Not until five years had passed did I see Lanier again. His appearance had changed—civilianized, I suppose, with a longish beard, a small fro, and a little pooch around the midsection—yet he was still Lanier all the same. I felt a pang of recognition, the strength of which surprised me given the years during which I had scarcely thought of him. How long had it been since he’d crossed my mind? There was a moment, early on, when it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him—that he’d drifted into the ether. I asked around, texted some old group chats to see if anyone had remained in touch. To the best I could tell, no one had. It seemed awful, in a way—that he could vanish like that. But then again, it wasn’t as though Lanier had kept a relationship with any of us. The uncoupling, I told myself, had been mutual. At any rate, if there had been a time when I could have casually called him, that time had passed. Our friendship was too far lapsed.
We were bunkmates, Lanier and I, our seven months in Syria. This was the summer of ‘17, when the war was still on—before we bombed them into oblivion. We’d been anxious to get over there, though I don’t believe either of us had any clear idea what we were getting into. Warfighting, I suppose—at least, that’s what they told us. That we would be “no better friend, no worse enemy.” When it came time to deploy we left in the dead of night, our company of some two hundred marines and sailors piling into a series of sleek charter buses that whisked us from our base in North Carolina to an air station in New Jersey, where we boarded a rotator to Ramstein, then Incirlik, then Baghdad. There were other passengers aboard, mostly civilians, and we could feel their eyes on us. I remember the sense of anticipation growing with each leg of the journey, the atmosphere intensifying. In Baghdad, we spent three days milling about an enormous, drafty hangar, playing cards and sleeping on the concrete. Our captain walked around the hangar repeating the old Mattis quote: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” Already my heart was in my throat. On the third night, we loaded onto white schoolbuses equipped with dark window shades, which we were instructed to keep drawn as the buses chugged along the highway to a linkup point on the Syrian border. They’d already issued us our ammunition, and my magazines felt heavy on my chest. I remember looking at Lanier sitting next to me on the bus, and each of us nodding, just the once. Like we had a shared understanding. Then the buses halted and we straggled out into the desert. A fleet of armored vehicles were strung out across the desert floor like huge, sleeping ghosts in the moonlight. One of the lieutenants issued a convoy brief standing atop an MRE box next to the hood of a humvee. He hiccupped as he spoke, a nervous tic for which I felt embarrassed on his behalf, then ashamed to have even noticed. I don’t recall truly hearing a word of what he said. The sun was breaking over the horizon, and in that instant it seemed as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen—the great vast desert, tan and cold and hard, and the piercing sun slicing out of the earth. Then the lieutenant told us to make condition-three rifles, and one hundred and fifty magazines clicked into place. Only when Lanier tapped my elbow did I realize that this meant me, too—that I should load my own rifle.
We divvied up into vehicles. A gunner stood in the turret, his face wrapped in a keffiyeh. I couldn’t help but notice how pale his uniform appeared, how sun-bleached and worn compared to my own. The convoy departed, and almost immediately we turned off the highway, occasionally following faint tracks but mostly bouncing right over the desert floor. The gunner scanned the machine gun from side to side, swiveling in the turret with the linked rounds clinking and a cloud of dust obscuring his face. I had no idea how he could see anything at all. We drove for three hours, and in all that time the terrain seemed never to change, as if we could drive to the ends of the earth and find no indication of human civilization. Then the driver pointed to a speck in the distance. “There she is,” he said. I craned my neck. We’d been briefed that we’d be posted at a forward operating base, FOB 23, but what I saw was just a blip—a disturbance in the sand. Only when we were within firing distance could I make out the telltale Hesco barriers, stacked two deep and loaded with earth. We paused outside a serpentine gate where a double-spool of razor wire laced the barriers, and I spotted two marines with medium-machine guns on either side of the gate, each sheltered in a kind of poor man’s pillbox of plywood and sand bags.
“This is FOB 23?” I asked.
The driver grinned. “Welcome to the Iron Maiden.”