“I miss you too.”
And it was always that. That was most of all what we said to one another.
* * *
—
SINCE I was the Fucking New Guy, I got sent with the company when it went out to the field to train. It was considered a hassle to go and sit out there for days and do nothing, and it would have been a hassle for a Shoo or a Yuri or a Burnes, who’d done it a million and a half times already, but I didn’t mind. I would have just been lonely as shit anyway and I could smoke cigarettes as I pleased.
The weather had been dry for months, and when the company trained with live ammunition the tracer rounds set the grass on fire. I’d go out and run around with a square rubber mat on the end of a long stick and slap at the fires to put them out. Sometimes the grass fires crept into a tree and the tree would go up like a match. Which I liked.
* * *
—
IT WAS good to go AWOL. There wasn’t any training on the calendar for Columbus Day weekend, so there was a window. As long as I could make it back in time for the 06:00 formation that Tuesday, no one would know I’d been gone.
As I was going AWOL I couldn’t use the Killeen airport; there was a chance the Army would have some goons there checking paperwork. Fortunately Yuri had a pathological aversion to authority types, and he said he’d drive me to the regional airport in Temple. From there I could fly to Bush Intercontinental in Houston and make a connecting flight north.
When work was over we got out of town, Lamb of God blaring in his Honda Accord. I didn’t know how he could listen to that shit and not kill himself. But I was grateful to him.
* * *
—
IT RAINED all weekend in Elba. Emily and I lay around and slept through the days. We would go out and drive around at night. It was fall and you could really feel that it was fall. There was that ache. You were crushed by the beauty of it all: all the bare trees and the black sky and the streetlights. It was two years since we had met. We were older now; we both had money saved and we had our jobs and we were very much on our own. She’d be 21 in a month. We were so sure that we had grown up. We would get married before I went to Iraq. She brought it up this time. She said it made practical sense. If we were married I’d get paid more and she could be on my health insurance. And I’d get to marry Emily.
“But we’re going to get divorced,” she said.
I said that was fine.
I said, “We’ll get divorced if that’s what you want.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Emily and I were married in Elba by a justice of the peace the Tuesday after Veterans Day. Joe and Roy had made the drive over from Cleveland to visit Emily and me that Friday night, and Joe head-butted me in the face. It was all in good fun though. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He didn’t know that Emily and I were getting married. No one did. She didn’t want anyone to know.
My nose was busted and there was still blood on my windbreaker and we had no rings. Emily was wearing a blue mechanic’s jacket with a name tag on it that read MARIO. She looked like an angel. And we knew that at that moment we were the two most beautiful things in the world. How long it lasted, I don’t know, but it was true for at least a few minutes. Six billion people in the world and no one had it on us.
After we got married she drove me to the airport and we sat in her car in the parking lot and cried like babies till it was time for me to go.
PART THREE
CHERRY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Unless you happen to have been there, you’ve never heard of where we were, so it doesn’t matter. There was a FOB, a forward operating base. The FOB had been built up around a power plant beside the river. The power plant was a monster of a thing and made all kind of noise. It burned oil so oil was everywhere. Oil was in the air. Oil covered the ground. We lived in the shadow of the power plant, by the North Gate, in the Russian Village, which was a few buildings, concrete buildings, close together. That was our company area, where we slept and lived and all that. Delta Company was down at the other end of the motor pool. The aid station was down that way too, next to the LZ. The rest of the battalion was in the Tent City on the east end of the FOB, on the other side of the power plant, past the haji shops, towards the Main Gate. The battalion TOC was up that way, next to the Tent City. At first I thought people were saying “talk” because the radios were in the TOC and people talk on radios. But it wasn’t talk; it was TOC. And TOC stood for something and somebody had to tell me that or I’d have always had it wrong probably. So TOC. The battalion had its TOC. Each company had its own TOC. There were many TOCs. TOCs abounded. The battalion TOC was the big one though, two stories. It faced the road that ran along the north wall of the FOB. The road ran west to where we were, by the North Gate, where you could look out and see the river on the left-hand side and Route Martha going up through the fields and the palm groves. Route Martha wasn’t two lanes’ worth of tar.
We showed up in December. We were taking over for some Nasty Girls, the Mississippi Rifles. They weren’t big on ceremony. They said we were ate-the-fuck-up. They had pictures of their kills and they’d collated them into a PowerPoint slide show called “Towelhead Takedown.” We phased in as they phased out. We did right-seat/left-seat rides. The last of the Mississippi Rifles was on his way home by Christmas. Christmas was our first day on our own.
Third Platoon was on QRF1. I was Third Platoon’s medic. We were staging by the power plant when Haji shot the battalion TOC with a rocket. Three were wounded. But we didn’t see anything. We were 200 meters from where the rocket hit, and there were buildings in the way. It was a great disappointment. In the beginning you wanted to be where the action was.
QRF1 meant we were supposed to go out if anything happened in the battalion’s area of operations. Should a patrol get hit or make contact, we were its backup. Should EOD get called, we were its escort. So it didn’t make sense when we were sent out to pull security while one of the miscellaneous sergeants from our headquarters platoon flew a small, remote-controlled airplane around outside the base. The little airplane was called a Raptor. I didn’t like it.
You were wide awake when you got out on the ground outside the wire for the first time. You expected to get shot any moment. We had stopped at a random spot where you couldn’t see anyone around but you were nevertheless sure that there was a haji out there who had been waiting all day just to shoot you. And you were as ready for it as you could get, but it didn’t happen. The sergeant fucked around with his airplane. The sun went down. The sergeant got his airplane back and we mounted up and left. It had got dark fast. On our way back we heard the battalion net saying a Charlie Company patrol was hit out on Route Polk. And we were supposed to get there. The problem was we had been out fucking around with the little airplane and we were on the wrong side of the FOB. We had to go through the Main Gate on the southeast end, then cut through the FOB to get out at the North Gate. We went half a klick on Martha and turned right onto Route Grove, which got us to Polk. If we had been on the FOB to start with we’d have made it in five minutes. As it was it took us close to thirty minutes. Half the battalion had beaten us to the spot. A long column of vehicles was between us and the Charlie Company Patrol.