A teenager's experience with the pressures of military existence coupled with a new baby and an unfaithful spouse.
"CARGO"
Chance Montana
Copyright 1996, Chance Montana, all rights reserved
The downpour was relentless. Huge, cold drops of Korea's monsoon rain pelted the black tarmac of the lonely airstrip in the dismal gray of a cold, dead sunrise.
Beside the flight line, a group of men huddled as closely as they could under the eaves of an isolated maintenance shack. They braved the biting wind and driving rain for their last cigarettes before climbing aboard the C-130 air cargo transport for the twelve-hour flight stateside. The men were all very tired. This rain had been drowning them for weeks, and in honor of their imminent departure, they had all gotten stumbling drunk the night before; counting on plenty of sleep during the long flight. Despite the conditions they had been enduring and the self-inflicted pain of their hangovers, they were laughing and joking among themselves. They were happy to have successfully completed their mission and to be returning home.
Nearby, seeming to belong with these men, yet somehow apart from everything around him, stood another, younger man. He stood alone, fully exposed to the elements, yet strangely indifferent to them. His mind was heavily occupied. He held his cigarette cupped within his hand to protect it from the weather, but before it was half smoked, the insipid rain had broken it in half on its way to his lip. He absentmindedly dropped his broken cigarette and lit a new one. As the rest of the men finished smoking and retreated into the shack to wait out the final minutes to departure, he remained in the rain, deep in thought. Aside from the movement of his cigarette arm, he stood motionless, a sadly animated statue in the rain.
This young man, not yet twenty, did indeed belong with the others. They were his friends, his brothers in arms, as he was theirs. He needed to be left alone. They respected his solitude. The others were happy to be returning to their homes and families or girlfriends. No one knew what awaited this young man upon his return.
Months ago, he had said his temporary good-byes to his beautiful young wife and their baby girl, kissing them tenderly as he joined the rest of his unit on the flight that had brought them all to this very airstrip. He followed his orders and did his duty proudly and well.
On occasion the time and means had been available for the men to contact their loved ones briefly, which they all did, except him. He had tried several times to reach his wife. Some of his calls even reached their house in the middle of the night, but she was never there to answer them. He had received no Red Cross messages; no word of misfortune having befallen his wife or daughter. Being fairly certain of her well being, he was left to wonder what his wife was doing in his absence.
He had thrown himself vigorously into his work. When any problems arose. He thankfully worked the extra hours to correct them, often sleeping only one or two hours for every two days. When he wasn't working, sleep eluded him anyway. He had found sanctuary in the pressures of his duty, protection from his fear that his world was being shattered while he was away.
Inevitably, the day arrived that his duty here was done and his unit was ordered to return home on the following dawn.
The prospect of returning to his family in the morning brightened his rainy afternoon. Maybe he had simply over-reacted to his unanswered phone calls. Everything in his life back home was probably just as it had been when he left it; it had to be.
His daughter had been born early in the spring of that year. It was now late autumn and he had known her for only two weeks of her young life. His wife had been his high school sweetheart; he had fallen deeply in love with her the moment he saw her and loved her more each day since. He was forever being deployed and the two of them had only spent one month together in the past year. He missed them both with an ache that reached all the way down to his toes. He decided to call home and then withdraw some cash from the ATM to buy them some gifts from this faraway land. As he headed off through the perpetual rain to find a payphone, there was a renewed lightness in his step.
He rang his home for hours, it was now nearly dark and still she did not answer. With each lonely ring from the receiver at his ear, his head sunk a bit lower and the light slowly drained from his eyes. He gave up trying to reach her and decided to use his bankcard to fill his wallet with enough cash to buy enough cheap Korean whiskey to numb his aching heart. The air of lightness that had accompanied his stroll to the payphone now exhausted; he sloshed his way through the rain and darkness to the commissary and the ATM. He inserted his bankcard and entered his pin on the keypad. His face paled and his eyes flashed fire for a second before settling to a dark, penetrating glare at the machine as it shredded his card. The machine's mocking response was to blink repeatedly at him; "ACCOUNT CLOSED….CARD NOT VALID….ACCOUNT CLOSED….CARD NOT VALID….". The full realization of what he now knew to be awaiting him at home finally hit him and he steeled himself to face her. His transformation from carefree teen to the grim figure beside that maintenance shack was now complete.
The C-130 sat waiting. His friends hustled aboard as the final preflight inspections were being completed. He numbly made his way to the aircraft as a man approaching a title fight; each step forever imprinting upon him.
Inside the aircraft, around all of the cargo, there was little room left for the men to sit. They had been fortunate to be allowed transport on this flight with such short notice, so no one complained much. The jump seats lining each side of this section of the aircraft were all occupied but one, and he made his way to it. The men sat with their backs to the wall, facing the boxes, crates, and other cargo items that were strapped down to the floor in the center of the plane. As he sat, he attempted to stretch his legs, but the box strapped down on the pallet in front of him was too close. It's top was slightly lower than that of his coffee table at home and he was about to prop his tired, wet feet up on it when something about the box struck him as being wrong, out of place. It was about two feet long and a foot and a half high and wide. It was plain and rough with the usual customs stamps and invoice slips attached to it. It looked unassuming enough, crude even, yet something about it touched him as the transport lifted off and banked toward home.
