheets tucked around his shrinking body. I am fully in the cockpit to help navigate the trip home. I do not try to discourage, or make comfortable, the unknown. His words sputter like an old movie on a continuous loop. There is no beginning or end. Characters just appear, telling stories that originated in the yellow house on Beverly Court, his childhood home. It is a celestial sphere where words and actions fall away and love hovers in a violet sky.

It is inconceivable that I would become my father, but then he hands me the controls. For five more days and nights, we negotiate the sharp edges and dark corners of our lives until Dad reaches the Karman Line, roughly 60 miles above the earth, where he circles for the last time. 

---

“My relationship with my adoptive father is one marred by disappointment, impenetrable silence, and occasional injury. The path to forgiveness from him to me and me to him has been one of the most extraordinary and rewarding journeys of my life. Magically, the healing blossomed during his extended dying. I wrote this essay to honor his past, my past, and our present.” —Andy Flaherty

Andy Flaherty is a second career educator whose life has been enriched by immersion into poetry, writing, photography, and the minds of generations of students. “Hover” is his first published work. His current effort is a series of fictional stories about navigating the landscape of a midwestern city in the late 1970s.

Sour Milk

by Mitzi Weems

I wake long before sunrise, rubbing my eyes, feeling like I am more exhausted than I was when I dozed off three hours ago. I’m pretty sure I never made it to REM sleep, the sounds from the baby monitor keeping me always on the edge of anything restful. When I walk into his room, he is already awake. I can see his big eyes looking at me in the dim, yellow light of the motion-sensor nightlight. He protests when I pick him up and relocate him to the changing table. His little whines and scrunched-up face compel me to work quickly.

His bed and his clothes are soaked through. I guess it’s time to move up to size 3 diapers because this is the third time this has happened. I don’t have time to give him a bath, so I wash him down with a wet washcloth and put a fresh diaper and bed clothes on him. Zipping him up from the bottom to the top, I think whoever designed the sleep sack was a genius. I put him on his play mat while I change the sheet and the waterproof pad under it. No chance I want a fed, content, and sleepy baby to wait on me to do it later.

I sit down in the rocking chair with him in my lap, happy his protests will end soon. When I can’t remember which side he finished on last, I feel of them both. The right side feels fuller and is leaking warmly down my stomach. As I maneuver his head to the right, he starts to cry. But when he has it, he latches on and starts to nurse as if he hasn’t eaten in days, rather than four hours. His jaws open and close in a noisy suck-swallow rhythm as I stroke the soft hair on his head.

Thinking I might jot down a few motherly memories, I reach for my journal on the table next to my chair. The light goes off. No movement, no light. So, I sit in the dark as he eats, worried I will fall asleep from the oxytocin flooding my body. I think of all of the work I need to do, stressing myself out before my day even starts. 

When he detaches himself, I flip him over so he can nurse on the other side. He sucks with less frenzy than he did before, and I know he will not take as long on this side. As he nurses, it feels like he is sucking all of the energy from my body. My bones are tired. But he is worth it. 

About fifteen minutes later, the oxytocin having drugged me to sleep, I wake up to the tiny feeling of something missing and cold air on my wet nipple. He has detached, asleep, with milk trickling out of the corner of his mouth.

I stand up and carry him to his bed, moving quietly and slowly to put him down without waking him. The light comes on as I move across the room, so I hesitate until I’m sure he’s still asleep. Gently, gently, gently, I lower him to the blue and off-white sheet with little cars and trucks on it. I lightly lay my head on his chest and tummy so he doesn’t feel like he is alone and wake up. The soft fleece against my cheek, the sound of his heart in my ear—the light goes off again—I enjoy the rhythmic in-and-out of his breathing. I could stay this way forever. About two minutes later, though, I slowly stand up and look at my sleeping angel. He’s looking at me with those huge eyes again. Why does he open his eyes wider in the dark? Does it help him see better?

I have to get ready for work, so I slowly move toward the door, hoping he will decide, just this once, he will be content in his bed by himself. When I get to the door, the sound of discontent assaults my ears and I sigh deeply. 

