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Deuce Out

Katey Schultz

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Courtesy Katey Schultz

Writer Katey Schultz (b. 1979) was born in Portland, Oregon, and most recently has lived in North Carolina. In 2013, she published her first collection of short stories, Flashes of War, which was named the Gold Medal Book of the Year in Literary Fiction by the Military Writers Society of America. This story from that collection, “Deuce Out,” is about Steph Bowlin, a teenager whose brother goes off to war in Afghanistan.

When we moved to Oregon four years ago, rain came with the lifestyle. Now it seemed a part of us. My brother Dustin wouldn’t know what to make of the climate when he shipped out to Afghanistan. He’d be in the southern part of the country, near the Iranian border. We knew that much. But the sun burned long and hot there with sandstorms whipping across the plateau. I read about it once. How the storms move with such velocity that grains of sand push into every exposed millimeter of flesh. Fingernails, eardrums, nostrils, eyeballs. Tiny rocks needling beneath the skin that threaten infection, the slow death of any soldier.

Dustin left on a Tuesday morning at 1100 hours. I watched him settle behind the wheel of his Nissan Sentra and back down our driveway, wiper blades fanning across the windshield in a frenzied, farewell wave. Dad rode with him to the bus station in Newberg, just a few miles away. I trailed the sound of the muffler growing softer through the wet, winter morning, then turned toward the front door and braced myself for the sight of Mom. She’d be at the kitchen table or maybe the counter this time. Either way her expression stayed the same: face sagging around two eyes that looked right past you. Without Dustin around, I’d have to cope with her doom and gloom alone. I stepped into the house and pulled the door shut behind me. The latch clicked quietly into place, but by the way it sent shivers up my spine it could have been the pin of a grenade pulled free.

Dustin used to drop me off at school on his way to the community college, but now I was on my own. The Nissan sputtered and jerked as I grew familiar with the clutch. The defroster was broken again, and I struggled to see through the steamy windows. It made Newberg look like a town on the verge of collapse, a sinkhole waiting to happen. I hadn’t even balanced my first algebraic equation of the day and it was already mid-afternoon in Afghanistan, the hottest part of Dustin’s day. I parked in the student lot at 0800 hours and listened to the rain ping against the roof of the car. In the back of my mind I could hear Dustin coaxing me along: Knock ’em dead, Sis.

Before he left, I wanted to learn everything. Jingle trucks, battle rattle, fobbits, you name it. “C’mon. Spill it,” I said.

5 “They don’t teach you that stuff in basic, Steph.”

“But you must have heard stories. You know. From your friends who’ve already been there.” We lay on the grass in Harrison Park. The sun was out, the sky a fantastic blue we hadn’t seen in months.

“No stories, Sis. Sorry.”

“Okay, fine. What about from basic?”

Dustin feigned a yawn.

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10 “Head’s up!” someone shouted. I glanced in time to see a tall girl wave her arms and point overhead. Seconds later, a bright purple Frisbee landed near our feet. Dustin hopped up, flipped the disc in his palms once before uncoiling his arm in a perfect arc, fingertips letting go at just the right moment. We both watched as the flash of color streaked across the field. With a graceful leap, the girl snatched the Frisbee from the air and smiled.

“Thanks,” she yelled.

Dustin bowed dramatically, then tipped forward into a full somersault, coming up on his toes and finishing with a wave.

“C’mon, show off,” I said. “Let’s go eat.” I elbowed him hard in the ribs, and we both smiled.

“What’d you call me?” Dustin asked.

15 “Ladies man!” I said, and with that our race back to the car was on.

I didn’t have to ask where he’d take us. The front booth at Round Table Pizza practically had a plaque with our names on it. They had the only self-serve soda machine in town, and I liked to mix and match.

“That’s so gross, Sis.”

“You haven’t even tried it.”

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British artist Xavier Pick spent six weeks with British, American, and Iraqi armed forces in the Basra region. The caption reads, “On way to deliver portacabin to school Christmas Eve 2008.”
What is the complex relationship between cultures represented in this piece? What story of war does this tell, and how does it compare with most of the stories you hear?
© Xavier Pick

“Seven-Up and Dr. Pepper? Please.” He slurped overflowing foam from the top of his A&W.

