Remembrance Burgs

A bald man, thirtyish, buys my breakfast at the Elgin Street Diner and shakes my hand since I’m wearing a black tunic with stripes on the shoulders. His son, boy of three or so, perches on his seat to peer at me. Dad reads my name tag and asks, “Did you see action in Afghanistan, Jones?” But I am too busy making faces at the boy to answer, exposing a mouthful of mashed potato. I am leaving The Forces soon and growing my hair long.

Today may be my last remembrance burgs, this sacred reunion in Ottawa. It’s easy for Tictac and I; Johnny drives from the Army base in Petawawa. We meet in our medals on Elgin street, by the courthouse, where the crowd thins. First the parade, then we amble down Dalhousie to Chez Luciens for classic bad joke: Army, Navy and Air Force walk into a bar…

There. Tictac in the shadows, hands in pockets and stubbly despite the occasion—so Air Force. He stares at his feet, blurry reflection in the polish. I cross the road and clasp his hand. My role, well-established over the year we spent in the desert, is hypermasculine banter: “I heard reports of a Captain causing havoc among Ottawa maidens—they’ve opened an orphanage for the unclaimed children. You know anything about that?” 

“Good to see you too, Jones. Stick with me. I’ll save you some scraps.” Tictac smiles—still dazzling; his role was to be beautiful. New lines under his eyes, though.

“How have you been?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got a new girlfriend. Her name is… Gin. We’re hanging out on the regular.”

10:30 and I could smell her on his breath. Started drinking after the tour and never stopped. In Cyprus, on our decompression, he did shots with an ogre from the brigade and screamed for three hours from a lawn chair: we were going to hell; Johnny was a vampire; I was a ghoul, and other curses. He kicked the canteen door off its hinges for a bottle of water and our handlers snipped the nanny-bracelet off his wrist and forbade him to drink until we flew home. He sat on the beach and hurled stones into the water.

On Remembrance Day I am half present and half back there, slipping in and out. I see Johnny, walking towards us from a side street, bigger than I remembered. In Afghanistan, we teased him for being scrawny. His triceps were causing us to lose the war—the Taliban doubled over laughing in their ditches. Though he didn’t look the part, he was always the muscle. Now he was burly and veiny, flexing his hands like a wrestler. Grabbed Tictac and I by the upper arms.

“My favourite fuckers. Parking was a bitch but I squeezed the jeep half on the sidewalk. Think they’d give a veteran a ticket on Remembrance Day?”

Tictac says, “The cop would need to be an even bigger douche than Jones.”

He snorts. “Impossible. Jones still has the douchebag gold medal for impersonating the handicapped kid.”

I say, “I thought what happened in the ‘Stan stays in the ‘Stan?” Mirthless chuckle from Tictac.
This story comes up yearly. See Johnny is infantry and unlike most guys in the operations centre, he didn’t find our tour hard enough—he wanted to ambush Taliban from camouflaged ruts, catch bullets in his teeth, shit while running at full speed. When we received a bushel of thank-you letters from a group of special needs kids, it was a small matter to steam one open, study the errors, copy the letterhead, forge a letter for Johnny, reseal it, and get him to read.

Deer solder in Afhganistan,

My nem is Danny. I am grade 5. My Mom seys I am handicap. 
I want thank you for yor service. I heer you fite bad guys and sav people. This vary increedible.

I also heer some solders are office solders that hid frum the fiting. If you r that tip of solder, pleaz pass my lettr to a reel solder, a reel man? 
I hat the idee that my lettr might end up in hands of coward office solder. 
Thank you fer fiting and doing the hard werk of a reel solder.

Danny

Inexcusable, maybe, but the look on Johnny’s face was worth it and so was the laugh we three shared about it once the culprit came clean. In a warzone, as on a ship, there’s nothing like a sick gag to make a long shift fly faster. During the year-long tour my jokes got darker. After a drone strike, watching a man reel in his intestines I might say, “Does anyone feel like going fishing?” Another guy caught in a grisly rain of 40mm fire, “Man—I’m never eating hamburger again”: an obvious lie. 

I notice a coffee stain on my sleeve, a brown patch contrasting the black. But we are all stained, I think, as we walk up Elgin toward the throng—civvies wear coats and gloves against the wind. After we salute for the anthem, old vets hobble past for their yearly dusting of praise and snow. One day we will be symbolic like them, tucked away in old age homes and legions, until we get rowdy and attendants snip our bracelets. I expect the process—becoming a symbol—is a painful one, where first your tongue rots then your fingers cramp so you can no longer clutch a pen. Little known fact: those figures on the war monument are actually real veterans, calcified beyond recognition, the perfect soldiers: stoic, uncomplaining, voiceless. They are not like me; I am leaving The Forces soon and growing my hair long. 

