EOD, the army’s ‘bomb squad’, is an old boys’ club, a comparatively homogeneous enclave in an otherwise authentically diverse institution. Graman was the only Black bomb technician in our company, in the battalion in fact, and for all I could tell in the entire EOD Group, which had all the army’s bomb techs stationed west of the Mississippi River under its command. Graman was a platoon sergeant when I showed up to his unit, my first assignment after finishing EOD school. I could tell that feelings about him within the company were mixed.
He’d been on five or six deployments, defusing bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan over the previous decade-plus, and was a few years away from retirement. He knew his trade and trained his soldiers hard for our upcoming deployment, which would include missions of varying lengths in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. But he was also loud and gregarious and flirtatious, and the special waggishness that comes from a youth spent in combat could be mistaken for frivolity. He had sable, lozenge-shaped eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, which was against regulation, but which he was able to keep by insisting that his facial hair was too ‘kinky’ to be shaved every day, which would have given him razor bumps. That shut the officers up.
This was 2017, the year of Kaepernick and Charlottesville and the Evergreen College riots. It was all new and bewildering enough that when Graman said things, courageously, like “All ya’ll benefit from white privilege” to a bunch of hillbilly bomb techs, it inspired more sincere argument than outright hostility, although people were more ferocious when he wasn’t around. His one consistent but unlikely ally was another platoon sergeant, Babb—a bald, neckless, deep-East Texan who wore a tan baseball cap with the words ‘STD Free Since 2003’ stitched on the back, a claim belied by the sores on his upper lip that glinted with ointment. Graman and Babb were fond of singing the chorus to ‘Ebony and Ivory’ together, which no one seemed to think was funny but me.
Babb at the time was battling sexual harassment charges, and a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) for some other infraction apparently so serious that he faced an involuntary discharge from the army. In the course of the army’s investigation into Babb, Graman had provided some sort of written character testimony that brought them even closer together. Graman was Black and liberal and Babb was white and conservative, and they flaunted their friendship—Babb especially.
During my first week in the unit, Graman and I were dispatched to the home of one of the very young privates in his platoon. The private’s wife had allegedly caught him cheating and spent the night waving a kitchen knife at him and their children, which brought the police. When we got to the house, the wife was sequestered in a bedroom while the private sat on a couch in basketball shorts, playing video games. Graman explained that we’d been sent there to obtain a statement from him, but we wouldn’t make him talk if he didn’t want; we could just keep him company. A large baby, fresh as a daisy, padded in and out of the room in diapers as Graman and I sat there with the rheumy-eyed private. He kept referring to his baby as “retard,” as in, “Get over here, retard.” When the military police and a chaplain arrived, we left.
As we walked down a long sidewalk toward one of the base’s JAG offices, a runty specialist walked by us in the opposite direction and neglected to salute me, either because he didn’t see the little first lieutenant rank on my chest or because he didn’t give a shit. Graman yelled “HEY, SCUMBAG” at the specialist, flicked the point of his collar up so that it slapped his chin, and got so close to his face their noses touched. “Did you not see my fuckin’ officer, here?” Graman barked at the terrified soldier, who snapped to attention and saluted me like I was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. “Don’t let me catch you like that again, specialist,” he shouted, “now get the fuck out of here.” The specialist scurried away sucking water from the hose of his CamelBak like it was attached to his mother. Graman broke into one of his enormous horse laughs and retold the story the rest of the afternoon.
Before we left on deployment, Graman was reassigned to battalion staff to make way for a platoon sergeant with more experience running EOD support for Special Forces, which was the mission in Syria. Graman seemed happy enough to stay back, having deployed so often for so long since he was 18, and that was the last we saw of him for nine months.
After the deployment, we all took about a month of leave, then returned to base in the late summer of 2018, at which point many of us were getting ready to be reassigned to some other unit or training school. The last time I saw Graman, he was playing Halo and eating gummy worms with some officers in the battalion staff office. “What up, sir,” he said, extending a fist bump without looking at me.
A few days later, I was in the shower in the early morning, it was still black outside, and I heard my phone ring twice. I stepped out, grabbed a towel, dried my right arm off, and reached for the phone to find missed calls from Parker, my own platoon sergeant. “Need everybody here now, you should tell your other officers,” he said when I called him back. “Sure, why?” I asked. “Graman’s dead,” he said.
I drove quickly from my apartment to the gates of the base, down the farm-to-market road that wound past ranches with red finching Longhorns grazing about, and the roar of tractors rising and falling. I spent the 25-minute drive huffing on a Juul and talking on the phone to Nimmons, another lieutenant, who’d been closer to Graman than I was. Nimmons was a prior enlisted bomb tech, competent and professional. “You know how we don’t know what happens when you die, like where you go?” he said. “Graman fucking knows now. He knows. Isn’t that insane?”
His comment irritated me, and the liquid from the Juul pod was leaking and stinging my lips, and the morning rush at the gates of the base was impassable. I sat at a red light for two revolutions without advancing. There was an effluvial stink in the town and my bladder was teeming with hot coffee urine, and I was enraged with what I felt was Nimmons’ idiotic comment. When I finally made it to the office, I was extremely agitated and didn’t feel like talking to anyone, which was just as well because everyone was standing around outside smoking in silence or rolling around inside the offices. The one-story, calcimined EOD office building was filled with rolling chairs and built on an uneven foundation that sank to one side, so that if you sat in one of the chairs and lifted your feet off the ground you would roll from one end of the room to the other, which some of the lower enlisted soldiers did over and over that morning, without speaking.
