Someone Kept Making My Bunk While I Was On Watch

This is not a ghost story, even though for a while I was sure it was.

On my second deployment I pulled the graveyard radio shift for most of the rotation, midnight to four in the morning. I would leave my little corner of the barracks with everyone asleep and come back around four-thirty exhausted, wanting nothing but my rack. And that is where the strange part started.

My bunk kept getting made.

Not just made. Made perfectly. Corners tight enough to bounce a coin, blanket smooth as glass, pillow squared. My boots, which I always kicked off in a heap, would be lined up under the frame, toes out, laces tucked. My uniform for the next day would be laid out neat when I had left it wadded in my locker.

The first time, I thought I had done it half asleep and forgotten. By the third time I knew that was impossible. I was a slob. I have never in my life made a bunk that clean, not even in basic when my life depended on it.

I started asking around. Who is messing with my rack. Everybody denied it. And these were not guys who would pass up a chance to take credit for a good prank -- if it had been a joke, someone would have been grinning. Nobody was grinning. Everybody looked as puzzled as me. One guy, half serious, said maybe the barracks was haunted, and honestly by week two I had started to wonder.

I did the obvious thing eventually. I stayed up. I told my relief I was feeling sick and got someone to cover the back end of my shift, and I came back to the barracks early, around two in the morning, and I waited in the dark.

Around three, someone moved.

It was Tuari. The youngest guy in our section, barely out of training, quiet to the point of invisible. I watched him get up in the dark, cross to my empty rack, and start making it. Silent, careful, methodical. Squaring the corners. Lining up my boots. Laying out my uniform. Doing for me, every single night, the thing I never had the energy to do for myself.