20 “Better drink it while you can,” I said. “I read about those MREs you have to eat. And remember the chow they fed you in basic? You said that stuff made Mom’s cooking look gourmet.”

“Don’t tell her I said that.”

“Duh.”

“And just because I’m stoked to go, doesn’t mean I won’t miss it here,” he said.

“Yeah, right.”

25 “You know what I mean, Sis. Not Newberg, but hanging out. Like this. You have to promise me you’ll spend time with your friends. Or meet new people, I don’t know — just don’t hole up in the house and let Mom and Dad drive you crazy.”

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“Mom and Dad wouldn’t notice either way,” I said. “Besides, I’m almost graduated. It’s not like I’m going to hang out in Newberg after that. People at school don’t get me. You’d better write while you’re gone.”

Dustin bit into a slice of pizza and nodded. “’Course I will.” He reached across the table and took a sip of my mixed soda. “Not too bad, actually.”

“At least here you get a first class D-FAC,” I said.

“Steph. You’re not in the Army, you know.”

30D-FAC. It’s a dining facil —”

“I know.” Dustin shifted in his seat. “I know what it is.”

That’s when I started using military time. If Dustin found his new family in the Army, the least I could do was get the lingo down. At first it annoyed him, but once he shipped out it became our secret code. He told me things in letters home that Mom and Dad didn’t know what to make of. Nothing top secret; just something we could call our own despite the fact that — excluding his basic training — I’d never gone more than a few days without seeing him my entire life.

The first email arrived four weeks after he left. Short and sweet. Typical Dustin. But the message included a P.S. for me: “Steph, look for something in the mail. Deuce out.”

Deuce out. Our joke since we moved here from Indiana. It came from tennis, a game we never played. Our family got invited by one of Dad’s new colleagues the week we arrived. We got lost driving there, unable to tell the difference between one gated community and the next, the illustrious West Hills unfolding beyond the town limits. Once we arrived, we knew we didn’t belong, what with all the matching polo T-shirts and Jack Purcells.

35 “Isn’t that a kind of car?” Dustin asked.

Jack Purcell? No, dummy. It’s a shoe. A really lame-ass, overpriced shoe,” I said.

“Watch the swearing, Sis. We already stick out.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “You asked for it.”

He rolled his eyes and grabbed me by the elbow. “Deuce out,” he said and led me down the bleacher steps, through the main gate, and into the courtyard. I laughed the entire way. “Deuce” had to do with scoring the match, but what it could possibly mean, we hadn’t a clue. We were out of there. Both of us.

40 It felt funny at the time — funny enough to remain an inside joke for four years — but now, Dustin’s words made me angry. How could he be so casual? I knew the Army had to be hard work, but being left behind felt even harder. A whole globe of possibilities existed beyond Newberg, and I couldn’t reach any of them. Dustin’s experience with other soldiers placed him into that same category: unreachable. He left and joined our nation’s defenders. He saw new things, made new memories. I stayed stuck, waiting for graduation, doing whatever it took to avoid snapping at Mom every time I saw that glazed look on her face.

The surprise in the mail was a list of slang words used in Afghanistan. “It’s short for now,” Dustin wrote, “but I’m learning more everyday.” Hardball. DCU’s. Ripped fuel. Hardball meant any blacktop road, and Dustin wrote that he saw his last one when he took off from an airstrip on base in Kuwait. DCU stood for desert camouflage uniform, apparently nothing special. “Imagine wearing faded brown fatigues every day from head to toe. I feel like the effing UPS driver, Sis, trust me. You’re not missing out.” The last one surprised me: ripped fuel. It’s the way soldiers talked about over-the-counter fad pills, squandered and traded in combat like candy. “Anything to amp your energy,” Dustin wrote. “Walking with 50 pounds of battle rattle on, let alone going out on patrol, is workout enough in this heat.”

But by spring, letters from Dustin rarely came. The leader of his unit’s Family Readiness Group told us not to take it personally. “Many soldiers find the support they need within their own platoon,” the leader said. “Life is complicated over there.” As if things didn’t feel complicated here. I watched Mom sink further into the couch. She hardly even noticed that I skipped Senior Prom. Dad didn’t turn mean, but some part of him stayed held back. My senior year of high school, yet everything deepened into a dull-colored silence that made me feel like a ghost in my own house. All I wanted was for someone to shout orders in my face — anything to break the silence with some clear directions. It had to be easier than slogging alone through the blandness of waiting back home.

