Chasing the Pinkmist:A Short Story

Chasing the Pinkmist

Sometimes you wish you didn’t care so much about pinkmist, but when you’re melting on an adobe rooftop in Iraq, you can only be quenched by it.

The sweat beads, drips, and drops off your brow— and the water hangs from your 6 day beard after your drink from the plastic canteen, your thoughts soar to the white Hawaiian beach you sank into after an hour of getting beat up by the surf— a condensated cup of Maui in your hand and your lover in the other. You overlooked her cracked and chipped white nail polish and you notice the bed sheets are the same pure white as you run your fingers through her sun bleached blond hair, which forces her into a half smile that makes you laugh from happiness.

Your thought segues to the scene you came home to last year. You find it sweet and sexy and innocent how her clothes trailed off in the hallway with the Indie falsetto singer cooing from her record player. Maybe you’ll jump in the shower with her, but you find her with another guy. A stranger that you’ve noticed before, he lives down the street. You know this is clichéd. 

            You’re forced to shake the thought, and with a lighted cigarette cupped in your hand, it helps. You exhale the smoke in short puffs, trying to conceal your perfectly perched position as best as you can. You wait and wish and want the next taste of pinkmist.

            You think of home again, this time about your three nephews. How old are they now? You think to yourself.

            “What?” Says your spotter.

            “What?”

            “How old is who?” He says.

            “I dunno.”

He shakes his head and goes back to his binoculars. You notice a tiny bug crawling on your glove, which keeps your attention long enough to have a weird conversation with some kind of sensitive conscience you have. You slowly put a finger on the tiny creature and kill it. You feel bad, kind of. The nephews… you backtrack. God, they’re dating and driving now. Far too young to drink in the horridly sweet taste.

Even the other guys in your unit stay connected with the bit of humanity left in this country, but they don’t have a clue as to how thirsty you are for a drink of the mist. No one does. No one gets how you simply crave the taste day in and day out. It’s your 5^th deployment and every mission can’t come quickly enough for you. You just want to feel the metal trigger squeeze. You want to hear the ringing in your ears after a shot goes out. You want to smell the carbon from the burnt gunpowder. The pinkmist is the icing though. The cigarette afterwards is a close second.

Sniper instructors say a shooter only needs to be on the scope for an hour at a time. You have been on the scope for three hours, far too long. You have been on your over watch mission for six days now, it might be seven. You don’t really know or care. The last time you had a taste was two hours and fifty minutes ago, and you spilled it on a window of a glass blower’s front door. His wife and kids had to clean it up. You watched with a cigarette cupped and a thought comparing sex and what you’re feeling now, both messy.

Finally, you see a teenage male round the corner of an alleyway that connects the main road you are over watching. The road is a hotbed for IEDs and it’s your job to prevent more being planted. The kid is followed by three more and they all are caring boxes, one has a shovel. The one with the spade begins digging a hole as the others look anxiously around. It’s like they know you’re watching them, but they are just too stupid… or motivated.

“Spotter ready.”
            “Shooter ready”

“Range, 500 plus 1” Whispers your spotter.

“Wind, left to right 5 “He continues.

“Send it” Your spotter commands.

“On the way.”

The natural squeeze of your finger parallels with your breathing and the recoil of your fired weapon sends a chill to the soles of your feet. As your hand ejects the spent casing with the bolt action lever, your eye stays glued to the scope. It was a perfect kill shot, just below the tip of his nose and above his upper lip. This is ideal for a one shot, one kill, as the bullet will travel through the head and sever the cerebral cord. The other two teens start to run.
 “Send it”

            “On the way”

Another blast rings out and catches the shorter teenage boy just shy of center mass, to the left of the spine in the meaty part of his back behind his shoulder. You know the part that always gets knots in the muscle tissue? He drops.

