Invasion of Privacy

we did our training for two weeks in the summer. Kind of fun, actually, be with the guys away from home every once in a while.”
    “Until.”
    “Until is right. Should have known better.” Elmendorf set down his glass. “My father was in WW II, the 45th Infantry. He’s from Lowell here, but he gets stuck in the 45th with all these National Guard guys from Colorado and Oklahoma , he can barely understand how they talk. And where do they send him first? Martha’s Vineyard, to practice amphibious landings. Then he ships out for Sicily somewhere. Here he is, this son of a German immigrant himself, trying to take Italy back from the Italians and the Germans. Crazy, huh?”
    I wanted to be patient, for Kira and for me, so I said, “Crazy.”
    “And that’s not all of it, either. When he’s in Sicily , my dad gets to see the first Bob Hope USO show, the very first ever. There’s Dorothy Lamour, Jerry Colonna, and Hope himself, coming out on stage and telling jokes and dancing some, then comedy skits. The show had to be held during the daytime, account of they were afraid the German bombers’d see the lights at night. All that and wounded at Palermo to boot, and he still gets called up for Korea seven years later. Which is why I should have known better than to stay in the Reserves.”
    “Where were you in the Gulf?”
    “Oh, here, there, and everywhere.”
    Which seemed a peculiar answer, as vague as Lana Step-anian had been about her husband’s hometown.
    Reaching for the glass, Elmendorf shook his head, then downed the remaining liquor like a shot of tequila. “They talk about Desert Storm as a war, and I guess it was, I don’t have anything to compare it to, myself. But you know how long the actual shooting lasted? I don’t mean those air raids in January and all, just the actual ground war.”
    “Not long, as I recall.”
    “Not long is right. A hundred hours. Saturday, twenty-four February, to Wednesday, twenty-eight February. I heard one guy call it ‘the Andy Warhol War,’ account of it was like somebody being famous for fifteen minutes, you know? Well, all I know is I saw enough death and destruction to last me a lifetime. It wasn’t war so much as slaughter. A video game where you just racked up points from planes or tanks or even the little bit of house-to-house there was. The Iraqi Republican Guards, they were well-armed enough, with nice green uniforms and these scarves around their heads and necks, fishnet pattern, like desert chieftains or something. But the poor regular soldiers? Shit, we just plowed them under, right under the sand. The ones that surrendered, the EPWs—Enemy Prisoners of War?—you could see them miles away, like long lines of ants, marching across the horizon with their hands up, praying to Allah because they were going through a minefield. I swear, I was on guard duty one night, and there was a windstorm, and by morning you could see all these mines the Iraqis had laid, a whole line of them, forty or fifty, maybe five meters apart. And I looked down at my LPCs and—”
    “Your what?”
    He motioned with the empty glass toward his feet. “My boots. LPC, that stands for ‘Leather Personnel Carrier.’ Get it?”
    “Got it.”
    “Like the Hummers, the desert jeeps we had? You run them on asphalt, that’s ‘hardball.’ You run them on sand, that’s ‘softball.’ I read in a magazine that this car dealer in New Jersey’s selling them for winter driving, get through the snow like we did the sand over in the Saud.”
    “What happened to you there?”
    “You mean, how come I’m in this bed?”
    “Yes.”
    Another tolerant laugh as he reached for the bottle and poured a few more ounces without offering me any. “I used to say it was from the MREs. You know what that stands for?”
    “I heard it as ‘Meals Ready to Eat.’ ”
    “Yeah, well, I called them ‘Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.’ Like, even starving Africans wouldn’t touch them, get it?”
    A poor joke, but I let him have it.
    “Only thing is,” said Elmendorf, “it’s not the food that got me, though I had to eat those MREs anytime the supply sergeant couldn’t come up with better through his ‘General Store.’ Scrounging and trading, you know?”
    “I don’t think that part ever changes.”
    A nod, then another toward the Jim Beam. “No booze, though. Jesus, they were strict about that. A Moslem country, we couldn’t disrespect our hosts by drinking liquor before we went off to