I was supposed to work on him. The entry wound might have been over his stomach. I didn’t know. There was a splash of blood from the wound, but there was no blood coming out of it now. Just fat pushed out of it. I balled up some gauze and pressed it into the wound. I covered the gauze with a Ziploc bag, taped the plastic down on three sides, and asked Sullivan to keep pressure on the dressing for me. I was looking for an exit wound. There wasn’t any exit wound I could see on the upper body, and since five-five-six rounds tumble, I could only guess where the bullet might have gone once it was in. I cut the haji’s sweatpants off with trauma shears. The haji had a big dick and he was shaved. That got a laugh out of Sergeant Bautista. But there was no exit wound.
I should have packed the haji full of gauze. I should have kept packing the wound till I couldn’t pack it anymore, till it was packed tight. But I didn’t. I should have had him lie on the side he was wounded on. But I forgot. I said I was going to prop the haji’s feet up on my helmet because the haji could go into shock if his feet weren’t propped up like that. And even though this was true I was only saying it just to say things because there was no exit wound and I didn’t know what to do. The haji’s eyes rolled up in his head and then came back, focused again, rolled up again. I was trying to start a line but his veins were flat. I said I was going to give him morphine to keep him from going into shock.
North said, “Do what you have to do, doc. You don’t have to tell us.”
I gave the haji morphine, so I could look like I was doing something right. I stuck him on his right thigh and went back to working on a line. His arm was thin. I couldn’t get a flash. Then I got a flash, but he moved and I lost it.
I said, “Keep still, you fuck! I’m trying to help you!”
North said, “Be quiet, doc.”
North had called for a medevac. That was one of the first things you were supposed to do. I’d told him to call it in as an urgent surgical. But the medevac wasn’t coming.
The haji started choking on vomit. The vomit was white and viscous, and I was clearing it out of his throat with my fingertips when he lost consciousness.
He had no breath. No pulse. I put the bag ventilator together with the CPR mask. I had Bautista do the chest compressions and I did the ventilations. A little of that and the haji came back and he was breathing on his own again.
Then he croaked.
We tried CPR another few minutes. His ribs were broken from the chest compressions and you could hear them popping. It was over with.
North radioed back to the company TOC and said the haji was dead and we didn’t need the medevac anymore. The haji was a corpse, and we had no practical way of taking him back to the FOB with us. We needed QRF to come out and get us, and they’d need to bring a body bag with them because we didn’t have one of those either. The TOC said QRF wouldn’t come out till after the sun was up. Better they be able to see the road, better safe than sorry. We stayed put.
The sun came up. That’s when I saw the other house. An old lady in black came out of the house and she saw the naked haji laid out on the ground.
North called to her, “Do you know him?”
He indicated the naked corpse.
She turned away and went back inside the house.
North said, “She knows him.”
The dismounts from QRF showed up. Castro was the first to reach us. He saw how I was looking and he said to me:
“This your first dead body, doc?”
I said no. Like he was asking.
Somebody gave me a body bag. I spread it out on the ground next to the dead naked haji and rolled him up inside it. That was when things got worse.
The old lady came out of the house again and was screaming her fucking head off. She tried to get to the body bag but a couple soldiers pulled her back and she fell on her knees and screamed some more and kept screaming. She started taking handfuls of dirt and pouring them over her head. She hit her face against the ground. Then she rose back up on her knees and went through the whole thing again. I closed the body bag. A young woman, real pregnant, had come out of the house, and she started doing the same shit the old lady was doing. And there were two boys. Very young. And they were screaming. Four soldiers took the body bag, and the old lady got up and ran after them. She tried to pry the body bag away from them. I was about to cry and maybe shoot myself when the AK-47 let loose. Full-automatic. Three long bursts. Stopped all that. Everybody scattered.
We took cover in a ditch. The infantry were returning fire. I was on the far left of our line, scanning the left flank because I thought a haji might try and pick some of us off that way.
Castro was in charge because his date of rank went back further than North’s did. He was on the radio and the radio told him to secure the dead haji. He called cease-fire: “THEY SAY WE HAVE TO GET THE BODY. GIVE ME FOUR VOLUNTEERS.”
Only three hands went up. I waited. Still no more hands. So I added a fourth since, all things considered, I had to.
I didn’t know where the shooter was, so I emptied a magazine into a cow standing in front of the house, figuring this was the safest course of action. Private Dallas was to my left, on his knees, firing an M14. He said, “DOC, I’VE GOT A WOODY!”
I left my aid bag in the ditch and threw red smoke as far ahead as I could get it. When the smoke popped we went. It was 20 meters to the body bag. The old lady was there. She was black cloth on the ground.
Running there wasn’t bad. Coming back the other way was more interesting. I was waiting on an AK round to come along and punch my brain out through my face. Yet I was calm, hadn’t ever been so calm. I closed my eyes and I saw Emily, clear as day.
No such round and I was back in the ditch. More firing. We did the bounding overwatch routine to the next ditch back. Dallas left off shooting and ran back to where I’d got to. He had my aid bag with him. I’d fucked up real bad and left it in the first ditch. My NVGs were in the bag, and if I’d left that shit out there I’d have never lived it down. The cherry just saved my ass.
I said, “Thanks.”
We fell back some more, shooting everything and nothing in particular. I shot the cow some more with a new magazine. Apaches were in the air now and the shooter was long gone and we were making fools of ourselves. No one was shooting back at us.
On the way back to the road there was a shit canal. So we made a bridge out of some branches and tried to drag the body bag across. But the body bag rolled off the branches and fell into the shit canal. I went in after it. It wasn’t easy getting it out of the water. The body was heavy and there were holes in the bag and the water ran out of the holes and into my face, like the dead haji was pissing on me.
We were nearly back to the road and I was dragging the body bag behind me with the haji in it and I could feel his head bounce in and out of the furrows in the field and we were out in the open and my hands were full, my rifle slung, and we’d just been shot at and my karma was fucked and I was jumpy. Dallas said something to me. But I didn’t know what he was saying. I said, “Don’t fucking talk to me! Pull fucking security!”
You weren’t supposed to let your nerves show like that.
When we got back to the road somebody told me to drape the dead haji on the front of one of the QRF tracks so no one would have to ride back to the FOB with the dead haji in the troop compartment with him.
* * *
—
I MISSED breakfast because I was up at the Main Gate waiting for the IPs to come and get the dead haji. Sergeant Castro was there too. He’d stayed to see that it went alright. I was so tired that my face hurt. I had just done my ninth patrol in four days. The IPs arrived.
Nobody said anything. I opened the body bag. We looked at the dead haji. The IPs took him and loaded him up and left. Castro saw how I was looking and he said, “You did what you could for him, right?”
I said I had.
“Then don’t beat yourself up about it.”
Evans was the first guy I saw when I got back to the company. He said he’d been in the company TOC when we’d been out there killing the haji.
“I know it’s a lousy thing to say,” he said, “but I was hoping that the guy wouldn’t make it. Who knows what kind of stuff he would have said.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s understandable.”
“The people up there are making a fuss,” he said. “They say we left another body up there.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. But we’re going back up there tonight. I’m taking two squads up there myself. We’re expecting retaliation. Will you be ready to go?”
I said, “Yeah, no problem.”
And we were back out that night.