EDWARD

Edward Chang was born on 20 May 1980 in Taipei and raised in Southern California. He studied at the University of California, San Diego, where he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and economics. Edward served in a U.S. Army aviation regiment in Operation Iraqi Freedom. After his deployment, he received a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and a law degree from Loyola Law School. He lives in Los Angeles, where he practices law and spends his free time wrestling his dog, Ludwig. His first novel, Chinks & Mortars, is available as an ebook, on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

When asked about Iraq, this is the first story I tell.

In the summer of 2003, on the first night my unit was in-country, I stood by the fence line watching military airplanes with my good friend, Jeffrey Powell, a young black man from Philadelphia. We watched the planes take off and land for a good hour with our mouths open, sand filling it, just dumbstruck that we were here. We saw stars. We saw darkness.

When we got to talking, it wasn’t about anything particularly deep. We were actually comparing Fratricide Lists. These lists were relatively common among the enlisted in my unit, for we were not a happy bunch. We were a Reserve unit, and the lower enlisted soldiers were composed of individuals who had lives outside of the Army. Our sense of identity did not require belief in the righteousness of the War, nor demand acceptance of the quality of our superiors.

There were so many reasons we were angry. There were the rumors that we weren’t supposed to have been mobilized to war, that we went to war without the approval of the Department of Defense. Our unit left the states purportedly mere hours before our orders were about to expire, as if someone had smuggled our seventy soldiers on a charter jet to the Middle East. When we arrived in Kuwait, I remember the confused looks on the faces of base officers in the in-processing tent. We waited for hours as those officers scratched their heads and asked my Command the same questions over and over. Who are you guys again?

In Kuwait, they told us they didn’t have a place ready for us to live. But we found the one tent on the outskirts of the base, the one without air-conditioning, and we stayed there anyways as the unwanted houseguests. No one knew why my unit went to war. Rumor had it that our Commander, a midget of a West Point graduate who ended up as a New Jersey warehouse manager or something, was ever so eager to go to War, to put something on his resume, to keep up with the accomplishments of his former classmates. It was he, we said amongst ourselves, who singlehandedly sent us overseas.

When we wore out our welcome at our first base, we hopped over to an Air Force base, also in Kuwait. When the Air Force told us to leave, our officers found a new home for us in Iraq. In a morning formation, the Command informed the unit how the enlisted were to drive the unit’s equipment from Kuwait into the heart of Iraq in Hummers, whose doors were made of linen, while the officers would fly into the country and meet us at a later date. We were angry for days on end. Angry at being treated as second rate citizens, for not having adequate armor, angry for having to prepare for our long drive, angry for having to weld weapons stands made of scrap metal onto the beds of our trucks.

Additionally, our officers and the senior enlisted soldiers were unbelievably socially inept. They said things like, “let her divorce you, the Army will issue you a new wife!” and “we won’t let you go home on emergency leave until your relative is actually dead.” And it was not unusual to hear them talk amongst themselves after returning back from made-up missions to Paris, saying things like, “I’ll put you in for a bronze star if you put me in for one too.”

As it was, Fratricide Lists were a morbidly funny way of dealing with these issues in our lives. The question was posed: if crap goes down, and you had to shoot someone, I mean, really, have to shoot someone out of necessity, who would go first?

That first night in Iraq, while comparing our Fratricide Lists, Jeff and I heard a whip like crack in the distance.

“Well, shoot,” I remember Jeff said.

“I hope we got them,” I think I said.

And in the horizon, we saw littly fuzzy domes of orange light and yellow strands of artillery fire. There was a rat-tat-tat too, the decibel level of a mouse fart. Then another crack, louder, less like a whip, and more like a thud, so definite that I could feel it deep in my chest. It dawned on both of us at once: we were the ones under attack.

I was twenty three years old, Jeff was twenty five, and we ran like the young stags we were. Jeff and I ran and ran until we finally found the shipment container that served as our bunker. We tumbled into it. Darkness, pierced now not by stars, but by dozens of little circles of flashlight beams.

The explosions went on.

I remember Someone Responsible eventually turned on the flickering orange light rigged inside the bunker. Two dozen scared and dirty faces appeared. Some of us were in full battle uniform, others were in various stages of undress, all of us were ugly beyond belief. We all wore Kevlar helmets, we all gripped our weapons. We all looked at each other and listened to the wrenching metal of the shipment container, folding in on itself under the pressure of all the sandbags we had spent the day piling on top of it.

“We should call in to headquarters,” Someone Responsible said, or something to that effect.

I remember all of us turned to look at our First Sergeant, a chain smoking former Airforce wookie-of-a-lady. She looked back at us from behind her thick military-prescribed glasses, her eyes clueless and huge as saucers.

Someone Responsible eventually found the phone rigged into the bunker and called in to who-knows-where. He took accountability. People answered him, “Here! Present!”, but all I can remember is us looking at our First Sergeant. I hated her in that moment.

“Listen up, y’all!” she bellowed, timidly.

No one listened.

“Listen to Top, everyone!” Someone Responsible yelled.

We all hushed down.

First Sergeant took command: “Um, we need to get a report from the status…report. And we need to be careful. Does everyone have their gear?”

My Korean friend, Kim, raised his hand. He didn’t have his pants. Someone else admitted that he was pretending to hold his weapon, but really, it was a broomstick.

“We need to send guards out,” First Sergeant announced rather decisively.

“Guards? The hell?” Someone Responsible let out.

“We need to guard against more attacks. We need someone to be out there to warn us about more incoming artillery fire.”

The orange lights continued to buzz inside our bunker. I remember that I thought of my Fratricide List in that instance.

“At random….” she began.

“Sh-t…” I said under my breath.

“F-ck,” I heard Kim say.

“You.” She pointed at Kim. “And you.” She pointed at me.

Kim and I forced smiles. Found out and exploited, the Orientals: the small dicks, the gook and the chink.