PRAYER IN THE FURNACE
Rodriguez didn’t approach me because he wanted to talk to a chaplain. I don’t think he even recognized who I was until I stood up straight and he saw the cross on my collar. At first, he only wanted a cigarette.
He had blood smeared across his face in horizontal and diagonal streaks. His hands and sleeves were stained, and he wouldn’t look at me directly, his eyes wild and empty. Violent microexpressions periodically flashed across his face, the snarling contortions of an angry dog.
I handed him a cigarette and lit it against mine. Rodriguez drew in, let the smoke out, glanced back to his squad, and his face again turned to violence.
Twenty years ago, well before I became a priest, I used to box light heavyweight. Rage is good for amping you up before a fight, but something different happens once the fighting begins. There’s a kind of joy to it. A surrender. It’s not a particularly Christian feeling, but it’s a powerful one. Physical aggression has a logic and emotion of its own. That’s what I was seeing on Rodriguez’s face. The space between when rage ends and violence begins.
I didn’t even know his name then. We were four months into our deployment, standing outside of Charlie Medical, where the surgeons had just called time of death for our battalion’s twelfth KIA, Denton Tsakhia Fujita. I’d learned Fujita’s name that day.
Rodriguez was wire thin, his body taut and electric. I was huddled against the wind, clutching my cigarette as if it could calm my nerves. Ever since my hospice days working with children, I’ve had difficulty with hospitals—the sight of needles turns me pale and weak, as if the blood is slowly draining out of all my limbs at once—and there was a leg amputation going on. Another of Rodriguez’s friends, John Garrett, had been injured at the same time as Fujita. I’d just learned Garrett’s name that day as well.
Rodriguez smiled. There was no warmth to it.
“Chaps,” he said. He looked back at his squad, all of them waiting for word on their friend’s condition. They were a few yards away, out of earshot. For a second, Rodriguez seemed nervous. “I want to talk with you.”
After attacks, sometimes Marines will want to talk to the chaplain or to Combat Stress. They’re enraged, or grieving, or oscillating between the two. But I’d never seen a Marine like this, and I didn’t really want to be alone with him.
“I’ll tell them I’m going to confession,” he said. His eyes were pinpricks. It occurred to me that he might be on drugs. Alcohol, marijuana, heroin—these were available if you knew the right Iraqi.
Rodriguez smiled again, the corners of his mouth tight. “He was a pretty good shortstop,” he said. At first I didn’t realize who he was talking about. “Not great, but good.”
“I should go in,” I said, “see how the docs are doing.”
“Okay, sir,” he said, “I’ll come find you.”
After the amputation, though, Rodriguez had disappeared.
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At Fujita’s memorial service, I read from Second Timothy: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” During memorials, I try as best I can to set an appropriate tone.
Captain Boden, the Charlie Company commander, came after me and told the assembled Marines that they’d “get them motherfuckers back for Fujita.” The men listened with surly acceptance. Little more was expected from Boden. This was the man who would announce, straight-faced, that his idea of leadership was “taking my Marines to the field and beating the shit out of them.” It’s a leadership style that goes over well with nineteen-year-olds before they’ve actually been to war. When their lives are on the line, Marines learn to want more than pure, unthinking aggression. Unthinking aggression can get Marines killed. In this deployment, it had already killed more than a few.
Rodriguez spoke next, in the role of the best friend. He was calmer than when I’d last seen him, and he spoke of how Fujita actually liked the Iraqis. That he was the one guy in the squad who thought the country wouldn’t be better off if we just nuked it until the desert turned into a flat plane of glass. Then Rodriguez gave a bitter smile, looked out at the crowd, and said, “Guys teased him, said Fuji’d been out fucking hajjis, and they could smell it.” It felt like Rodriguez was berating the audience. Marines from his squad looked at each other uneasily. For a moment I wondered if I’d have to step in, but Rodriguez went on, the remainder of his remarks in a more traditional, hagiographic vein.
The rest of the service was standard, insofar as it was heartbreaking. When the first sergeant did the roll call, a number of Marines put their faces into their hands and a number openly wept.
When Fujita’s squad approached the battle cross, they knelt close together, their arms over one another’s shoulders, leaning into one another until it was one silent, weeping block. Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children. Then one by one they stood up, touched the helmet, and walked to where Captain Boden stood in the back, grim, stupid determination set on his thick, square face.
After the service, Staff Sergeant Haupert held court in the smoke pit behind the chapel. Haupert was the acting platoon commander of 2nd Platoon. Their original platoon commander, Lieutenant Ford, had been killed in an IED blast in the first month of the deployment.
From the smoke pit, you couldn’t see to the city, but I turned away from Haupert and looked out toward it anyway. The men in Charlie Company spent every day in Ramadi. I went out regularly, too, but always to an outpost. Never on a combat mission. I ministered. Always busy, always overworked, but still, most days I woke up in my bed on base, prayed in relative safety, and only listened for violence in the distance. Augustine, sermonizing from safety about the sack of his beloved Rome, repeated only what he could not know for sure: “Horrible it was told to us; the slaughter, burning, pillaging, the torture of men. It is true, many things we have heard, all filled with bellowing, weeping, and hardly were we comforted, nor can I deny, no, I cannot deny we have heard many, many things were committed in that city.” I had the same problem.
