Redeployment (3 page)

We sit down at a big table. The DFAC is pretty full, there’s probably a thousand people eating there, and we’re sitting between some Ugandans and some Marines and sailors from the TQ BOS.

I’m across from PFC Dyer, and he’s not eating much. I’m next to some Navy O4 from the BOS, and he’s chowing down. When he sees we aren’t exactly FOBbits, he starts talking. I don’t tell him what we’re here for, I just say a little about our COP and how it’s good to eat something that’s not an MRE or the Iraqis’ red shit and rice. He says, Y’all are lucky. You came here on a good day. It’s Sunday. Sunday is cobbler day. And he points to a serving table in the rear of the DFAC where they’re serving cobbler with ice cream.

So fuck it, when we finish we all get up to get some cobbler, except for Dyer. He says he’s not hungry, but I tell him, “Eric. Get your ass up and get some fucking cobbler.” So we go.

KBR’s laid out all kinds. Cherry cobbler. Apple cobbler. Peach.

The O4 says cherry’s the best. Roger that. I get the cherry. Dyer gets the cherry. We all get the fucking cherry.

Sit back down, I’m across from Dyer and he’s looking at his ice cream melting into the cobbler. No good. I put a spoon in his hand. You’ve got to do the basic things.

In any other vehicle we’d have died.
The MRAP jumped, thirty-two thousand pounds of steel lifting and buckling in the air, moving under me as though gravity was shifting. The world pivoted and crashed while the explosion popped my ears and shuddered through my bones.

Gravity settled. There’d been buildings before. Now headlights in the dust. Somewhere beyond, Iraqi civilians startling awake. The triggerman, if there even was one, slipping away. My ears were ringing and my vision was a pinpoint. I crawled my eyes up the length of the barrel of the .50-cal. The end was warped and blasted.

The vehicle commander, Corporal Garza, was yelling at me.

“The fifty’s fucked,” I screamed. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

I got down and climbed through the body of the MRAP. I went on my hands and knees across the seats and opened the back hatch. Then I stepped out.

Timhead and Garza were out already, Timhead posted on the right side of the vehicle while Garza checked the damage.
Vehicle Three came up with Harvey in the turret to provide security. It was a tight street, just getting into Fallujah, and they parked off to the left of the MRAP, which was slumped down in the front like a wounded animal.

The mine rollers weren’t even attached anymore. Their wheels were spread out everywhere, surrounded by bits of metal and other debris. One of the vehicle’s tires was sitting a few feet out, cloaked in dust, looking like the big granddaddy of all the little baby mine roller wheels around it.

I wasn’t quite steady on my feet, but training kicked in. I put my rifle in front, scanning the dark, trying to do my fives and twenty-fives, but the dust would have to settle before I could see more than five feet in front of me.

A light in one house glowed through the haze. It flickered, quickly dimming and brightening. My head rang and my back hurt. I must have slammed into the side of the turret.

Timhead and I stood on the right side of the MRAP, oriented outboard. When the dust settled I saw Iraqi faces in a few shitty one-stories, looking out at us. One of them was the bomber, probably, waiting to see if there was gonna be a CASEVAC. They get paid extra for that.

The civilians were probably watching for it, too. You can’t plant a bomb that big without the neighborhood knowing.

Since my heart was pumping fast, the pain throbbed in my back in superquick spurts.

Corporal Garza circled to the other side of the MRAP, assessing the damage. We stayed where we were.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Fuck,” said Timhead.

“You all right?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“I feel fucking . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

There was a crack of rounds, like someone repeatedly snapping a bullwhip through the air. AK fire, close, and we were exposed. I had no turret to crouch down in, and only my rifle, not the .50. I couldn’t see where the rounds were coming from, but I dropped back behind the side of the MRAP to get cover. I snapped back to training, but there was nothing to see as I scanned over my sights.

Timhead fired from the front of the MRAP. I fired where he was firing, at the side of the building with the flickering light, and I saw my rounds impact in the wall. Timhead stopped. So did I. He was still standing, so I figured he was okay.

A woman screamed. Maybe she’d been screaming the whole time. I stepped out from behind the MRAP and felt my balls tighten up close to my body.

As I approached Timhead, I could see more and more around the wall of the building. Timhead had his rifle at the ready, and that’s where I kept mine. On the other side there was a woman in black, no veil, and maybe a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid lying on the ground and bleeding out.

“Holy shit,” I said. I saw an AK lying in the dust.

Timhead didn’t say anything.

“You got him,” I said.

Timhead said, “No. No, man, no.”

But he did.

