1st Lt. Adam Straus-Goldfarb, US Marine Corps
I bought this WiFi puck from a Nepali man who worked out of a Conex box-turned-widget shop on Camp Dwyer. The purchase was not, strictly speaking, necessary.
The FOB had its own WiFi, a relic from when it had been one of the primary Marine bases in Helmand Province, supporting operations in Marjah and as far south as Bagram Shah during the surge. But by the time I arrived in December 2019, Dwyer’s state of decay matched that of the war effort writ large, with half-mile patches of empty gravel between the remaining structures.
The majority of the service members there (myself included) were tasked with simply defending the perimeter. Beyond that fence line, the country’s infrastructure was still in shambles, and Dwyer’s WiFi was spotty at best. My primary impetus behind buying the puck was being able to talk on FaceTime audio with my parents for more than two minutes at a time without the call dropping.
It turned out the puck was not much better than the FOB’s WiFi. A ten minute-long conversation still involved redialing at least two or three times, delays of variable length that left long pauses between exchanges, and constant questions of “can you hear me?” Sometimes, the connection would lag and then speed up, my mother’s voice coming in like a speed talker with a lungful of helium. A persistent echo made my father sound like he was in an empty gymnasium as he described the progress of another long New Jersey winter, the improvements he was making in his tennis game, my brother’s performance at swimming practice, and so on.
Ultimately, these technical issues didn’t make much of a difference. It’s almost too obvious to bother saying, but a phone call doesn’t do much to bridge the gap between Garmser and Princeton. Still, my parents and I could at least be “in touch” insomuch as we knew the outlines of one another’s lives, knew the answer to the question “how was your week?” Beyond that, each call reassured my parents that I was still alive and still more or less myself. They appreciated the simple fact that I was not becoming a stranger to them, which had been a close third behind death and dismemberment on their list of fears when I’d deployed.
Part of me wanted to be a stranger, though. Not just to them but to myself. Like all melodramatic young men, I had a hunger for conspicuous self-transformation. I thought often of Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge and the other World War II Marines who said goodbye to their families in 1942 and returned, victorious, three years later, with hardly a letter home in between.
I wanted to know what it would be like to undergo that crucible in a vacuum, stripped of everything except for what the Marine Corps gave me. But the puck (among other factors) made that impossible. Thanks to its connectivity, I found myself absentmindedly scrolling an ex-girlfriend’s Instagram feed minutes after a rocket attack, still firmly tethered to the person I’d always been and the world I’d always inhabited.
When my deployment ended, I re-entered that world. The term “homecoming” is a bit misleading, though, because I returned not to New Jersey but to Twentynine Palms, California, the desolate desert installation where I was stationed. After a brief respite, I transferred to another unit and began another workup for another deployment. I no longer needed my puck, but I was still on the other side of the continent from my family. It’s a hard truth of military life that you’re always gone, and whether or not you’re deployed is really just a question of degree.
In the face of this, all there was to do was hold fast to the lifelines that connected us, be they care packages or precious days of leave spent on the east coast. This puck was one of those cords. And like the others, it held when my family needed it to: always tenuous, but never severed.
-1st Lt. Adam Straus-Goldfarb, Platoon Commander, U.S. Marine Corps