“Hey, sweet boy. Mommy’s gotta go to work. Are you sure you don’t wanna just go back to sleep?” 

He wails his answer to my question. I pick him up and hold him to my chest with his head on my left shoulder and sway back and forth, jiggling him up and down gently in hopes he will relax and decide to let me go. But he is holding his head up and away from my shoulder and looking at me with those big, round eyes. Clearly, he is wide awake.

I take him into our bedroom where my husband is fast asleep. I say my husband’s name and touch his arm. He continues to sleep and turns to the other side, making a little snorting sound as he does. I say his name again and push his shoulder a little more firmly to wake him up.

“Tag, you’re up. I have to get ready for work.”

My husband sits up slowly and takes one of the three partially-used burp cloths from his nightstand and throws it onto his left shoulder. He sleepily puckers his lips for a kiss before he takes the baby and puts him on his shoulder. Both are back to sleep immediately. How does he do that? 

I lightly kiss my son on the back of his head and my husband on his forehead and then go into the dark room across the hall. I can just barely see the sleeping forms of my other two sons in their bunkbeds. I lean down and kiss the head of the form in the bottom bunk. I hate that I can’t reach my oldest son to do the same, so I kiss my fingers and gently touch them to his forehead. Then, I go into the bathroom and close the door to get ready for work.

Three hours later, I’m on a packed Bluebird bus with forty-six other Airmen. There are two more busses like it in the convoy traveling across the white Utah desert. 

I’m sitting in the front seat by myself, reviewing the training orders for the day. As the senior member of the group, I am responsible for overseeing the safety of and “commanding” the troops for the training trip. I guiltily wish I was not the senior member. It is so much harder to give orders than to take them. It is so much easier to carry out one part of the mission than to oversee the entire thing.

My breasts start to hurt under the twenty-five-pound weight of my old-style training body armor. So, I take my vest off, thankful for the fact I possess the only seat on the bus with an empty space—a perk of the position. I lay my body armor on my three-day pack next to me on the seat. 

The familiar pins-and-needles pain of my milk letting down tells me it is time to pump. In our home, more than a hundred miles behind us, my baby boy is either eating or about to eat. 

I can feel milk cooling in concentric circles around my nipples. I discreetly reach under my uniform top and feel of my desert tan t-shirt. I feel what I already know—wet spots on both sides. I ask the bus driver how long it will be before we get to the training range. He says forty-five minutes. 

Great, I’ll be drenched by then. Oh, why didn’t I put nursing pads in my bra cups? I was focused on making sure I had the gear I needed and focused on getting to the armory before the report time. That’s why. 

I am torn between wishing I had weened my son before this short-notice predeployment training and feeling like I owe him more than the six months he’s had. When I received my orders last week for the training, I went to my PCM for something to dry up my milk so I could just be done with it. But, in usual form when it comes to women’s issues, my twenty-nine-year-old male doctor literally told me to “suck it up”—those exact words. He didn’t even try to help. 

Stopping cold turkey wasn’t an option for the baby or unless I wanted another mastitis infection, one of the most painful things I have ever endured.

I return to the plans for the day and try to focus on them so my milk will stop leaking. I actually fall asleep and wake up when the bus stops at the entrance to the training range. One thing nursing three babies has taught me is how to go from dead asleep to instantly productive, something I’ll find useful downrange.

I get out of the bus and show the combined orders and my ID to the gate guard. He looks at them, hands them back, salutes me, and waves us through the gate. All without a word. I smile and say “thank you,” returning the salute. 

“Have a good day, ma’am.”

We enter the expansive range, almost a million acres. Traveling to the training area, we occasionally disturb pronghorn antelope as we go. As the road curves around a bare hill in front of us, I look back and see our small convoy of three buses and two HUMVEES has left a slowly dissolving trail of tan dust behind us. It is only 1000 in the morning and already 105 degrees. I pull a small, waterproof spiral notebook from my cargo pocket and make a note for my “After Action Report” that this terrain is certainly appropriate to prepare these Airmen, including me, for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

When the busses eventually pull up to the training area, I note several desert tan tents, various vehicles, and a water buffalo (a vehicle designed to provide drinking water to troops in the field). I leave the bus and talk to the training supervisor, a retired soldier working for a defense contractor that provides combat training at the range.

