Being There, Page 3

by Bartle Breese Bull

One evening I speak to a soldier called Kenneth Eastridge out on the smoking balcony. It's cold out and it's been raining for three days. Eastridge, a 20-yearold specialist, is going on leave tomorrow. It's almost 5 p.m., and his friends James Farmer and Zach Siebeneck want to go to dinner and get back so they can play a farewell game of Halo 2 on their Xbox. Eastridge is slight, soft-spoken, and goofy, with floppy hair. He's gentle and smart. When I arrived he showed me his High Times collection. He seems at first to be a middle-class slacker, a skinny stoner from a nice subdivision in accentless Anywhereville. I wanted to talk to him more, because I liked him and I didn't know if an offbeat character like him could be happy in the military.

Eastridge: I'm not going to reenlist. I've had a great time, but I can't wait to be out of the army. I grew up on my own, and I never had no rules or people telling me what to do. My mom left me when I was 10. She was a crack addict. My dad would go to work at 5 a.m. and then hang out with his friends. I was all alone the whole time, the only white kid in the projects in our part of Louisville.

My dad grew up on a farm, but the government took it away to build a highway. When my mom abandoned me the first time she brought me a videogame one day and said she was going out. She didn't come back for two and a half years.

When I was 12 or 13 I shot one of my buddies. I killed him. The news said I shot him over a Sega game. My lawyer told me I didn't have to plead guilty, but I was devastated and I didn't want a trial. I knew what had happened. I pleaded guilty.

It brought my mom and dad back together. My mom was a runaway crack addict, and now she has a garden and works for an online shoe store. All because I killed my best friend. Her and my dad moved out from the projects to the country, and they go shopping together and get me High Times and Barely Legal.

My dad taught me how to shoot a .22 when I was four. He took me out to the creek where his family's farm used to be. They had been there for generations. My grandfather was in World War II. He was captured by the Nazis and escaped. The army was different then. I don't know if we could do what those guys did, all that Band of Brothers stuff, Normandy and all. But we look after each other like brothers, so I guess it's all the same. You fight for your buddies.

After I killed my friend I didn't shoot a gun again until I was 18 or 19. When I smelled the gunpowder I got all shaky-like. I saw him again, looking the way he was after I shot him, this crazy look on his face and a big-ass hole in his chest.

That gunpowder smell. That and burning metal. The smell of welding -- like, once we had to fix the lights on top of the Humvee -- just that smell makes me nauseous. Or the antitank mine that blew up our vehicle when my ears got fucked up. That was the same smell of burning metal.

A lot of my friends have been killed back home. I lost three in a month once. One was shot by a guy he'd beaten up in a gang thing. My other buddy was running from the police and wrecked his car. The other one was drunk driving and fucking around and hit a tree. If I hadn't joined up I'd be with those guys. All my living friends are in jail -- for murder, for drugs.

When I think of home I just think about my family, starting my family. I'm in love, man.

I'm getting married in a week or so, in Korea. I can't wait to have kids. My dad has always wanted to have his own body shop. Maybe we'll call it Pony's. That's his name, Pony. I'll have to get used to the smell of melted metal, I guess.

My fiancee never left Korea. She might have to move to the States and stay with my parents before I get back. She's scared. She thinks it's like the movies -- everyone shooting each other.

Bangme.net is the Fashion TV of the 3rd Platoon's cyberlife -- Bang Me and its online meat-market cousins, hotornot.com and myplace.com. They are places you can go online to see pictures of women, read what they say about themselves, and meet them or the weirdos behind the perky personas. If someone "bangs" you on bangme.net, it means they like your photo and profile and want to be part of your Bang Me string. Then you e-mail each other back and forth and meet in a Wendy's back home. Joseph Baggett, a 20-year-old Tennessee Wiccan, has a 98 percent positive response from 418 women on the site. His Bang Me portrait shows himself without his spectacles, holding erect an enormous M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon in the barracks bathroom. His Bang Me tag is "MentallySick."

The four-screen computer room is packed 20 hours a day with soldiers instant-messaging their women or parents, shopping for pickup trucks, and watching one another coax chatroom hotties into sexual -favors with lines like "Excuse me while I lock the door to my room." The wallpaper on the computers is always changing: a psychedelic pot plant, an Arby's roast beef sandwich that morphs into a vulva, an altered Family Circus cartoon with the little blond kid pointing to his dead friend and telling his mother, "I'm Rick James, bitch." A nun smoking a bong, an advertisement for tiffanyteen.com.

As the soldiers surf for knives, baby strollers, old Ford Mustangs, and inflatable German nurses, their talk hangs in the room like smoke, dissipated only when someone is killed and communications are shut down for three or four days while the family is notified. Outside it could be a freezing, muddy night or a warm spring afternoon. In the windowless room the fluorescent light and the disembodied chill of cyberculture never change. "Check out this site, live-shot.com. You can shoot the fuckin' deer from Iraq and the company will send the meat to your family.... That's a man, dude. That's definitely a man.... Hey man, that slut banged me, too.... This is what I got waiting for me back home. [On the screen is a photo of a pretty four-year-old girl in a pink tutu.] Just five more months of good luck and I see my daughter. [A loud knock on wood] It's a shame her mother is such a cunt, though.... Jesus, my driver and gunner from when I came here with the 3rd Infantry in the invasion, they just came back to Iraq, got re-deployed -- they just got fucking blown up. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. [I hear the soldier breathing in and out through his nose for ages, behind me at his computer while I work at mine.] Jesus Christ..."

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHAN RYDENG SPANNER/POLARIS IMAGES

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