Living with Honor by Salvatore A. Giunta

Author:Salvatore A. Giunta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold

There’s a video floating around somewhere that was made by Toph shortly after we returned to Italy. It’s nothing more than a few minutes of footage taken late one night (or early in the morning) in front of the barracks. A bunch of the guys had been hanging out for a few hours, tossing a football around, drinking beers, telling stories about Afghanistan. Basically, this is what we did a lot of the time on deployment (without the beer, of course)—hang out together and shoot the shit. We were accustomed to being outside, or virtually outside, one hundred percent of the time; we also were accustomed to hanging out together 24/7, in spaces so tight you couldn’t fart without everyone knowing it (not that anyone cared or tried to hide their flatulence). So when we got back to Italy, we naturally did the same thing. And in this one video, as Toph pans the crowd and conducts some impromptu, drunken interviews, Berg continually passes through the scene, wandering back and forth, asking the same question over and over.

“Anybody seen Card or Sal?”

I don’t know where Card was, but I was with Jen. We were both perfectly fine, but Berg, in the video, seems anxious and worried. I remember giving him some good-natured shit about that when I saw the video.

“You miss me, Berg? Hell, we’ve only been back a few days.”

“Fuck you, Giunta! I just didn’t know where you were.”

The truth is, his concern was understandable, when you consider that for an entire year, we were all virtually inseparable. If you had asked me at any given time during the deployment, “Where’s Berg?” I’d have been able to give you an answer. If he wasn’t in his room, then he was probably out taking a shit or messing around with one of the laptop computers. And he would have had the exact same information on me. There was no privacy; there were no secrets. Berg, Card, and I were like the Three Musketeers, always keeping an eye on each other, aware of what the others were doing, and what information needed to be shared. That wasn’t unique to us; it was the way things operated on deployment. Large groups became smaller groups, and friendships and working arrangements were tight and intense. If time passed without seeing one of your buddies, you naturally assumed something bad had happened; no one just wandered off or disappeared without letting someone else know where he was going.

You don’t break those habits easily when you return to a quiet, safer existence, any more than you can suddenly stop spitting on the ground. So there is Berg in the video, a few thousand miles from combat, drunkenly wandering around, fretting about friends who were perfectly safe.

Readjustment took its toll in ways large and small. Spitting on the floor is one thing; figuring out how to channel the aggression and hostility that fuels the soldier on deployment is quite another. One of our mortarmen died after overdosing on pills and alcohol shortly after we returned from Afghanistan.

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