I turned back to Haupert, in the midst of his own sermon, a simple sermon but one buttressed by the experience of daily patrols. “What do we do?” Haupert was saying to the loose assembly of 2nd Platoon members. “We come here, we say, We’ll give you electricity. If you work with us. We’ll fix your sewage system. If you work with us. We’ll provide you security. If you work with us. But no better friend, no worse enemy. If you fuck with us, you will live in shit. And they’re like, Okay, we’ll live in shit.” He pointed off to the direction of the city, then swatted with his hand, as if at an insect. “Fuck them,” he said.
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I retreated back to the chapel, which was where Rodriguez found me. I was organizing all our candy in the walk-in closet off to the side, stacks of candy and jerky and Beanie Babies sent by grateful Americans to the troops, care packages I often ended up distributing to the platoons. Chaplains receive more care packages addressed to “Any Marine” than we know what to do with, but the excess can be useful because coming to get goodies is one inconspicuous way Marines can talk to the chaplain without announcing to their unit that they have an issue.
Rodriguez entered the small space silently. He didn’t have the same level of intensity as the first time we talked, though it was there, in his eyes and in his hands, in the way he couldn’t just stand still but had to always move. They say that on patrol in Ramadi, you don’t walk, you run.
“You know what we were doing,” he asked, “when Fuji got shot?”
“No.”
“Nobody does,” he said. He looked around suspiciously, as if someone might break in on us. “Nobody thought I should talk to you,” he said. “What’s a fucking Chaps gonna say? What’s anybody gonna say? You know nobody respects chaplains, right?”
“Their mistake.”
“I respect priests,” he said. “Most priests. Not the little-boy fuckers. You ain’t a little-boy fucker, right?”
Rodriguez was testing me. “Why? Are you?” I said. I folded my arms and made a point of sizing him up, giving him a look to let him know I wasn’t impressed. Normally I’d be more aggressive, maybe even pull rank, but I couldn’t after a memorial service.
Rodriguez held up a hand. “I respect priests,” he said again. “Not the faggots and the boy fuckers, but, you know, priests.”
Rodriguez looked around and took a breath.
“You know we get hit like every fucking day,” he said.
“I know you’ve got a violent part of the city.”
“Every day. Shit, they used to come at us in the Government Center three times a week. Suicide assaults. Crazy. It’d end with air strikes on Battleship Gray or Swiss Cheese. Allah’s fucking Waiting Rooms. Killing motherfuckers. And you go out on the street, you go on a raid. You stop for a minute too long, you’re getting lit the fuck up.”
His face contorted into one of those quick snarls of rage I’d seen before. “You remember Wayne?” he said. “Wayne Bailey? You remember him?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. I made a point of remembering the full names of all the dead. And Bailey was one of the fallen I’d actually interacted with before he died. That made it easier.
“We were checking on a fucking school. And they made us stay. We’re on the radio telling them we gotta go and they’re like, No, stay there. We’re like, We stay here too long, something’s got to happen. But the Iraqis are late and we got to follow orders. And there’s a group of kids and the first RPG lands smack in the group of kids.”
I could remember seeing the ComCam photos. I’d seen sick and dying children before, but that had shaken me. It’s strange how a child’s hand is so easily identifiable as a child’s hand, even without a frame of reference for size or a recognizable body for it to be attached to.
“Then Wayne gets hit. Doc was pounding his chest and I was holding his nose, doing rescue breathing.”
Wayne, everybody said, was a popular man in the platoon.
“My last deployment,” Rodriguez said, “IEDs, IEDs, IEDs. Here there’s still IEDs, but them suicide assaults are coming every week. We’re getting shot at every week. More firefights than any unit I ever heard of. And Captain Boden, he puts up a board listing all the different squads. The Most Contact Board.”
Rodriguez lifted a tightly clenched fist to his face and looked down, baring his teeth. “The Most Contact Board,” he said again. “You get a hash mark every firefight. IEDs don’t count. Even if somebody dies. Just firefights. And it’s like, whoever has the most contact, they get respect. ’Cause they been through the most shit. You can’t argue with that.”
“I suppose not.” Suffering, I thought, has always had its own mystique.
“Four months in, them suicide assaults stop coming. Hajjis got smart. We were chewing them up. And now it’s just IEDs. And Second Squad”—he slapped his chest—“my squad, we were the leaders. Not just in the platoon, in the whole fucking company. Which means battalion, too. Probably the whole fucking Corps. We were top. Most fucking contact. Nobody could touch our shit.”
“And then…,” he said, and stopped for a second, as though to gather courage. “Attacks fall off. Our squad’s stats fall off, too. Staff Sergeant gave us shit for it.” Rodriguez scowled and then, imitating Haupert’s gruff, confident voice, said, “You pussies used to find the enemy.” He spat at the ground. “Whatever. Fuck that. Fuck firefights. Firefights are fucking scary. I don’t get off on that shit.”
I nodded, trying to hold his eyes, but he looked away.
“What were you doing,” I said, “when Fujita got hit?”