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Whenever Dustin’s letters came, I searched the envelopes for signs of the desert. I knew his mail went through a collection point in Kabul before processing. Once stateside, it might even be X-rayed before making its way into the hands of a US postal worker, then finally delivered to our box. I don’t know what I expected. Dust, sand, a fingerprint — but even his brief, handwritten pages felt lifeless. “Hotel, Sierra Hotel,” Dustin wrote. I knew that he meant HSH, using the Army’s phonetic alphabet to say, “Home, Sweet Home,” a place he said he missed, though I found that hard to believe. I wanted to tell him the only thing he was missing would be my high school graduation, which couldn’t seem to come fast enough.

“We don’t even know where he is,” Mom whimpered one night. We sat on the couch with our TV dinners, watching the evening news.

45 “He’s over there,” Dad said and pointed his fork at the lower half of an Afghanistan map on the screen.

“But, Pete.” She sighed. “We don’t even know what he’s doing.”

“He’s an infantryman. He’s doing his job. He’s doing what the Army trained him to do.”

“And what, exactly, is that?” she asked. She rarely talked that way.

Dad pressed the mute button on the remote, then dropped his fork into a rubbery pile of Salisbury steak and gravy. “Let’s go out. Do you want to go out? What do you say? Ice cream? Steph?” He stared straight ahead, the blue light of the television casting his face in electric plaster.

50 “Sure, Dad.”

“Fine,” Mom said. “I’ll eat double. For Dustin. God knows my boy deserves a scoop of chocolate ice cream by now.”

Our boy,” Dad said. But I said it too and they both looked at me.

Our boy,” I repeated. “You two aren’t the only ones that miss him.”

I started training the next morning, 0715 hours, 26 MAR 10. Dustin offered me his free weights before he left but I never bothered to pick one up. They came in handy now. I jammed a sweatshirt into the bottom of my Jansport for padding, then set a fifteen-pound weight on top. I wrapped the matching weight in my gym shirt and crammed that, along with my textbooks and binder into my pack. It looked awkward but did the job.

55 “I’m going to work,” Mom called from downstairs.

“I’ll catch the bus,” I said. The Nissan was in the shop. I didn’t care. It made me miss Dustin too much. A few minutes later I hustled down the stairs, faster than normal from the weight bearing down on me, then out the front door. I hit the pavement at a slow jog, heart pounding. Two hundred meters to the bus stop and I’d already broken a sweat.

Every day after school I had two hours to workout before Mom and Dad got home. I found out about the Army’s first physical fitness test online. It seemed simple enough: two minutes of sit-ups, two minutes of push-ups, and a timed two mile run. I knew I could do it, but whether or not I could nail enough repetitions or hit the sweet spot with my running pace seemed another matter. One way to find out.

Once I made up my mind about enlisting, I thought time would zip past. Instead, the opposite happened. 1545 hours. 15 APR 10. A date everyone else remembered because of taxes. I remember because it was the first time I set foot in the U. S. Army Recruiting Office.

I wore my hiking boots — the closest thing I owned to combat boots — with a pair of Dustin’s ratty, beige cargo pants, my dark gray hoodie, and my Jansport (still with the free weights in it). I kept my hair pulled tight in a ponytail, not a single dark brown strand fallen loose along the back of my neck. My bangs distracted from the look, but I clipped them to one side and sprayed them down. From the driver’s seat of the Nissan I saw storefront displays plastered with soldiers of every race. I cracked my window and squinted through the rain. The left side of the display featured the latest military protective gear, DCU’s, and training fatigues. The right side encased two life-sized cardboard cutouts of the same soldier — one in uniform with a M4 Carbine at his side, another in a cap and gown, gripping a leather-encased diploma. I checked my hair in the rearview, then hustled from the car to the main door, leaping over puddles in between.

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60 My boots squeaked with every step, a line of sole-shaped puddles following me down the linoleum hallway. I turned right into the U.S. Army entrance — there were others, one for each branch of the military — and snapped my feet and hands to attention. The drumming of my heart could have kept time for an entire company. I stilled my breath and straightened my spine. I didn’t know how to salute and didn’t dare try, but I’d studied the grades online and observed that the first man I saw wore a patch with three hard stripes.