•   •   •

We figured that the kid
had grabbed his dad’s AK when he saw us standing there and thought he’d be a hero and take a potshot at the Americans. If he’d succeeded, I guess he’d have been the coolest kid on the block. But apparently he didn’t know how to aim, otherwise me and Timhead would have been fucked. He was firing from under fifty meters, a spray and pray with the bullets mostly going into the air.

Timhead, like the rest of us, had actually been trained to fire a rifle, and he’d been trained on man-shaped targets. Only difference between those and the kid’s silhouette would have been the kid was smaller. Instinct took over. He shot the kid three times before he hit the ground. Can’t miss at that range. The kid’s mother ran out to try to pull her son back into the house. She came just in time to see bits of him blow out of his shoulders.

That was enough for Timhead to take a big step back from reality. He told Garza it wasn’t him, so Garza figured I shot the kid, who everybody was calling “the insurgent” or “the hajji” or “the dumbshit hajji,” as in, “You are one lucky motherfucker, getting fired on by the dumbest dumbshit hajji in the whole fucking country.”

When we finished the convoy, Timhead helped me out of the gunner’s suit. As we peeled it off my body, the smell of the sweat trapped underneath hit us, thick and sour. Normally, he’d make jokes or complain about that, but I guess he wasn’t
in the mood. He hardly said anything until we got it off, and then he said, “I shot that kid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You did.”

“Ozzie,” he said, “you think people are gonna ask me about it?”

“Probably,” I said. “You’re the first guy in MP platoon to . . .” I stumbled. I was gonna say “kill somebody,” but the way Timhead was talking let me know that was wrong. So I said, “To do that. They’ll want to know what it’s like.”

He nodded. I wanted to know what it was like, too. I thought about Staff Sergeant Black. He was a DI I’d had in boot camp, and the rumor was he’d beat an Iraqi soldier to death with a radio. He’d turned a corner and run smack into a hajji so close he couldn’t bring his rifle around and he’d freaked, grabbed his Motorola, and bashed the guy’s head in until it was pulp. We all thought that was badass. Staff Sergeant Black used to chew us out and say crazy shit like, “What you gonna do when you’re taking fire and you call in arty and it blows that fucking building to fuck and you walk through and find pieces of little kids, tiny arms and legs and heads everywhere?” Or he’d ask, “What you gonna tell a nine-year-old girl who don’t know her daddy’s dead ’cause his legs is still twitching, but you know ’cause his brains is leaking out his head?” We’d say, “This recruit does not know, sir.” Or, “This recruit does not speak Iraqi, sir.”

Crazy shit. And crazy cool, if you’re getting ready to face what you think will be real-deal no-shit war. I’d always wanted to get hold of Staff Sergeant Black after boot camp and ask him what had been bullshit and what was really in his head, but I never got a chance.

Timhead said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“So don’t,” I said.

“Garza thinks you did it.”

“Yeah.”

“Can we keep it that way?”

Timhead looked serious. I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Sure. I’ll tell everyone I did it.” Who could say I didn’t?

That made me the only sure killer in MP platoon. Before the debrief, a couple guys came by. Jobrani, the only Muslim in the platoon, said, “Good job, man.”

Harvey said, “I’d have got that motherfucker if fucking Garza and Timhead hadn’t been in the way.”

Mac said, “You okay, man?”

Sergeant Major came over to the MP area while we were debriefing. I guess she’d heard we had contact. She’s the sort of sergeant major that always calls everybody “killer.” Like, “How’s it going, killer?” “Oo-rah, killer.” “Another day in paradise, right, killer?” That day, when she walked up, she said, “How’s it going, Lance Corporal Suba?”

I told her I was great.

“Good work today, Lance Corporal. All of you, good work. Oo-rah?”

Oo-rah.

When we were done, Staff Sergeant pulled me, Timhead, and Corporal Garza aside. He said, “Outstanding. You did your job. Exactly what you had to do. You good?”

Corporal Garza said, “Yeah, Staff Sergeant, we good,” and I thought, Fuck you, Garza, on the other side of the fucking MRAP.

The lieutenant said, “You need to talk, let me know.”

Staff Sergeant said, “Oo-rah. Be ready to do it tomorrow. We got another convoy. Check?”

Check.

Me and Timhead went right back to the can we shared. We didn’t want to talk to anybody else. I got on my PSP, played
Grand Theft Auto,
and Timhead pulled out his Nintendo DS and played
Pokémon Diamond
.

•   •   •

The next day,
I had to tell the story.

“Then it was like, crack crack crack”—which it was—“and rounds off the fucking blown-up fucking mine rollers and me and Timhead see hajji with an AK and that was it. Box drill. Like training.”

