Alpine Start

I wake to the low beeping, barely heard above the wind. The snow strikes the wall of the tent, in the dark it sounds like the night is trying to put me back to sleep. I turn on the lamp, and off the alarm. The tent wall is mere inches from my face, the weight of new snow pressing down, until I shake the walls and the poles spring the tent into shape. My naked arm feels the bite of cold, and I hear the distant rumble of avalanches coming down the face. Instead of climbing we will sleep the day through, and tomorrow we will try again.

It’s dark, but this night there is no wind and the snow shows signs of stopping. Three AM, it’s fifteen below outside, but my sleeping bag is comfortable. I dress inside it to put off the inevitable shock of putting on frozen boots. Hopefully they will thaw quickly today. They are cold, but the mountain waits.

Outside, light snow falling, wisps of clouds stream past the beam of my lamp. Tie in now; there are crevasse between the tent and the face, crampons click, and snow crunches under foot. Yesterday’s snow has blown off, through gaps in the clouds the moon lights the peak. A cold blue light shows cold blue ice, on this cold blue night.

A short walk to the ‘shrund, but I don’t see it until the crevasse opens beneath my feet, a dark maw, cold breath sucks heat from the cold air and from me. As I swing my head from side to side, my light expels the dark, but I see no way across. Walking along the bottom edge, one eye alert to the shape of the snow, ready to warn of undercutting, the other eye ahead looking for weaknesses in the wall of ice. Near the far edge of the face, where it is bounded by a ridge of rocks, there is a bridge of snow. It looks too soft to hold my weight, but perhaps the rocks will hold the path on.

The rocks are featureless in the dark, as I make my way to them, the moat is a few feet wide; not enough to be insurmountable, but retreat would be challenging. I step across, and details appear and then are washed out by the flat light of the headlamp. A small hold is found by feel and the way forward opens, for a moment. A few more moves and I’ve run out of holds, the rock is blank and vertical, but a few feet to the left lies the snow and ice of the face we had set out to climb.

A brief call to my partner “watch me!” though there is not much else to see this early. I step out on to the snow, and the rest of the climb is before us.

Alice's Part 5

The alarm screeched in his ear. Two hours. Ray turned the alarm off, leaned over and picked up the phone. He dialled the help line.

‘Hello?’ a young woman answered. ‘G.I. Help Line.’

‘Say I go AWOL?’ he said. ‘What are my options?’

A big yawn. ‘Well, you can go home to your family, change cities, or there’s Canada.’

‘Canada?’ Ray had only heard that the winters were even colder there than those at home. He had heard people skied to work, and lived in igloos. He kind of wondered about the igloos, though. Canada wasn’t that far north.

‘Yeah. There isn’t any guarantee that you can stay, though. And you can never come back.’

‘I’d never be able to come back?’

‘Well, you could, but you’d get some time in prison, and will have difficulty finding work with your dishonourable discharge.’

‘Hmmm. Ok.’ Canada felt like a long ways off. It wasn’t going to open its arms, and he would never be able to see his mother and father again. ‘I’ll think about it. Is there any support up there?’

‘Yeah. Got a pen?’ she asked. ‘Good.’ She gave him the number, and told him to ask for Michelle, who would guide him through the process if he decided to go.

‘Thanks,’ Ray said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Good luck.’

Ray checked the clock. He had an hour and forty minutes before he would be missing, and he still didn’t know where he was going. He got up, showered and packed a small bag of things he would need. Once he had dressed, he walked out the door.

As he walked down the street, he knew it would be the last time. He stopped by the diner, and ordered a muffin and coffee. ‘Alice, can you put honey in that coffee?’

‘Sure’

Ray tried to pay, but Alice would have nothing to do with it. He went to sit down in a booth. He looked at his hands--the scars he remembered getting, and the few he couldn’t. He ran them through his hair.

Alice brought his coffee out to him. ‘How are you, Ray?’

‘I’m … doing better,’ he answered, cradling his mug of coffee in his hands.

‘Don’t you ship out this morning?’

‘Yes,’ Ray said. He paused. ‘No, I think I’m going …I am going to go to Canada.’ His voice cracked, and he coughed to cover it up.

Alice smiled. ‘You know what, Ray? I think it takes a lot of guts to do what you’re doing.’ She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I’m proud of you.” He watched her walk back to the counter, then finished his coffee.