“Good afternoon, Sergeant,” I said.

“Good afternoon, Ma’am. What can I do for you today?”

“I’d like to enlist. My brother is in Afghanistan. I’ve been working out. I want to sign up,” I said. Then I bit the inside of my cheeks to make myself shut up.

I tried to hold the Sergeant’s gaze but grew too curious. Three other desks filled out the tiny office, two more male noncommissioned officers and one woman, each wearing full fatigues. The American flag hung above the Oregon flag. Beneath them both I saw a signed photo of President Obama, Commander in Chief.

65 The Sergeant smiled and looked at the others. “Congratulations,” he said. “That’s a decision you should be proud of. Sergeant Hill?”

“Yes, Sir?” the woman answered.

“Please get Ms. —”

“Bowlin,” I said.

“— Ms. Bowlin oriented.”

70 “Yes, Sir.” She turned and indicated that I sit in the empty chair next to her desk. “Welcome to the family, Ms. Bowlin. I can tell already the Army will be pleased to have you.”

Sergeant Hill explained a packet of promotional materials, then gave me a fact sheet to show my high school guidance counselor. As a minor without a degree, I needed proof I was on track to graduate high school in good standing. Easy enough. More difficult would be what Sergeant Hill called PC, parental consent. My 18th birthday wasn’t for another five weeks, 24 MAY 92.

“With all due respect, Ma’am, I’d prefer not to tell my parents I’m enlisting. At least, not until I get to go to basic.”

“That’ll be fine, Ms. Bowlin. We can get your information into our system this afternoon,” Sergeant Hill said and began entering my name into the computer database. “But we can’t get you started in our Future Soldier Program until you’re 18 or have PC.”

“I can train on my own while I wait,” I said. I almost unzipped my pack to show her the weights but decided against it.

75 “Is there a particular career in the Army that interests you?”

“I want to work in combat support.”

Sergeant Hill paused at her keyboard and looked at me. “Then physical training is a good idea, Ms. Bowlin.”

I waited for her to smile but she didn’t. “What else can I do in the meantime?”

She stood and opened a file cabinet, retrieving a thick pile of papers. “This,” she said, slapping the heavy stack onto her desk, “is a packet of five practice tests for the ASVAB.”

80 “The —?”

“The Armed Services Vocation Aptitude and Battery test. It’s like the SAT at an 8th grade level.”

“I’ve taken the SAT.”

“That’s a good start,” she said and handed me the practice tests. “But this will test you for various career fields as well.”

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I left two hours later with a free ARMY T-shirt and more papers than I could fit into my Jansport. Most importantly, I had a glossy appointment card stamped for the day after my birthday, 0900 hours. I’d bring my letter of good standing and take the ASVAB right there at the Recruiting Office. Three days later I’d find out if I scored high enough and which career fields I was slated for. With everything in place, I could be in Portland at the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) by 01 JUN 10 for my physical, then take my Oath of Enlistment.

85 By the time I pulled the Nissan into our driveway, Mom was already home from work. I finally felt excited about something for the first time since Dustin left. I wanted to rush inside and tell Mom about the enlistment grades and education benefits, the latest cash bonuses since Obama upped the troops in Afghanistan. But she wouldn’t understand. The way that I saw it, Dustin and I were two of the most loyal siblings on the planet. I didn’t want to do anything without him and not even the global war on terror could prevent me from trying to maintain that. I would go and be with him. Even if we never ended up in the same province, at least I could say I was there. I tried. He wouldn’t be the only Bowlin soldier choking on desert sand.

A letter from Dustin arrived 23 MAY 10, two days before my appointment for the ASVAB. It included a Kodak memory card from his digital camera, which explained why the letter was dated April, but it hadn’t arrived until late May. An officer in Kabul probably screened the images first. We’d never know how many Dustin originally sent, but when I loaded the photos onto the computer in my bedroom, we only saw seven. Mom and Dad peered over my shoulder and waited as I enlarged each image.

The first two looked blurry: accidental shots of a soldier’s boot and another of somebody’s back. But the third picture showed a close-up of Dustin with six other Privates in his unit, each standing shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes squinting into the sun. Dustin’s face looked darker than I’d ever seen it, either from sand or sunburn or a mix of both. His eyes blazed brilliant green beneath the rim of his helmet. Behind him, the desert looked as spent as a piece of old cardboard.

