It was shortly after New Year’s that Lanier lost everything. By this point in the deployment, Dejung and Lanier regularly played for high stakes, for chips of such value that no other marines would join. But on this night the stakes rose to a new level of irrationality. A crowd of marines gathered about, as if anticipating ruin. There seemed something gross in it, something nauseating. Loath as I was to watch, I found myself unable to look away. Dejung had his boot up on the table, unnaturally bulging at the ankle, and he ran a knife over his cheek, as if he were a cowboy or a frontiersman. Lanier sat silent and erect. Neither of them pondered over their cards. The bets came one after the other, with such rapidity as to be reflexive, as if there were no scenario in which either would fold. It took me a moment to notice the medal stashed away with Dejung’s chips. “Your medal,” I said. Lanier didn’t respond, didn’t even look up from his cards, and I turned to Dejung, who sat with a hint of a smile playing at his lips. “You let him gamble away his medal?” Dejung picked up the little anodized disk, which hung by a ribbon from its prongs, and held it in front of his face, scrunching his brow as if he’d not noticed it before. “Would you look at that,” he said.
The rest of the hands went by too fast. We were all of us silent until it was done, like the hushed congregants at a burial. In the end, Dejung spun his phone on the tabletop while Lanier sat and stared. “Show’s over, gents,” Dejung said. Someone asked Lanier how much he’d lost, but he seemed not to hear. Then he looked at Dejung.
“One more,” he said.
Dejung laughed. “Brother,” he said. “It’s over. You’re done.” He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched his legs, the mangled foot jutting strangely. Then he gave a little laugh and asked Lanier what he had left. In tandem, the two of them looked over to our bunk, where our gear hung from the posts or was splayed next to the rack: our kevlars and body armor, our plastic jugs of protein powder and creatine, some random packets of corn nuts and peanut butter.
“Okay,” Dejung said, sitting upright and leaning over the table. “We go one more, we go for everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
Dejung gestured over to our bunk—to the kevlar and the body armor, the corn nuts and peanut butter. “Everything.”
Lanier looked blankly at his gear. “I’m on post tonight,” he said.
“That’s the bet,” Dejung said. He kicked his chair back. “No risk it, no biscuit.”
It seemed an outrageous risk to take, even for Lanier. To gamble away his gear. And yet even before he responded I knew what he would say. There was never any doubt in how the game would end, either. Afterwards, as Lanier readied himself to go out on post, I shoved my kevlar and body armor into his arms, but Dejung made him return the gear. “He’s made his bed,” he said. A part of me half-expected someone to intervene—a lieutenant or a captain, someone who could make things right with a single command. But no savior was forthcoming, and Lanier left the tent clothed only in his desert camouflage. That night I didn’t sleep at all. I felt untethered, as if all fixed points had been set adrift. For hours I paced the tent, listening to the wind sluice through the flaps and from time to time opening the doorflap to peer outside. All through the night, I pictured Lanier crouched in a guardpost without his body armor, and I asked myself if the experience would be for him a kind of torture of the mind, awaiting some faceless threat, or if in some twisted way it would provide a form of relief. If it did, it was a relief in which I could not take part. Instead I was left pacing the tent, stifling a swelling desire to run—to lift back the doorflap and escape through the gate, out into the desert, flapping my arms and screaming into the void.
Lanier returned in the morning much as he’d left, though his eyes had grown weary and raw. I sprang from my rack to meet him. “Lanier,” I said. He looked at me. After a moment, it occurred to me he was waiting, expecting me to speak. But whatever I felt, I couldn’t find the words. It seemed too big to give voice to, and I instead stood there awkwardly, a part of me inclined to reach out in an embrace. “I’m pretty tired,” he said. I nodded. Whatever the moment had meant, I knew it had now passed. I watched him walk to our rack, where he gathered up his shaving kit and his shower shoes. He slung his towel over his shoulder and looked at me with his tired eyes. His fatigue was so great he appeared to be crying. Then he nodded, just the once, before making his way out of the tent.