We are to dismount to a staging area with our weapons and gear and stand by. Given the training schedule for the day, I decide it’s time for everyone to visit the latrines, fill their canteens, and pull out MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) for an early lunch. I give instruction to the senior member on each bus. Then, I selfishly look for a bathroom.

I find the line of port-a-potties behind a long, tan tent. Taking off my body armor, I lean it against the outside of the port-a-potty before stepping up and closing the door. In the 110-degree day and tiny space, it smells like I am inside of a sewer. 

I take out a small, hand-operated breast pump from the cargo pocket of my pants and attach a breast-shield, a cone-shaped device with a hole in it, from another pocket. The hand pump is not as quick as the industrial-strength electric one back in my office, but it will have to do. I unbutton my uniform top, peel my wet t-shirt off my midriff and breasts, and unclip the left cup of my nursing bra. 

After positioning the breast shield over my nipple, I quickly pull and push the little cylinder in and out of the hand pump. I don’t have a bottle to attach, so I start to pump without one. At first, nothing. So, I close my eyes and imagine I am back in my rocking chair, with my baby, nursing. It is so annoying how my milk lets down at the worst times, but then not a drop when I’m trying to pump. As I stand leaning over the toilet hole, I try to relax. After thirty-seconds or so I feel the intensity of my milk letting down, and it starts to flow as the pump continues to pull at my swollen breast. In the dim light, I see milk splatter from in-between the small valve and the tiny white membrane on the bottom of the pump. 

When I travel, I usually take home a replacement supply to my husband, the “keeper of the milk.” Alongside my uniforms, I usually pack a briefcase-sized breast pump, supplies, and a little ice chest. Finding a place to pump is never easy. Neither are logistics. Since 9/11 it has been almost impossible to get liquid on a plane, but I fight until I win those battles. 

Pumping in the field, especially in a port-a-potty, is not sanitary. So, this time I “pump-and-dump.” My husband will feel uneasy—there is no milk to replenish what he uses today and tomorrow. 

My husband is adept at melting and warming the little bags dominating our freezer at home, never using the microwave, of course, since it kills the natural immunity-boosting properties. I think of the little frozen zipper-top bags, a few ounces each, lined up in containers and organized by date—pure gold. I feel guilty. I know their number is dwindling and that formula will soon be a reality for my baby. I feel guilty I am not there to feed him right now. But I know he’s safe and fed, even though he is not with me.

Milk splatters into the toilet hole, onto the bench beside the hole, on the floor, on my desert boots, and on my camouflage pants. I wish I had brought a bottle so it doesn’t splatter everywhere. 

In six or seven minutes, when my triceps start to protest the exertion from the in-and-out motion, I notice very little is coming from the pump. After shaking the droplets of milk from the breast shield and unscrewing the hand-pump, I put the breast shield in a zip-lock bag and stow them both in my cargo pockets. At least pump-and-dump doesn’t require me to keep all of the little parts of the hand pump apparatus pristinely clean. At least there’s that.

I don’t have time to pump the other side, although it protests with fullness and leaking. I put a folded, desert-tan bandana into each bra cup. I don’t have time to go the bathroom, either. I’ve taken too much time as it is. I clean up the splattered milk as best I can and open the door.

As I leave the port-a-potty, there is a line of Airmen waiting for the latrines. I feel guilty I have taken so long pumping. I go into the cadre tent to find out if our instructions for the day are ready. The air in the tent is cool, but I hurry out as fast as I can, knowing one of the downfalls of morale is the irritation of “hurry up and wait,” especially when it is inching above 110 degrees.

Later, we sit on tan, silty sand under a covered (blessedly) open-air classroom and receive refresher training. Cadre also issues MILES gear (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) and instructs us how to use it. The sensors on the torso and helmet harness alert us when we are hit by a beam from the MILES attachment on the barrel of a weapon. When our sensor alerts, we are to drop to the ground and stay in place. Cadre will issue a KIA or other casualty card. The MILES gear, coupled with blank ammunition rounds, is intended to simulate the reality of combat.

