The gambling began with Dejung. He’d purchased a set of poker chips through the military exchange and in his down time would corral together a table of marines for hours-long tournaments. The games soon became a fixture of the canvas tent. Mostly we played for small stakes, dollar hands and quarter bets, recording our various debts in a green cloth notebook which quickly took on an almost sacred status. For the most part, the debts were so many and so varied as to cancel themselves out, and I doubt if anyone would have been capable of calculating the ultimate tally from the endless scroll. I think we all held an unspoken understanding that at the end of the deployment, the green cloth notebook would be burned or destroyed. The gambling was just a way to pass the time. But I soon suspected that for Lanier it was something more—that the extravagant stakes he wagered held some deeper meaning. We had, by this point, creatively sourced a circular table and several folding chairs from the chow hall, and Lanier would sit there with an almost expressionless look on his face while others came and went, oblivious to their fawning. There was no obvious joy when he won, but neither when he lost was there any regret. Not that I could see, at least. Just a serene self-assurance and a blind faith that the cards would turn in his favor. They rarely did. For all his certainty, he had no special talent for cards, no sense of when to fold—and yet the losing seemed not to bother him, as if his commitment were to the act itself, without regard for consequence. His debts went in the green cloth notebook the same as ours, and although I never tallied them up, I was often left with a degree of shock—that he would bluff so strongly with so weak a hand.
It must have been September or October that Lanier lost several hundred dollars to Dejung in a single sitting—an exorbitant sum for a junior marine. I watched from the lower bunk as he pushed his chips into the pot. He gambled without pause or reservation. Dejung, for his part, propped his misshapen boot on the table and tipped back his chair, narrating each hand in the voice of a carnival barker. The game didn’t last long at all. When it was over, they took out their phones and transferred the money, as if unwilling to allow so large a debt to linger as one more tally in the green cloth notebook. Then Lanier sat alone at the card table. I had a queasy feeling, watching him sit there. For whatever reason, he’d begun to shave his face, and I remember noticing the razor bumps along his neck—how they were pus-filled and inflamed. He looked at me and flashed a half-hearted hang loose sign. “So it goes,” he said. And perhaps I should have been more skeptical, more willing to question the stakes for which he played. But, in the moment, his composure reassured me. I felt certain that he knew what he was doing—that any anxiety on my part reflected only my own discomfort with risk. If I placed greater value on a paycheck than did Lanier, perhaps that said something more about me than it did him.
It was around this time that another pickup appeared on the horizon. They stayed further out this time, firing a few shots before disappearing into the desert, and although their shots were wild and unaimed, one of the rounds struck a blast wall and sent a fragment of concrete into a marine’s cheek. At first we were told that the marine was fine, that his body armor had blocked the shrapnel. But the marine did not return from medical, and soon we heard he’d been evacuated to Baghdad before finally being sent home. In time, we learned that he had lost his eye. After the attack we increased the number of marines on post, and our lieutenant instituted additional security measures. Already we required foreigners to exit their vehicles and submit to a search of their belongings. Now we established heightened scrutiny, casting a generalized suspicion on the drivers of the fuel trucks and the water trucks and on the caravans of local nationals who worked the chow hall and the laundry. The new security measures called for pat-downs. “Don’t be afraid to get in there,” Dejung would tell us as we lined the foreigners up behind the blast wall, their hands against the concrete and their feet spread apart. When he felt it necessary he would demonstrate, driving one hand into the foreigner’s back while he rammed his other hand up their thighs or into their armpits. Most of the foreigners spoke no English at all, but they quickly learned the expectation, and after exiting their vehicles would walk to the backside of the blast wall and assume the position.