By Jon Doughboy
Black boys and brown boys and poor white boys from the trailers and farms of red America make up the world’s greatest fighting force otherwise known as the US Army. And I was one of those boys but now I’m a man and people still thank me for my service when they see my tattoos if I’m ordering milkshakes for my daughters at the stand on the 
beach they love or if I’m at one of my friend Ryan’s parties where he’s trying to set me up with a divorcee and thinks this information will help me get laid, “yeah, in the Army, in Afghanistan” but I’m not there to be thanked for my service, I’m there to get laid or find love or even just for that moment the next morning where it isn’t just me in bed but a head of long hair and I go to the kitchen and I make her eggs, make this relative stranger a little meal and the sense of purpose that flows from that, from pouring the juice to brewing the coffee to toasting and buttering the bread, you know?
They keep thanking me and thanking me even though the country where I served has collapsed and the bad guys won and the good guys, that’s us, I guess, the good guys, so my teachers always told me and my CO told me and Bush and Obama and my ex-wife—good guys, they said, heroes, but none of us ever understood what we were doing there, something about terrorism and women’s rights and Russia and Iran. Decisions and plans and strategies all above our pay grade.
Ryan lost his foot but he likes it, the gratitude, capitalizing on the gratitude. I lost a strip of intestines when a stray bit of shrapnel penetrated my guts and I have to drink some powder before every meal otherwise what little intestine I have left, the Doc at the VA told me, can’t digest the food it gets. It’ll be overworked, she said. Not that it’s a big deal. I’m not complaining about that though the powder tastes funny sometimes, like sand, like dust, like gunsmoke like the pieces of Ryan’s foot I found clinging to my helmet like the way my wife trembled when I got home, trembled her way to a divorce, like the way my daughters look at me sometimes afraid I might break, like this whole world, trembling, like…
I’m fine, though, really. But if one more fucking person thanks me for my service—
Jon Doughboy is shucker-in-residence at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. Catch him @doughboywrites or on the Corn Cam.
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