In my experience, MILES gear functionality is not great, but better for this open-environment training than the sim rounds we sometimes use. Sim rounds are live rounds with modified real projectiles and are better used for MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain) training since MILES doesn’t work inside structures. Sim rounds can leave very nasty bruises and sometimes some bleeding—if one is hit. I try not to get hit. Both produce the sound of small arms weapon fire to remind us this is not a game. 

I divide personnel into squads, making sure to assign squad leaders who need leadership experience but who won’t totally tank this important responsibility. These Airmen don’t get much field training or weapons training before they are split up and sent downrange to work mostly in Army units, so we need to make the best of today.

We begin to rotate through the training lanes which meander through ten-or-so acres. We practice everything from combat formation movements to realistic battle scenarios to combat first aid to casualty reporting and evacuation. 

Several hours later, exhausted, I sprint through pinkish haze from a smoke bomb and drop to the ground for a fifty-meter low-crawl under barbed wire with my M-16 in one hand and dragging a field med bag in the other. I’m just glad somebody else has the dead weight of the two-hundred-pound casualty dummy to drag this time. When I hit the ground for the umpteenth time, I feel the full weight of my vest, my gear, and my body on my engorged breasts once again. The pain is intense. 

At the end of the lane, I stand up and spit dirt and dried weeds out of my mouth. Sand crystals crunch between my teeth. My bandanas are otherwise utilized, so I blow the muck out of my nose into my hand, wiping it on my pants.

I move out of the way of the Airmen emerging from the low crawl behind me. Mixed with my dripping sweat, milk is seeping out from under my body armor. My uniform is soaked and I smell a unique sour odor. The milk is doing what unrefrigerated milk does after hours at 118 degrees—spoiling. Great! Something else to try to explain, or hide, in my male-dominated reality.

I do not like it, but I ditch the next lane and return to the port-a-potty. I am exhausted, and the day is not even close to over. Plus, I didn’t get lunch, so I’m famished. I down a half of a canteen of water, knowing I’ll never make it if I don’t hydrate, especially when my body is using twice the usual amount of water. 

Not knowing when I will have another chance, I pump both breasts—RELIEF—and change into a t-shirt and bra from my three-day pack. I wish I could change my uniform, but don’t have time to remove my boots and peel off these sweat and milk-soaked pants in the small space. It would take forever. Just getting gear off and pulling my pants far enough down to urinate is hard enough—men have such an advantage.

After another few hours of physically grueling activity, the sun is getting low on the horizon. We move to the next segment of the training. Cadre assigns us to the “base camp,” which we must defend, and informs me we will accomplish various missions throughout the night. Mission orders will be issued at the “appropriate” times. 

When I get to the command tent, it is already getting dark. We need to get our defensive positions set up. Since we are just a hodgepodge of personnel from various units, I have to quickly assign the functional leadership duties to my senior folks—logistics, operations, security, etc. I assign resources and tell them how many and which troops they have to carry out their duties. 

After getting my bearings, I sit down in an actual chair for the first time since we got off the bus that morning. It feels good to sit even if it is a hard folding chair. Cadre appears and tells me we have twenty minutes to mission-plan our first mission. It is a convoy mission to deliver fuel to the fictitious FOB Anchorage. 

During the night, we endure five attacks on our base camp and run three convoy missions to various fictitious FOBs (Forward Operating Bases). I command the first convoy mission. Almost to the FOB, we encounter a simulated IED, which disables the lead vehicle. Smoke billows around the vehicle I am in, blinding both the driver and me. 

“Contact left! Contact left!” echoes over my radio a split second after the explosion.

We are taking small arms fire on the left of the convoy. I hear the M-16s in the turrets of the HUMVEEs firing at “the enemy.” We don’t train with 50-cals up top like there will be when we get to Iraq.  

Following the most current TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) at the time, I dismount to take cover behind the axle of my vehicle. My legs are way too short to get out of a deuce-and-a-half quickly. I feel the full weight of my body, my vest, and my gear on my tailbone as I hit the ground when I jump down. I will be reminded of this fall, and the resulting herniated disk, every time I do sit-ups for the rest of my life. 

