Wore Down

By David Buchanan

“We are at war.” 
The colonel in charge of Al Dhafra airbase said this, twice, during his welcome speech. He said it again at an award ceremony my crew and I were required to attend.
“Congratulations to the award winners. Now get out there. We’re still at war.” 
We didn’t win any awards.
The colonel also said, “There are still hajjis out there who need killing.” 
Terry, another pilot in my squadron, liked to say that too. Sometimes I heard him say it over the radio as a farewell to any other pilot in Afghanistan that might be listening on our open inter-plane frequency. “Whistler 98 is headed home. There are still hajjis out there who need killing.” As if he had just done some of the killing himself.
I first met Terry at basic training at the Air Force Academy in 1995, and from the very beginning, I felt sorry for him. I can even remember the first time I saw him. Dozens of busses lined up to deposit loads of eager teenagers in front of a big marble wall emblazoned with the words, “Bring Me Men.” Footprints painted on the concrete told us where to stand before we were marched off into the campus. As my bus pulled up, I noticed a group of upperclassmen in blue berets surrounding one new cadet who was trying to do pushups. The upperclassmen were bent at the hip, screaming at a fat kid wearing cargo shorts and a striped polo. Terry. I heard an upperclassman yell, “If you can’t do a real pushup, do them from your fucking knees!” 
Terry and I ended up in the same squadron of thirty-five cadets that summer, and all through basic training he drew that same kind of attention from anyone trying to train us. He could never do more than three pullups at once. When he ran, he would shuffle along, slower and slower, until one of us would have fall back and grab his rifle and canteen so he could catch up. I pitied him from the very beginning. I pitied him for being mediocre, and I pitied him for forcing the entire squadron to slow to a walk so he could keep up, padding along as he did, all flatfooted and pigeon-toed. That pity soon developed into loathing. 
Twelve years later, I ran into Terry on Thanksgiving Day, eight years after we both graduated from the Academy, in the chow hall of Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. My roommate at USAFA used to call him Chunk, after the portly kid from the 80s movie, The Goonies. Now, at the age of 30, he had become a chiseled muscle-bound officer with a smug grin and a high and tight haircut. And, I quickly noticed, he very much cared about his diet. He had a big plastic water bottle full of Boost protein drink. He mounted his elbows on both sides of a plate piled high with salad greens and a plain pile of tuna fish. His face was lean, his arms massive. 
The Terry I knew had been a four-year member of the Fat Boy Club. Every Monday morning, before the sun came up, the Fat Boys would mosey down the hill to the cadet gymnasium where their necks were measured with tapes and their love handles were pinched with calipers. Every Monday night, his body fat percentage back in the acceptable range, Terry celebrated with a large Dominos pizza. The new Terry ate tuna and greens and hated carbs. His face had matured. Square jaw. Trim waistline. His uniform was pristine, and he looked like he actually had to shave now. A barbed wire tattoo wrapped around a huge bicep below his T-shirt sleeve. 
He had no idea who I was. 
“What’s your name, again?” he asked.
“Class of ’99?”
I nodded.
“And you were in squadron 20? Well. Hey. I guess I remember you,” he said.
As he chomped on, I chattered about our common jobs. We were both captains now, and we were both aircraft commanders in KC-10 refueling airplanes. That meant we both took off from our Al Dhafra airbase four or five times a week, flew to either Iraq or Afghanistan, and turned circles in the sky for hours until we had given all our gas to other airplanes. Then we flew back to Dhafra, ate, went to the gym, showered, sent emails home, and slept. It was 2007, and we were supporting two wars in two countries, so the routine rarely changed. That monotony made me hate everything about Al Dhafra, but Terry seemed to love it. He said that it gave him plenty of time to work out. He was a disciple of cross-fit, and he snorted when I said that I’d never heard of it. He called it “fit,” as in, “well, good to see you, I gotta go do some fit.” 
After our Thanksgiving reunion, our paths crossed often, in the chow hall, the bathroom, the tent that served as our gym. Eventually, I became obsessed with Terry’s new traits. He ate nothing with flour or gluten in it. He looked at my bowl of Cocoa Puffs like it was poison. Refined sugar, pretzels, Girl Scout cookies, pancakes: all of these things were strictly off limits. He bragged about eating half a dozen eggs for breakfast every morning, and he had organic, unsweetened chocolate shipped from home for his occasional, special dessert. “Paleo,” he would say, pointing at a plate covered in slices of beef and broccoli. He said he was trying to follow a primitive lifestyle.