The third teen has hidden himself behind a car. You know you could shoot through the car, but you don’t want to just injure him, allowing for a getaway. You wait, he waits. You scan the area around the car, anticipating any avenues of retreats he may decide to pick. There is really only one logical one, back through the alley they came from. Water begins running from the tire of the car.
            “He’s fucking pissed himself!” Your spotter exclaims with a sick kind of desperation in his laugh.

You decide the waiting is bullshit and you want to fully fill your pinkmist cup. You tell the spotter to get you the .50 cal sniper. He doesn’t hesitate and moves with a sense of urgency. Maybe he needs the mist in his life as well. You give the scope three clicks and put your crosshair just to the right of the left taillight of the orange and white Opel with piss coming from the tire.

            “Send it”

            “On the way”

            The 50 gives its best recoil as the bullet the size of a gorilla’s middle finger spirals to its target.An explosion of metal and flesh ensue. It is horridly magnificent. Everything is gray, except for the pink that sprays and leaks from the dead man’s body. With a bullet that size, if it hit his head, there would be nothing left. Especially after mushrooming through the car’s metal. You can’t go and observe your artwork, but your mind fills in the gaps and it’s spectacular.

            You gladly endure your 15 month deployment. You soak in the death and destruction and desire to kill. Your home is not only physically far, but mentally as well. You wonder if your family will be able to recognize your actions and thoughts and thoughts that become actions and thoughts and actions that become spoken words. You wonder how fucked up you really have become. You dream and see the faces you have taken the life from. You dream with crosshairs. Your everyday life is consumed with crosshairs. You are met in the airport by your family with banners and tears but not a single one from you. You examine every passing face in the airport and every possible sniper nest and ballistic loophole. You are in America, but you’re situational awareness level is Ludacris Paranoid. You break out in sweats when strangers are within 5 feet of you, hordes of strangers looking at you. Your uniform still has dried blood on it, but it’s the cleanest one you had. You smell like Iraqi sand and shit. You feel filthy. No amount of showers can smooth this dirty feeling of your skin. You start to think it’s deeper than that. You start to think it might be a mental thing.

            The drive home isn’t any easier. Every little mound of dirt or pothole or piece of trash makes you flinch. You tell yourself there is no IED that can get you here, but you know that’s not entirely true. You want your dad to drive in the middle of the lane, but this isn’t a combat zone. You can’t do whatever you want here. The laws are enforced here. Cars speed past you, and the whole time they were approaching you had an eye on them in the mirror. You wish you were on a patrol, sweating in a Humvee that is bound to blow up. You wish it was post-explosion, the ringing in your ears silencing the voices screaming of lost limbs and those in your head that were thirsting for pinkmist.

            You are pretty quiet through your welcome home barbeque. There’s nothing to say so you stay silent. You scan the houses around you and count the windows that you would shoot yourself from if that were the case. You feel hunted. You feel the predator constantly creeping over you. You sweat out of anxiety and try to drown it with whiskey and Xanax and weed. You sleep in thirty minute increments; sometimes you get lucky and get a full hour, you always see faces in dreams though. There is always crosshairs on them. You have become the unsuspecting victim counting tallies on a back wall in a morgue. You start to think you are one of the weak-minded, and you don’t dare tell a soul of the thoughts you have.

            You watch the 24/7 news channels, switching back and forth between MSNBC and FOX. Your thoughts seem to fight you even more, but your cellphone tings at you with a message from your high school friends, are you coming tonight?

It’s your high school reunion and you find it hard to believe it’s been 10 years since you’ve last seen this group of people. Facebook helped bridge a certain type of gap, but they’ll never picture you as you. So, you go and drink a few beers and make them look bad at pool. You shoot more whiskey than they could ever handle. You drink and you smoke and you curse, and they love you for it. The girls ask about all you’ve seen and you tell them PG stories. Your class president won’t leave you alone, though she never looked at you back then. You have meaningless sex with her in the bathroom at the local country club and she slaps you after you notice her chipped pink nail polish and asked her why the husband didn’t get her a manicure. You get too drunk and tell everyone you didn’t like them 10 years ago and they’re just as annoying now.