He waved goodbye to Alice, walked out the door, and down the road. He heard a car in the distance behind him, and put out his thumb.

Alice's Part 4

The alarm’s scream once again cut into his thoughts. Two and a half hours.

There was a cute girl--Irean--who worked at the diner during the busy hours. Ray tried to talk to her, but she didn’t really understand why he was in the army, and she never really got past it.

It was during his attempts at courting Irean that the nightmares had started. He had dreamt of horrible scenes, of him wandering through streets surrounded by people he knew, all dead. At first, the dreams would start where he had grown up, on the streets of Indianapolis. Then, jarringly, the location would shift to the Baghdad shown on CNN. The people that he knew were those lying on the streets.

Ray still thought he would go. He wanted to protect the world from the demon Saddam. After months of poor sleep, he began to look closely at the news coming out of Iraq. He watched in horror as no weapons were found and the Army ran out of places to look. The longer it went on, the more obvious it became that they weren’t going to find anything.

Ray had taken Irean to dinner once; things had gone well until one of them had mentioned the war, or maybe it had been in the news on the T.V. above the bar. It was before Ray was certain of anything, but he was beginning to have his doubts.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Even you have admitted that Dubbya’s case doesn’t add up, but you’re still going to get yourself killed.’

‘I’m just not sure. I want to protect America,’ Ray said. ‘But there’s so many things that don’t make sense. I’m confused.’

‘Then don’t go.’

‘I have to go: it’s in my contract’

‘Your contract is ridiculous. I saw my brother’s before he left. Now he’s in a wheel chair.’ Irean got frustrated--despite what she thought was outstanding evidence against the war--with his waffling and walked out.

Ray had begun to suspect that his government had betrayed him, but it was when Powell had admitted that there were no WMDs to be found, that he truly felt how deeply he had been lied to. Later, Blair was found to have used a report that was ten years old to go to war; it only added fuel to the fire of doubt.

The alarm’s beeping was more insistent when it started again. Two hours and fifteen minutes until he had to be at the airport.

He had applied for C.O. status the day after he had taken Irean to dinner. She had pushed him over the edge. The sergeant, who accepted his form, had looked him up and down, and sneered.

The suspense over the next few weeks put a lot of stress on Ray. He lost sleep, and didn’t eat for days on end. He worried they would still send him to fight a war he didn’t want. One day he was visiting Alice at the diner.

‘You look rough,’ Alice said as Ray walked in the door. It was a slow day, and Alice was watching the rain trickle down the window.

‘I feel worse.’

‘Haven’t seen you in a few days, how are you doing?’

‘Well, I haven‘t slept or eaten in days,’ Ray said. ‘And… I’ve applied for my C.O. status.’

‘Do you think they will give it to you?’

‘I hope so.’ Ray felt, and sounded uncertain.

‘Well, if you don’t, there are other options,’ said Alice.

‘I guess,’ said Ray, before he gave a weak grin, and went out into the rain, on his way to the base.

Ray hadn’t heard anything about his C.O. status until yesterday. The sergeant of his unit had spent fifteen minutes yelling at the troop, saying that there would be no acceptances of applications: everyone was going, whether they liked it or not. Ray had gone straight home then--crying like he had never cried before.

Alice's Part 3

‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘My name’s Alice.’

‘This place yours?’ Ray asked.

‘It’s my baby.’

‘I just transferred from my basic in California,’ Ray answered. He smiled. ‘Could I get a coffee? With milk and sugar, please.’

‘Sure. How are the boys on the base doing? I used to take a bigger role in the goings on at the base,’ she said. ‘These days there’s no interest in the coffee houses, just lattes.’ Alice poured him his coffee, added milk and then stirred in the sugar. ‘Back before you were born, around ’67, my husband and I ran a newspaper for the boys,’ she continued. ‘They used to write about the officers, what it was like overseas, in the jungle, and why the war was wrong.’

As they talked, they walked to a booth, and sat down.

Ray scratched his head. ‘How’d you get away with that? There’s no way the Army would have liked it.’

‘Of course the command didn’t like it,’ she answered. ‘We got raided, fined, shut down, and thrown in jail. The soldiers involved had it worse, for the first bit anyway. Later, it got dangerous for the officers to resist the boys.’ The last was said with a certain amount of pride.