Terry convinced the maintenance guys to give him a giant tire that came off an old broken-down dump truck on base, and he set it up behind the gym-tent so he could hit it with a sledgehammer he hauled all the way from his base in California. I glared at him from my treadmill as he cleared out a corner for his exercises, a series of lunges and jumps and lifts that sent him pulling and grunting and spraying sweat all over the place. He wore a stocking cap while he worked out, and he paced around, snapping his fingers to whatever music was blaring in his headphones. He gave out high-fives, and he’d pause every so often to feverishly write down his reps and weights in a little green notebook. He strode from station to station in a brown skintight t-shirt that read “Taliban Hunting Club” above a gun sight centered on a bearded, bin Laden outline. 
I told everybody I could that this was a different guy, that during basic training twelve years ago, Terry got out of a training session because he had tendonitis in his elbow and in his ankle. Since he couldn’t run or do pushups, the upperclassmen made him sit on a log and watch the rest of us do our pushups and squats and whatever random exercise they came up with. Later, in the shower, a buddy of mine looked at naked, flabby Terry and said, “Terry, you are a fucking pussy.” Terry took it with a firm smile, as if there was no way anything negative someone might say about him could be true. I wanted him to hurt more, but he never did. And when complements did come, he responded with the same silent smirk. He got C’s in almost every class except computer science. It was the nineties and no one knew anything about coding, except Terry. He helped me with my homework once, and I called him a computer wizard. He looked at me like I was a pest he had to tolerate. 
I used to think that the reason why he refused to measure himself against his peers in any conventional way was because he was a home-schooled guy. I’d never known anyone who hadn’t been to a real high school, so, at the Academy, it was sort of refreshing and interesting in a foreign way. “What do you mean your mom was your English teacher and math teacher?” But Terry would shrug and smirk and—except for anything involving his computer and coding—continue to strive for mediocrity. 
At Dhafra, however, his oblivious self-assurance had turned him into an incurious know-it-all. He loved to one-up every story he heard. A pilot in our squadron once mentioned that he had to get four stiches on his chin after playing a pick-up game of basketball. Before he could finish his sentence, Terry said, “Yeah? I had to get five stiches on my elbow once.” He held court about airplane performance and shrewd investment decisions he had made back home.
I kept talking shit about Terry behind his back. I told my crew about the collection of human-sized swords he kept hidden in the back of his closet when we were cadets. One Saturday afternoon, while the rest of the cadet wing was cheering at a football game, Terry and his one friend—a freckled red headed kid named Clay—took to the empty quad armed with two of those massive swords. I was in my room, sick, and watched them from my window as they giggled and dressed for battle. The friend wore the helmet from a suit of armor. Terry wore a chain-mail shirt and issued gray sweatpants. Two inches of his belly showed below his armored blouse. They swiped at each other in long, slow motion sweeps of those ridiculous weapons. “What a nerd,” my copilot said. 
Terry barely met standards at the Academy, but at Dhafra he was a stickler for the rules. A band of enlisted folks called First Sergeants—eager to get a deployment on their records, draw their tax-free pay, and position themselves for promotion—ruled that small base. There was even a special set of regulations specifically drawn up for us all to follow. It was called “The Community Standards.” Terry volunteered to help the commander update it. A reflective safety belt had to be worn at all times. No headphones outside the gym-tent. No sunglasses inside any tent. No sunglasses on top of your head. Mandatory hand sanitizer before every meal. No more than two Gatorades per meal. Two beers every 24 hours. No sex in the dorms. No porn. An un-tucked t-shirt would draw Terry or one of his goons to your side immediately. They were always so casual about it: “Hey, sir, can I get you to tuck your shirt all the way in? Hey, thanks. You take care now.” 
I liked to eat the chocolate chip cookies that the chow hall kept on hand, but they were crispy, so I ran them through the toaster to soften them up. Soon, the other three guys in my crew started doing it too. We left chocolate streaks all over the counter, and Terry noticed. “Hey man,” he said, “you’re making a mess.” I ignored him, so he had a line added to The Community Standards about cookies and toasters. He even prepared a laminated sign of a cartoon image of a cookie with a big red X across it. Soon, every First Sergeant at Al Dhafra was watching the toaster like it was an IED about to explode. 
I told more stories about Terry. As freshman, Terry and I were in the same swimming class. We all had to take this course, and it was easy to pass, but the final exam included jumping off the ten-meter diving platform. The instructor told us to fix our eyes on a spot high on the opposite wall, cross our arms over our chests, and step off into the void. But when Terry fell, he looked down and hit the water face first. It knocked him out for a moment, and the instructor had to jump in and pull him out. Terry showed up at dinner later that night with a pair of black eyes. My copilot asked Terry about it one day when we were getting ready to go fly. Terry acted puzzled, like he didn’t know what the guy was talking about.
One day at Al Dhafra, I was shaving when Terry came into the bathroom and pointed out that my new mustache was way out of regs. It extended beyond the corners of my mouth. 
Right after he left, his copilot, a first lieutenant named Seth, came in. So I asked Seth what it was like flying with my old Academy buddy. 
“It’s fine, but he’s a stickler, and he hates flying in Iraq,” he said.
