Chapter 2 of A Texas Son in Washington's Army
The morning came fast as it always did for Carl. He woke up in a fit, having had his normal nightmares. He looked at his phone and found the time to be 0430. He unplugged the phone from the charger that was conveniently built into the bed of his truck. Time to shower and enjoy the day in Monticello. Carl went into his green storage box he kept all his non-essential equipment. Inside was a large clear thick plastic bag. Coming out the bottom was a stem with a plastic shower head. The top had a cap that could be loosened to put water into. Normally you would fill it and hang it so that the sun would warm the water, but there was no time for that. Carl filled the field shower with water from his large water jug that sat next to his storage box. There was just enough water to fill the shower. Carl made a mental note to fill it at the next stop. He put on music while he stripped down and got under the water stream. He turned a rotating switch to allow the water to pour over him. He quickly got wet, soaped, and rinsed in under a minute. He shut off the water and began drying himself off with his microfleece towel. He hopped on the tailgate and stood up on the plastic so he wouldn’t keep getting his feed dirty. He dressed in his normal jeans, of course ensuring his revolver and Beretta were secure in their place. He stood in the back of his truck after getting fully dressed, wearing his Texas flag shirt and stared at the shower hanging from the rope.
Carl was suddenly back in Afghanistan early in the deployment. He could hear his former Soldier and friend Sergeant Halfapple showing him the shower he built for the section. He had taken two of the barriers normally used to fill full of dirt and make a barrier to stop small arms fire, and stacked them on top of each other. He found snips and cut an entrance out. When you walked in, a bar was slid through the mesh and it help a field shower. Halfapple looked for approval from his Section Chief. Carl, known then as Staff Sergeant Houston, looked at Halfapple and smiled. “Now I don’t have to smell all you dirty fucks inside the operations center.” That was as close to a compliment as Halfapple could hope to hear. Halfapple began walking from the operations center to organize the section and get the days operations moving. Carl relied on Halfapple for almost every facet of his responsibilities. Carl turned and looked back at the shower smiling just as he heard the “zzzzzzzzziiiiingggggggg”. He immediately recognized the sound of a rocket as it flies over head. He looked back towards the operations center and saw a cloud of smoke and dirt but no Halfapple. As recognition of the event settled in, Carl heard the radio going crazy and then heard small arms fire coming from the perimeter. Carl looked back at the impact location and could now see Halfapple laying on the ground. There were already casualty teams moving to his location. Carl put on his gear, grabbed his rifle and began running towards the perimeter defense location near the small arms fire. He could see a machine gunner wounded. The assistant gunner was opening an ammunition box getting ready to feed more into the M240B machine gun as the gunner began spraying hate back out towards two individuals who were shooting back at them. The Hesco barriers, meant to create a barrier were now creating dead space where the individuals were. They held the AK-47s above the barriers and blindly shot into the perimeter of the forward operating base.
Carl managed to pull himself out of the day dream. He had been thinking about Halfapple a lot in the last few weeks. The guilt he felt was not apparent to Carl, but it tore him up inside regardless. He finished packing up his stuff, securing it as he always does. He put his go back pack in the front on the floor and sat in his truck. It was now 0530 and the sun would soon come up. Carl needed to get gas, refill his water and then get to visit Monticello. After his gas station trip for gas and horrible old food he made sure his map app was set in correctly and drove to Monticello. He loved how the streets were named after Jefferson. Carl pulled into the parking lot which was completely empty. There was a sign that said museum closed for renovation. Carl noted that he should have first looked up if they were open. He began to feel some despair. “This is why you plan things out and don’t act spontaneously!” he said in his usual harsh tones he reserved only for himself. Carl sat in his truck, in the parking lot and stared into his windshield. He wasn’t looking beyond the windshield, only at it. After an unknown amount of time he was startled by a knock on the driver’s side window. Carl reached towards his right side where his Beretta was but recognized a security guard uniform and relaxed. He rolled down the window and looked at the security guard while placing his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun just over the guards shoulder.
