Free Major Conflict by Maj USA (ret.) Jeffrey McGowan

laughing at the story we’d heard before, our laughter renewed and fortified each time Dave or Ron or one of us would repeat the phrase “Remain calm” in a deeply concerned voice, or when the image of Dave rushing out would flash back through our minds. I remember looking around in a boozy haze of hilarity and thinking how cool it was to have friends like this. These guys are rock solid, I thought, and I know they’ll make excellent comrades in arms. I felt compelled to make an impromptu toast, so I called for another round of shots, stood up somewhat unsteadily, and raised my glass.
    â€œTo my best buds,” I said. “You guys are the best. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize for all the horrible things I’m going to do to you over the years, but then again you’ll probably have it coming, whatever it is.”
    They all laughed and drank along with me. Alvarez flipped me the finger and Dave punched me hard in the arm while Ron yelled, “And fuck you, too, McGowan!”
    â€œI smell a golden dragon!” Ron said then, and we all soon agreed to leave the bar and head to the Golden Dragon Strip Club.
    This wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined the army. I’d been part of one of the last groups to be commissioned formally as both an “officer and a gentleman,” and I’d thought that meant we had to live by higher standards than, say, the privates in the army and the average Joe civilians. But this was pre-Tailhook, and there was a kind of renewed swagger in the military now that billions of dollars had been pumped in since Ronald Reagan had taken office seven years before. The Berlin Wall would soon collapse, and the Soviet Union would dissolve shortly thereafter, and we’d emerge as the world’s sole superpower. There was a renewed sense of entitlement and pride, and in a way I think we were expected to live a little bit on the edge, to live wildly, like winners, now that the cold war had finally ended and it seemed as if the long national trauma of Vietnam had finally run its full course and, in a sense, been atoned for.
    And so it was that we often went to the Golden Dragon Strip Club after spending a few hours at the bar. On this particular night I was pretty much six sheets to the wind, and that made it easier for me. I remember feeling strangely disconnected as the lap dancer, a petite redhead with enormous breasts, swiveled over my thighs. I remember thinking that she was Russian from her accent and how strange that was. The girls at the Golden Dragon were all local girls and were all clearly American. Later on I’d learn that it was something she put on, the accent, and that she wanted to be an actress, “like Meryl Streep,” she’d say. She smiled when I got erect, but at that point in my life you could have rubbed me up against sandpaper and I’d have gotten hard, so I knew it really didn’t mean anything. I heard Alvarez laughing somewhere behind me, and then another beer was suddenly put down on the table in front of me. I played along. I went through the motions. It was actually kind of fun. I really didn’t mind coming to the Golden Dragon with the guys. What I minded was that I had to pretend that a woman’s body meant the same thing to me as it did to them. In the strange illogic of denial, though, I still had every intention of getting married and having a family. This moment—me, a young soldier, drunk at the Golden Dragon Strip Club in Lawton, Oklahoma—was, I believed, just another chapter in the normal narrative of a regular guy. This is what you did. In a few years I’d be married with children and look back on these days with a kind of fondness. The fact that I wasn’t really feeling much for the redheaded “Russian,” the Meryl Streep wannabe, on my lap, or for the laughing blonde on Dave’s lap, or for any of the women in the club for that matter, only meant, I