I recover quickly, but then struggle to take a prone position with the too-long M-16 rifle. I wish I had been issued an M-5. Its collapsible stock fits me perfectly.  

When prone, the back of my too-large body armor pushes the back of my too-large helmet, which, in turn, pushes the front of my helmet down in front of my eyes. As I struggle to see and fight, cadre hands me a card that says, “Your fuel transport vehicles are damaged, but repairable.”

The vehicles in the convoy lose radio communication with each other. Amid the craziness of yelling, weapons fire, smoke, and noise of non-fragmentation grenades, my MILES sensor alerts as I try to move between vehicles to communicate orders. I kneel to the ground in place and stop fighting. Cadre, lurking in the dark, appears and gives me a KIA card. 

“Oh, how I have failed as a leader,” I think as guilt washes over me and I lay down on the ground, waiting to be revived.

The “tat . . . tat, tat” of small arms fire surrounds me. Someone has taken my position, using the cover afforded by the vehicle’s steel wheel. My troops continue defending the cargo as I lay there in the dark on my back on the side of the road. My adrenaline subsides as I relax, marveling at the stars in the vast Utah night sky—until I remember there are camel spiders and venomous scorpions and snakes crawling this desert. 

Over the next twenty minutes, I feel dozens of imaginary creatures crawling over me, up my sleeves, and into my boots. Blessedly, the engagement ends and I am revived by cadre before anything gets its fangs or stinger into me.

After the engagement ends, I request a LACE report (Liquid, Ammo, Casualties, and Equipment) from the vehicle commanders. Cadre lurks around us, grading us, as we render combat first-aid to the casualties while the mechanics work in a frenzy to repair the “disabled” vehicles. Then we load up our casualties and complete the delivery. Fuel delivered, mission accomplished, we return to base camp.

Later, as I plan the last mission of the night with my deputy and functional leaders, I know I need to pump. But, before that, I really should conduct morale visits at the perimeter DFPs (Defensive Fighting Positions) while it is quiet. I want to ensure troops defending our camp have what they need, are awake, and have their heads in the fight. At one position, I relieve a female troop long enough for her to go to the latrine, and then I get stuck fighting during an enemy attack. Finally, I return to the command tent.

Exhausted and needing sleep, I take my folding chair behind the command tent in the pitch black of the desert. The odor of urine strikes me—I’m not the first to be back here. I lean forward and start to pump directly onto the ground. My arms are tired and bruised, and I almost don’t have the energy. I adjust to face the tent. Hopefully the sandbags and the concrete t-wall will shield me from any NVGs (night vision goggles) looking back this way.

As I pump, I regret that any other nursing mothers on this training trip have even less privacy and less time to pump. There certainly is nothing in the Airman’s Handbook or the many hours of “professional military education” to help us deal with the reality of womanhood or motherhood while carrying out our duties. And there are no accommodations in war. We just have to “suck it up” and deal with it the best we can.

I know I need to ween my baby boy before my deployment next month. But I’m trying to do my best for everyone for as long as I can. 

Relieved but famished, I decide to replace some of the calories I have burned. Training taxes all of our bodies. But, for me, the energy sapped by producing milk is greater than the physical exertion of training. 

I eat “bar-b-q ribs” cold, having removed the heaters when I field stripped my MREs yesterday. As I eat the rectangular piece of processed meat on the dense, heavy MRE bread, I hydrate with the included electrolyte drink mix. I put it straight into the water of my canteen even though I know I’m not supposed to.  

Squeezing applesauce into my mouth from the corner of a tan pouch, I peek out of the tent flap. The cloaked sun’s glow at the edge of the desert tells me our training is almost over, and that it’s about to get hot again.  

Troops and gear packed up and on the way back to our home installation, I work on the after-action report. The bus smells like BO, gun powder, and dust—and sour milk. I look at the Airmen who are exhausted and filthy. Some sleep. Some stare out the window. Who knows what kinds of collateral damage and personal sacrifices their deployments will bring them? I wonder how many of them feel like they are cheating someone, or a lot of someones, in their lives by leaving. 

