29 PALMS

29 Palms

1. Ungentle

     I had midwatch, midnight to 0400, walking post around our 155mm howitzers in the battalion's gun park. "Twentynine Stumps," California. Desert, my ass: deserts were supposed to be hot. This place of sand and rock was cold, knucklenumbing fucking cold. 

     I walked around and around the guns. My boots crunched the cold sand. For diversion I broke the ice on shallow puddles left from a recent winter rain. Toward the end of my watch, a new skin of ice would form where I had kicked the holes by the time I made the next pass. The hawk was out. 

     The cold made the stars seem closer. They glittered, along with the frost crystals and the silvery steel barrels of the cannons, the galvanized metal of the quonset huts and the glass headlight lenses of the dark hulking trucks. 

     And cold was clear. The air had nothing in it: no blowing clouds of gritty powder, as came in summer sandstorms; no billows of blueblack diesel exhaust we'd kick up above the motor pool when we worked on our vehicles in the daytime.

     There was no one to talk to, no sound to hear except what I made. But seeing... the fierce clarity of the air seemed to demand that everything around me jump at my eyes. I stopped to look. What was around me - the big guns, quiet now but pregnant with awful noise, the hulking unlovely trucks with their starkly utilitarian knobby tires - seemed peculiarly visible in the cold clear air, seemed to be broadcasting a special silent demand to be seen, just now and just as they were, by me. 

     I took off my right glove. The cold bit deeper, but for a moment I experienced the feeling more as sharp than cold. I touched things. I walked up to where the inclined barrel of a 155mm howitzer pointed off toward the low jagged ridge that formed the base's horizon to the east. The combined light of cold stars and cold moon and cold floodlight crept into the cannon's dark maw and disappeared. 

     I reached up and put my bare fingers into the howitzer's mouth, just over six inches in diameter. The steel's deep cold bit my fingers. I looked at the steel ridges of the rifling that spiraled down into the barrel. The ridges were square and sharp. 

     The canvas covering lashed over the cannon's breech was frozen stiff, rough to the touch. I kept touching cold rough things: the howitzer's tractorlike tires, the steel wheels, the lug nuts big as a medium-sized dog’s paw, the sharply threaded studs onto which the nuts were tightened, the gun's two I-beam ways that converged at the towring, the angular fenders of the trucks, the crude steel grates that guarded their headlights, the frozen ropes, the canvas, the chains. I touched my own uniform, my equipment: the hard angles of the grooves in my rifle's flash suppressor, the machined edges of its receiver and operating rod handle, the serrated windage and elevation knobs on either side of the rear sight, the grooved plastic canteen cap with its flat keeper chain, the rough web belt, the checkered bayonet handle with its machined slot for my rifle's bayonet lug, my canvas field jacket, more rough than warm; the webbed rifle sling that cut its groove into my shoulder, the inhospitable steel pot on my head. Snaps, buckles, zippers, eyelets, all with their clear signal of what was to come. My mind scanned the words I knew, feeling that one word, and one only, was trying to insinuate itself into a prominent position before me. It came: ungentle. I had, through the simple succession of my own choices from among life's options, landed myself in a situation where nothing soft or gentle or comfortable or comforting was to be found.

     I put my glove back on, slapped my hands together, and went back to walking my post.