The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [48]
“You push on the elbow sharply like this,” he said, “and you just slide out like so…”
The IPs, standing in a mute semicircle, waited for the translation and nodded. I went back down the hall to the unlit room with the Mad Lib players.
It was almost time to head back out. Explosions in the morning, gunfire on the way, another explosion at lunchtime…but at least we got a Mad Lib finished and spent a few hundred taxpayer bucks an hour teaching a couple of lazy-ass Iraqi cops who will never leave their police stations for any meaningful reason to practice self-defense techniques against criminals they will never apprehend. Plus, we had time for an MRE lunch. They sure didn’t have packs of Skittles at Bastogne!
Sure, this made sense. This was worth the trouble, this Iraq war.
Biederman sighed, shook his head, and looked up at no one in particular.
“What the fuck are we doing here?” he whispered.
I shrugged. Who knew?
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” he muttered.
We got into the trucks and went back home.
Sometime later, when I’d find myself holed up in a similarly isolated retreat in the Texas Hill Country with the ex-military preacher Phil Fortenberry—talking about enemy aircraft and arterial breaches with somewhat older men and women, many of them ex-soldiers moved on to a different but no less confusing stage of life—I wondered if somehow the army, with its same tireless belief in American can-doism and its same sit-in-a-circle get-to-know-u rituals, doesn’t prepare some of these kids for future Encounter Weekends. Maybe it was a stretch, but there was something about this weird sojourn through the violence and trauma of Iraq, continued on later through sexual brokenness and loneliness and substance abuse and all the other existential horrors of life in a massive industrial empire like ours—something about going through all that with only a third-rate carnival barker like Phil Fortenberry or some other midlevel officer to make sense of it for you was what made it hard to imagine anything sadder.
FIVE
DISCOVER THE DIFFERENCE
IN ORDER TO BECOME a full-fledged member of the Cornerstone Church you must take a class—another excruciatingly dull seminar led by an admonishing fourth-tier minister with an unresolved power complex. It’s actually a two-day course: a two-hour Friday-night jaunt and a six-hour haul the next morning.
I skipped the Friday-night session, spooked by the life coach seminar the night before. At that class, I had been shocked and horrified when a nunlike post-chemotherapy church administrator passed out forms asking for our Social Security numbers for a “routine” background check—a potentially fatal development for my entire satanic enterprise. Note to Christians: demon journalists do not fear the word of the Lord, but they do fear the national credit inquiry system. I left abruptly in the middle of that class, citing an emergency phone call—leaving my increasingly hormone-crazed companion Laurie, who’d cheerily kept my seat warm for me before I showed up, to finish out the gig alone.
“But where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m…sorry,” I stammered. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a problem.”
Concerned, Laurie called me several times the next day, pleading with me to come to the Friday-night membership class. But I was afraid that one, too, would require some kind of incriminating ID, so I cooked up a real tearjerker of a story to get out of the Friday session. Even I was ashamed of laying this one on my Sister in Christ.
“It’s my ex,” I explained on the phone. “It turns out she wants to get a divorce right away. She’s apparently met somebody…”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s what I was going through recently.”
Soon Laurie was rambling about her ex. I blinked off the Internet screen I’d been reading and cracked open a soda. This was going to take a while.
Laurie’s