Loose Change: Anecdotes from a Circumstantial Soldier
Alisha Costanzo
Published by Alisha Chambers
Smashwords Edition.
Copyright 2010 Alisha Chambers
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I had the funniest thing happen to me the other day.
One of my guys was out sick, and he had talked me into doing his deliveries. I always said that I would never deliver this shit, but I always said a lot of fucking things.
And well, we’ll just say that I know someone real well that knows how to cook.
So, I’m out on his run with this tiny sheet of notebook paper that tells me where all of his deliveries are. I had made at least the first half of them, and there, next on the list, was the address to the County Court House.
I stood there at the bottom of the steps mulling over whether I should go in or not. This had to be a set up, and I thought, No way. But then I decided, fuck it; I may as well get it over with.
So, I went up to the office he had written out for me and seen that it was the District Attorney.
Fuck, I’m going to jail.
But then, I’ve been there before.
I just opened the door and walked in without knocking. She looked up and recognized the backpack—the look on her face giving away that she knew why I had come.
“Close the door,” she told me.
“I think I have something you want.”
She looked at me kind of horrified, “What do you want?”
It was like mortal enemies coming face to face, only I had the one up because I had a secret about her. ‘Cause lets face it, she never could get charges to stick to me, they always got dropped or were minimalized.
“I want my record to disappear. I want to join the Army, and I want my record to disappear.”
She opened the top right-hand drawer of her desk and pulled it out, “Webb, Jason D.” was written along the tab in red marker. It was like an inch thick; I got in trouble a lot when I was young. I was always into something stupid.
“Holy crap, I didn’t know it was that big.” Pause. “Why do you have that in your desk?”
She laughed and told me that she took a personal interest in me. I think it’s because her daughter had a crush on me.
Then she told me that she’d take care of my file, and I wouldn’t have any problems with it anymore.
So now I was free and clear to join the Army.
I wish this had happened before I tried to sign up for the Air Force.
You’ve got to be thinking, why does this motherfucker want to join the military? Well let me tell you, it was the day from hell.
I had had a bad day and lost my mind. We’ll just say some bad shit happened, and I blacked out for most of it. It was spotty, but I remember going into the recruiter’s office. My ass sat down, put my feet up on his desk, opened my bag of McDonald’s, and asked him, “When can I leave?”
Now, most people assume that’s it you’re in no matter what. But you have a chance to back out, and when that chance made its appearance, I couldn’t decide.
I flipped a coin, and it told me to follow through, so I did.
Besides my grandfather thought it was a good idea; it’d straighten me up. I even changed my last name to Chambers before I signed, nothing like being a whole new person.
***
Basic Training was lonely, I didn’t know if I could have handled the lonely anymore. No one in my family wrote to me. Fuck them, ya know?
So, then I went to AIT. For those of you who don’t know, it’s Advanced Individual Training, and it happens after Basic.
I wound up calling this girl Tracy; we had graduated together, and I wanted to talk to somebody from home, but not my family. This one time her little sister had answered the phone; I had a freshman science class with her and her cousin when I was a senior. So, from then on I started talking to her too.
Eventually this led me to flipping another coin. What happened was that this girl I had broken up with was calling me, and she assumed that we were going to get married. Jessica, Tracy’s younger sister, didn’t assume anything.
I flipped the coin to decide between the two, I didn’t want to be alone, and I would invite one of them to come to Hawaii with me after AIT. I flipped ‘cause it was like choosing between the evil I knew and the one I don’t. It was pretty lame either way.
It turned out to be Jessica.
So as it went, the next time I called her I asked her if she wanted to go to Hawaii.
Her response was that there had to be a catch. Well there was, Army said we had to get married, and then they’d pay for it.
She agreed because she wanted out of her parents’ house, and when I came back for leave, we got married.
Me and Jess were married for three months when it all changed.
I found out that she had been lying to me. She was not a sweet girl, and it was sudden. It was like a flare; she became a crazy bitch, stopped taking her birth control, and got pregnant so I wouldn’t leave her.
She was lucky about that one too, because I was close to saying sayonara to the whole situation.
Her excuse for the turn around was that she was homesick. Jess refused to get a job, clean the house, clean up after herself, or do laundry, and we argued all the time because of it. I’m not going to work fourteen hours a day or more just to come home and clean up after her.
She got me though, I decided I was going to try and work it out because she was pregnant.
But, let me explain what happened exactly. Put in perspective so to speak.
We had been at home, and she went crazy screaming at me and shit. Then she would start bawling and being sorry that she was screaming at me. But then, she’d go back to screaming at me, then bawling again.
I have no idea what she was fucking screaming about.
So, the bitch decided to go for a walk to get fresh air or something, and I locked her ass out. When she came back, I wouldn’t let her in for like a half hour.
