I’d left some money with Roy when I was home. Roy sent me an ounce baked into some brownies. He’d had his girlfriend do the baking. It was some care package: these brownies, plus Roy had thrown in a Johnny Cash poster, three packs of Winston Reds, and some Perc 10s in an Advil bottle for good measure. Real magnanimous of him. I said, Roy, you’ve done good.
He’d sent his girl to mail it at the post office and she did and then he found out she’d put his return address on the box. So he sent her to the post office to get the package back and she did. Then she took it back to Roy and Roy changed the address on it and they sent it again, fake address this time. That was Roy.
We had about got lynched out at the car bombing that afternoon. The car bomb did what car bombs do and four were dead in the market. It would have been more but the sheep took most of the blast. So you had flesh and blood and wool on the pavement. You had bloodstains on the pavement, little lakes of blood. And all the hajis were out there, like a macabre sort of block party. A teenage haji was punching a kid in the face. He shoved the kid down into the shins-deep garbage in the gutter. The kid came up with a splintered two-by-four, swinging it around and raving in boy-pitched Arabic that sounded like tears in his eyes. But then Teen Haji got the two-by-four away from him and beat him with it some. And the old hajis stood around and didn’t do anything, lest they should be mistaken for men unaccustomed to brutality.
What was left of the car was there. Our patrol had been nearby when the battalion ordered us to keep the IPs from getting rid of what was left of the car before QRF could bring EOD out to look it over for indications of who had put the bomb together. So we were waiting for QRF. And more and more hajis closed in around us. There were only two dismounts in the street. I counted as one and the other guy, Lessing, was 30 meters up from where I was. The gunners and the drivers couldn’t leave the trucks. The vehicle commanders could have left the trucks, but they didn’t even though they should’ve. I was trying to watch all the rooftops and all the dark window spaces and all the corners all at once, looking for the haji who meant to shoot me in the face. It was early in the afternoon and the sky was clear so the sun had everything blinding. And all these hajis were getting out of control and I kind of wanted to just say fuck it and let them run riot all over the place so as to better illustrate for the VCs why some more help on the ground wouldn’t have been amiss.
So Lessing and I were pissed off when we came back in, but then there was a package from Roy and there were these fucking brownies with an ounce of weed baked in them, and the fucking Winstons….It was just what the doctor had ordered.
Lessing and I got high as shit. These were some fucking brownies. They tasted like straight weed: you could hardly taste anything else, just weed and a hint of chocolate. We got shitfaced on these fucking things. If we’d have had to deal with anybody but Borges or Burnes that afternoon we’d have been fucked. Anybody else probably would have sent us to fucking Leavenworth, or shot us on the spot, a summary execution, to make an example of us. It was that serious. We were so high.
Burnes and Borges rolled in around when I was getting into the Percs. I said to Lessing, “You want one of these.”
He said, “No thanks.”
I said, “C’mon, motherfucker. Don’t disdain my favors. You always look out. What’s mine is yours.”
He said, “I used to be addicted to heroin.”
“This isn’t heroin.”
“I robbed convenience stores.”
“Suit yourself.”
Burnes and Borges said they’d take some Percs since I was offering. I said, “Fuck that. Have some brownies.”
And they did. And they too got retarded. I ended up keeping the pills for myself. I did give one to Borges because I kind of had to, but that was all; the rest I kept. Still they didn’t hold me but a few days. When we didn’t have any proper drugs, there was always computer duster to huff. It was summer and people were getting killed. People got killed more in summer. And we could be killed. And we had no way to know.
About Emily I guess I was deluding myself. Somewhat knowingly. Or just knowingly. Or maybe I didn’t know. I can’t remember.
Often I used to come in in the mornings from IED ambushes, and I would go online and check my email. A lot of times she didn’t email, and when she did it usually wasn’t good. She’d say she was ashamed of what I was doing. But I didn’t ever tell her what I was doing. She knew as much as she had before I left.
I’d bought a bootleg DVD from the haji shop. It was a movie about the lives of emperor penguins and what they endured so they could keep living in Antarctica and making babies and all that. I thought the world of these fucking penguins. I wrote to Emily and told her she ought to see the movie about the penguins. She didn’t. Then I said, Of course she can’t see it. She is in the fucking wilderness. So I ordered it for her on Amazon. Amazon sent the movie about the penguins to her in the wilderness. She emailed me and said the movie was stupid and the penguins were stupid. I thought, Why would she do that? Couldn’t she just pretend for me? I would have pretended for her. But she had said the penguins were stupid. That was exactly what she had said. Stupid. I thought, She is good, so I have done something wrong.
After having my heart broken by email, typically what I’d do was drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. If there was a card game going, I’d play and I’d lose some money. Mostly I had bad luck at cards. But early in the morning there was often no card game. There was often nothing worth reading. No one awake. So what I’d do was I’d look at the IKEA catalog. I had copied and pasted a lot of shit about IKEA furniture into a Word document and I’d look through it and think about what kind of furniture Emily and I would buy when we went to live together. I thought if I did this shit in Iraq and I lived through it and I saved some money, it would be enough for me and Emily to start a life together. And we would have a savings and she would have a degree and I could go to school and it would be okay because it wouldn’t be just something given to me. I’d need to be smart like Emily. And she would become something and I would become something, a librarian maybe, and we would have enough money and be middle-class and want for nothing and we would be independent of everyone and no old bastards who voted for wars could tell me anything because I’d done what they’d wanted. So I used to smoke Miamis and drink coffee and be tense after being out all night lying in the fields north of the FOB. I didn’t actually watch much porn, you know. I mean I’d seen some, I’d seen a few Fuck Vans and all that, but mostly I didn’t fuck with it. It felt like cheating. And when I’d jerk off in the porta-shitters, I didn’t think of other girls. I’m not ashamed of this. I tried to be good.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
One of my jobs was to get the pus out of the abscess on Sergeant Bautista’s ass. He was a big guy and he had a big ass. He was from New York City. Neither one of us was wild about the arrangement but it couldn’t be helped. I’d go see him in his room around 20:00. He’d be playing Madden, and he’d lie on his stomach with his pants down past his ass and I’d take yesterday’s sterile gauze out of the abscess on his ass and clean the pus out of the abscess.
“It doesn’t smell as bad as it did yesterday,” I’d say.
“That’s good,” he’d say.
I’d say, “Yeah, that’s a good sign.”
Then I’d put some sterile gauze in the abscess, folding the strip of gauze triangularly and poking it down into the hole with tweezers.
I’d say, “Okay. See you tomorrow.”
And I’d go and hand out the shit pills.
Also sometimes guys got crotch rot.
Mostly this was all I ever did.
I was not a hero.