I kept telling the story. Everybody asked. There were follow-up questions, too. Yeah, I was like here, and Timhead was here . . . let me draw it in the sand. See that, that’s the MRAP. And hajji’s here. Yeah, I could just see him, poking around the side of the building. Dumbass.

Timhead nodded along. It was bullshit, but every time I told the story, it felt better. Like I owned it a little more. When I told the story, everything was clear. I made diagrams. Explained the angles of bullet trajectories. Even saying it was dark and dusty and fucking scary made it less dark and dusty and fucking scary. So when I thought back on it, there were the memories I had, and the stories I told, and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true.

Eventually, Staff Sergeant would roll up and say, “Shut the fuck up, Suba. Hajji shot at us. Lance Corporal Suba shot back.
Dead hajji. That’s the happiest ending you can get outside a Thai massage parlor. Now it’s over. Gunners, be alert, get positive ID, you’ll get your chance.”

•   •   •

A week later,
Mac died. MacClelland.

Triggerman waited for the MRAP to go past. Blew in the middle of the convoy.

Big Man and Jobrani were injured. Big Man enough to go to TQ and then out of Iraq. They say he stabilized, though he’s got facial fractures and is “temporarily” blind. Jobrani just got a little shrapnel. But Mac didn’t make it. Doc Rosen wouldn’t say anything to anybody about it. The whole thing was fucked. We had a memorial service the next day.

Right before the convoy, I’d been joking with Mac. He’d got a care package with the shittiest candy known to man, stale Peeps and chocolate PEZ, which Mac said tasted like Satan’s asshole. Harvey asked how he knew what Satan’s asshole tasted like and Mac said, “Yo, son. You signed your enlistment papers. Don’t act like you ain’t have a taste.” Then he stuck his tongue out of his mouth and waggled it around.

The ceremony was at the Camp Fallujah chapel. The H&S Company first sergeant did the roll call in front of Mac’s boot camp graduation photo, which they’d had Combat Camera print out and stick on poster board. They also had his boots, rifle, dog tags, and helmet in a soldier’s cross. Or maybe it wasn’t his stuff. Maybe it was some boots, rifle, and helmet they keep in the back of the chapel for all the memorials they do.

First Sergeant stood up front and called out, “Corporal Landers.”

“Here, First Sergeant.”

“Lance Corporal Suba.”

“Here, First Sergeant,” I said, loud.

“Lance Corporal Jobrani.”

“Here, First Sergeant.”

“Lance Corporal MacClelland.”

Everybody was quiet.

“Lance Corporal MacClelland.”

I thought I heard First Sergeant’s voice crack a bit.

Then, as if he were angry that there was no response, he shouted, “Lance Corporal James MacClelland.”

They let the silence weigh on us a second, then they played Taps. I hadn’t been close with Mac, but I had to hold both my forearms in my hands to stop from shaking.

Afterward, Jobrani came up to me. He had a bandage on the side of his head where he got peppered with shrapnel. Jobrani’s got a baby face, but his teeth were gritted and his eyes were tight and he said, “At least you got one. One of those fucks.”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “That was for Mac.”

“Yeah.”

Except I killed hajji first. So it was more like Mac for hajji. And I didn’t even kill hajji.

•   •   •

In our can,
Timhead and I never talked much. We’d get back and I’d play
GTA
and he’d play
Pokémon
until we were too tired to stay up. Not much to talk about. Neither of us had a girlfriend and we both wanted one, but neither of us was dumb
enough to marry some forty-year-old with two kids in Jacksonville, like Sergeant Kurtz did two weeks before deployment. So we didn’t have anybody waiting for us at home other than our moms.

Timhead’s dad was dead. That’s all I knew about that. When we did talk, we talked mostly about video games. Except there was a lot more to talk about now. That’s what I figured. Timhead figured different.

Sometimes I’d look at him, focused on the Nintendo, and I’d want to scream, “What’s going on with you?” He didn’t seem different, but he had to be. He’d killed somebody. He had to be feeling something. It weirded me out, and I hadn’t even shot the kid.

The best I could get were little signs. One time in the chow hall we were sitting with Corporal Garza and Jobrani and Harvey when Sergeant Major walked up. She called me “killer,” and after she passed, Timhead said, “Yeah, killer. The big fucking hero.”

Jobrani said, “Yo? Jealous?”

Harvey said, “It’s okay, Timhead. You just ain’t quick enough on the draw. Ka-pow.” He made a pistol with his thumb and finger and mimed shooting us. “Man, I’d have been up there so fast, bam bam, shot his fuckin’ hajji mom, too.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, son. Ain’t no more terrorist babies be poppin’ out of that cunt.”

Timhead was gripping the table. “Fuck you, Harvey.”