I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth about the song. How it was really about commercialism and the mass media doing everything it can to manipulate people’s minds. How it promoted the government or the Army in no way at all.
Three months later she was beaten up and raped.
I pause a moment, waiting to see Nova’s reaction. As usual, he doesn’t give one.
He says, “Who was responsible?”
“An American soldier.”
Fifty-One
Because of our location in the desert, we had no running water. We had to do our business in the porta potties stationed around the base. One night Karen went out to one of those porta potties. She did her business. When she opened the door, someone was waiting for her. He punched her in the nose. He knocked her down. Then he hit her two more times until she was unconscious and raped her.
“Apparently it happened a lot over there,” I say. The fan keeps blowing in the corner, making the drapes over the windows sway. “Some women were knocked out and raped and then left there to be raped by whoever else came along.”
“What was done about it?”
“At the time? Nothing.”
I forced Karen to go to our CO. She hadn’t wanted to; she was embarrassed. She said she couldn’t even identify the man if she had to. I wasn’t there when she spoke to the CO. I only found out later what the CO said. He apologized but asked her what did she expect—we were at war.
I told Karen we would contact someone else, but she told me just to forget it. Her face was pale, her eyes red. The air was so dry in the desert that it dried the sweat off our bodies. It did the same to tears.
“Don’t make a big deal about it, okay?” She hugged her knees up to her chest. “I’m just gonna forget it ever happened. You should, too.”
But I couldn’t forget. Now every male soldier I looked at was a suspect. It was strange; the enemy had suddenly become the ones inside our base.
I started asking around. A few of the girls admitted that they had heard stories of other women being raped in the same way. None ever admitted it was them. But sometimes I could see it in their eyes. A flicker, nothing more than that. It was the same thing I now saw in Karen’s eyes. Before there had been an energetic fire, a passion to try to give shelter to the world, undo all the front lines. But that fire had been extinguished. She became withdrawn. Detached. Distant. One time I found her behind our building, punching the wall. She’d held her broken and bloodied hand up to me and said it didn’t even hurt.
I called my father. He was stationed somewhere halfway around the world; I never knew the exact location. I told him the situation. I told him what the CO’s answer had been. I told him I suspected it was happening to other girls. He was quiet for a long moment. I could hear the static on the line and pictured a giant black hole between us. Then he said, “You’re a smart girl, Holly. You know how to make it right.”
There was only one way I knew how to make it right, but I refused to consider the option. It was too extreme. It was too … unlike me.
Then Karen became even more detached. One of the girls found her in our building banging her head against the tiles. She was sent to the infirmary. She was given medication. It was decided she should return home.
The day before she left, however, she overdosed.
I thought about what my dad had told me. How I was a smart girl. How I knew how to make it right.
I decided that night—just hours after Karen killed herself—how I was going to do that.
I began making nightly trips to the porta potties. I would wait inside for five minutes. It was stifling hot. The stench was nauseating. I spent the time counting how long I could hold my breath.
When I opened the door I expected someone on the other side, someone who would try to punch me in the nose, push me down, knock me unconscious.
But there was never anybody there.
A week passed. Then another week. I was beginning to lose hope. I was beginning to look at the rest of the male soldiers during the day with hate. They were all guilty. They were all hiding something.
Finally one night during the third week someone was waiting for me. I heard his boots crunching the dirt outside the porta potties. He was being too sloppy. He was getting away with too much and his ego had grown too big.
When I opened the door he threw a punch at my face, but I ducked it and kicked him in the balls. He grunted, fell to his knees. While he was momentarily stunned, I withdrew my knife and shoved the blade into his chest. I kept it there and didn’t take it out until he’d stopped breathing. His body went limp. I pulled the knife out, let him drop to the ground.
There was nobody around. The night was silent. The sky was clear.
And at once a series of impulses began to race through my mind like a line of dominoes: I wanted to kick him; I wanted to stab him one hundred more times; I wanted to cut off his dick and stuff it in his mouth and leave him out for the rest of his brothers-in-rape to see (this last thought so gruesome and unlike me that for a moment I actually questioned
