First Sergeant Hightower came out and called the company to attention; then the captain came out to say a few words. He thanked us for our hard work, said some other things. And when he’d said all he was going to say, he had the first sergeant hit the play button on the boom box and the Toby Keith song started playing. Then right when it got to the big crescendoing part where Toby gets to talking about putting boots in people’s asses and that’s what Americans do, the captain gave the order: “Present…patches!”
It was too fucking funny and we couldn’t help laughing in his face. We didn’t want to do it; just it couldn’t be helped. The patches went around. It was awkward but they went around and we got them. You could see the first sergeant was upset about us not being as solemn as he’d have liked, and after all the patches were passed out he had us close ranks and he right-faced us and marched us to the back of the motor pool, where he went about smoking the dogshit out of us for a while on the blacktop in the noon heat. He really gave us the works: Front-Back-Go’s and Starmans—Starmans being a simply infamous form of exercise. He had us do that shit, and what was crazier was everybody staff sergeant and below got caught up in it. That was about the craziest shit in the world to us joes since none of us had ever seen an NCO get misused like that before.
* * *
—
I DON’T know if it was two weeks after that. I went out on a census patrol with Third Platoon. Cheetah was driving. Cheetah was a shitbag. He was big into Faces of Death and what was almost certainly child pornography. He would buy all the stupid gaudy knives the haji shops sold and mount them on the plywood wall above his bunk. He was driving that morning, and I thought it was stupid since he wasn’t even a grunt. He was the lowest ranking of three supply POGs in the company, and he wasn’t even good at that because he kept getting himself Article-Fifteened for being a moody knife-pulling shitbag. Yet he was leaving the wire with us and he was even driving. It was something to do with him having assured the first sergeant that he wouldn’t be such a shitbag all the time if he could only leave the wire a little and feel like part of the team.
Lieutenant Evans was riding shotgun. Perez was in the turret. I was in the back. Neither Cheetah nor Perez was an American citizen. Cheetah was from Somalia. Perez was from Mexico somewhere. I wondered about the implications of this. I think they both liked America more than I did. What was my problem? We were the lead Humvee of three that had left on the patrol. It was midmorning. The three Humvees drove north on Route Polk and took a right turn off the highway and onto a trail that hooked around a main irrigation canal. The trail ended some 150 meters short of some houses where the day’s censusing was to be done. I told Evans he shouldn’t try to drive over the ground between the trail and the houses. I said we ought to dismount and walk the rest of the way.
“Why can’t we drive?”
“The trucks can’t drive through that shit, sir. They’re too heavy. They’ll get stuck.”
“It looks fine to me.”
“It only looks fine because it’s dry on top from the fucking sun. But it’s all shit under the surface. Trust me. I’ve seen shit identical to this before. Lieutenant Heyward got four vehicles stuck trying to drive through identical shit as this. You don’t remember Lieutenant Heyward because he got fired before you came to the company, sir.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think we’ll try anyway.”
The truck didn’t go 20 meters and it was stuck. Evans told Cheetah to back out, but the truck couldn’t go back either, and it didn’t help that Cheetah didn’t know what he was doing. So then Evans wanted North’s truck to come up and pull us out, and I said, “You don’t want to do that, sir. That’s what Lieutenant Heyward did and it didn’t work. You’ll only make things harder for QRF when they get here. You need a Bradley with a tow cable.”
“Hush.”
So after the three trucks were stuck Evans radioed the FOB for QRF to come and fetch us out. It was either that or he could defect to the hajis.
QRF arrived. They were from First Platoon, a Bradley in front of three Humvees. The Bradley came tearing up the fucking trail and went directly into the shit and buried its track up to the skirt. So ended the rescue. It looked like we were going to be stuck awhile, like all day, and I took a turn up in the turret. A haji was watching us from where the houses were. I watched him watching us. I thought it must have been that he was amused by our situation, so I let it go. He got bored after a while and he went away.
Sergeant Caves was there. He had come up with QRF and he was bullshitting with North. They were talking about what a clusterfuck the day had turned into. They talked about where they would go hunting when they got back to the States. The battalion radioed and told QRF to return to the FOB and come back to us with a wrecker. The Bradley would have to stay put. The order went around. QRF headed back and Caves departed with them.
We heard the dull thump. We saw the smoke streaming into the sky. I asked Evans if QRF had a medic with them. He got on the radio, “Echo one six, this is echo tree six actual.”
A voice came back on the net. It was Lieutenant Nathan. “Um…this—uh—isn’t a good time.”