After the ceremony the people disperse, blowing on their fingers. Tictac says, “Johnny, is it true you’re getting promoted?”

“Yeah, man, any day now. Got all my courses and I merit high. Of course having the tour helped.”

“Next time I see you I’ll call you John,” I say. “And then when you make Colonel, Jonathan.”

“Just call me Sir.” He punches me on the shoulder. 

Not the first time he bruised me—I remember one night in Kandahar I was coming on the night shift and Johnny was outgoing. Had his feet on the desk and his hand in his belt—couldn’t shake the smile from his face. I said, “Why so happy, playing with yourself?”
He said, “Nope. I killed a guy. He was digging in the road—we spotted him with a Predator, but I lined up a jet for a bigger boom. Intelligence watched him for a bit, they said he was an insurgent.” His eyes shone. “It was beautiful, Jones. My first time—the bombs were going off around him and he was running and the blood was splashing; it was like a movie. It was just like a movie.” 

Johnny swaggered after that but he stopped calling me Kill-Jones, which was something like a killjoy, except for IED emplacers. Coming home, Kill-Jones was above my head in giant neon letters, blinking. Everyone I met could see it. That’s in the past except Tictac is sucking his flask every couple seconds, his eyes glossing. At an upstairs table at Chez Lucien we call for beers and burgers, mountains of cheese. We play remember-that-time, and what-ever-happened-to, until Johnny says, “I’ve been waiting to tell you guys, Amanda and I are pregnant—I’m gonna be a dad.” We congratulate him all over again; I’ve only seen him this excited once before.

Tictac finishes his flask and beer and orders more. Slurs, “We might as well talk about it. We always do.” His eyelids droop but the waitress lingers on him anyway—chiselled Greek God in uniform with medals. Tictac’s curse is he’s never invisible. 

We talk about one night when Tictac was on watch; an Afghan woman in a black robe walked the road east from Zangabad. The intelligence guys said, “That is a confirmed Taliban fighter carrying a bazooka. Repeat, confirmed Taliban fighter.” Tictac hadn’t organized a strike before, but he’d seen it done plenty. The drone he had on scene had no missiles, so he relocated one from Dand, in the east. 

Tictac addressed the whole operations center and said, “We’re going to wait for more information before we strike.” 
Johnny scoffed. “What else do you need to know? Taliban fighter. Positive ID. It’s a no-brainer.”

“Yeah? You don’t find a woman-fighter strange? Or odd that she’s walking openly in the middle of the day?” There was a tinny quality to Tictac’s voice—he squirmed in front of the monitors, sweating.

Johnny said, “We all get cold feet the first time, man. It’s a tough thing to do, but we’ve got positive ID. How many of our soldiers have these people killed?”

Tictac shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. That thing in her arms could be a carpet for all we know.”

Johnny lowered his voice, “Tictac, you know last week in Helmand they got three insurgents hiding AK47s in rolled-up prayer mats. Move fast or the men will think you’re a coward.”

I was quiet this whole time and Tictac turned to me. He passed a pencil between shaking hands. “What do you think, Jones?”

“My only regret is the ban on human trophies. Her skull would make a fine mug.”

Tictac winced and turned around for another advisor, but there were none.

“Launch the missile,” he said.

Those seconds before the strike stretch longer than you think—the explosion is always a surprise. But we were more surprised when that bazooka reached out a little limb, and waved a baby’s hand. “Stop the strike!” Tictac hollered. The baby stuck his head out of the blanket and cried; the mother paused to soothe him. The missile was already in the air. 

The dying, the watching. This is the part we never talk about, but meet every year to circle round. A scrap of black dress fluttered on the crater’s edge—it was the easiest thing to look at. After, Johnny squeezed Tictac’s shoulder and said, “That was just a future insurgent, man. Don’t worry about it.”

Through no fault of the cooks, remembrance burgs always taste like ash. We see that little arm waving again and again, like the child knew we were watching, and we see it stop moving, too. Johnny is checking his watch; we pay our tabs and embrace in the street—a little snow is falling.  I will not be attending next year, this meeting of monsters; I am leaving The Forces and growing my hair long. I scan the sidewalk for hoof prints, claw marks, the swish-patterns of tails: nothing. Just boot prints in the snow.