I said not especially but we never starved or nothin.
In the morning I was in the back courtyard, guarding things as I often was, and it was getting on in the morning because the shit flies were out. The shit flies landed on your lips and walked around. Then they went to go get more shit on their feet. There was shit everywhere so it was easy enough and they’d come back and they’d walk around on your lips some more. It got so you only noticed when they weren’t around.
I heard some shit like yelling, and two IPs crashed through a door into the courtyard. They were wrestling over a 9mm Glock. Both of the IPs were wearing plain clothes. They looked like 1970s TV detectives with their slacks and their mustaches and their leather jackets. I knew the gun was loaded; people don’t usually wrestle over unloaded guns. And it was a Glock so there was no safety switch on it. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot them.
So I just stood there. Some more haji cops ran out and they pulled the two apart and one of them got run off and somebody threw a shoe.
* * *
—
THE PILGRIMS came out under a white sky. The imam had been martyred where the big mosque was and that had been 1000 years ago and the mosque was named for him. That’s what the intelligence officer had said.
The minaret broadcast verses and a great slow drum sounded and the men struck themselves with knives in unison. I was standing on top of the barricade and I saw all this. A sea of black. Dust clouds rising into the air and disappearing. Nothing changed in 1000 years.
And now when I try to remember the way the verses went, the way the drum went, I can’t get all the way back there. I am forever outside of it. I know how it was, how it looked, but I can’t see it. I didn’t have a camera. I didn’t believe in taking a camera out with me. I suppose I thought if the Haj ever took me alive I wouldn’t want him filming me with my own camera when I got my head sawed off.
Some IPs came back and showed me their cuts from where they had been cutting their own heads. The cuts were unimpressive. It was like they almost really had and then hadn’t.
On the last night of the Ashura a haji tried to sneak over the wall behind the police station, and Sergeant Bautista shot him in the ass with a star-cluster flare. I was there too. The haji got away. We could have shot him a lot more and with real bullets and nobody would have given us a hard time about it. But we were fakers, so we didn’t.
At the bridge on the way back, I gave Pebbles an MRE. She held it tight against her chest and ran off with it. But one of the shoeless boys caught her and punched her in the head and took the MRE away from her. She was sitting in the dust when we drove away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
We didn’t get much in the way of prior notice; then the sergeants were at us, going:
“Git yer shit.”
“Chop chop, dalli dalli.”
So on and so forth.
PFC Borges was huffing computer duster with his battle buddy, Specialist Roche, when Staff Sergeant Castro came banging on the door. Borges went to get it but he was too fucked up and he fell and busted his lip. He had to go to the aid station to get stitches real fast.
It was an inauspicious start to Operation Honor Bright. Yet we rode out, north by northwest.
Our work was tiring and we wouldn’t have much luck because Haji knew we were coming, because when you were mech you didn’t ever surprise anyone.
It was a lot of women and children, some old men. You didn’t see men of fighting age when you were out there. Either they were with the IAs or they were with the IPs or they were dead or they were detained or they were hiding or they were somewhere else.
A rifle squad walked the road that ran along the riverbank. Shooting broke out in a clutch of houses on the other side of the river. Grenades going off, machine-gun fire—it sounded like something real. The squad took cover on the back side of the road. Except Borges and I. We slid down the shooting side and scanned the far bank of the river. This was my first day carrying a rifle. I’d traded my pistol to Yuri for it. Now I was looking to see if there was anybody I could shoot bullets into.
Not a minute, not 30 seconds. The shooting stopped. And maybe it was real, but it was nothing to do with us. Staff Sergeant North and Staff Sergeant Castro were laughing on the far side of the road. They’d done this kind of thing before. North, who had just got his E-6, had been with the battalion in ’03, and he had shot a haji off a rooftop. Castro, a former Marine, had been at Fallujah in ’04. He said, “C’mon, doc. Don’t be fucked up. You’re supposed to go away from the shooting.”
I said something. I was still a retard.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say. Next time, the other direction.”
Even Borges was laughing at me and he’d done the exact same shit I’d done. Really I’d just been following his lead. And he had about wiped out sliding down the berm. But nobody would bust his balls over it; Borges was on his second tour, so if he wanted to fuck up and get himself shot, that was on him.
We went back the way we came, and we stopped at an empty house facing the river. Halfway across the river was an island that was overgrown with date palms. North cocked a high-explosive round in his two-oh-three and sent it into the island, where it worked about as you’d expect. That was just North acting out. He was disappointed because we were on the wrong side of the river and he knew he wasn’t going to get to kill anybody.
* * *
—
LIEUTENANT HEYWARD had been fired. It was because he kept having us all put in bullshit paperwork. He’d made up a bunch of sworn statements for all of us who had been on QRF1 that Christmas. The sworn statements said we had all been within 50 meters of the battalion TOC when the rocket hit it. This wasn’t true. We had been much farther away than that. But had we been within 50 meters we would get credit for having been in combat and Heyward would get a Combat Infantryman Badge, which was good for promotion points if for nothing else. So 50 meters it was. And he had us all sign these statements he had written up on our behalf and he turned them in. When they got kicked back he printed out a new batch and had us sign again. Then he turned the new batch in and got himself fired that way.
* * *
—
EVEN WHEN the people were shooting, my mind was somewhere else. I was out of sorts. I’d asked Emily if she’d got the orchid I’d sent her and she’d said yeah, she’d got it. Well what did she think? She thought it was dumb. Why had she thought it was dumb? What did the card mean? It was the bouquet of parentheses from Seymour: An Introduction. Well, what the fuck was that? She didn’t know. I’d given her that book around the time we met. I’d thought she’d like the story with the quiet old man who smoked and drank liquor. She’d said she liked the book. Had she even read the book?
I’d told some of this to Yuri. I said, “She’s fucking hiding something, isn’t she?”
He said I was a fucking idiot.
Did that mean he thought she was hiding something?
I said, “Yuri, just tell me yes or no. Is she hiding something?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT