In the can the next night, after about thirty minutes of me staring at the ceiling while Timhead played Pokémon, I tried to bring it up again. I wanted to talk about what Staff Sergeant had said, but Timhead stopped me.
“Look,” he said, “I’m over it.”
“Yeah?”
He put both his hands in the air, like he was surrendering.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m over it.”
? ? ?
A week later a sniper shot Harvey in the neck. It was crazy, because he wasn’t even hurt bad. The bullet barely grazed him. A quarter inch to the right, he’d be dead.
Nobody got positive ID. We kept driving, primed and ready to kill, but no targets.
As we moved down the road, my hands jittery with adrenaline, I wanted to scream, “Fuck!” as loud as I could, and keep screaming it through the whole convoy until I got to let off a round in someone. I started gripping the sides of the .50. When my hands were white, I would let go. I did that for a half hour, and then the rage left me and I felt exhausted.
The road kept turning under our wheels, and my eyes kept scanning automatically for anything out of place, signs of digging or suspicious piles of trash. It doesn’t stop. Tomorrow we would do this again. Maybe get blown up, or get injured, or die, or kill somebody. We couldn’t know.
At the chow hall later that day, Harvey pulled the bandage back and showed everyone his wound.
He said, “Purple fucking Heart, bitches! You know how much * I’m gonna get back home?”
My mind was whirling, and I made it stop.
“This is gonna be a badass scar,” he said. “Girls’ll ask and I’ll be like, ‘Whatever, I just got shot one time in Iraq, it’s cool.’”
? ? ?
When we got back to the can that night, Timhead didn’t even pull out his Nintendo DS.
“Harvey’s so full of shit,” he said. “Mr. Tough Guy.”
I ignored him and started pulling off my cammies.
“I thought he was dead,” said Timhead. “Shit. He probably thought he was dead.”
“Timhead,” I said, “we got a convoy in five hours.”
He scowled down at his bed. “Yeah. So?”
“So let it go,” I said.
“He’s full of shit,” he said.
I got under the covers and closed my eyes. Timhead was right, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good to think about it. “Fine,” I said. I heard him moving around the room, and then he turned off the light.
“Hey,” he said, quiet, “do you think—”
That did it. I sat up straight. “What do you want him to say?” I said. “He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants.”
I could hear Timhead breathing in the dark. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
BODIES
For a long time I was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell them lies.
“There was this hajji corpse,” I’d say, “lying in the sun. It’d been there for days. It was swollen with gases. The eyes were sockets. And we had to clean it off the streets.”
Then I’d look at my audience and size them up, see if they wanted me to keep going. You’d be surprised how many do.
“That’s what I did,” I’d say. “I collected remains. U.S. forces, mostly, but sometimes Iraqis, even insurgents.”
There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story. This lieutenant colonel who’s visiting the Government Center rolls up, sees two Marines maneuvering around a body bag, and decides he’ll go show what a regular guy he is and help.
As I tell the story, the lieutenant colonel’s a large, arrogant bear of a man with fresh-pressed cammies and a short, tight mustache.
“He’s got huge hands,” I’d say. “And he comes up to us and says, ‘Here, Marine, let me help you with that.’ And without waiting for us to respond or warn him off, he reaches down and grabs the body bag.”
Then I’d describe how he launches up, as though he’s doing a clean and jerk. “He was strong, I’ll give him that,” I’d say. “But the bag rips on the edge of the truck’s back gate, and the skin of the hajji tears with it, a big jagged tear through the stomach. Rotting blood and fluid and organs slide out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag. Human soup hits him right in the face, running down his mustache.”
If I’m telling the story sad, I can stop there. If I’m telling it funny, though, there’s one more crucial bit, which Corporal G had done when he’d told the story to me for the first time, back in 2004, before either of us had collected remains or knew what we were talking about. I don’t know where G heard the story.
“The colonel screamed like a bitch,” G had said. And then he’d made a weird, high-pitched keening noise, deep in his throat, like a wheezing dog. This was to show us precisely how bitches scream when covered in rotting human fluids. If you get the noise right, you get a laugh.
What I liked about the story was that even if it had happened, more or less, it was still total bullshit. After our deployment there wasn’t anybody, not even Corporal G, who talked about the remains that way.
Some of the Mortuary Affairs Marines thought the spirits of the dead hung about the bodies. It’d creep them out. You could feel it, they’d say, especially when you look at the faces. But it got to be more than that. Midway through the deployment, guys started swearing they could feel spirits everywhere. Not just around the bodies, and not just Marine dead. Sunni dead, Shi’a dead, Kurd dead, Christian dead. All the dead of all Iraq, even all the dead of Iraqi history, the Akkadian Empire and the Mongols and the American invasion.