Finally, when she was calmly sitting by the glass door on the porch I let her inside. That woman started screaming at me again.
“Fuck this! Fuck you! When you’ve got your shit all figured out let me know.” I went into the other room and left her there crying all over the place, and I just sat on the couch ignoring her.
Let her be fucking crazy.
She didn’t take long to get over whatever she was screaming about and came over to the couch. Jess sat down and put her head on my shoulder to love on me.
I turned to her saying, “Fuck this! If you’re not pregnant, you’re going to be.”
So, I got up and found her birth control, and I popped each pill out into the toilet.
The next day, I took her to the doctor for a blood pregnancy test. Three days later, we found out she was a month pregnant.
I knew she had lied to me about her birth control, hormonal bitch.
***
No shit, there I was in Afghanistan for my first deployment.
We lived in a bowl. There was a mountain range around us, so there was no way in or out without going over the mountains, except for the gauntlet. It was a valley through the mountains where old crashed helicopters laid because the Afghanis had thrown chains and rocks at the Russians as they flew through it; it proved to be very effective.
We were flying up to the top of one of the mountains to let the SF guys run around for high altitude training. Being the crew chief, I had to ride up there with them, and I got bored.
I decided that I wanted some of the snow from the mountain because it was finally cold enough for there to be snow towards the top. So, I took a box of bottled water, emptied it out into my helmet bag and filled the box with snow.
When we got back to the base after all the training was done, I had snow while none of the others did. There were some fuckers in the hanger on top of a Black Hawk, so they couldn’t get away from me or fight back when I started pegging them with snowballs.
“Fucker, I’m going to get you for this.” Private Malone yelled as he ducked with hands covering his head. I pegged him in the back of the thigh so hard that he let out a muffled wail.
“Consider this payback for my missing eyebrow.” I launched another snowball at him, missing.
The others were standing around laughing at me pummeling Malone, Cobb-Knob, and Fiasco.
It was the perfect opportunity for mass annihilation. Pulling the cardboard box of snow up with my left hand, I pivoted, scooping unpacked balls of snow and lobbing them at the five guys who stood there watching.
They scampered away too fast, and I returned to my trapped prey until I ran out of snow.
When they came off the aircraft, I was already running. Fuckers couldn’t catch me; I set the pace during PT.
***
So, no shit, there I was flying around the Pakistani border.
We were just out on a basic patrol route. A little while ago, we had seen this guy just walking in the middle of the desert. I mean he was alone, with no camel, no pack with food or water, and he was fifty miles away from any city. I swear these people could survive anywhere, resilient fuckers.
So, now there were these Anti-Aircraft Armaments off to the right tracking our movements.
I pulled open the box I built onto the back of the pilot’s seat—my little snack box. I grabbed a chocolate bar and ripped it open. The box had enough junk food in it to feed the fifteen men that could fit in the helicopter for two days.
There were only four of us now.
I had an almost full case of Dr. Pepper beside my seat, I popped one open to wash down the chocolate. It was warm, like it always was. Having no ice is something that takes getting used to.
“I’m going to see if I can’t get them on FM2,” I told the pilot and pointed to the triple A’s.
The chances of this happening with there being thousands and thousands of possible frequencies are almost zero, but hey I always liked to try.
Leaning over, I switched their control of that radio over to my console. Flipping through the channels, it was only seconds until I found them; I had gotten lucky that their frequency at this location was close to ours.
“Hello, hello.” I said. “Hello…”
“Hello,” the voice on the other side said.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“Who is this?”
“Well if you can see a helicopter, that’s me.”
“If you can see a missile battery, that is me.”
Looking out my window, I saw one of the dozen triple-A’s or so lower.
“A’ right, what have you got over there?” He had a little bit of this and that. I told him, “I have Dr. Pepper and chocolate.”
Our pilots agreed to land so we could trade with the Pakistanis even though this was highly looked down upon and completely off mission.
Each of the dozen triple-A’s followed us as we landed before just lowering.
We traded mostly food, MREs, drinks, and candy. Mostly we just hung out.
There was a dark kid running around that I gave a chocolate bar.
We just bullshitted. I never want to go home. My wife’s there, and she’s a bitch. I remember telling her I was being deployed. I told the guys the story.
“I’m going on vacation,” I told her.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going on vacation by yourself?” Bobbing her head, she put her scaly hands on her fat hips.
Why did I marry her again? Oh yeah, that’s right I flipped a coin. Same way I decided to join the Army—bad fucking day.
“Yeah, I’m deploying to Afghanistan.”
“Why would you call it a vacation?” She screeched, and her face blushed red.
“Because I don’t have to be around you.”
Jess thought I was actually taking a vacation without her, and she got pissed. She doesn’t know I hopped a few of the islands in Hawaii without her.
Fuck that bitch; I’m gonna volunteer to stay another year just to keep away from her.
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