dry patch
Randy Brown
The Old Man calls to interview me for a civilian job.
“Did you know it was going to be me on the line?”
(I did not.)
“Will that be a problem?” he asks.
I am hours away, via cell phone, at the base of a mountain
on the trail of a tumbleweed vacation. The sun is already rising hot.
I observe to him that I am still wearing my Camelbak and boonie hat,
and that I am worried that communications will drop at any minute.
This all begins to feel very familiar, I conclude, and he laughs.
Once, in other sands and clothes, I managed his unit’s radios and landlines.
But that was years ago. “If we break contact, I will wait for you
to re-establish our connection,” he now says.
I hope that doesn’t sound too familiar to you, I tell him.
He laughs again—or, at least, I think he laughs.
After all, it is hard to hear
over the desert.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Randy Brown
All I want is a bag of popcorn
and some getaway laughs on a Friday afternoon,
and darned if the guy in line behind me
starts chatting up the stranger behind him.
First Guy is starting O.C.S. tomorrow, he says.
Buddy of his, another Mustang, committed suicide
earlier this week, and the funeral is Sunday.
Second Guy has drill this weekend. Remembers
after he last got home from active duty, his sergeant
called a few weeks later, said that one of the platoon
had first shot his wife and then himself.
I do not turn.
I do not engage.
Even though I know the password:
the name of the deceased.
Instead, I hunker down
in my green fleecy hat.
The woobie I wore in Afghanistan.
The type that sergeant major hated.
The Middle West is a small town,
just like the Middle East.
Everybody knows each other,
and remembers what happened, if not why.
I buy a ticket for a Tina Fey movie,
the funny one, about journalists downrange.
The soldiers, thankfully, do not follow my lead.
Must’ve gone to Deadpool instead.
Randy Brown traveled the world as a child in an active-duty U.S. Air Force family in the 1970s, then landed permanently and happily in the American Midwest. A former editor of community and metro newspapers, as well as national trade and “how-to” consumer magazines, he is now a freelance writer and editor based in Central Iowa. Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. A 20-year military veteran with one overseas deployment, he subsequently authored the award-winning 2015 collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire.
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