And nothing happened.
* * *
—
IT WAS Sullivan who told me how he’d seen the old lady get hit with our fire that morning. And I knew it was true because Sullivan didn’t lie and he wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The battle roster number was EAJ-0888, and we were trying to think of who that was. We knew it was a guy from First Platoon because Staff Sergeant White had called it in. We knew it wasn’t Specialist Jackson, First Platoon’s medic, since line medics were attached to Bravo from HHC and if the dead guy were Jackson the battle roster number would have started with HHC and not E. The first initial being A wasn’t much help as we weren’t in the habit of calling one another by our first names. It took us the better part of ten minutes to come up with a guy from Third Platoon whose last name started with the letter J.
Private Jimenez.
We cleared houses like we normally did when these things happened. It had been just a klick away, south of us, past the bend in the road, down a little past OP1, so we didn’t need to go anywhere. And with nothing to the west but a short field and the river, we turned east off the road and went about it.
A blind retard was chained to a palm tree in front of the first house we came to. An old woman, presumably the retard’s mother, stood near the gate of the courtyard, and some of us filed in. There were four rooms around the courtyard so we split off to see about each one and I kicked a door in and went into an unlit room. The room was empty except for a haji lying on the floor with his eyes closed. I said, “Get the fuck up, motherfucker.”
But he didn’t move.
I moved closer to him, rifle trained down on him. “GET THE FUCK UP, MOTHERFUCKER.”
He opened one eye and looked at me, stayed unmoved, closed the eye. So I had my mind made up to kick him in the face. I didn’t go around kicking hajis in the face for no reason and I didn’t know anyone who did, but Jimenez was dead and I was going to kick the haji in the face. I brought the kick as hard as I could, aiming center mass. But I stopped halfway to connecting. It was all I could do to stay on the one foot and not fall on my ass. The haji got up and stretched and he shuffled out of the room. I can’t remember when it had occurred to me that maybe he was also retarded. I unfucked myself and went outside to see where the haji had gone. He was heading off into the fields, looking up into the sun. Nobody touched him.
Jimenez was a cherry. He was one of the replacements who had come to the company after First Platoon lost the four guys killed out on Route Polk. He hadn’t been around two months and he was dead. It was unlucky.
Sometimes the dead guy was really an asshole, or you could make the case that he was. Not so with Jimenez. For all intents and purposes Jimenez was a saint. That’s why he stuck out like a sore thumb in an infantry company.
The thing is your average infantryman is no worse than your garden-variety sonofabitch. But he talks in dick jokes and aspires to murder and it doesn’t come off as a very saintly mode of being. Yet Jimenez was a saint. It wasn’t like he was soft or anything like that; he was a tough kid. He’d only just turned 19 but he was strong with a deep chest and the kind of unbreakable wrists one gets from working with his hands. And he’d work. The sergeants liked him for that. But he was so goddamn nice that he drove people crazy sometimes. Like he’d play poker with the poker players and he’d play bad hands. Dealt a queen-four off-suited, he was liable to call two preflop raises and hit a boat on the river. And when people got mad at him for playing garbage he’d apologize and try to give them back their chips. But it didn’t work like that.
The last time I saw Jimenez was about eight hours before Haji killed him. He’d been boxing Staff Sergeant Castro in the weight room, sparring, and Castro had popped him on the nose pretty good so his nose was bleeding—not broken or anything, just bleeding. And Castro told him to go see a medic and Jimenez did what he was told and when he came around looking for a medic I gave him a hard time. I said, “What the fuck are you coming to me about a bloody fucking nose for, cherry?”
And he didn’t say anything. He just smiled, all awkward, like he was embarrassed for me.
I said, “C’mon, cherry. I’m tired. Please don’t come to me with dumb shit, okay? I’m really fucking tired, you know?”
He went out with a fire team in the morning. They set up a TCP on Route Martha. They’d gone out when it was still dark and they hadn’t had a good look at the spot where they were set up and they didn’t know Haji had laid a one-five-five round underneath the road there. The road was just a paved berm and it was easy to mine. And the Haj was watching them. He saw Jimenez stand on the spot he had mined.
I heard Koljo talk about it. It was later that same day. He was telling some joes what it had been like. He said, “It looked like something out of a horror movie.”
The one-five-five round took off both Jimenez’s legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming. The fire team traded shots with two fucking murderers, but the murderers got away, north through a palm grove. The fire team couldn’t go after them because they couldn’t leave Jimenez there by himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A lot of Internet pornography went around the FOB. The biggest file had been passed down to us from the Mississippi Rifles, who had inherited it from the Marines, who had inherited it from the 10th Mountain Division, who had inherited it from whomever. We watched the Fuck Van a lot. The Fuck Van was the last thing we needed to see. The way the Fuck Van worked was the Fuck Van would cruise around looking for young women to video getting fucked in the Fuck Van. Several bros would ride in the Fuck Van and they’d be on the lookout. Then one bro would go “look!” and he’d point out a young woman walking down the side of the road and maybe she’d have a bag of groceries or something like that. It would always begin innocently enough. The bros would call out to the young woman and offer her a ride. At first she’d be reluctant to accept the ride because the Fuck Van was a panel van and she associated this type of van with rapists and laborers and these were strange bros. But the bros would overcome her misgivings with their bro charms and she’d inevitably accept the ride. Once they got her in the Fuck Van the bros would make fun of the young woman and call her stupid so as to make her feel insecure about herself and they’d ask her questions that got rather personal and after a few minutes they’d ask her to take off her shirt. She would decline at first. So the bros would offer her cash. Once the cash came out things changed. Before long the woman would be completely naked, sucking off several bros at once, and they’d have her do things like say the ABCs with a dick in her mouth and she’d do it. When the bros were done with her they’d take turns coming on her face. Then she’d get dressed and the Fuck Van would pull over at a random spot where the bros would kick the young woman out of the Fuck Van and throw her groceries at her and call her a whore and drive away.
One day the Fuck Van happened to be playing on a laptop on the card table and Sergeant Thorpe happened to see it. A young blond woman with a British accent was getting double-penetrated by some bros in the Fuck Van. Thorpe noticed something and he stopped the video.
“She’s a slut,” he said. “Look! The slut’s wearing a wedding ring!”
He dragged the timer back to a point in the video when there was a close-up of the young woman fingering her clitoris, and you could definitely see she was wearing a wedding ring.
A married woman in the Fuck Van!