When Arnold got killed we had to pack him out. Arnold was dead as shit. Packing up his stuff was no good. He didn’t need it. Who needed it?
There’d been seven of us in the room.
Now there were five.
Shoo had been on the patrol that Arnold got killed on. He told me what it had looked like. Said it was bad, just a complete mess. Like somebody’d run him through a juicer.
“That’s bad luck,” I said. “He hardly ever left the wire.”
Shoo said yeah, “That was only the third time he’d gone out.”
“Goddamn.”
Then I had the day off. It was good. Burnes was hanging around as well, telling me some shit about something. He used to smoke weed when he worked at the airport in Boston and he hit an airplane with the fuel truck he was driving. I was high as shit. Burnes took a hit off his Miami and drank some of his coffee.
Then Shoo walked in. “Bad news, guys. You’re going to have to stop smoking in here.”
This was the worst news. Burnes and I each smoked about four packs of Miamis a day.
Burnes said, “You’re kidding me. Why?”
I said, “Sarr, this is unreasonable.”
“You’ve got a new guy moving in here, coming over from HHC. He’s going to be one of Sergeant Drummond’s joes. His name’s Specialist Branson or some shit like that. He’s moving in here today.”
Burnes said, “C’mon, you’re joking.”
I said, “Sarr, we smoke. Lessing smokes. Cheetah smokes. We all smoke, except for Fuentes.”
“And I don’t mind,” said Fuentes from over where he was in the corner. “It doesn’t smell any worse in here than it would if they didn’t smoke.”
Shoo said, “Enough of this noise! I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. No more smoking.”
Specialist Branson showed up an hour later. He came walking in the room like he owned the fucking place, the room we had lived in over eight months. He was a big motherfucker with a bald, pink head and a blond mustache. He didn’t say hello.
Lessing had come back in the meantime. We’d told him what was being done to us. He said, “So this is the piece of shit?”
I nodded.
Burnes set his book down and looked at Branson. “What’s your fucking problem, man? I’m serious, man. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Branson looked around the room. He didn’t seem to be worried about the way things were going. You could tell right away that he didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about things.
I said, “We smoke in here, and you can get fucked.”
Branson went over and looked at the wall above Lessing’s bunk where Lessing had stapled fifty Maxim girls to the wall.
Lessing said, “Hey. Cocksucker. Do you mind?”
Branson left. He hadn’t said anything, not one word.
Ten minutes later Sergeant Drummond walked in. “Lessing, you’re gonna have to take those girls off your wall.”
“Excuse me, Sarr?”
“You heard me, Lessing. Branson’s a Christian, and those girls on your wall are offensive to him.”
“Then tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Oh come on, son. It ain’t gonna hurt you none to take them old girls down off the wall. Just put em in a book so that way you can look at em whenever you want to. How’s that sound?”
Lessing lit a Marlboro Red and looked at his boots. He was too upset to continue the conversation. Drummond was pleased. When he left he was laughing at us.
“Here comes old Branson,” he said. “Make way for old Branson. Here he comes.”
Shoo came back. “What’s the fucking problem now?”
Lessing said, “Sarr Drummond said I have to take my pictures down because of the new guy, Sarr.”
Shoo said, “You’re kidding me.”
He said no he wasn’t kidding.
Burnes said, “This guy is a piece of shit. Please don’t do this to us, Sergeant.”
I said, “He’s telling you the truth, Sarr. This guy Branson comes in, doesn’t say shit to anybody, looks around, leaves, and then he’s got Sarr Drummond in here two seconds later telling Lessing he’s got to take all his pictures off his wall.”
Shoo considered this; then he said, “No. No, that goes too far.”
And he left and told Drummond to find somewhere else to put Branson.
And we smoked cigarettes as we were wont to do.
CHAPTER FORTY
By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing. We had wasted our time. We had lost.
People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.
There were rumors of death: the occasional murders, the horrifying endings. Someone from Bravo Company: the medic quit, said he couldn’t face going out anymore. One of EOD’s people: there was a second IED under the first one. Gone. Etc. Etc. We set up a patrol base. Haji knocked it down with a car bomb. More women got shot to death: a woman holding a baby, a pregnant woman. At least it was fall. We had arrived in fall, so there was that point of reference. We were getting close. Really a year is nothing. It takes that long to learn to be any good in the field, and then once you know what you’re doing, you’re on your way out.
It’d been a while that I’d had the feeling that Staff Sergeant North hated my fucking guts. Maybe half the times I’d left the wire were with North. I think I was just about on every patrol North went on that year, over a hundred patrols probably with him. We’d been through some shit, got bored as hell together. Now the motherfucker didn’t like me at all. That was fine. There was no danger in it. Just he’d talk shit, like I’d light up a Miami when we were somewhere in the daytime and he’d come up and get shitty about it and say, “This isn’t fucking smoke break time.”
And right in front of motherfuckers, like I was some fucking cherry.
For his own part he was kind of fucked. He’d start letting loose with his two-oh-three, lob some grenades around just for the shits of it, wouldn’t even call in a test fire. That’s when you knew he was in one of his moods. On a day like that he might walk the whole patrol into the river and we’d be bathing in shit and parasites. Still, that wasn’t personal.
What was personal was North got to coming at me wrong all the time. It really started after I said all that greasy shit to Lieutenant Evans and walked off from that patrol. Now if North had something to say to me he’d either have someone else say it or he’d look off at something far away or he’d turn his back when he talked. It’d have made sense if North didn’t also think that Evans was an asshole. And it’d have made sense if North was always about his discipline, but what with his sending two-oh-three rounds downrange for no fucking reason and talking shit about Evans when Evans wasn’t around, it wasn’t like North was completely all the way alright. So who the fuck knows.
Part of it was I wasn’t as fucking wild about America as North was. That and the shit wasn’t any fun for me. All it amounted to was some more people were dead and Emily was probably getting fucked by other guys. Probably every time I cleared a house some fucker was balls-deep in Emily. I was lovesick. And yeah it must have been nice to be North, to be tough, to believe in this, to be a killer. But I wasn’t ever tough and I wasn’t ever gonna be. If I was some kind of veteran now it was only on account of luck that I hadn’t got my soft ass killed. Sometimes that’s enough to have somebody fooled. But North knew I was a fake because he’d been there half the time and seen it. I’m sure there were some other people who knew, but no one hated me for it half as much as North did.
* * *