“Sir, the museum is closed. It will be open again at the end of the month. I am going to have to ask you come back when it’s open.” Carl noticed the name tag on the uniform said White, which was presumably the guard’s last name. His uniform sleeves were short and they were tight on the very large arms that could not have possibly fit into them. A tattoo could be seen half way covered by the sleeves, but enough to recognize the large USMC letters. “White, I see you were a Marine.” White nodded but continued to look suspiciously at Carl. “I just got out of the Army. I was stationed at Bragg. Decided before I went home to Texas permanently I would check out the pieces of American history I never bothered to before.” White still kept his arms near his waist. There was no firearm, but a flashlight and night stick were easily seen hanging from his black leather belt. White did not seem to care about this information as much as Carl had hoped. He decided to try a different approach. “So how many deployments did you get done before you called it quits?” Carl asked this knowing it would likely elicit an emotional response. Marines are not accustomed to being called quitters in any way. “I didn’t quit, I moved on!” White’s jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed. “So did I. Three deployments in what was obviously a losing battle and I moved on.” Carl said. He figured at the very least it would end in some good old fashioned inter-military trash talk. That always brightened up his mood. White was staring off into space. Carl knew the look. The same look his soon to be ex-wife often described him having. “White, snap out of it bro. The look on your face seems to have answered my question on deployments. Afghanistan or Iraq?” White let out a breath as he returned to the real world. “I was in Fallujah. I volunteered to stay but they made me come home.” Carl allowed a moment of silence to pass before speaking. “That was some tough fighting. I was in Baqubah. My Brigade manned checkpoints in North Diyala and they took huge amounts of casualties. VBIEDS were a daily occurrence.” VBIED was a short term that mean vehicle borne improvised explosive device. “I am not even sure where they got that many hoopties.” White and Carl both spoke the same language and the bond of warriors was established. “I didn’t get your name. I’m Sean White.” White held out his hand and Carl opened the door to his truck and stepped out. He extended his hand to White and gripped it firmly. “I’m Carl Houston. Great to meet you.” In that handshake a silent agreement was made. “The renovation crew doesn’t usually show up for another 45 minutes. Would you like the quick veteran’s special tour?” White asked. Carl couldn’t turn this opportunity down. Carl hated crowds so this was the perfect solution. “I would be truly honored devil dog.” Carl stated sincerely.
Carl followed White into the mansion. Everything was clean, but a few rooms had cloths draped over all the furniture. The areas that were not near the renovation could be freely maneuvered in. “What is your main interest? We don’t have time for the full tour, but I can get you closer than you normally could in a regular tour.” Honestly I would like to see Jefferson’s bedroom and the chair he invented that he used while writing the Declaration of Independence.” White knew exactly where the chair was and it was in what Jefferson called his cabinet. Carl walked into the cabinet and was in awe. The busts and the books. It was just an overwhelming feeling to be in the presence of so many items that Jefferson himself may have touched and worked on. He looked around and asked if he could sit in the chair. White motioned with his head that it would be ok. “Sit lightly, if you break it, were both fucked” Carl loved how when veterans identified each other they didn’t mince words. Carl reverently and lightly sat slowly. He slowly rotated the chair realizing that Jefferson invented this chair and it had a certain gravitas. Carl didn’t believe in make believe and supernatural phenomena but there was definitely a feeling of awe. He could see some paper laying on the ground under a nightstand. White had moved on to do security check as per his job and Carl sat there just taking it all in. He decided to get up and see what was on the ground. He picked up the paper and unrolled it. It seemed to be a letter written by John Adams. It was yellowish and fragile. It didn’t simply unroll easily like new paper would. He decided that accidently destroying a piece of history would be less than optimal, so he simply placed it on the nightstand and exited the room. A breeze with no discernable origin blew past him. Carl got the chills but otherwise was not phased. He caught up with White who showed him to the bedroom where Jefferson died. It was not the original bed apparently, but this is the spot where Jefferson died 5 hours earlier than Adams fifty years to the day of the ratification of the Declaration. The chill had come back to Carl.
"Feels ominous doesn’t it?” White asked. Carl nodded his head in the affirmative. They both left the room and as White walked with him to the parking lot Carl asked “Do you ever just stand in awe at the sheer majesty and magnanimity of this place?” “I feel it every day. Semper Fi Carl.” “Ehbone.” Carl stated as he took his hand. Paratroopers had a way of saying airborne that sounded broken but was understood by most in the community. They shook, looked each other in the eye and nodded. Everything that needed to be said happened in that silent stare. Carl got in his truck and put on his seatbelt. He looked at the clock as he started the engine and it was only 0900. He saw a van pull in with a construction logo on it. “First leg of the trip complete” Carl said to himself. He pulled out his phone and plugged it in. He created the route to Massachusetts and then scrolled through his podcast app. He decided while he drove he should listen to some John Adams history before he made it to Peacefield. His search brought up Dave Rubin’s “The Rubin Report” again and he saw “Who Was John Adams?” listed in the title. This time it was another professor named C. Bradley Thompson. The discussion was good. He learned about the alien and sedition act and how Adams botched that. What would have otherwise been a wonderful story about a framer ended on a sad note. It was Jefferson who had to pardon the citizens placed in jail by the unjust law. The more Carl studied the history of the foundation of America the more he realized many of the same complaints about politics existed at the very beginning. “It’s truly amazing how we managed to survive like this.” Carl said in frustration.