I never felt any ghosts. Leave a body in the sun, the outer layer of skin detaches from the lower, and you feel it slide around in your hands. Leave a body in water, everything swells, and the skin feels waxy and thick but recognizably human. That’s all. Except for me and Corporal G, though, everybody in Mortuary Affairs talked about ghosts. We never said any different.
In those days I used to think, Maybe I’d handle it better if Rachel’d stayed with me. I didn’t fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The smell of it gets into your skin. Putting down food is hard after processing, so by the end of the deployment we were gaunt from poor nutrition, sleep deprived from bad dreams, and shambling through base like a bunch of zombies, the sight of us reminding Marines of everything they know but never discuss.
And Rachel was gone. I’d seen it coming. She was a pacifist in high school, so once I signed my enlistment papers the thing we had going went on life support.
She would have been perfect. She was melancholy. She was thin. She always thought about death, but she didn’t get off on it like the goth kids. And I loved her because she was thoughtful and kind. Even now, I won’t pretend she was especially good-looking, but she listened, and there’s a beauty in that you don’t often find.
Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody, there’s a real community you don’t get in other places. If you’re like me, though, and you don’t fit in, it’s a prison. So our relationship was half boyfriend/girlfriend, half cell mates. For my sixteenth birthday, she blindfolded me and drove me twenty miles out of town, to a high point off the interstate where you could watch the roads stretch out forever across the plains toward all the places we’d rather be. She told me her gift was this, the promise to come back here with me someday and keep going. We were so close for two years, and then I signed up.
It was a decision she didn’t understand much more than I did. I wasn’t athletic. I wasn’t aggressive. I wasn’t even that patriotic.
“Maybe if you’d joined the Air Force,” she’d said. But I was tired of doing the weaker thing. And I knew that her talk about the future was just that, talk. She’d never leave. I didn’t want to stay with her, work in a veterinarian’s office, and be wistful. My ticket out of Callaway was what passed in our town for first class. The Marine Corps.
I told her, “What’s done is done.” It made me feel like a tough guy from a movie.
Even still, we stayed together through boot camp. She wrote me letters while I was there, even sent me naked photos of herself. A few weeks earlier another guy’d gotten a package like that and the DIs had put the photos up in the bathroom stalls. The guy’s girlfriend had worn a cheerleading uniform and stripped it off picture by picture. I remember thinking how glad I was that Rachel wasn’t the kind of girl to send me something like that.
Mail call in boot camp works like this. One of the DIs stands at the front of the squad bay with all the platoon’s mail while the platoon stands at attention in front of their racks. The DI calls out names one by one, and recruits run up and take their mail. If it’s a package or an envelope that feels suspicious, the DI makes him open it right there. So when I opened Rachel’s letter it was in front of the whole platoon and with Sergeant Kuba, my kill hat, glaring at me.
This wasn’t the first time I’d had to open a letter with him watching. My parents had sent me photos of their vacation to Lakeside. That was no big deal, and I hadn’t been worried. I didn’t think my parents would send me naked photos. Rachel’s name on the envelope, though, terrified me. I opened it slowly, trying to come up with a plan if the photos turned out to be contraband.
The envelope had three glossy four-by-six prints that Rachel had developed herself in our high school’s darkroom. When I pulled them out and saw her thin, pale, and very naked body, I didn’t even look up for Sergeant Kuba’s reaction. I stuffed the prints into my mouth, closed my eyes, and hoped for the best.
It’s impossible to swallow three photographs at once, especially if you’ve only got two seconds before your kill hat has one hand on your face and the other on your throat while he screams and sprays spit at you.
The senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Kerwin, came running and broke us up. When Sergeant Kuba released my neck, I spat the pictures on the floor. Staff Sergeant Kerwin looked at me and said, “You must be fucking crazy, and I must be on the Marine Corps shit list if they give me a worthless fuck like you to turn into a Marine.” Then he leaned in close and said, “Maybe I’ll just kill you instead.”
He told me to pick up the photos. It was hard because I was shaking and because all the other DIs were screaming at me. I tried to hold them so my hands covered Rachel’s body. Only her face stared out, and her face in the photo seemed scared. She often looked like that in photos, because she didn’t like how she looked when she smiled. There’s no way she’d ever taken shots like that before.
“Rip them up,” he said. It was a kindness.
I tore them, slowly, into smaller and smaller pieces, twisting and tearing them, making sure no one could put them back together. When they were in shreds, he turned and walked away, leaving me to the other DIs.
I had to eat the torn pieces while Sergeant Kuba delivered a lecture to all of us on how a true Marine wouldn’t just share naked photos of his girlfriend with his platoon, but would let them run a train on her as well. Then he told them they were all fucked up if they’d tolerate an individual like me in their platoon, somebody who thought he was special, and he took them out back and thrashed them for a good twenty minutes while I stood at the position of attention and watched. Every night that week, he made me stand at the mirror and scream, “I’m not crazy, you are!” at my reflection for a half hour, and he hated me from then on and thrashed me pretty much continuously while I was there.
