Jacqlyn Cope

Rosario

            The night that I arrived, it was my 22^nd birthday. It didn’t feel like I was getting older, but it felt like more of a suspension of time where everything began to blur. Life and death started to mirror one another, and I felt as if I lived in the in-between spaces that mortals are not supposed to have access to. It was exhilarating, boring, and terrifying all at the same time. I still long for the nights that brought forth a feeling of near death, so close I could kiss it if it were a person.

            After hauling my luggage off the plane, I followed Avila and the others from my base as we made our way to our new workspace. I could barely see in front of me because my helmet was too big and kept slipping onto my forehead and covering my eyes. We stopped in front of a tattered plywood building. There were no windows I could make out; it was just a sand-worn, sad little shack. It reminded me of the tree houses seen in movies where boys make their own rules and place signs on the doors notifying everyone, “No Girls Allowed.”

 I could feel the black funeral rosary in my right pant cargo pocket, and it ended up living there for five months. I would grab hold of it on more than one occasion and pray to a God I didn’t even have faith in at that time. I only had faith in coming home to my mother, who had given me the rosary to keep me safe. I pulled it out of my pocket and rolled it around in my palm, feeling the cracked wooden beads in between my fingertips, inhaling the familiar scent of home. It was my grandmother’s rosary and the only thing, I thought, I still had left of her.

            That night progressed into alarms and hiding under desks while IDF attacks commenced overhead. Bagram Air Force Base was surrounded by mountains, making it the perfect target for anyone who wanted to set off rockets at the base and haphazardly aim at the flight line in hopes of blowing up the biggest assets, planes. I could barely keep myself awake after traveling for four days from the U.S., even with the incessant alarms ringing from every corner of the base.  Avila, Aguirre, and Cortez, all squadron members from my home base, sat awkwardly on the pleather couch in the shack’s tiny college-style break room. Their eyes are hollowed out by their dark circles and the fatigue that traveling over time zones exerts on people. I sat on a footstool near Avila and unstrapped my helmet from my chin. Breathing in the body odor of everyone in the room, I coughed and took notice of all our rifles strapped to the front of our chests. Mine was so big that it was almost as tall as mine. I held the muzzle away from my body, checking the safety twice and thrice. Touching it made my hair rise and turned the inside of my stomach as I had envisioned using it on a person.

            Of course, we were never to leave beyond the base walls because we were ground support and the Air Force never goes on convoy missions, but it didn’t mean the possibility was 100% ruled out.

            “Hey, Cope,” Avila lifted his chin towards me from the couch.

            “Yeah,” I answered, almost in a whisper.

            “Let’s take a picture. You should take my sidearm and keep your M-16 strapped on you.”

            He handed me his M-9 pistol that rested in his leather vest harness.

            “I guess that would be kind of cool. Why didn’t I get an M-9?” I asked while I whipped the harness around my shoulders. It sat nicely on my waist, and I felt like one of those old-time gunslingers from a John Wayne film.

            “You don’t fly on the plane like we do. We can’t carry those giant ass M-16’s when we care for the patients up there.”

            He took out his phone and positioned it for a photo op.

            “Okay Copey, smile!”

            The flash from his phone startled me, and I found it hard to smile with guns strapped to me. My grandmother’s rosary pressed into my thigh as I shifted the butt end of my M-16 around to be more comfortable, but I wasn’t.

            “Oh, okay, okay. I think that’s enough, Avila. I’m not even supposed to be carrying your weapon,” I said as I handed him his sidearm.

            I could feel the power in that instant of possessing something that had the potential to kill another, it was tempting, but I could also feel the fear pass through at the very thought of pulling the trigger on somebody.

           

A silence came over me instantly as I looked at the photos. Cortez and Aguirre roared with laughter from the couch during the whole process.

            “Oh man, she looks so tiny!” Cortez quipped as he hit his knee with his hand.

            “Yeah, Cope, I don’t think they should have given you an M-16,” Aguirre snorted a laugh.

            Surrounded by men at the time, I never thought about how they viewed me. I felt part of something. I thought I was accepted into a brotherhood, but as a woman, you can never be somebody’s brother. Although Avila was kind, I would overhear him talking about the few females who came through on flight crews. The men would crowd around near my desk. After the other women left the room, they would comment about their appearances. A group gathered by my desk during the first week of the new arrivals from other bases.

            “Oh yeah, did you see her? I bet that ring she has doesn’t stay on this whole deployment,” some maintenance guy I didn’t even know had mentioned.

            “With that ass, I would hope not,” the other unknown man chided while lifting his hand to smack an imaginary backside.

            “Prime meat right there,” Avila added into the mix, not even looking at me once to see if I had heard what he said.

            I ignored the banter because I wanted to belong, be accepted, and be part of the boys’ club. To them, I was Cope and nothing more. No complicated labels of race or ethnicity; I didn’t need to choose or show I belonged to one culture or the other. But I was wrong, and that sense of belonging was ultimately false.

I also secretly harbored a need to be noticed by them too. To validate that I was pretty enough to be looked at that way as if that was all I ever had to offer. It was a curious feeling, the need to be wanted by strangers.

 And as the nights passed through that deployment, with my rosary in my pocket, that burnt and worn relic of the grandmother I never knew gently reminded me that I was still alive. And it kept me sane and grounded even when death reached its rough hand to touch my cheek, and I was tempted to turn to it because it felt like purpose, belonging, and acceptance. That rosary, my own star, was the only thing that helped me cut through all that darkness.