Thorpe couldn’t watch the Fuck Van after that.
It was too bad for Thorpe. He was still all fucked up from what his old lady had done to him. It was sad as fuck. And he wasn’t the only one. A lot of us were getting fucked around.
The Fuck Van was bad for morale. Guys argued about whether the Fuck Van was actually real. But it had to be real because it was there and we could see it. And we knew then that life was just a murderous fuckgame and that we had been dumb enough to fall for some bullshit.
* * *
—
THIRD PLATOON was on QRF1 the night that Haji took some paratroopers alive at an OP north of Checkpoint 9. It was a straight shot up Route Martha to get there, and we could have made it fast, but we were held up on account of a lot of last-minute additions to the patrol roster. Then the blue force tracker went down. That was our GPS, and we weren’t allowed to leave the FOB without it working. So we were stuck waiting with the trucks staged at the North Gate.
Specialist Jeffries said, “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
Jeffries was a little fucker and he didn’t know how ate-the-fuck-up he was. He thought he was alright because he’d been in the 82nd Airborne once. But nobody gave a rat’s ass that he’d been in the 82nd Airborne. The only reason Jeffries was on the roster that night was the captain’s usual driver was on midtour leave and they’d had to have somebody fill in. And Jeffries was worried about light discipline.
“I’ve got to say something!” he said. “I’ve got to!”
He went to tell whomever that we were sitting ducks. When he came back he was looking chastised.
“I can’t believe this!” he said. “Freaking amateurs!”
It was more than an hour before we were on our way. We went up north, past Checkpoint 9. The trucks stopped to let us out. Hueso-Santiago led a squad into some fields west of the road. North led a fire team heading northeast. And Lieutenant Evans, First Sergeant Hightower, Castro, and I went off due east of the road. There was no shortage of aircraft above us. Through one came word of a target house. We were going to clear it.
Evans said, “This is the target house.”
The first sergeant asked if he was sure.
“They say we’re right on top of it.”
The target house was twenty-five meters away. No lights on. Without any words it was determined that the lieutenant and the first sergeant would cover Castro and me from the tall grass on the edge of the yard while we kicked the door in and cleared the house. So Castro and I crossed the yard and stopped next to the door. I’d kick the door in. I was pretty sure I was about to die but it would have been lame if I’d pussied out, so I flicked the safety switch to burst and I didn’t think about it. We went in. I went left and Castro went right. There was nobody in the entire room. I scanned a smaller room from a doorway and again there was nobody. There was a stairway in the back corner of the room and we saw it and we didn’t hesitate before we were going up because we didn’t give a fuck about dying and really we had figured out by then that this target house was bullshit.
Back at the road, Greene was giving Jeffries a hard time. He said he’d personally shoot Jeffries if Jeffries ever touched a radio again. He said he was serious.
I asked Sullivan what it was about.
He said, “Numbnuts over there green-lighted an airstrike on Hueso’s squad. Almost got them all killed.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. Hueso’s people don’t have IR beacons on their shit because they’re all from fucking Bradley crews. The aircraft thought they were the Haj. But that’s what happens when you send Bradley crews out as dismounts. Ate. The fuck. Up. The fucking aircraft radioed the captain to see if all our people were accounted for, but the captain wasn’t in his truck and numbnuts, fucking Jeffries, radioed back on his own and said all our people were accounted for. Meanwhile Hueso’s out there and this big IR beam comes down on him like some shit out of a fucking UFO and he radios on the company net and says, Um, I think I’m about to get lit up by one of our aircraft. So Greene figures out what’s going on, and he runs over to the captain’s truck, yelling like he’s fucking gone crazy, and he pulls numbnuts off the radio, calls the fucking shit off, thank God.”
“Fuck.”
We regrouped at the road. The target house had been cleared. So there was nothing left to do but search everywhere else till somebody found the missing paratroopers.
Everywhere else was connected by paths through tall grass and palm groves and shit canals. The paths were very narrow and turned a lot and you couldn’t tell what was around the bends. We cleared some houses. Most of them were empty. We found nothing. A group of soldiers moved on a house about fifty meters north of us. We had run out of houses where we were, so we thought to move up that way and see what was going on there. North and I went ahead while the first sergeant got the rest of our people together. By the time North and I reached the house it had been cleared. Some hajis were sitting on the living room floor. There were three young children, a boy and two girls, and a mother and a father. The television was on. Four paratroopers and an interpreter were in the room as well. And one of the paratroopers, a sergeant, an E-5, took an asp off his gear and flicked it out. He took the boy from off the floor and shoved him into a wall. He grabbed the boy by the back of his neck and he said, “I’m looking for some friends of mine.”
He jabbed the boy three times hard in the ribs with the butt end of the asp. The boy’s father, the mother, the two girls: not one of them so much as blinked.
He said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
He hit the boy some more. The boy took it quietly. His legs buckled but the sergeant had him by the neck. No one said anything. The sergeant hit the kid some more. He had his mind made up to hit the kid for a while, so he did. And it was meaningless because we were looking for some dead men. They’d died and gone to the Internet. That’s where people go when they die these days. At least when they die like that.
I walked out of the house and I ran into Lieutenant Evans.
I said, “You probably shouldn’t go in there, sir.”
He said, “Why not?”
I said, “One of the Airborne guys is beating up a kid.”
He said, “Oh.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
After we had been in Iraq awhile, it became apparent that they weren’t about to piss-test any of us. Something decent they’d done for us, I imagine.
So you could get high.
But there was the question then of how.
You could get narcotics from the right interpreter. But then you might have a stroke or fall out of a fucking guard tower or something else infamous. And you didn’t want that. So what you did was you’d have it sent in from the World. The mail people X-rayed the mail and they had drug dogs for it too. But it wasn’t that serious. You could get a little weed in. You could get a little powder. Prescription drugs were wide open (within reason). If you could get somebody to mail it, and if they showed a little restraint, you were good.
Of course it wasn’t every day you got such a care package. So what ended up happening was you’d form little cliques, three or four like-minded individuals getting weed or pills or liquor or whatever sent in from the World. Liquor usually came in mouthwash bottles. Little bits of weed came in all kinds of ways.