Carl drove on to Quincy, MA he continued to listen to streams, just letting the auto-play function send him “down the rabbit hole”. Somehow eventually he ended up listening to a physicist discuss the idea that time may not in fact be linear. “Holy shit, how did I end up listening to a physicist?” Carl was trying to follow much of what he was saying but science was never his strong suit. He listened until he pulled over for gas and decided to steer it back to history. He checked his navigation app and realized that he was only a few hours from Quincy. He checked satellite mode looking for areas to camp out nearby. Peacefield was not as remote as Monticello was. He saw a reservation that looked open, but going there was most likely off limits. Finally he saw a state park that looked like a good option. He could find a remote area there to camp out for the night. He set in the course to a wooded area he could see on the map and began driving that way while more videos played discussing everything from the arguments over including a condemnation of slavery in the declaration to Hamilton making the case for central banking and national debt. Carl, being a libertarian was familiar with Hamiltonian politics and he loathed them. He arrived at the state park. He didn’t see any signs forbidding camping, but there didn’t seem to be any actual camping spots he could see. He found some dirt roads that led off to the wilderness. The routine was simple as always. He strung out his tarp above the bed of the truck and arranged everything to make a bed. He opened his storage box and saw the field shower as he rifled around looking for his camping stove. Next to it were two cans of ravioli. He decided tonight would be a good night for a hot meal. It had been a while since he had stuck anything other than beef jerky and gas station taquitos in his face. After he heated up the can of clogged arteries he ate it with a brown spoon that he kept from one of his old rations. It was something he learned down range. Always keep an MRE spoon just in case. He finished the gluten filled can of loneliness and stared at the field shower he tossed aside while looking for his stove.
“Staff Sergeant Houston, what do we do?” the machine gunner yelled at him. Houston was already grabbing two fragmentation grenades from the ammunition pile. “I’m gonna go over there and give them a surprise. You keep laying down the hate.” Carl said. With that he got up and sprinted to the barriers that were about twenty five meters away. He got there as he heard the AK-47 fire over his head. He held the first grenade in his right hand and flicked off the secondary safety. It was a simple metal clip that held the spoon in place just in case the pin was pulled too soon. Once he flicked that off he ran his left middle finger through the ring and pulled and twisted just like they teach you in basic training. He hadn’t actually thrown a grenade since basic but the concept was simple enough he never needed to get retrained. Pull pin, throw grenade, and duck down. Once the pin slid from the grenade, it was ready to throw. He leaped up from a crouching position and gently lobbed the grenade over the barrier. He ducked back down and counted to five. Just as he got to 4 he heard the loud boom and felt the barrier heave as the shrapnel mowed through flesh and encased dirt alike. He listened and could hear some moaning still. He wasn’t sure exactly how many were on the other side, but he decided not to take any chances. He pulled the safety and pin from the second grenade, waited to hear movement, and leapt up tossing the grenade more to his left next to a different barrier. The explosion ripped through the other barrier and now there was no moaning. He ran back to the perimeter guard and jumped in the hole. The machine gunner was scanning for targets but between the grenades and the towers everything seemed to be slowing down. He told them to stay on the radio and then Carl began running back to the operations center. The line medic was there trying to determine if there were any more casualties to coordinate casualty evacuation. Only one casualty was reported. Sergeant Halfapple. He looked at Mong, his medic and asked how Halfapple was doing. Mong merely shook his head back and forth. “He was dead when the medics got there.” Carl knew better than to show emotion in that moment. He simply turned to the radio operator and told him to begin getting status reports from the tower guards. The radio operator was already doing that, but there wasn’t much left to do at that moment.
An uncommonly cold breeze sent shivers down Carl’s spine as he awakened from his trance. He packed up everything he took out of the storage box and laid out his sleeping bag and woobie. That was what he called his camouflage blanket that was issued to him. He “lost it” in country, or so he told his commander. The commander of course made him pay for it, but Carl didn’t care. He loved that thing. It was the old green pattern, not that stupid digital bile color that Army was using for a while. He plugged his phone in and began scrolling through his music collection. He decided to play George Straight. King George as he was referred to in Texas, colloquially. Texans would never accept a king, but he was the king of country music as far as they were concerned. Carl’s musical tastes were not singular in nature, ranging from Slipknot to Conway Twitty. He didn’t like to get bogged down in collectivist ideas of what was considered “good music”. Carl laid in the bed of his pickup truck and imagined himself already sitting on the hot sand dunes he grew up partying on. So many bonfires and crazy ideas happened on that beach. While his friends from his high school days were moving on with their life he was trapped in a prison he couldn’t escape. Not literally but too often he felt like an alien in his own country. People were happy enough to thank him for his service, but the moment he said he was against more war and fighting in the Middle East, all of a sudden his service no longer mattered. He was labeled a conservative cuck for suggesting the human resource of blood and sweat was not worth the return. He could feel his jaw clench as he thought about it.
