There was a battalion formation on the LZ. It was only our second time taking dead, and the lifers were still making a big deal out of it like somehow you were the asshole. And you went along with it.
Cecco and Greenwald. They were just names to me. I hadn’t ever talked to them. If I’d ever seen them before I didn’t know. It was IPs who’d done it. It had happened on Route Carentan. The EFP went through the up-armor no problem. It smashed Cecco’s head. It cut Greenwald at the waist—he spilled on the gunner’s platform.
The Black Hawks didn’t spend two minutes on the LZ. Some medics carried the body bags out. When the medics were clear the Black Hawks went on their way. The battalion sergeant major told us to fall out. Then two other helicopters were coming in. They showed up a ways off against the grey sky, and we stayed around to see what they were about.
The second pair of Black Hawks landed, and all these beautiful women came out of them. And the women waved and bounced and they had white teeth. And they didn’t know or whatever but still it was goddamn awful.
The Denver Mustangs Cheerleaders were on display at the DFAC for an hour, talking to the soldiers, taking pictures with the soldiers. Beautiful women with skin like expensive cream. And they were there, albeit not for long.
I didn’t go see them. It wasn’t like they were going to fuck you. And that was what this was all about: you were supposed to want to fuck them and they were supposed to not fuck you.
If you were a ballplayer they’d fuck you.
If you were a ballplayer they’d let you do everything to them.
They’d let you disgrace them.
But you weren’t a ballplayer.
* * *
—
WE NEVER did anything to the IPs. But some of us from Echo were put out on a cordon on the edge of the Big Shia City one night about a week after Cecco and Greenwald. We were supposed to block anyone from going in or out while Special Forces raided a Mahdi compound.
A voice came over the net, sounded like death metal, said they were ready.
And they killed a lot of hajis, 40 of the poor motherfuckers. It only took a few minutes. We didn’t do anything but stay in place. We didn’t even hear it. I wouldn’t ever have known about the 40 dead hajis if I hadn’t read about them on Yahoo! News the next morning. I wondered how it was they’d done it.
Anyway. That’s when I figured out we weren’t there to do shit. We’d do for getting fucked-up-or-killed-by-bombs purposes, and everyday-waste-of-your-fucking-time purposes, but no one thought we could do the actual fighting, whatever that was.
* * *
—
SINCE YURI was done, as in all fucked up and not going to be back, First Platoon was without a medic of their own for a while, and I ended up on most of their patrols, on top of the ones I was doing with Third Platoon. So I was on a fuckload of patrols. I was getting pretty dull already from exhaustion, but then again I was on edge all the time because I was waiting for the war to happen to me.
When I went out with First Platoon I usually rode in Sergeant Caves’s truck. Private Rodgers did the driving. Specialist Clover did the gunning. They were all tough guys and they weren’t trying to lie about shit. They said they wanted to kill somebody, really anybody if it came to it. It was that simple. But there wasn’t anybody for them to kill, so we just rode around, and when we weren’t on the move we’d talk about what drugs we had done and what shit we had done and what we had paid for ecstasy when we were in the world, things of that nature. Clover had got his ecstasy the cheapest. But Rodgers had seen a guy get Uzied to death one time. So he was the winner.
I took my helmet off. Clover looked down from where he was, up in the turret, and he saw the card I had taped on the front of the inside of my helmet.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Herman Thompson,” I said, “the running back.”
“Why do you have Herman Thompson taped inside your k pot?”
“My wife used to have a crush on him back when she was in grade school, back in the early nineties when he ran the ball for Buffalo and they were in the championship every year. I made fun of her about it once, so she sent me this card with a letter the other day telling me to be careful cuz if I got killed she was gonna fuck Herman Thompson. So I have the card taped in the front of my helmet as a sort of reminder for me not to get killed.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“I paid a hundred and ten dollars for an orchid on Valentine’s Day and she gave it to her grandmother.”
“Fuck.”
Rodgers asked me if I was scared of getting hit. I said I’d prefer not to get hit if I had any say in it. Rodgers said he wanted to get hit because he’d get free hunting and fishing licenses for life if he had a Purple Heart.
“You don’t want a Purple Heart, doc?” Clover asked.
“Not especially.”
“Hey, doc,” Caves said, “check this out.”
He was holding a hand grenade by the pin.
I said, “Nice hand grenade.”
He said, “I brought it back with me from Afghanistan.”
I knew why they were fucking with me. They thought I was an asshole. I’d been fucking up and they’d heard about it. I had gone out with QRF a few nights before when one of the battalion’s snipers had fallen down and said he was hurt. He’d said he was hurt so bad that he needed morphine before he could be evacuated to the aid station. I wasn’t the type to deny anyone morphine and I was going to stick him in the leg with a 15mm auto injector of it, but I was holding the fucking thing backwards and the needle shot through my thumb and came out my thumbnail, spraying morphine on the ground. A number of people had seen this happen. And there’d been another fuckup whereby I came to appreciate how difficult it could be to start an IV on a real-life heat casualty. You got a real heat casualty and his skin was like rubber, and the needle as dull as a spoon. Evans had seen me stick the same heat casualty five times in a row without starting a line. I was sure I’d get sent back to the aid station. But I stayed where I was.
* * *
—
ALL OF us cherries got our combat patches on Easter. The combat patch wasn’t like a CIB or a Combat Medic Badge or something that you at least had to get shot at or whatever to get. The combat patch had nothing to do with actual combat, not even pseudocombat. It was just a unit patch, usually a division patch, that you wore on your right sleeve so everybody would know you’d been deployed to a theater of operations and stayed a little while once. In short it was a big fucking nothing. But all of us in the company who weren’t outside the wire, who were just hanging around waiting, maybe getting some sleep or cleaning weapons or breaking track or watching porno or playing cards or huffing duster, got rounded up by the squad leaders and told to stop whatever it was we were doing and go up to the motor pool and form up as a company.
They’d brought a boom box out. It was on the pavement, hooked up to an extension cord that ran from the mechanics’ shed. So we knew something was up, and then we found out we were getting our combat patches. No one gave a shit. Really this was an inconvenience. So we bitched. Rodgers said real loud that they could keep the patch if he could get to see some combat.