Back at the installation, we clean our weapons, count ammunition, and return it all to the armory. We organize and turn in our gear. We try to ignore our screaming muscles as the pain attempts to interfere with what we have to do. After the last troop is gone and the last thing is done, I go home.

When I walk in the door, my two oldest sons are running in circles in the living room. The oldest is chanting “Mommy’s home, Mommy’s home, Mommy’s home” over and over. My three-year-old’s efforts sound more like “Me gnome, me gnome.” 

I kiss the big boys on the top of the head, and my husband appears from the kitchen with the baby, who starts to wail violently when he sees me. My milk lets down at the sound of his cries. My husband gives me a quick kiss and tells me he kept the baby hungry, just for me, but he can’t wait much longer. 

I drop my gear in front of the door and take off my uniform top, trading it for the baby. My husband holds the uniform top at arm’s length, but doesn’t say anything about the emanating stench. I realize I am way too dirty, regardless of how hungry he is. So, “mommy’s sorry,” and I kiss him, hand him back, and then disappear into my bedroom. 

Dust wafts out of each boot as I unlace and remove it. One of my socks is soaked in blood, the corner of my big toenail having eaten into the side of my toe. I peel off my filthy t-shirt, pants, and socks and brush my teeth in a hurry. During my quick shower, milk pours down the front of my body because I haven’t pumped in hours and because I can still hear my baby crying. The warm water, white milk, and blood mix at my feet on their way to the drain.

I make another entrance. The instant my older boys see me, they start up again. Or maybe they never stopped. I sit down on the couch in the living room with my hyperactive sons chanting as my husband disappears to finish dinner. 

The baby is angry at me and is screaming at the top of his lungs. I position him in a football hold, and the comparative quiet when he latches on is startling. He acts like he hasn’t eaten in the two days I have been gone. But I know Dad has fed him every four hours since I last walked out the door.

I start to relax as he nurses. My six-year-old tries to crawl into my lap with the baby, his knees and elbows hitting every bruise. Not comfortable, he finally settles for sitting at my left and rubbing the baby’s head as he tells me about his day. As I listen and look out of the picture window in front of me at the mountains, my three-year-old is still running in circles, “Me gnome, me gnome, me gnome.” 

I know my husband and my babies have sacrificed. I know they are about to make more sacrifices, ones my babies won’t even understand. And I know when the baby stops eating and soaks me in warm spit up, I will smell, again, like sour milk.

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“‘Sour Milk’” is an honest and revealing look at the intersection of military service and breastfeeding. That intersection, possibly the least talked-about aspect of military service, can have an enormous impact on military families.” —Mitzi Weems

Mitzi Weems balanced the important identities of “Mom” and “Sir/Ma’am” and “Honey” for twenty years and retired from active duty in 2018. While she enjoys writing about a variety of topics, her current writing focus illuminates neuro-differences and neurodiversity in our society. Mitzi has been a licensed attorney since 1997 and is published in that field. In addition to writing, Mitzi is passionate about her family and about tending her garden and her chickens. 

Intuitive Guide to Battlefields and Violence

by Christina M. Wells

1. Take the winter tour of Christmas lights past the field where soldiers ran, their feet slipping in the grass with their guns braced against each other. Now there’s a slight snow, and there’s cocoa in the car with the station that plays nothing but holiday music from Thanksgiving to New Year.

2. Note that for you, nothing much happened here except a picnic you took one summer. You were a few blankets over from two women in sarees, and you watched a little Black girl with plastic pink barrettes at the end of tiny braids. She was running after a little boy, but there was laughter. Not blood.

3. Play volleyball at the end of the field if you can stand it. Otherwise, run for the trail in the woods that has a bench at one curve. Don’t think about how long this dirt has been here and whether anyone hid behind trees, or for that matter, whether they do now. Watch the wind blow leaves past you, and then, wonder what else is hiding in the air.

4. Think about how long it takes for the ground to absorb blood, how many layers down the DNA is. Even without a body, so much runs like a river below the mud your sneakers hit.

5. Or go to a winery on this land. A man plays guitar on a back porch, his speakers playing a heavy bass. Glass cases line the walls. Knives and guns are artifacts, but the signs are incomplete. There are no obituaries here—only weapons that sit by tables where you pour red from a bottle to forget red underground.