Rodriguez looked around at the stacked-up care packages all around him. Our closet was crammed with rows of wooden shelves filled with M&M’s, Snickers bars, individually wrapped brownies, Entenmann’s cakes, and other goodies. Rodriguez dug his hand into a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pulled one out, inspecting it in his hand. “You know this is Sergeant Ditoro’s first deployment?” he said.
“No,” I said. I figured he was talking about his squad leader, though I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to stop his flow of words by asking.
“Embassy duty.” Rodriguez shook his head and tossed the candy back into the bag. Then he quickly wiped at his face. It took me a second to realize he was wiping away tears. In relation to what, I wasn’t sure. “You know, if I hadn’t been busted down after that DUI, I’d probably be leading this squad.”
“What happened,” I asked again, “when Fujita got hit?”
“About a month back,” he said, “Corporal Acosta was buzzing off Ambien. That shit gives you a body high, and it’s like being a little drunk. Maybe he’d taken something else, too.”
“He get Ambien from the Combat Stress team?”
Rodriguez laughed. “What you think?” He pulled a plastic sandwich bag full of little pink pills out of his cargo pockets and held it at eye level. “How you think any of us sleep?”
I nodded my head.
“We set up an OP,” he said, “and we just trash it. I mean, insurgents like to destroy any place we use as an OP anyway, so might as well go crazy. And Ditoro, he doesn’t have respect. Acosta, though, he’s good to go.”
“Even on drugs?”
Rodriguez kept going. “Last deployment, I saw what he did. Suicide bomb, and Acosta was helping wounded and the motherfucker was on fire. He didn’t even realize. He was actually burning and he was running around helping wounded kids and shit. Man could have gotten a medical discharge, one hundred percent disability, but after burn unit he stayed in to do another deployment. Man’s got fucking respect.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“So Ditoro ain’t saying shit to Acosta. And Acosta is buzzing. We’re not even looking and he strips to his underwear and Kevlar and goes out on the roof like that, dick hanging out, and he starts doing jumping jacks, screaming every Arabic curse word he knows.”
It wasn’t the craziest thing I’d heard of Marines doing.
Rodriguez smiled, his eyes dead. “They started shooting at us within five minutes.”
“Who’s they?” I said.
“What?”
“Who’s shooting at you?”
He shrugged. “Insurgents, I guess. I don’t know. Honestly, Chaps, I don’t care. They’re all the same to me. They’re all enemy.” He shrugged again. “We lit them fuckers up. And we get back and it was, you know, another hash mark. On the Most Contact Board. We went out and found the enemy, instead of waiting for him to IED us. And our stats went up.”
“Ah,” I said. “So you did it again.”
“Sergeant Ditoro would make the junior Marines play rock-paper-scissors, see who goes.”
It was starting to make sense. “Fujita was a junior Marine.”
“When he got here,” he said, “Ditoro used to make him sing, ‘I am the new guy and I am fucking gay.’” Rodriguez laughed. “It was funny as shit. Fuji took it well. He played the game. It’s why we liked him. But he didn’t like us setting up contact bait. He said it was fucked up. That if it was his neighborhood, he’d take a shot at some asshole on the roof. But we did it anyway.”
Rodriguez paused. “Fuji played the game,” he repeated. “You know we’re back up top for most contact?”
“And the day Fujita died…”
“There was a sniper. There wasn’t shooting. There was one shot. I helped Ditoro put Fuji’s pants back on while Acosta tried to stop the bleeding.”
“And then Garrett…”
“They IED’d us while we were bringing Fuji back.”
Rodriguez lowered his head and stared at the ground, clenching and unclenching his fists. He grimaced, then looked straight at me, challenging.
“If you killed somebody,” he said, “that means you’re going to hell.”
Marines had asked me about that before, so I thought I had an answer. “Killing is a serious thing,” I said, “no doubt about that. And—”
“I mean”—Rodriguez looked away, down at the candy—“somebody you’re not supposed to.”
That brought me up short. At first I didn’t understand what he was talking about, though I suppose it should have been obvious. “You’re not responsible for Fujita’s death—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Rodriguez snapped, eyes back on me, angry. “I mean, not Marines. I mean, out in the city.” He took a breath. “And, if other people did it, too, when you’re out there, and you don’t stop them. Do you go to hell, too?”
The silence held for a moment. “What are you telling me, Lance Corporal?” I said it in an officer voice, not in a pastoral voice. Immediately, I knew it was a mistake.
“I ain’t telling anything,” he said, drawing back. “Just asking.”
“God always offers forgiveness,” I said, softening my tone, “to those who are truly sorry. But sorry isn’t a feeling, you understand. It’s an action. A determination to make things right.”
Rodriguez was still looking at the ground. I was cursing myself for fumbling the conversation.
“A lance corporal,” Rodriguez said, “don’t have the power to make anything right.”
I tried to explain it wasn’t about outcomes, which you can’t control, but about the seriousness of intent. Rodriguez cut me off.
“If this is confession,” he said, “that means you can’t tell anybody what I said, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s not confession. I’m not confessing shit. I ain’t sorry for shit. You can tell anybody you want.”
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