No one knew anything about what happened except for Babb, who’d been at Graman’s house since the night before, to be with his wife while the property was converted by police into a crime scene. When Babb came to the office later that morning, he said that Graman and his wife had been in a volcanic argument about something. At one point, Graman took out a gun and pointed it at his temple, to make a threat. He either pulled the trigger by accident or didn’t know the gun was loaded, we were told. His wife could have sworn, she told Babb, that she saw a look of genuine, animalistic surprise in his eyes and on his mouth when he realized what he’d done, but by which point he must have already been dead.
Later on, the battalion commander, who was incapable of making himself understood clearly in any setting, gathered us all on the lawn to make a discomposed speech about Graman that demonstrated he’d known close to nothing about him, which didn’t bother anybody because we were used to battalion commanders always talking nonsense and conjuring things out of mid air. We awaited instructions about the forthcoming memorial and volunteered for various duties associated with it, and then went on with our day.
The memorial was held on an evening in the base’s chapel. The company commanders, battalion officers and sergeant major had spent the day harassing us about our duties and uniforms, not out of respect for Graman’s family or the solemnity of the occasion, but because they learned that the post commander, a two-star general, and his command sergeant major would be in attendance. The base was already famous in the army, and crucially in Congress, for an escalating number of suicides, homicides, and unresolved violent deaths, which in a couple more years would add up to a larger number of dead soldiers per annum than the entire army was suffering in Afghanistan—all of which gave Graman’s memorial the feeling of a stop on the post commander’s circuit.
When Nimmons and I walked into the chapel there was a large projector showing photos of Graman. The pictures were hard to make out because every light bulb in the building seemed to be turned on, which made you squint and throw up your forearm as if to shield a solar glare, and the blazing artificial light all but washed out the photos on the projector, which rotated to a song from a Disney movie (I can’t remember which) that played on repeat, which seemed grossly inappropriate for the occasion until I considered that it might have been chosen by Graman’s son, who looked no more than eight. He sat with his mother in the front row.
People filled the pews starting in the front and snaking from right to left. When we arrived there were about four or five rows already filled, and the decent thing to do would have been to take the first available seat in the row nearest the front that hadn’t yet been filled. But this was impossible, because the man at the end of the snake, the only person with empty row next to him, was Deponte, the Headquarters and Headquarters Company commander, who had spent the months since we returned from deployment trying to convince me to sign (i.e., take legal possession and responsibility) for a bunch of equipment housed in the motor pool which neither of us had any use for. Deponte outranked me but had no line unit under his command; it was perfectly understandable that he wanted to offload this useless but very expensive equipment onto a helpless lieutenant so that he wouldn’t be financially responsible when something inevitably broke or was lost. But his incessant efforts to shunt this crap onto my books was preposterous and I’d spent weeks bilking him.
Nimmons tried to lead us to the empty seats next to Deponte but it was impossible, I insisted. Deponte would see me and even in an atmosphere like this would immediately resume his whinging about his robots and x-rays and jammers and bomb suits which he knew were broken or lost and was trying to force me to sign for. I looked around and saw that two of my team leaders, Ruiz and Garcia, were seated in the middle of a full row but rather far apart from each other, probably due to Garcia’s hallucinatory belief in the breadth of his lats and quadriceps. Nimmons sat next to Deponte at the end of the snake and I walked up to Ruiz and Garcia’s row, and several people had to stand and complained as I forced my way past them. So now I sat between Ruiz and Garcia and eventually the service started.
The speeches from the battalion and company commanders and the chaplain were arrogant and juiceless, but then there was to be a speech by Babb. It was unusual for the brass to allow itself to be upstaged by a platoon sergeant who actually knew and understood the deceased, but someone had allowed it, and Babb, from the moment he started speaking, grasped the moment with exceptional grace, and he held the entire chapel in his hand. He spoke of how unlikely his friendship with Graman had been. Graman was Black, Northern, and liberal, while Babb was white, Southern, and conservative. He said that the more time they’d spent together, the more they persuaded each other to understand where the other was coming from. He confessed that on that day—this was 2018—he considered himself a progressive, which he never thought possible. And it was because of Graman.
It was then that those of us who knew Babb feared what might come next—which it did. In his plangent swamp twang, which on that night had the texture of petroleum jelly, Babb explained to the crowd that he stood accused of certain things, unspeakable things he was not even capable of perpetrating. Graman knew this, he said. If anyone in the world knew Babb’s character, knew that he never and could never do the things that he was accused of doing, it was Graman, which is why he’d provided written testimony to the character of his persecuted friend. Babb didn’t say what these things were that he was accused of or who was accusing him, but as he spoke, he looked up now and again at the washed-out projector with the picture slideshow of Graman, the base’s latest inexplicable suicide.
The vulgar and perverse turn the speech had taken pivoted a third time before it ended. Babb became elegiac again, but the chapel was filled with poison now. The next day, a battalion staff officer told us that he’d been sitting behind the post commander, and heard him say of Babb to his command sergeant major, “Let’s see what we can do to help him.”
With that, Babb’s mission was complete, and no one heard another word about what happened to Graman.
Names have been changed to protect the privacy of soldiers and their families.
Jeremy Stern is the editor-in-chief of Colossus.