Free Joker One by Donovan Campbell

Bowen’s sleeves down to his forearms and out of his pants down to his calves. The one I remember most vividly was the many-eyeballed, screaming, writhing skull that wrapped around Bowen’s right forearm. Teague caught me staring and said simply: “Oh yeah, sir, Bowen’s crazy. Don’t worry about it.” Clearly, there was always more to my men than met the eye.
    During our urban assaults, Corporal Raymond, a new team leader in Leza’s squad, told me, “Sir, if you can’t be smart, you’ve gotta be strong,” shortly before turning himself into a human cannonball as he used his entire body to smash through a barrier that I had previously considered impenetrable. Mahardy, who had kept on the straight and narrow since being accused of underage drinking, had a gift for talking incessantly and loudly, but he was also extremely intelligent (1370 on his SAT and a dean’s list student at Syracuse University before the Corps) with a knack for thinking one step ahead of his orders and asking insightful (and sometimes sarcastic)questions thereof. In a clever move, Teague combined this love of the spoken word with twenty extra pounds and made Mahardy our backup radio operator. By contrast, our primary operator, Yebra, still rarely spoke, but he had wholeheartedly dedicated himself to his machine and had turned himself into a technical wizard capable of teaching others the radio’s most esoteric inner workings.
    Feldmeir, alas, could fall asleep walking. I had never seen anything like it. One moment he would be patrolling, and the next he would be sprawled over on his side, fast asleep with arms and gear akimbo. However, Feldmeir tried so hard to be a good Marine and to be accepted by the squad that watching his painful eagerness, particularly since his squad mates remained standoffish toward him at best, hurt sometimes. After all, the platoon was probably the first real home he had ever had. Teague spent hours working with Feldmeir, desperately trying to get him ready to save and protect lives in combat, but nothing seemed to work. For a time, I debated whether to try and pawn our narcoleptic off on the Ox and his small company headquarters staff, but eventually I decided against it. Feldmeir had been given to me, and he was, therefore, my responsibility to develop. Besides, we were going into combat slightly shorthanded as it was. We were going to need all the trigger pullers we could get, even if they were narcoleptic. Like Feldmeir, but for different reasons, Staff Sergeant also had trouble walking; he demonstrated this shortcoming very visibly to the Marines by falling to the back of the company on his first hike out with us. But he never quit, and I began to realize that he was fiercely loyal to me—never once did he contradict my orders in front of the men, and whenever the Ox questioned my actions, my platoon sergeant was the first to leap to my defense. By now, Staff Sergeant’s initial fear of the Gunny had developed into full-blown terror, for the Gunny continued to ride my platoon sergeant mercilessly.
    Meanwhile, the tattooed Bowen got better and better with every passing day. As each training event followed hard on the heels of its predecessor, I became overwhelmed with the responsibility of it all. Bowen somehow managed to pick up on this, and would devise ways to help shoulder my load, usually without me knowing. When I had to assign and reassign weapons, Bowen would do it for me. When it came to after-hours PT sessions for our laggards, he would take them on himself. When any discipline issues cropped up with his men, he would handle them well before theyreached me. If I ever needed anything, no matter how Herculean or how last-minute, I could ask Bowen for it, and somehow he would have the job done two hours quicker and three times better than I imagined—my squad leader had that rare gift of fulfilling not only the task that I had actually assigned him but also the task that I
should
have assigned him. His