“You know he used to be a fattie. We called him Chunk, from Goonies.”
“That’s funny,” Seth said, “I’ll remember that.” 
The next morning we went into the chow hall for breakfast after we returned from a long overnight mission to Iraq. Terry had just landed as well, and as he chewed, he eyed people coming in, making sure they used the required hand sanitizing station. My nineteen-year-old boom operator skipped the line and Terry noticed. “Hey! Airman!” he barked. “Sanitizer!” He was mad and red-faced, with a quiver in his voice.
“Leave him alone,” I said. “We just landed.” 
“Me too,” he said, jumping up and getting in my face. He pointed at some new signage on the wall. “A bug is going around,” he said. There was a sign featuring a cartoon bug, with a big red X across it. 
“Oh, fuck off,” I said.
He put his nose up against mine. I could smell the oil and vinegar dressing from his salad on his breath. 
“If you tell anyone else about Chunk, I’ll beat your ass,” he whispered. 
So, yeah, Terry hated me too.
A week later, my crew and I had the day off of the flying schedule, so we each took two Ambiens and had a Halo tournament on the Play Station in my room. We mentioned it to some other crews, and the next time I went to refill my Ambien prescription, the flight doc wouldn’t give me any more of the sleeping pills because someone had told him about our “drug abuse.” Of course it was Terry.
I was coming back from checking email one morning when Terry’s copilot Seth waved me into the room they shared. He lifted the lid of Terry’s big plastic trunk. It was about a quarter full of Starkist tuna Lunch-To-Go packs—those all-in-one packs of tuna, crackers, mayo, and relish. Since most of our missions lasted well over eight hours, the chow hall loaded us up with food. But because of another The Community Standards rule, they wouldn’t take back unused food. Cases and cases of unopened cans of soda and uneaten candy bars and brand-new tuna packs went directly into the trash. Seth said Terry’s plan was to take his hoard back the United States and save a buck on lunch. So, after that, every few days Seth would knock on my door when Terry wasn’t around. I would run in and take an armful of tuna packs so that his trunk never got more than half full.
In the end, though, Terry won. 
The Air Force had recently introduced a new medal that was to be awarded to folks who engaged the enemy in combat. This included taking fire in an airplane, and Terry wanted one of those medals in the worst way. The problem, though, was that tankers like ours were in no danger. We flew way too high to take fire from the ground, and we landed in a country that was safer than any city in the United States. Terry tried to argue that he should get the medal because he got “lased” once. Someone in the outskirts of Abu Dhabi had been shining laser pointers at our cockpits when we came in to land. It happened to just about all of us—one guy even got some minor eye damage from looking right at the thing—but Terry was the first one to try to use it to get the combat action medal. He filled out the paperwork, wrote up a citation, and sent it up the chain of command, but it was rejected. Headquarters wasn’t ready to count lasers as weapons.  
Terry didn’t give up his quest, though.
I liked to fly at night so that I could take off in the evening, land around breakfast time, and be sleeping when the rest of the base was awake. Usually, this meant that I flew in Afghanistan, since, for whatever reason, more nighttime missions were going to Afghanistan than to Iraq. As Terry’s copilot Seth had mentioned, Terry preferred flying in Afghanistan, so we often found ourselves on similar flying schedules.
The KC-10 airplane we flew can carry a lot of gas, and if there is bad weather in Afghanistan the fighter jets that need it aren’t always able to get off the ground. But we fly anyway, the logic being that it makes sense to keep gas overhead. If it’s not there and someone needs it, it has to come all the way from the United Arab Emirates or Kyrgyzstan. The KC-10 can also receive gas, midair, from other tankers. So if one KC-10 has been flying for a long time and is ready to go home but still has a full tank of gas, that tanker usually passes that gas on to the next KC-10 to arrive in country. 
One night in Afghanistan, I checked in on the ground controller’s frequency, and he sent me up to the far northeast corner of the country to take all the gas I could from Whisper 98—Terry’s call sign. He had been orbiting there in a rectangle of airspace named Ruth. All of our orbits carried such names (Beth, Ruth, Amy, and so on), but I liked it up there in Ruth. It was my favorite aunt’s name. 
It was also where most of the ground combat was happening then, and this is probably why Terry always tried to orbit there. A week earlier an American helicopter had been shot down in this area, and my crew and I refueled the A-10s that provided close air support for the rescue. A-10s fly low and slow. So, in the KC-10—which is really nothing but an airliner with extra-large gas tanks and no defensive systems—we have to descend way lower than normal to give the A-10s gas. In Ruth, this means you must descend so that you are (relatively speaking) close to the ground as you fly up and down a mountain valley until you are low enough for the A-10s.
