MY DEAREST MARTHA

My Dearest Martha,

We have now been encamped upon the banks of the Reflecting Pool these three weeks past, and I confess to you, in the strictest confidence, that my constitution is not what it once was. It is not the heat that has hollowed the eyes of my men and set them to trembling in their bedrolls, nor the humidity, but the enemy’s newest and most fiendish weapon, deployed against us with a girth of cunning I confess I did not think them capable of.

Dildos, Martha.

Dildos with words on them.

Every night now, from dusk until the small hours, my men walk the fence line with flashlights raised, sweeping the beams low along the chain-link, and it is no longer enough merely to find the things. Now we must read them too, every last one, front and back, before we can even begin the business of removing them. It is delicate work. Slow work. A man cannot rush it, however badly his arms ache from holding the light steady long enough to decipher each carefully lettered obscenity.

Private Ashworth found the first one Tuesday last, hanging nobly from the fence by the grace of its own anatomy, bearing the inscription FUCK DONALD TRUMP in letters bold enough to read from twenty paces.

He stood there a full minute working his mouth as though he intended to argue with it.

I did not have the heart to tell him it does not respond to reason.

Corporal Higgins discovered one reading 86 47 and spent the better part of an hour attempting to solve what he believed was a military cipher before Sergeant Dubrowski, with extraordinary fatigue, explained the matter.

Higgins has not been the same since.

He keeps doing arithmetic under his breath while on watch.

The one reading FUCK I.C.E. has appeared no fewer than six times now, in six different sizes, as though the enemy maintains an entire quartermaster corps devoted exclusively to that sentiment. The one reading FUCK FASCISM has become almost comforting in its predictability. One sees it glowing in the flashlight beam and thinks, Ah. That one again.

But it was the one reading TRUMP CAN SUCK MY BALLS that broke Sergeant Dubrowski.

He read it once.

Then again.

More slowly.

Moving his lips.

Then sat down in the grass and remained there for what I estimate to have been twelve full minutes.

No one disturbed him.

There are wounds a commanding officer must simply allow a man to process.

Discipline has begun to suffer.

Last evening Private Ashworth requested permission to classify the recovered specimens by caliber.

I informed him there exists no such system.

He replied that there ought to.

I found myself unable to disagree.

Sergeant Dubrowski has begun referring to the larger ones as “heavy artillery.”

I corrected him the first three times.

Yesterday I caught myself doing it too.

We have established an evidence table.

There are columns now.

Date.

Approximate dimensions.

Color.

Political sentiment.

Remarks.

The paperwork alone will haunt me until the Lord calls me home.

There is a particular indignity, Martha, in illuminating another man’s profanity with a government-issued flashlight purchased by the American taxpayer. One feels less like a soldier than an unusually well-funded hall monitor.

At last we apprehended three of the enemy, caught in the very act of deployment, our flashlights turned upon people instead of rubber for the first time in days.

I informed the fellow carrying the backpack, a man who appeared more inconvenienced than dangerous, that he was being detained for vandalizing federal property.

He spoke to me with what I can only describe as genuine curiosity.

“Did I damage something?”

I confess the question stopped me cold.

I looked to the fence.

Still standing.

I looked to the Reflecting Pool.

Still fenced off.

Still green.

Still peeling.

Still exactly as God and the Department of the Interior had left it.

I looked back at the fellow with the backpack.

I did not have an answer.

So I informed him once more that he had vandalized federal property.

It sounded no more convincing the second time than it had the first.

The conversation then turned, quite naturally, to who had unzipped the backpack, who had handed whom which particular dildo, and whether possession of another one constituted sufficient cause to enlarge the battlefield.

Before long we confiscated the backpack itself as evidence.

Evidence of what remained unspecified.

Later came the citation.

Not for vandalism.

Not for destruction of government property.

Not for defacing the monument.

Not for damaging the fence.

Somewhere between the sixth form and the seventh signature, the vandalism quietly died.

No ceremony.

No bugler.

No folded flag.

It simply became:

Failure to Use a Receptacle.

Thus ended the Battle of the Reflecting Pool.

Not with glory.

Not with sacrifice.

But with littering.

They were released after about an hour, laughing, the lot of them, as though the whole affair had been staged solely for their amusement.

I confess I no longer possess sufficient evidence to dispute that theory.

The men ask difficult questions now.

“If the next one says something even ruder, do we notify headquarters?”

“How many lumens should a tactical flashlight possess before it becomes complicit in political speech?”

“If we confiscate enough of them... do we win?”

I have no answers.

Only forms.

Please, Martha.

Gather the church ladies.

Light what candles you can spare.

Pray for my men.

Pray for Sergeant Dubrowski.

Pray for Private Ashworth, who now flinches whenever he encounters chain-link fencing.

Pray for me.

And pray that someone, somewhere, someday, explains precisely what it is we are protecting this fence from.

The darkness I could survive.

The mosquitoes.

The heat.

The paperwork.

Even the endless humidity.

But no academy prepared me to stand beneath the Lincoln Memorial, illuminating a rubber penis with military precision while reading the words TRUMP CAN SUCK MY BALLS into the official silence of the National Mall so another federal employee could verify that I had, in fact, read it correctly.

Should I survive this campaign, I fear I shall return home outwardly unchanged.

Yet every time I see a chain-link fence, some irretrievable portion of my soul will instinctively reach for a flashlight.

As always,

Your loving husband and soldier

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