As the young man pondered the strange effect this simple box was having on him, his unit's OIC (officer in charge) stood in the front of the cargo bay in which they were seated and called for everyone's attention. "Gentlemen, an American serviceman and his wife have lost their child in an accident. Its remains are being shipped on this transport to the states for burial. It will be with us as far as Alaska." Barked the OIC." You will treat that box with respect.", he added, gesturing toward the box at the young man's feet. At this revelation, he could feel his stomach turn. He was at once glad that he hadn't used the "coffin" as a footstool and sickened by the irreverence with which this child's parents and government, his government, had treated it…It, mind you…not him, not her. They referred to the deceased child as "It". What not so long ago was someone's sweet, laughing, playing baby had been neatly, efficiently, and heartlessly transformed by the military machine to a crude plywood box strapped to a pallet in the belly of an air transport among boxes of ammunition, electronics gear, and other assorted cargo. Just like that- yesterday, someone's sunshine; today, another piece of cargo.
He sat there for twelve hours; staring at that box, mourning a child he had never known, fearing for his own daughter. Would she even be there when he returned home? He struggled against the nausea that was growing within him. He was a stoic young man, rarely showing his emotions and never allowing a tear to fall from his eye. Nonetheless, he found himself on the edge of openly weeping throughout this flight. He tried to combat this state by focusing on happy memories, to no avail. His mind led every memory he could conjure up excruciatingly to his wife in the arms of another man, pressuring his daughter to call another man daddy. Finding himself repeatedly confronted with that image nearly pushed him over the threshold, but he was still able to grit his teeth and swallow it all back down. He jolted back to the makeshift coffin at his feet and resumed mourning the unknown child. The sorrow he felt for this child was not as intimate, nor as painful as that which he encountered in trying to comfort himself. It did not strike so tender a region of his heart as did his own fears.
His unit laid over for one hour in Alaska before beginning the final leg of their flight homeward. He did not go inside the terminal with the others. He stayed out on the airstrip and sought solace in the beauty of this night. The air was clear and crisp. Although it was quite cold, he took no more notice of it than he had of Korea's rain.
The sky was nearly cloudless and a full moon bathed the mountainous countryside in its soothing, gentle glow. The glittering stars were so close that it seemed he could almost reach out and touch them. The northern lights could vaguely be seen in their hypnotic dance just at the edge of the horizon. He lost himself in these surroundings, trying to forget his torments.
The ground crew was busily unloading the transport; replacing the off-loaded gear with varied other cargo to be transported on to some other installation. He noticed his lonely neighbor from the flight passing by on a forklift. He was again deeply saddened by the sight of that little box strapped to the pallet among miscellaneous, inanimate cargo as if someone thought it belonged there. The forklift set the pallet down callously on the side of a taxiway, roughly one hundred yards from him, presumably to wait there for placement on a different aircraft, which must be arriving soon. As the forklift hustled away, the young man's attention remained on the child's coffin. Not ten feet from it, something vaguely shone in the moonlight. He walked toward the luminescent object, somewhat transfixed by it. As he got closer, more detail became apparent to him. It was some sort of wildflower, he knew not which. Its blossom was large and white. The dew had settled on it, adding to its shimmer in the moonlight.
He suddenly knew what he must do. Looking around, he saw that he was pretty much alone; anyone within sight was too busy with their own duties and concerns to notice him. He pulled his field knife and cut the flower close to the ground, so that its stem was long. He proceeded to trim the bulk of the leaves from around the stem and blossom until it was the purest beauty he had ever seen. He then guided the flower through the cargo net and wedged the stem beneath an invoice pouch atop the box. For the rest of its journey, people would know that someone cared enough to not treat this child's coffin as"cargo". Kneeling over the coffin, for the first time since early childhood, the young man broke down and wept openly.
He rode a DC-9 for the flight from Alaska to home. Exhausted from months of anxiety and insomnia, and emotionally spent after his private funeral ceremony, he fell asleep quickly in the relative comfort of this aircraft. It was a fitful sleep. He encountered strange and terrifying dreams. Nightmares of his baby girl someday becoming "cargo" tortured his sleep. He awoke with a start shortly before the plane touched down. In consciousness, it suddenly occurred to him that, when he was not actually performing his duty, he was nothing more than cargo. He was flown, driven, or floated wherever he was needed and taken out of his box until the job was done and it was time to ship him to the next one. His enlistment was nearly over and he now knew that he would not be re-enlisting. On that airstrip in Alaska, the realization of what it meant to be"daddy" had come clearly to him.
He no longer cared what his wife had been doing while he was gone. Whether she left or stayed was of little concern to him now. Her betrayal had crushed the faith he once had in their love. That could never be renewed. The only love he now knew or would ever again trust was that which he felt when he had held his perfect little baby girl for those two weeks which now seemed an eternity away. The only happiness he could now recall was the overflowing joy that cascaded over him when he saw his little angel smile or heard her laugh.
As the plane taxied to a stop, the men filed out of it and down to the taxiway to joyfully greet their loved ones. He lagged slightly behind the others until he saw his wife pushing their daughter in a stroller near a far corner of the terminal's outside wall. He strode deliberately to them. As he neared them, his wife softly, somewhat mechanically, uttered"I'm sorry". They were her only words. He did not care just then, whatever discussion was necessary between them would have to wait. He wanted now only to see his daughter.
He picked the baby up and cradled her in his arms. Looking into her innocent, twinkling eyes; he now knew that his primary purpose in life was the protection of that innocence and the nurturing of that twinkle. As he rocked her in the cradle of his arms; her eyes danced happily, she giggled and amidst an outpouring of joyful baby gibberish, he heard her utter “”dada” for the very first time.
He held her closer and, in spite of the lonely teardrops rolling down his cheeks, his smile nearly split his face in half.
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