The next picture must have been a joke, because there were four Privates crossing a dirt road, Dustin leading the way, then two other soldiers on the sidelines laughing and pointing at them.

“It’s Abbey Road,” Mom said. She almost smiled.

90 “What?” I asked.

Abbey Road, honey. The Beatles album.”

“Huh?”

“See how they’re spread evenly across the road, toe-to-heel?” Dad pointed to the picture. “And that one there, the third guy — he has a cigarette in his hand.”

“Yeah?” I was still confused.

95 “Look, Pete,” Mom said. “Dustin even put his hands in his pockets, just like Lennon.”

“Oh yeah,” Dad said. He smiled after he spoke, a wide, fatherly grin I hadn’t seen in a while.

“Isn’t John Lennon the guy who got shot?” I asked.

Mom glared at me, then turned abruptly and left the room. Dad waited for a moment and exhaled a long breath. “Yes, Stephanie. John Lennon was assassinated.”

“Dad, I didn’t mean to —”

100 “I know. Just try to think about how your mother feels right now, okay? Try to think about it.” He left my room and took Dustin’s letter with him. I skimmed the last few pictures, but they only showed soldiers I didn’t know, hulky guys holding M16’s up to the camera. They looked tough, but they also looked bored. I didn’t notice any women.

When I heard Mom and Dad close their bedroom door for the night, I reached under my mattress and pulled out the Army materials Sergeant Hill offered my very first day. I visited her a few times since, and she shared study tips with me. She told me to call her Corrine and gave me her cell phone number in case I had any last minute study questions. Even though I couldn’t technically join the Future Soldier Program until I’d passed all my tests, Corrine liked my enthusiasm and gave me handouts each time I stopped by the Recruitment Office.

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The Seven Army Values loosely spelled the word “leadership,” which helped me remember them in order: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. The Soldier’s Creed read like a prayer, which is exactly how I recited it to myself each night: I will always place the mission first. I will never leave a fallen comrade. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American Soldier.

2300 hours. 24 MAY 10. The day Dustin would have taken me to Round Table Pizza for my birthday, if he hadn’t left, and let me order Canadian bacon and pineapple. My favorite. His least. Instead, I sat in bed writing my third draft of a letter to him, trying to find the best way to surprise him with my enlistment. Now he wouldn’t be the only one. The Army would be one more thing we could share, something bigger than Newberg and bigger than our inside jokes. It would also be my ticket to something better than home. The thought alone made me smile. “I’m on my way,” I wrote. “Can’t wait!”

The next day, I wore my Army shirt to take the ASVAB and kept Corrine’s business card in my wallet for good luck. I had to skip school, but by then it didn’t matter. In less than a week I’d be a high school graduate, one step closer to Dustin. I wanted to qualify for as many career fields as possible. Combat support would be the closest to infantry work I could get — women weren’t allowed in full combat. From what I could tell, I’d probably be assigned maintenance or civil affairs work in the field.

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Look carefully at this recruiting advertisement for the U.S. Army. What words and images would likely appeal to Steph? Why? Would her parents or Dustin agree with the message of the advertisement? Why?

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105 28 MAY 10. 1300 hours. Corrine’s name flashed on the caller ID on my cell. I was in Chem class but called her back during passing time.

“Corrine? Hey, it’s Steph. I’m sorry I couldn’t pick up.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Excuse me, hold on. Can you hold on?” I ducked through the hallway and quickly spun the combo on my locker. “Corrine, are you there?”

“Still here.” She chuckled to herself.

110 I stuck my head into the locker and pressed the phone tightly to my ear. A river of students flowed down the hall behind me but I could have been in a foxhole, the enemy all around. My heart raced with anticipation. “Sorry. It’s a little noisy right now.”

“That’s fine, Stephanie. This will only take a minute. We received the results of your ASVAB test this morning, and I’m proud to say you passed with flying colors. I’d like to see you at your earliest convenience to get you over to MEPS and set you up with a career counselor.”

“Sweet!” I shouted. “I mean, thank you, Sergeant.” The bell rang and the hallway emptied. I pulled my head from my locker and reset the lock. “I’ll report at 1500 hours.”

“That’ll be fine, Steph.” Then she hung up.