The tension combined with the new cold breeze led him to decide to build a small fire. He got up and gathered some dead wood and some dried leaves. He used rocks to build a perimeter and built the normal teepee of sticks to help the fire burn. He pulled out a lighter and a napkin from one of his gas station meals and used them to start the fire. Once he felt it would remain lit, he pulled his bag and woobie down from the truck along with his back pack. He always felt the need to keep his rifle near him. It was a throwback to multiple deployments where you are always within arm’s reach of your rifle. He spent literally years sleeping with his rifle and every time he came home it would take months to lose that feeling that he was always missing something. He arranged everything away from the fire so he would not burn up in the middle of the night and laid there, staring up at the tarp that was over him. He began controlling his breathing and clearing his mind. He learned this technique from a podcast called “Waking Up” yet he often used the technique to fall asleep. It was the only way he had learned to clear his head when it would not shut off on its own.
That night he dreamt he was in a new place, surrounded by strange people. He didn’t recognize any of them, which was weird since he always had the same dreams with the same people over and over. On the ground there were wailing women holding broken men. The weeping was overwhelming as he turned in circles seeing the same thing, different people in the same situation, everywhere he looked. In his hear, as if being whispered from directly behind him he could hear the words “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Carl could feel the breath on his cheek and lobe but as he turned he saw no one. This was of course a very famous quote from Thomas Jefferson but he had never himself used it. He remembered hearing it from the Jefferson talk during the first leg his trip. He then was in a different scene. He saw a man dressed in clothing that seemed foreign to him. Something like he would have seen in one of the old movies about colonial times. A tricorn hat and brown doublet. Pants that ended at the knees and stockings that finished covering the rest of the legs. Shoes that were brown and worn with thin soles. He watched as he spit on the larger man. This man was wearing a white wig and red coat. His large hat was under his arm, as many Soldiers often carried their headgear. The man in the brown doublet could be seen spitting in the face of the man in the red coat. With a simple hand gesture the surrounding soldiers began to bayonet the other man over and over. They separated his head from his body. It was gruesome and more vivid than any other dream he had ever had. He could then see a man, standing in a room surrounded by other similarly dressed men reading a note out loud. “General Warren has fallen at Bunker Hill.” He could see this man tearing up, a swell of emotion becoming increasingly hard to hide. “He was my physician. I knew him.” The room was silent as the news slowly washed over the room.
He quickly was swept from that room everything faded from around him. He could hear a voice behind him. He turned and he could see a tree. A large leafless and white tree. It looked as ancient as it did dead. The pool at the bottom was not one of water, but was red. It was almost non-existent. A final leaf fell down slowly and landed in the small puddle. The voice began to get louder and all he could hear at the end was “patriots and tyrants….” Carl immediately sat up. The fire was out. The momentary panic that often overtook him upon waking up began to pass. He felt around and found his back pack. He unzipped it and felt the two pieces of the rifle in there. He reached into his pocket and found his lighter and tried to light the last few full pieces of dried wood on fire so he could go back to sleep. The light from the lighter illuminated enough of the surrounding area that Carl could see something was wrong. He could not see his truck. He looked up and he could see a full moon. The moon had been waning when he went to bed that night. A deep uncertainty began to take over Carl. He could not begin to understand what was going on. He thought to himself; did I imagine the moon was not full? Carl could then hear voices coming from his right. He reached into his bag, flawlessly assembled it in the dark, placed in a full magazine and put two more magazines in his back pockets, one per pocket. He reached up and flicked on the flashlight that was attached to the side. He began to move towards the voices but as he got closer he could also hear the sound of horse hooves on the path. He arrived in the opening and the horses and men were ahead of him. He turned off his light but it was too late, they had seen it and turned around. He moved off into the trees and ended up back at his sleeping area. He grabbed his Benchmade knife and slid it into his front right pocket and realized the rest of his gear was in the contico box in the back of his truck. All he had was what he had on, his woobie, sleeping bag, and go bag. He grabbed the Gurkha blade and attached it to his belt in the back. He slung his rifle and moved 25 feet or so towards a thicker wooded area grabbing his go bag as he moved and quickly putting his arms through the straps. He left behind his sleeping bag and woobie hoping they would be a distraction. He sat silently now listening.