Ray was uncomfortable with the idea of resisting. ‘But, why? What’s the point? The Viet Cong were just a bunch of Commies anyways.’

Alice’s voice trembled, as she said, ‘The boys believed that the peasants were people, too, that they deserved peace, as much as anyone else.’

Ray apologized. He had never really thought about the whole thing, and the news never talked about the enemy as human beings, and all his training had demonized them. He thought she was wrong, but he needed someone to talk to.

‘It’s okay. You weren’t there.’ Alice smiled. It was a sincere smile; the type of smile shared between friends. She excused herself and went back to take the orders of some other patrons.

From then on, whenever he had time, he would head to Alice’s for coffee. If she wasn’t cooking breakfasts, she would give him coffee for free. Ray and Alice would talk for hours during the several months between when he moved to town and when he was called up. They mostly talked about his childhood in the city, and hers in the Midwest. There were some days though when news of the war in Iraq would creep in.

‘Ray, did you see the news last night?’ Handing him a cup of coffee.

‘Yeah. I can’t believe how well the WMDs are hidden,’ said Ray, scratching his head. ‘I thought they would have found some by now.’

‘Hmm, I don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘There were lots of searches before the war.’

‘I remember.’ He swilled his coffee, thinking about the lead up to the war.

‘I know it’s not really your thing, but there’s a rally at the base this weekend,’ said Alice. She looked hopeful. ‘You could come if you want. There’s a man coming to talk about the weapons.’

‘I would, but…’ Ray felt uncomfortable about being seen with the crowd. ‘I’d better not: I could get in a lot of trouble.’

Alice's Part 2

The next time they talked, it was Ray’s birthday, and his father was helping him pack his bags. Ray was leaving to join the Army as he had always wanted to, but it wasn’t supposed to have gone this way.

‘So, you’re leaving,’ he said to Ray. ‘Well, that will make life easier.’

‘I’ll send what money I can,’ Ray replied. He half expected his father to smile: to show the same pride that he had shown when Ray first mentioned the army.

‘Well, do what you can,’ his father said, as he turned to leave Ray’s room. ‘Just don’t get yourself killed, alright?’

‘Sure,’ Ray said. He shivered; the heat had been cut off again.

Ray’s family was poor, and they could seldom afford to pay all the bills at once. They got paid on a rotating basis. Sometimes the heat would be turned off for months at a time. These months were often the coldest of the year. The state power company only seemed to notice the late bills when it was well below 20˚.

The alarm went off. Still with tears in his eyes, Ray hit the snooze button. It was 4 am. He had three hours to decide. He couldn’t accept that in a few short days he would be driving the streets of Fallujah; he would be an occupier in a country that had done nothing to deserve the treatment it was receiving.

For his entire basic training, he had been a model soldier. He’d been on the verge of promotion, when everything changed. The Twin Towers fell. Within a few short months, the lame duck president was leading the nation to a quick victory. Ray had felt left out when his unit had been left behind. Shortly afterwards, though, the president was talking about going to war in Iraq. Ray had been overjoyed: finally he could be a hero.

Ray had called the G.I. help line the night he received his orders to ship out, at the end of January. ‘Hi, I don’t want to go to Iraq, and I’m wondering what my options are.’

The man on the other end of the line sounded tired. ‘There’s a couple of things you can do,’ he said. ‘You can apply for Conscientious Objector status, or you can go AWOL. I’ll warn you, though; the Army won’t like what you’re doing.’

‘’Kay, thanks. I’ll think about it.’ Ray had never run away in his life. He’d been forced away more than once, but to actually flee was beyond anything he had ever considered.

The alarm began again. Two hours forty-five minutes. Ray reached over, and hit the snooze again: he still wasn’t ready.

There had been protests around the world. Ray had watched them on T.V. He‘d been fascinated by the size of the crowds. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in every country on earth. Ray was amazed that so many people could be against what his country thought of as so right. His friend, Alice, had gone to the ones at the base.

Alice owned a little diner--built from two airstreams welded together--where Ray felt at home. He wasn’t quite sure what it was about the place. Maybe it was the food--which was the same as every other diner everywhere else--or it may have been the juke box, or the chrome and vinyl booths. In any case, she had been kind when he’d first come in, uniform and all.