A month before he was immolated on Route Polk, Sergeant Caves found a haji dog wandering around the company area. The haji dog was just a few weeks old. He could fit in the palm of your hand. He needed food and Caves gave him food and adopted him as his own and called him Sonny.
After Caves got killed, First Platoon took care of Sonny, and Sonny got to stick around. Sonny was well liked because he was a very good dog, courageous yet of a gentle nature. And when our company’s dismount patrols left the wire in the daytime it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see Sonny going along up and down the line.
Then one morning some POG from Foxtrot Company, name of Sergeant Teague, was out taking her walking exercise around the perimeter of the FOB and it took her past our company area. We’d just as soon as she didn’t come around; she looked a lot like a fucking gargoyle. Anyway. Sonny barked at her and she got so traumatized from it that she went to the battalion TOC to complain about Sonny. And it followed that two heroes from HHC (officers) volunteered to come down to Echo Company and shoot Sonny. When they got there they found him resting on his favorite spot, beneath the shade trees by the horseshoe pit. They walked right up on him. Sonny didn’t try and run because he wasn’t afraid of soldiers. Maybe he thought they had come to give him something to eat, perhaps a cheeseburger. Instead they shot him in the snout. He got away and tried to hide himself under some boards. The two officers had to drop down into the prone to finish him off. They were wearing their ballistic eye protection so it was all on the level.
I don’t remember exactly what I was doing when this happened. But I wasn’t there. Probably I was kicking some doors in somewhere. Nothing dramatic or whatever. Just doors. I’d kicked a hundred doors in. More like two hundred doors. Nothing ever came of it. Not once. And I didn’t get killed. The next day I was playing poker with the poker players. I’d been out on a patrol all the night before and I should have been sleeping but I wasn’t because I could only sleep when I was on a patrol; that was the only time it appealed to me. So I didn’t get much sleep and I was burned out and I was pissed about the dog when Arnold came in from radio guard to get me. He said, “Get your stuff. QRF just got called out.”
I wasn’t on QRF that day.
I could have gone anyway. But I didn’t feel like it.
I said, “Sarr Garcia from HHC is on QRF. He’s covering for Sarr Shoo while Shoo’s on midtour leave. Sarr Garcia will be in the aid station. You can find him there.”
“But—”
“Fuck you, Arnold! Fuck you, you goddamn motherfucker! You fucking bitch! You don’t ever leave the goddamn wire. That’s why you love this goddamn shit. Well fuck you, Arnold. I’m not on the fucking thing and I’m not going.”
Arnold left and got Garcia. Garcia went out with QRF. I stayed at the FOB and played poker. That’s how I missed the big battle, the one when the battalion sent forty hajis to the garden with the rivers underneath it. And I’m glad I missed the battle because it was probably bullshit and the Army just murdered your dog anyway.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Specialist Grace looked like Jean-Michel Basquiat and he was a Bradley gunner. His friend Carranza drove the Bradley. I hadn’t seen much of either Grace or Carranza since Fort Hood. They were in Delta Company. We had different AOs. But sometimes I’d see them on the FOB, and when I’d see them I’d say hi and they’d say hi. They were good people.
This is what happened to them: they hit an IED up north of Checkpoint 9, during some big operation. I don’t remember which big operation. There were so many. All the big operations had names. They had names so you knew they were big operations but then nothing ever happened. Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors.
Grace and Carranza hit an IED. Carranza was wounded. He was in the driver’s hatch and his face was fucked up and he was blind and the Bradley was on fire. Carranza’s fucking face was gone, but still he thought to drop the ramp so that the guys in the troop compartment could get out fast. Grace pulled Carranza out of the driver’s hatch. Grace had taken some shrapnel, but the shrapnel had hit one of the Kevlar wings that were Velcroed to the shoulders of his IBAS, so it hadn’t hurt him.
The battalion had had to reiterate the order about wearing the Kevlar wings since we didn’t want to wear them because they looked retarded. It was enough of a trick getting the hajis to take you seriously when you weren’t wearing the wings; if you were wearing them you might as well forget about it. They were a fucking disaster: they made it so you couldn’t shoulder your rifle right, they tangled with the straps of your assault pack. They made the days seem hotter than they would have seemed otherwise, and the days were hot enough already. But the lamest thing about the wings was they only stopped the kinds of bullshit that would send you home early and relatively unscathed. They were useless when it came to stopping the real shit. The only practical use I ever found for the wings was you could stack them on a Humvee seat and sit on them while you rode around because even trivial bits of shrapnel were crucial where your junk was concerned. But apart from that the wings were garbage. Most everybody would have been court-martialed rather than wear them. But Grace wore his wings. They’d told him to wear them and he did what he was told to do because he was pretty laid-back about shit. And he took the shrapnel on one of the wings. The shrapnel would have wounded him. Maybe he’d have gone to a hospital for a while and he’d have had a little rest and then been just fine. He might have even got to go home. But the shrapnel didn’t wound him, because of the wings, and the pro-wing people made a big deal out of this.
The last time I saw Specialist Grace it was the day that all the enlisted on the FOB who weren’t busy doing something real important got called down to the DFAC to see the Sergeant Major of the Army. He had come to pay us a visit. I got caught up in it, and I was standing in line, waiting to get into the DFAC. The battalion sergeant major was out there chopping it up with Grace, and he wanted all of us to hear him talking. He said to Grace, “You had a close call, huh?”
Grace said, “Yes, Sarr Major.”
“It was a good thing that you were wearing all your body armor, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Sarr Major.”
“What about these prima donnas who don’t want to wear all their body armor because they like to style and profile?”
“I dunno, Sarr Major.”
At no point did the battalion sergeant major mention that the IED that had caught Grace ineffectually on the wings had also gone through however many inches of Bradley hull armor or that PFC Carranza didn’t have much in the way of his face anymore and his legs were fucked too.
When we were inside the DFAC, the Sergeant Major of the Army was introduced and he said a few words. The Sergeant Major of the Army was the highest ranking noncommissioned officer in the Army. So it was supposed to be a treat maybe. He was a real piece of shit. He thanked us all for our hard work, and then he told us about a change being made to the Army’s pension plan for retirees. He said the Army was going to defer pension payments to retirees until said retirees were retirement age, meaning in their sixties. He said the changes would affect only future enlistees, but that didn’t stop some of the old hands from giving the Sergeant Major of the Army a hard time.
One old hand stood up and said, “Now what exactly is going on here, Sarr Major?”
And the Sergeant Major of the Army said, “We looked at it and we saw that, since so many ex-military go on to be CEOs, that the pension payments could be deferred. But keep in mind that these changes don’t pertain to anyone in this room. Next question.”
“Are we going to get our pensions or not, Sarr Major?”