6. Or go somewhere else. It’s a cloudy wind a few hours north. You could go to a well-lit lunch spot in the rain and have a salad in a giant bowl, or you could go to a battlefield where state names commemorate. These are your options.

7. You can walk with your green ski jacket and mittens with only the wind pushing you as you go forward. Note that it may feel like something else is here, though, and I don’t mean the shady guy with a Confederate flag on a plate at the front of his big red truck. Something else plays off of you both, and it’s not one person as much as it is the whole lot of them, everyone who was here before it got to be a park.

8. Go downtown. There’s a house where a lot of tourists go because something happened there, one day. Even if nothing else ever did, that day outweighs the rest of them. Two women with sandy hair and a balding guy with glasses each say there are cold spots where there isn’t a vent. See how hard it is for you to go through the door to leave.

9. Take a ghost tour at night, because who wouldn’t in a town with more dead than alive? Get electronic gizmos for your time. Walk in the dark toward a house with cars out front and a light on at the top of a staircase. See if your ghost gear seems to beep for the dead, and not the living. 

10. Scoff at the woman who claims to see things when she clearly doesn’t. Spend time thinking about how often the box you carry makes noise no matter where you walk. Someone is here, was here, is/was here simultaneously. Remember the red river some feet under the gravel, the mud, the battle off the battlefield. Prepare to scare yourself with the war that wasn’t in uniforms. War isn’t so uniform. Sing hymns in the car and tell the dead to stay.

11. Get on a plane. When it’s someone else’s war, maybe you won’t feel it. Find a castle with yellow flowers growing out of gray walls and wonder why it’s missing the roof over the great room where girls in long dresses walked. Think about how hard it is to imagine reasons why a sturdy ceiling would disappear when walls remain. When the ground takes them back.

12. Check the travel advisories before you get on another plane. Wonder at the advice that you should worry most about the places where the roof isn’t already gone. Have a drink. It’s complimentary, after all.

13. Go home. Read the celebrity column in the news to miss what could happen here, there, somewhere. 

14. Spend time in a museum where they check everyone’s bags individually, then tell you that they hope you have a good time. Think about the time you walked from one quadrant of the city to another because someone shot a guard in a museum about atrocities in a war and nobody knew whether he’d been caught. Think about how you looked over your shoulder for blocks.

15. Think about where you can’t hold hands. There’s no war outside those houses unless it’s yours.

16. Go to the library. Try not to think about the sign outside where there was a battle once. Now people drive too fast, screeching up to a light. There are asphalt and yellow lines where there might have once been red.

17. Turn left, then right. There’s a church where something happened with a war. You don’t remember what, but this means war crosses your mind on the way to get coffee.

18. Or go to that other coffee chain instead. It faces a road named after a Civil War figure. Note that the people who work there are nice, though, and the lights over the people with laptops aren’t even fluorescent.

19. Make a list of everywhere you aren’t safe. Stick it on your stainless steel fridge, the one that doesn’t absorb your handprint. Think about the therapist who said to make anxiety positive. Go back and put a list of where you feel safe. It’s a short list under a magnet from a museum where a guard rifled through your purse. 

20. Stay home where it’s safe. Bundle yourself in a quilt on the couch with your therapy cat and your therapy dog. Watch a documentary about war. Get up and lock the door. 

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“Though my wife served in Bosnia and Iraq, this piece comes from my observations, mostly in this country and occasionally abroad. It’s intended to address the commodification of war, and the places with devastating histories where people go for ‘fun,’ forgetting or ignoring the wars that have happened, are happening, or could happen.” —Christina M. Wells 

Christina M. Wells is an editor and coach. She has published in the Northern Virginia Review, Crab Fat, bioStories, Big Muddy, and Sinister Wisdom, among other magazines. Her work also appears in five anthologies, including Real Women Write: Seeing Through Their Eyes, ed. by Susan Schoch for Story Circle Network. She has an MA from University of Arkansas and a PhD from University of Maryland and was a finalist for the 2022 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction (New Letters). She also has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is currently working on a novel. Find her at https://bychristinamwells.net.