The fob was an austere place, everything dust-covered and rusted-over and painted in coyote brown or olive-drab green. Its very austerity tautened our nerves. Those first few hours our platoon sergeant led us in a tight column to scout out the helipad and the howitzers, the prison gym and the billeting tents, as we committed to memory what would soon become commonplace. The marines we were replacing did little to assist. They’d prepared no formal turnover, no handoffs or briefings, and as we explored the fob it seemed they wanted nothing to do with us. On the few occasions that we interacted, they treated us with an inexplicable disdain. “Shitbirds,” Sergeant Dejung said, shaking his head and squinting his beady eyes. “Absolute shitbirds.” None of our predecessors escaped his admonition. They wore their body armor slack and seemed not to watch their sectors of fire at all, and Dejung regarded them with a disgust that exhilarated and intimidated us all at once. His disgust may as well have been dogma. Dejung was a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient, which in our eyes made him something of a god. We followed behind his gimpy lope, nodding along and adopting his judgments as our own. That his wounds had left a noticeable hitch in his step served only to magnify our reverence, his malformed foot not so much a disability as an emblem of resilience. As if through sheer determination he’d forced his will on the world.
That first night, we claimed the bunks and wall lockers that would serve as our homes for the next seven months. The officers slept in trailers, but we lived in a series of large green canvas tents, stocked with rickety bunk beds and sagging mattresses. Lanier was a natural bunkmate. We were both quiet, both young, the two of us the newest members of our platoon. Until joining the Marine Corps, neither of us had ever seen the ocean. While we jockeyed for a bunk far from the doorflap, Dejung claimed a bunk all his own, which he dragged into a corner of the tent, then tucked his tarp under the top mattress such that it hung like a curtain. “That,” he told us, “is not a tarp. That’s a wall. No one touches my wall.” Lanier and I ended up with one of the worst bunks in the tent, situated next to a seam in the canvas through which the wind sluiced and whistled. We rock-paper-scissored for the lower rack and I pulled rock to his scissors. Lanier looked at my rock. “Dang,” he said. Then he went about unpacking his gear. I don’t recall any of us talking much that night. We were all, I think, a little on edge, awaiting our first mission in the morning. I climbed into my sleeping bag and, using the springs above me as a kind of clip, affixed a photo of my girlfriend alongside my watch and dog tags. Before Lanier climbed up to his bunk, I caught him glancing down at me. He gave me a sheepish grin.
“It’s nothing permanent,” I said. “We can switch midway through.”
He seemed to think about it, scratching at his trim beard. Even now, I can remember how jealous I felt of that beard. Lanier was the only one of us who hadn’t been dry shaving since leaving North Carolina—the medical officer had granted him a no-shave chit, on account of his thick, coiled facial hair—and his beard seemed to me a quiet luxury. After a moment, he made the hang loose sign. “Deal,” he said. Then he climbed up onto the top rack, the springs extending and contracting above my face. Looking back on it now, I’d meant what I said. But, for whatever reason, Lanier never took me up on the offer, and I never brought it up again.
We’d come to Syria as warfighters, but almost immediately we were forced to reconsider. There was a hierarchy at the Iron Maiden. Three units operated out of the fob, and our role, as we soon learned, was to provide local security for the other two. We were, for lack of a better word, their bouncers. What this meant in practice was that each day we stood post at the fob’s gate or along the walls, our kevlar helmets and body armor hot and heavy in the Syrian sun. It was repetitive duty, but we quickly learned to prefer the gate to the guardposts or the pillboxes, where we’d spend eight hours at a stretch crouched behind a machine gun, scanning our sector of fire—right to left, near to far, rapidly suffering a sense of entrapment. On gate duty, by contrast, we controlled the entrance and exit of vehicles, and this afforded us some degree of human interaction, of sheer physical movement. We searched every vehicle, American or otherwise, and for those vehicles driven by foreigners, well, we were polite, and we were professional. Yet even on gate duty we suffered from a general state of disillusionment. We watched the other units on base with a curdling envy, jealous of their missions and resentful of their sense of purpose. This was true for the artillery marines, who fired off their howitzers at all hours of the day, but it was even more so the case for the special operations marines. The operators, as we called them, lived in a world of their own, as if they created their own rules and their own reality. They were permitted to grow beards and to wear baseball caps, and in general didn’t give a fuck about anyone else. When we watched them leave base, headed out in their tactical vehicles on some unknowable mission, it only reinforced our sense of claustrophobia as we walked the same gravel paths, ate the same tasteless food, and stood the same monotonous posts. And there was no diminishing it: once the claustrophobia set in, it never left. As the deployment ground on, we began to lose ourselves to a communal cabin fever.