This night in Afghanistan, though, weather kept most fighters from flying, so from the silence of the radios I assumed that it was just me and Terry up there. I met Whisper 98—I was Whisper 99—inside Ruth, and I flew closer until I was about fifty feet behind Terry. The boom operator on Whisper 98 cleared me closer, all the way to what we called the contact position, and lights on the bottom of his airplane helped me maintain a spot about ten feet away so he could maneuver his boom into the receptacle above my head. 
There was a solid deck of clouds covering most of Afghanistan, especially around Kandahar and Bagram, but in those mountains north and east of Bagram where we were it was clear all the way to the ground. 
I was almost done taking all of Whisper 98’s gas, when his boom operator said, “Uh, Pilot. Boom,” over the radio intercom.
“Go ahead,” I said. 
“Uh, sir, there is something rising at you from the ground.” 
“Huh?” I said.
“Uh, yeah, there is definitely something tracking you. There’s a corkscrew.”
This was rare. KC-10’s don’t have the ability to turn very quickly or to throw out chaff or to use countermeasures of any kind. We don’t even have parachutes, and there are only four windows outside of the cockpit in the entire aircraft. It is a reliable and safe airplane, but if someone were to shoot at us, we would just sort of hope for the best. Besides, we owned the skies over there, and the folks in the intelligence office always assured us that none of the bad guys had anything that could reach up so high. In this war, there were no bad guys at 25,000 feet. 
But a missile makes a corkscrew smoke trail as it climbs, and if anything looking like a rising projectile followed by a corkscrew smoke trail comes our way during active air refueling, we were trained to call “Breakaway Breakaway Breakaway” on the radio and get away from the other aircraft. I liked to think of it as running away gracefully. 
So that’s what I did. I made the “Breakaway” call over the radio, pulled the throttles of my jet all the way to idle, and started a violent turning descent away from Whisper 98. 
But all the panic was for nothing. There was no missile. It was just an illumination flare at a small American base directly below us. My boom operator had been listening to everything unfold on the radio and ran to the back, going from window to window until he could see the flare, a distant yellow light falling back to earth far below us, swaying below a small parachute. He burst back into the cockpit yelling, “It’s a flare! It’s a flare! It’s a flare!” 
We giggled about the mistake. Terry took Whisper 98 home to Al Dhafra, and I set up an orbit in Ruth.

Christmas Eve rolled around, and my crew and I had the day off. I slept in, went for a run, binge-watched three episodes of The Sopranos on DVD, took a shower, shaved, and then headed over to the chow hall for an early Christmas dinner. Terry and his crew had left for home to the US a couple of days earlier. I didn’t see him go, but I did spot his trunk full of Tuna Packs sitting on a pallet with his Cross-Fit sledgehammer, waiting to be loaded onto a KC-10 bound for California. It was good walking around Al Dhafra knowing he was gone.
I walked into the chow hall and lathered up my hands with the required disinfectant and remembered that it was a tradition for deployed commanders and their staff members to don big camouflage-colored chef hats and serve turkey to the masses on holidays. In this manufactured show of support and teamwork, everyone grins and cracks jokes and pretends like they’re having a good time. Terry would have loved it.
I picked up a tray and stepped into the line. Colonel Tyreen, the commander of Al Dhafra, was scooping Christmas mashed potatoes when I heard him ask the guy in front of me, “Did you hear? Some hajji fool took a pot shot at one of our 10s a couple of weeks ago. It’s a good reminder we’re still at war.” 
The guy said, “No, I didn’t hear that. I hope they missed.”
“They sure did,” said Tyreen, turning towards me with another scoop of potatoes, “and we’re giving the whole crew the Combat Action Medal.”
“Well good,” the guy responded, “I’m glad it missed.”
Tyreen smiled my way and slopped potatoes onto my plate.
“They didn’t miss. It was a flare,” I said.
He stared.
“It’s true,” I said. “I was there. It wasn’t a missile at all. It was a flare. And it wasn’t fired by a hajji or a muj or the Taliban or Al Qaeda. It was fired by a Marine.”
Tyreen looked at my face, then my nametag, then my face again. He turned to the next guy in line. 
“Really,” I said, “I was there.” 
“You were what?” Tyreen asked. 
“I was there. It was a flare.” 
He gave me a smug and confident look that wasn’t unlike Terry’s. He wore a grim smile, a smile that managed to forgive me for suggesting something that was flat out wrong from anything he had previously considered possible. It was clear he was just dismissing me as wrong or ridiculous. I turned and moved on down the line.

When I was leaving the chow hall, a First Sergeant stopped me at the door. “Hey, sir,” he said, “Can I get you to roll down the sleeves of your flight suit real quick? Hey, thanks. And that mustache looks like it’s way out of regs. Can I get you to trim it up a bit? Thanks. You take care now.”

****

Dave Buchanan is a retired Air Force pilot and a former English teacher at the Air Force Academy. He writes about growing up in a small town in Kansas and growing old in the military.