QRF wasn’t far away. Evans sent North with some dismounts and some fire extinguishers to try and get there and help out. The quickest way back to the hardball was across the irrigation canal. It was deep enough and wide enough that we had to get in it and swim across. We were loaded down with fire extinguishers, guns, body armor, assault packs, all that shit, and we were having a hard time not drowning in the motherfucker. Perez almost drowned and Cheetah had to pull him out. I was the first one to get across. I crawled up the bank and got to my feet just as a white bongo truck was coming down the road, going the way we were going. I pulled my rifle up and aimed where I guessed the driver’s face was. I took my left hand off the grip and signaled him to stop. If he didn’t stop I was going to try and murder him. But he stopped. I moved up to the driver door. It was two hajis in the cab. I saw North and the interpreter coming up on my right. North told the interpreter to tell the hajis to take us down the road. We piled in the truck bed. We stopped about 100 meters short of the QRF element and ran the last part of the way.
On the other side of the rear Humvee there was a hole in the road and farther on a Humvee was burning. A charred seat was lying on its side on the road. Specialist Farley was standing there looking. I said, “Where are the casualties?” He said, “They’re all dead, you fucking asshole.” I looked again at the body of the gunner. He was burned away, scraps of IBAS clung to his torso, legs folded up, femurs and tibias and fibulas with black tissue, arms melted, body eviscerated and lying on its guts, face gone, head a skull. The smell is something you already know. It’s coded in your blood. The smoke gets into every pore and into every gland, your mouth full of it to where you may as well be eating it. Soldiers are getting water out of the paddies on either side of the road with a Gatorade cooler, ammo cans, whatever else and making a chain from the water to the fire. The fire extinguishers are used up quick. First Platoon’s new medic, a lifer named Jackson, is yelling about how somebody needs to pull security. He’s the only one on the road who gives a fuck about security, and he’s right but nobody gives a fuck. I’ve got my helmet off and I’m going back and forth with it from the water to the fire, carrying water in it, and it’s not registering with me that this is idiotic, but we are all obsessed with getting the fire out even though everybody’s fucking dead and there’s really no reason to hurry. The fire’s out and the three dead make four counting the one on the road: Caves, Rodgers, Clover, and I don’t know who the fourth is. Half the battalion is lined up on the road. I go down the road and wave at the gunner of the first track I see. I hold four fingers up to the gunner, and I mouth the words body bags. I go to turn back, but I look twice because Clover’s walking up the road. I say, I thought you were dead. I say I thought he had been in the truck. He says he was supposed to go on midtour leave this morning. Says the flight out got canceled though. I say, Fuck, I thought he was a ghost just now, and fuck, sorry about those guys because I know they were tight and who was the gunner? He says Easton. I say, Fuck. What about the fourth guy? He says Dewitt. The four body bags come. The captain is there by the truck now. Dewitt is curled on the platform under the turret. The face is gone so you couldn’t know who it was unless you knew because Clover just told you. A burned-up hot-white skull, empty sockets, teeth clenched like they’ll shatter. The captain gives a look to say, Pick up the body. I take it by the top half and he takes it by the legs. Muscle tissue is slick black, hot enough that the latex gloves break on contact. Hands burning too much, I’ve got to set him down. Set the body down. Set him down. Pick it up again. Somebody helps, supports the body under the ass burnt off. The penis and testicles, his dick and his balls, are burned off, and it’s a tab of flesh there, not a centimeter of it. We shuffle back some steps to the body bag laid open on the ground. Lay him in the bag. Close the bag. Go to the water. Throw away what’s left of the latex gloves. Back on the road some guys are picking up Easton. They stop and one’s saying, Holdupholdupholdup. His guts are coming out. They have Easton on his back now. The part of his face that was lying against the pavement hasn’t burned away. It’s a circle of flesh. The right eye hasn’t burned away. You can tell just from the eye that it’s Easton—blue eye—and this kid looking down crying says, “That’s Easton. That’s my friend.” Caves and Rodgers are in the front seats, Caves leaning forward against the dash. It’s easy getting him out because his IBAS is mostly intact and it keeps his guts where they are. The hand grenade is still attached to his IBAS. I don’t remember that it’s there. I send him back to the aid station with the hand grenade strapped to him. They have to call EOD to deal with it. Rodgers is in the driver seat and I know because he was Caves’s driver. Otherwise I wouldn’t know. Caves and Rodgers have no faces. All faces burned off. No faces anymore. Rodgers is in the body bag. A shook-up sergeant named Edwards tells me he thinks there’s some more of him still in the truck. He points to a string of fat running along what’s left of the driver seat, the frame of it. I don’t know what to do. I skim it off with my fingers, roll a ball of it, and throw it in the water. Then I walk down the road, gory as fuck, not making sense.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I went home on midtour leave in May. Two weeks. And I got disappointed: Emily was only around a little while. She said she couldn’t hang around too long in Cleveland because she had got a job in Washington State somewhere and it couldn’t wait. Something to do with Nature. Whatever it was she couldn’t miss it. There were other girls who’d have fucked me. And they were beautiful. I should have fucked them all. But I didn’t because I was supposed to be married, even though I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. I went back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Some nights we walked what seemed like forever; some nights we didn’t walk far; some nights somebody shot a dog out of boredom. This night there were five of us, a fire team. North was leading it. We took the road as far as OP1, the first observation post, then veered off to the right and down into the fields between Route Martha and Route Polk.
We settled into an empty field from which we could see neither of the two roads. North wasn’t interested in the roads. He thought he could catch a haji out in the fields. The curfew was sundown, and our ROE was to shoot anybody we caught out after dark. Even with the sand flies it was easy to fall asleep. Night vision was tedious and all this was nothing. We sat still for some hours. Nobody talked. Nobody moved. The bugs ate us.
North got up to leave and we followed him. We filed to the edge of the field and brushed through the tall grass and into a dooryard. There was a haji on a bed outside in front of the house. I heard him breathe and stumble when he took off running. North radioed the company TOC and the TOC said go ahead and shoot him.
The haji had gone left and we spread out in a line to turn him up. I was scanning a ditch, hoping I wouldn’t see him as I didn’t feel especially ready to shoot him right that minute. It was Sullivan who spotted him, and he called out as much. The haji was up and running, 30 meters in front. Private Dallas—a brand-new cherry we had with us—went chasing after him. Dallas crossed into my line of fire and I didn’t shoot. But the rest of the fire team opened up. Never mind the cherry.
We came up with our rifles shouldered, and the haji was laid out on his back. He had blood on his white tank top. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He was good-looking, young. Twenty-five at most. He was quiet—eyes staring—thinking probably he was going to die.