I stared at the phone in my hand. Something was actually happening. I would be a soldier in the US Army. The tardy bell rang, and I hustled into the girls’ bathroom. I should have been in English, but that seemed worlds away. Finals were over, and teachers held parties in class, checking in textbooks and handing out doughnuts. I set my backpack on the floor, lowering the forty pounds with ease. Standing in front of the large mirror, I backed my left arm out of my sweatshirt sleeve and through the bottom, raising my arm like a body builder. I flexed my muscles and tightened my fist. Corrine had told me that soldiers use their fists as a guide for reading topographical maps, the top line of my knuckles like a ridge of mountains. Between each knuckle, a saddle, and at the edge of my fist along the side of my pinky was a cliff. Hills could be marked on either side of each knuckle, the places where soldiers had to climb or descend, near the summit of each knuckle-peak.

115 Things moved quickly after that. The career counselor said they could only reserve my Army job for seven days, then I had to decide. I knew right away I wanted to be a Bridge Crewmember, position 21C. A few days later I drove to the MEPS office in Portland to swear in and take the Oath of Enlistment. Job description and contract in hand, I settled into the driver’s seat of the Nissan to drive home and tell Mom and Dad. That’s when my phone rang. It was Dustin. I held the sound of his voice in the palm of my hand, the closest we’d been in almost six months.

“Steph, it’s me I —”

“Dustin? Where are you?” I almost shrieked. “You’re not going to believe this! I just finished —”

“What do you think you’re doing?”He sounded like a stranger. Worse. He sounded like Dad, the few times I’d heard him lose his temper.

“Steph, I got your letter.”

120 “Dustin, I passed. I passed everything. Or at least the beginning of everything. It’s all happening!”

“This isn’t for you. This isn’t what it seems,” he said. Then slowly: “You. Do not belong. In the Army.”

“What do you mean I don’t belong? I just took my Oath. We can be in it together, now. So much has happened since you left. I’m going to be a Bridge Crewmember. We might even be in the same —”

“Goddamnit, Sis. Slow down!” I heard his lungs heave, his voice crack. “There’s nothing you can do for me here.”

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“Dustin?” I said his name, but it got lost somewhere over the Pacific. He wasn’t the same brother I had before he left. Then again, I wasn’t the same sister.

125 “I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll email you later.”

After basic, I shipped to Fort Leonardwood, Missouri, for bridge training. By 20 SEP 10 I flew to a US Army base in Germany for TTP. Tactics, techniques, and practices. I sent letters to Mom and Dad once a month, short and sweet — just like Dustin’s.

For his part, Dustin called almost every week. He never got angry with me like that again, but we rarely talked about my enlistment. He hated feeling responsible, and nothing I said convinced him I’d done it for myself as much as for him. We didn’t joke around like before, but at least our military jargon finally had a true purpose. The daily B.S. of unit power struggles, trying to swipe the right kinds of protective gear, downing MREs between gags — I lived all of it, and all of it brought us more and more into our new family. We served in the same Division but never crossed paths in the field. He couldn’t see how hard I worked, but very few women served in combat support and word got around. I could hold my own, at least at first, and that’s the message I wanted him to hear.

02 FEB 10. I landed in Kabul and began the long road trip to Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan. We were there to erect a series of dry support bridges used for crossing land gaps. About the time Dustin flew home on leave — he joked it was “spring break” — my Company moved to Nuristan Province in the Hindu Kush Mountains. There was heavy fighting along the Pakistan border and infantrymen needed temporary bridges for transport. Something that could be set up and dismantled in a hurry. We were trained to build modular bridges in under ninety minutes.

We rarely left a bridge set up overnight, as the open crossing created a liability — an invitation for insurgents. But the sun had set, and we had another unit that needed to cross at the same location in a few hours. Guards posted on either end and the rest of us set up camp strategically tucked into sidewalls of the mountain. 0230 hours, 26 APR 11, a handful of insurgents tried to cross the bridge. They made it halfway before being detected, and when they returned fire, our combat soldiers took them out. We dismantled the bridge that day, but by nightfall more insurgents crossed the land gap without it. Never mind how they navigated those cliffs by hand and foot, but they did, and they ambushed our camp just before sunrise.

