We took different routes all the time. Don’t be predictable. It’s up to the convoy commander, and they’re all lieutenants, but most of them are pretty good. There’s one who can’t give an Op Order for shit but tends not to fuck up too bad on the road. And there’s one female lieutenant who’s tiny and real cute but tough as balls and knows her shit cold, so it evens out. Still, there’s only so many routes, and you got to use one.
It was at night and I was in the lead vehicle when I spotted two hajjis, looked like they were digging in the road. I said, “Hajjis digging,” to Garza. They saw us and started running.
This was just getting into Fallujah. There were buildings on the left side of the road, but they must have been spooked stupid because they ran the other way, across a field.
Garza was on the radio, getting confirmation. I should have just shot them. But I waited for an order.
“They’re running,” Garza was saying, “yes…” He twisted and looked up at me. “Light ’em up.”
I fired. They were on the edge of the field by then, and it was dark. The flash of the .50 going off killed my night vision. I couldn’t see anything, and we kept driving. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were body parts at the edge of the field. The .50 punches holes in humans you could put your fist through. Maybe they got away.
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There’s a joke Marines tell each other.
A liberal * journalist is trying to get the touchy-feely side of war and he asks a Marine sniper, “What is it like to kill a man? What do you feel when you pull the trigger?”
The Marine looks at him and says one word: “Recoil.”
That’s not quite what I felt, shooting. I felt a kind of wild thrill. Do I shoot? They’re getting away.
The trigger was there, aching to be pushed. There aren’t a lot of times in your life that come down to, Do I press this button?
It’s like when you’re with a girl and you realize neither of you has a condom. So no sex. Except you start fooling around and she gets on top of you and starts stressing you out. And you take each other’s clothes off and you say, We’re just gonna fool around. But you’re hard and she’s moving and she starts rubbing against you and your hips start bucking and you can feel your mind slipping, like, This is dangerous, you can’t do this.
So that happened. It wasn’t bad, though. Not like the kid. Maybe because it was so dark, and so far away, and because they were only shadows.
That night, I got Timhead to open up a bit. I started talking to him about how maybe I killed somebody.
“I’m bugging a little,” I said. “Is this what it’s like?”
He was quiet for a bit, and I let him think.
“For me,” he said, “it’s not that I killed a guy.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like, his family was there. Right there.”
“I know, man.”
“Brothers and sisters in the window.”
I didn’t remember them. I’d seen all sorts of people around, eyes out of windows. But I hadn’t focused in.
“They saw me,” he said. “There was a little girl, like nine years old. I got a kid sister.”
I definitely didn’t remember that. I thought maybe Timhead had imagined it. I said, “It’s a fucked-up country, man.”
“Yeah,” he said.
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I almost went to the Chaps, but I went to Staff Sergeant instead.
“It’s not that I killed a guy,” I told him. “It’s that his family was there.”
Staff Sergeant nodded.
“There was this nine-year-old girl,” I said. “Just like my sister.”
Staff Sergeant said, “Yeah, it’s a son of a bitch.” Then he stopped. “Wait, which sister?”
Both my sisters had been at my deployment. One’s seventeen and the other’s twenty-two.
“I mean…” I paused and looked around. “She reminded me of when my sister was little.”
He had this look, like, “I don’t know what to say to that,” so I pressed.
“I’m really bugging.”
“You know,” he said, “I went and saw the wizard after my first deployment. Helped.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll go after my first deployment.”
He laughed.
“Look,” he said, “it ain’t like your sister. It’s not the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“This kid’s Iraqi, right?”
“Sure.”
“Then this might not even be the most fucked-up thing she’s seen.”
“Okay.”
“How long we been here?”
“Two and a half months.”
“Right. And how much fucked-up shit have we seen? And she’s been here for years.”
I supposed that was true. But you don’t just shrug off your brother getting shot in front of you.
“Look, this isn’t even the wildest Fallujah’s been. Al-Qaeda used to leave bodies in the street, cut off people’s fingers for smoking. They ran torture houses in every district, all kinds of crazy shit, and you don’t think the kids see? When I was a kid I knew about all the shit that was going on in my neighborhood. When I was ten this one guy raped a girl and the girl’s brother was in a gang and they spread him out over the hood of a car and cut his balls off. That’s what my brother said, anyway. It was all we talked about that summer. And Fallujah’s way crazier than Newark.”
“I guess so, Staff Sergeant.”
“Shit. There’s explosions in this city every fucking day. There’s firefights in this city every fucking day. That’s her home. That’s in the streets where she plays. This girl is probably fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine. She’s not your sister. She’s just not. She’s seen it before.”
“Still,” I said. “It’s her brother. And every little bit hurts.”
He shrugged. “Until you’re numb.”
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