A true story about music

In November of 1998 I was a young soldier torturously surviving the last painful stretch of basic training. Minutes after eleven o’clock on any of those cold desert nights would find us miserably tucked into our sleeping bags, M-16’s resting uncomfortably under our heads so that we would be awakened if they were to be snatched from under us in our sleep. All twenty soldiers around me had fainted away like exploded light bulbs after another eighteen hour day when our commanders stormed in, shouting and banging their rifles against the metal support poles of our tent.

Moments later we were fully dressed in our uniforms and sitting on a concrete slab, cold, tired and more miserable than ever. We were told to wait for a bus. Meanwhile we sank heavily back to sleep in our places, having barely been awake throughout the whole metal-clanging ordeal. Saddam was stirring things up, the Sergeant had barked at us. He knew we had no idea; we’d been disconnected and ripped apart from the world, stripped of access to any media during our sunstroke days and drained of all interest in anything but sleep during the precious little nighttime we had to ourselves. Things are looking dangerous, the Sergeant continued in his condescending shout, and all basic training soldiers are being recruited for extra work.

An hour later we arrived at a huge warehouse and were assigned tasks. We were placed around tables arranged in a factory-like assembly line and began to robotically take apart air filters off of gas masks, replace their batteries, put them back together and pack them up in their brown boxes. For the first couple of hours there was still some talk to be heard amongst us, but the commanders, who paraded angrily between the lines, shut us up.

One by one our commanding staff vanished. They were just as tired and miserable as we were, and with no one to hover about them they gradually sulked off to sleep. By that time there was no need for their intimidating presence over our shoulders; conversation had died out into an eerie silence. We were a factory of automatons, each programmed with the simplest of motions, so mind numbingly repetitive it might even be accomplished in our sleep. I can’t remember what I was doing, was I undoing the screws, was I taking out the batteries and throwing them away, was I putting fresh ones in? I do remember one soldier pleading to trade jobs. He couldn’t find a single friend willing to switch tasks with him, and was finally silenced by a commander. I remember asking myself, why? Was there one step on the assembly line that actually demanded consciousness? Were we all too tired to teach our hands anything new?

And then I blew out like a light bulb face down onto a table scattered with upright screws. They’d been arranged in formation like soldiers. Two of those soldiers would surely have poked my eyes out if a good friend of mine hadn’t caught my head in time. He slapped me awake and then sent me off to a corner of the huge warehouse to sleep. My fellow soldiers had sneakily created a decoy; a few of them were hidden behind brown gas mask boxes they’d stacked ceiling-high in a row parallel to the wall to create the illusion that the warehouse ended there. I welcomed the cold floor and used my hard plastic canteen as a pillow.

Unfortunately, I only got a few minutes of sleep before I was rudely awakened once again by the panicked rustling of soldiers. They dragged me to my feet, out of our sanctuary and into to the smell of cold morning air, where our commanding officer had us all lined up for inspection. I stood stiffly and listened to the officer’s speech, my cheek flat and pink from being pressed up against the plastic canteen, my eyes burning red from being yanked out of deep sleep,

Soldiers are unaccounted for, he yelped. Soldiers are falling asleep! I felt with fearful certainty that his eyes would stop on mine; I knew that everything about my disheveled appearance made it obvious that I was exactly one of those soldiers. He stared at us all with blank eyes and demanded that all those who were sleeping come forward. We were all silent, of course.

Then a frail voice spoke from behind me. I could not turn back to see who it was. Permission to speak sir, the soldier said, and I felt a surge of relief run through my body, knowing that this stupid kid was about to put his army boot in his mouth and take the fall for us all. Permission granted, the officer replied. Sir, the soldier said, why don’t we drive your truck into the warehouse and park it in the middle and turn on the radio?

I could hear every mute response around me in the silence that followed; I heard the rubbery strain of eyes popping out, I heard the grinding of teeth and the biting of lips to hold in laughter, I heard the clenching of toes in boots and the digging of fingernails into flesh, I heard stomach muscles tighten and smiles swallowed. Even the officer himself seemed to be holding back laughter, which he could not allow himself to let out, not in front of fresh basic training soldiers. Eagerly, almost sadistically, we all awaited his response. He paced around us one last time and ordered us back to work.

We sat down and resumed the flow of the assembly line. The brown army truck rolled into the warehouse. The truck’s doors were opened, and the radio was turned on. Music filled the space. It was a fifties and sixties music station. After sleepless days and nights we had finally entered a dream. “Twist and shout!”, the radio sang, “Tell Laura I love her…”, and gas masks traded hands. The sun shone in on us and we were alive. It was the strongest second wind any of us had ever experienced. Every hour on the hour the radio beeped the news, and we heard of the mounting tensions in the gulf, and of soldiers like ourselves who were preparing for any possibility. We imagined ourselves to be heroes, real soldiers and not the scraggy bunch of kids we really were.