130 The gunfire sounded like microwave popcorn at first. I’d never been that close to it before. At least not when it was aimed at me. I woke disoriented, snapped on my Kevlar, grabbed my flack vest, and got onto all fours. Right arm through the first hole, left arm through the second. Bullets sang by my ears, no time to zip. I grabbed my weapon, then ran low and straight, following the sound of our soldiers’ voices. Watch how fast I ran, the open flaps of my vest like wings in the wind. See how the bullets danced around me, never hitting their target. Then finally, half a dozen of them did.

0439 hours. 27 APR 11.

I have nothing to say about white lights or Heaven or Hell or even who else I saw. But I will say this: there’s nothing like it, that fever of live-action death.

In the living world, people study amputees with ghost limbs. A missing right arm mysteriously itches. A missing left leg throbs. In the dead world, we’re given ghost ears. Different people hear different things. What I hear is always the same. It’s Mom. It’s Dad. They keep asking, “What happened? What happened? What happened?”

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Understanding and Interpreting

  1. When pressed by Steph for information about life in the military, Dustin replies, just before heading out to Afghanistan, “No stories, Sis. Sorry” (par. 7). Look at Dustin’s communication with Steph once he is on the battlefield. What is the conflict between her hopes and his actual communication? What does Steph hear or not hear in Dustin’s letters home?

  2. How do Steph’s parents’ actions and behavior, probably inadvertently, cause her to enlist?

  3. Steph calls Dustin’s first email and his letters “short and sweet” (pars. 33 and 126), but elsewhere she describes them as “lifeless” (par. 43). What do these letters from Dustin represent for Steph?

  4. Even though Steph conducts a lot of research on the army, she also seems rather naive about military life. Identify places where she demonstrates this quality and explain why this is important to the point Schultz is making in this story.

  5. Shortly before she takes her oath, Steph writes, “I’m on my way” (par. 103). What do this line and other actions she takes reveal about Steph’s motivations for enlisting?

  6. How do Dustin’s character traits lead, however indirectly, to the tragic ending of the story?

  7. What are the differences between Steph’s expectations of life in the military and the reality? How do these differences help to illustrate the theme of the story?

Analyzing Language, Style, and Structure

  1. While most of this story is told in roughly chronological order, Schultz decides to start with the scene of Dustin leaving for Afghanistan. How does this choice help to illustrate the central conflict within Steph?

  2. In addition to showing the origin of the inside joke Steph shares with her brother, “deuce out,” what purpose does the flashback in paragraphs 34–39 serve for establishing Steph’s character?

  3. Look back at the scene when Steph goes to the U.S. Army Recruiting Office for the first time. What key details does Schultz use to describe Steph, as well as the setting of the office and the actions of the recruiters? What do these details reveal about Steph and why she makes the choice to enlist?

  4. Schultz provides us with very little information about Steph’s life outside of her relationship to her parents and Dustin. Apart from a brief mention of skipping the senior prom (par. 42), Steph makes no mention of her friends or social activities. How does this lack of description relate to the conflict Steph is facing?

  5. Writers often include details that foreshadow an ending such as the one in this story. Look back and identify and explain how Schultz’s specific language or plot choices can be seen as foreshadowing.

  6. Reread paragraph 130, which begins, “The gunfire sounded like microwave popcorn at first.” What do you notice about the shift in language in this paragraph? How does this shift point toward the last section of the story?

Connecting, Arguing, and Extending

  1. Imagine that you were an editor working with Katey Schultz before the publication of this story. Write an argument either for or against the current ending of the story. Is it effective or not? Why?

  2. Katey Schultz is a civilian, and while she interviewed a number of soldiers for the short-story collection in which “Deuce Out” was originally published, she has no firsthand experience with war or combat. Do you believe writers like Schultz are entitled to tell stories like this, or that even fictional accounts of war should be told only by people who have fought in wars? Why or why not?

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  3. It is only very recently that the United States military has begun to allow women to serve in forward operations in a war zone. Why do you think women were kept out of combat? Consider whether women should be allowed to serve in these capacities and in direct combat roles, and write an argument for your position.

  4. You are probably only a little bit younger than Steph and will at some point be facing a similar decision about what to do after your graduation from high school. Is entering the military a likely option for you? Research the entrance requirements, benefits, and risks, and then write an essay, with supporting evidence, explaining why the military might be a career option for you.