—
CORPORAL LOCKHART and Specialist Jeffries lived in a room across the way. They had lived there all year. It was a little room; you’d hardly notice it if you didn’t know it was there. Specialist Haussmann also lived with them. None of them had left the wire much. Specialist Haussmann would have been alright, but he had a tendency to bitch all the time; he bitched more than he was worth, so he was set aside, and people had forgotten about him, and he was stuck.
Corporal Lockhart and Specialist Jeffries didn’t bitch as much as Haussmann, but they were especially frail, and somebody had made them the company’s arms room clerks. They listened to My Chemical Romance a lot, and they talked about what a fucking cunt Corporal Lockhart’s wife was, and they had an idea to catch mice and make snuff films with the mice.
I saw one of the snuff films they made. A mouse in an empty ammo can. A small white hand (Lockhart’s, I believe) descended into the frame. The hand held a can of Zippo fluid, and it squeezed the can. The mouse was soaked. The hand disappeared from the frame. The hand came back; it held a lighter now, ignited the mouse. The mouse ran back and forth, a little fireball; stopped dead in its tracks; tipped over like a ditched bicycle.
There was always a fuckload of mice running around the building, so they had plenty to work with, and they made I don’t know how many of these mice snuff films. They thought they were clever, and they might tell you about how in one of them they drowned a mouse or how in another one they dismembered a mouse and cut the mouse’s head off with a cigar cutter or how in another one, their masterpiece, they crucified a mouse on Popsicle sticks and disemboweled the crucified mouse while it was on the cross. Haussmann didn’t know what to do. He kept trying to get moved to another room, but he couldn’t get moved. “It isn’t fair,” he said.
Back in Killeen, Texas, Corporal Lockhart’s wife had grown emotionally distant. In the time since he had gone off to Iraq, she had started partying a lot and working as a dancer and fucking a guy named Dale and spending all of Corporal Lockhart’s money. She told him all about the shit in more detail than you’d have expected she would. It seemed a little overvindictive, but in her defense she was hot and Corporal Lockhart was the type of guy who went around crucifying mice.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Haji hit Delta’s patrol base. The road along the west bank of the river was the only way to get there and it was night and we were obviously going to get hit. Haji’s thinking was he could throw a few clips and an RPG into the patrol base, and if he made some bodies there, great, and if not, he had left an IED on the only road in, and QRF was sure to hit it.
The first track missed the pressure plate. Our Humvee missed it too. And this was good for us in the Humvee, that we had missed it, because it was big enough to have fucked us up something tough.
The pressure plate was at a point in the road where the road was half-gone from old IEDs. The pressure plate spanned all that was left of the blacktop there. But at the same time the road was so torn up there that a driver might skip it altogether.
The third vehicle, Evans’s track, set it off. The explosion was dull, like it had gone off underneath. Perez was up in the Humvee turret, yelling, “IED! IED!”
Sullivan let off the gas and the truck slowed to a stop. I slipped my aid bag onto one shoulder and opened the back driver-side door. I was half out when Sullivan hit the gas again. The Humvee bucked forward and I ate shit. Hueso-Santiago ran past as I was unfucking myself. He was the vehicle commander of the lead track. He had taken it upon himself to go see about the one that had been hit. And I was running that way too. I caught up with Hueso-Santiago. He was crawling all over the front of the disabled track. Everybody was fine but the driver, Private Miller, and he wasn’t bad off. He had taken shrapnel on the inside of his left thigh. Hueso-Santiago pulled him out of the hatch.
The hole in Miller’s thigh was big enough to put a thumb into it with room to spare. But he’d be alright. The shrapnel hadn’t found the artery or anything. I packed the hole with gauze and put an Ace wrap around the thigh so as to keep pressure on the wound. I started an IV and gave him morphine. I’d told Hueso-Santiago to call the medevac in as urgent surgical because Shoo had once told me to always call our guys in as urgent surgicals even if they weren’t.
This was an easy casualty. The casualty had a face. He wasn’t burned up. He didn’t bleed out internally. He’d be alright. He’d get a Purple Heart and the Purple Heart would get him laid a few more times than he would have otherwise and he didn’t even have to get hurt that bad. The thing about Purple Hearts is you can’t get hurt too bad. You get hurt too bad and girls won’t fuck you no matter how many Purple Hearts you have.
QRF2 took a long time getting out to us with EOD and a wrecker. There was some shit going on at the FOB. People were saying, “The FOB’s been overrun!”
This turned out to be an exaggeration. What really happened was a few of the battalion snipers had gone up in the scaffolds of the power plant and a guy out in front of the Delta Company TOC saw the snipers and mistook them for Haji. So he shot at them. The shots missed the snipers and came down on the Echo Company TOC. Echo thought the shots were coming from the scaffolds, having also seen the snipers up there. Echo started shooting. The shots missed the snipers and came down on the Delta Company TOC. Delta was now certain that the snipers were the Haj, and a lot of Delta guys opened up on the snipers. A firefight ensued between two American rifle companies with the battalion’s snipers caught in the cross fire. In the midst of all the confusion an interpreter set up an IED in the battalion weight room. No one was seriously injured.
* * *
—
EMILY HAD left the state of Washington. She was back in Elba. She was going to school. She wasn’t out in the fucking wilderness anymore and I could call her again. So I called her when I could call her, but there wasn’t much to talk about. All I could say was I’d be back soon. I didn’t recognize that this was something she maybe wasn’t looking forward to, even though I knew, and I’d known the whole time. Still you hold with the lie.
I paid her tuition for fall semester.
She’d asked me for the money so I thought we were good.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The worst possible outcome was to get killed at the end, after all the bullshit. If you weren’t going to go home it was better to get killed early on. That was the logic. You didn’t want to get killed at the end.
Two from our battalion were killed that morning. We were going out that night, a squad worth of guys from Third Platoon, led by Evans. It was supposed to be our last patrol of the tour, and the roster was a mix and match of shitbags and fat guys. I couldn’t imagine us being effective. But we were just going out in Humvees and making a short trip up and down Route Martha. So it didn’t matter.
We weren’t out long when the company net said a Raptor was sending back video of four armed men. The armed men were east of us. Coordinates were given. Could Lieutenant Evans get there?
He looked at his map. “It’s a kilometer, roughly.”
I said, “Sir, this is a bad idea.”