You start walking home but a girl from the reunion picks you up 3 blocks down the road. Jarren, you think her name is. She remembered you in high school as the funny guy. You stare out the window of her moving car, completely hopeless and empty. She tries to make small talk but you just ask her what music she listens to.

“I hope to god you don’t say ‘everything’” You make your little finger quotations.

 “For just once, I would love for a female to actually have an opinion on this subject.”

“Actually I do like everything, my playlist ranges from-“

“Tupac to Kings of Leon to Conway Twitty? Yeah, I’ve heard that shit before.”

“You know what, just get the fuck out.”      

She swerves the car hard to the side of the road, nearly throwing you out of your seat.

“Oh come on, I was just joking.”

“You’re an asshole, get out!”
 “I am a fucking asshole!”

You trudge the rest of the way home and the neighbor is sitting on a lawn chair in your driveway, 2 bottles of Jack Daniels next to him. One of which is halfway empty. A CCR song is playing… something about rain. There are no words said, he just opens the other and hands it to you as you fall to a chair. Swigging the sour mash sends a warm sensation through your veins that you hadn’t felt in a long time. Without a word or a second thought he lights a joint and passes it to you, followed by 4 blue pills and . You recognize these. These are Ambient. You recall a time you hallucinated on these same pills coming back from your first deployment. The AC window unit turned into a monster and started laughing at you. Recalling the terrible experience you downed them with the whiskey anyways. I mean, you can only hallucinate if you fight the urge to sleep, these pills give you the urge to sleep… to coma, rather.

“Your ole man says you just got back.”

“Yeah”

“Did I ever tell you I was in Vietnam?” He finally said.

“No” You manage to say as you hold in a coughing session from the pot.

“3 deployments man, 3 fucking deployments into that jungle and I swear to god I can still hear those gooks talking at night, like they were having a nice get together and mocking us at the same time, like they had night vision eyes. They knew right where we were, all the time. The weird thing is, I knew we shouldn’t have been there, but I had this overwhelming feeling dedicated to the uniform I was wearing. And when I would come home, I would be called terrible names and spit on and protestors banging the car window and hood. I never felt so degraded and ashamed wearing that uniform. To this day I still see the first kid I killed, actually not even the kid, it was what I assumed was his mom. Staring right at me with no tears in her face, just staring… right at me with her son lying there, dead, with half of his face torn off. That’s the shit I’ll never forget.”

He gets up from his chair and puts a hand on your shoulder. There are no more words said, but definitely a connection was sent and received. Combat veterans have this sort of thing, when there has been so much destruction seen, heard, and smelled the brain has to process these things in one way or another. It’s like this emotional process can be relieved from one to another, knowing there has always been terrible shit for the grunts to see and do.

Before you know it he is gone and you are now the one sitting alone with a bottle of jack and a joint in your hand. Bob Dylan’s voice comes from the radio,

“You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy

You play with my world
Like it's your little toy”

You accept that you are just a toy, a pawn, being used as cannon fodder for a small group of elites that want nothing but more money to sit on. You become disgusted with yourself, mirrors become your enemy. You try to show no signs that you were military, but others that are can tell without even talking to you. There’s a certain demeanor about a combat veteran. You count days left in your contract. You think of ways to get out of it. You fight voices in your head and the triggers that spark them. Flashes, crowds, unsuspecting thuds from your dad moving things in the attic, everything from everywhere collapses your ability to function normally. You eat pills that make you fuzzy and everything cloudy. You stop eating pills and hear the voices again. You drink to pass out, but it does nothing but cause dependence and in reality there is no sleep. You learn the neighbor has passed away, an Agent Orange assassination. Cannon fodder. You feel no one around you understands, no one can connect. There is only one way to cope, so you become pinkmist.