The next time I saw Rachel was after I graduated from boot camp. I showed up at her parents’ place in my uniform. Dress blues are supposed to get you laid, but she started crying. She told me she didn’t think she could stay with me if I went on a deployment, and I asked her to give me at least until I went to Iraq. She said yes. Ten months later, I was heading out. They’d given me the opportunity to deploy if I deployed with Mortuary Affairs, and I took it.
Rachel came to see me off. She gave me a sad little blow job the night before and told me we were done. In the military, the thing women are supposed to do if they love you is stay with you at least through deployment. Maybe divorce you a few months after you get back, but not before. Which meant, to my simple little mind, that she didn’t love me. That she’d never loved me and that everything I’d felt so strongly about in high school was just me being childish. Which was okay, because I was going somewhere that would definitely make me a man.
Except what happened in Iraq was just what happened, nothing more. I don’t think it made me any better than anyone else. It was months and months of awful. And the first weekend back we got a ninety-six, and Corporal G convinced me to go with him to Las Vegas.
“We need to get away from Iraq,” he said, “and you don’t get much more American than Vegas.”
We didn’t go to Vegas proper. We drove an extra thirty minutes to go to some local bar where, according to Corporal G, the drinks would be cheaper. If we struck out there, we could always leave and find some tourists looking to party.
I never liked G, but for clubbing he’s the one to go out with if you want to get laid. He’s got a whole system. He scopes the bar and talks to lots of girls early on. “Quantity is better than quality,” he says. “It’s all about planting seeds.” In that first hour, he doesn’t try to seal any deals or even stay with a group of girls for more than five minutes. “Make them think you’ve got better options,” he says, “so they’ll want to prove you wrong.” He knows which girls to hit on at which parts of the night, which girls to say hi to but then bounce and leave wondering, and which girls to keep hitting on. Late in the night, when everyone’s a bit looser and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge, he starts buying lots of shots. He never drinks any himself, though.
Girls like Corporal G. He’s a tall workout freak with a trapezoid chest, a slew of shiny dress shirts, and dance moves right out of a music video. He avoids carbs, overloads on red meat, and shoots steroids immediately after any unit drug test. He can be charming, too, and he’s ruthless when he gets going. If he likes a girl, he lets her know right away. “What’s your name again?” he’ll stop and say in the middle of a conversation. “I want to know for sure because I’m getting your number in two hours.” It doesn’t work every time, but it doesn’t have to. Once a night is enough.
At the local bar, he did his best to set me up with a girl. She was thirty-eight years old. I know that for sure because she kept repeating it like it made her guilty, being with a bunch of twenty-somethings just old enough to drink. And she had a fifteen-year-old daughter who at that very moment was babysitting the son of this plump brunette Corporal G was targeting by the end of night.
“Fat girls fuck better ’cause they have to,” he’d said as though dispensing great wisdom. “And they’re easier, too, so it’s a win-win.”
I could tell the brunette liked him because she tried to convince her friend to like me, too. They’d talk off to the side, the brunette pointing at me from time to time. And when I’d ask Thirty-eight to dance, the brunette would give her an approving nod. None of that worked so well. Even on slow songs we’d dance so far apart I could picture her fifteen-year-old daughter standing in the open space between us. Then Corporal G bought her enough shots to get a grizzly bear wasted, and it was on.
Late in the evening, the brunette told us we were all too young, then asked how much we worked out and felt our pecs. She slipped her hand underneath my shirt and cupped my pec and squeezed, smiling at me the whole time with this drunk smile.
To me, that was crazy. I hadn’t touched a woman since Rachel, let alone been touched by one. Just being close enough to a girl to smell her was enough. And then she touched me like that. And then she touched G, too. If she’d asked us to fight each other for her, I’m sure we would have done it.
Thirty-eight had her arm around me when we left the bar, but the cold air sobered her up a bit and she unhooked herself and walked to her friend, who was talking with G. He motioned to me.
“You get in their car,” he said.
“What?”
He shot me an angry look, walked over, gripped his hand on my shoulder, and said into my ear, “You get in their car, deal’s sealed.”
The thing had a drunk logic to it, so I followed the two women to a lime green sedan and got in the backseat without asking if it was all right. The brunette got in and sat at the wheel. She wasn’t sober enough to have any business driving, but she was sober enough to know it was weird having me in the back. Thirty-eight got in the passenger side, and we drove off, G behind us following in his car.
“So, where do you live?” I asked from my hostage’s position in the backseat.
The brunette said a street name that meant nothing to me.
“Nice place?”