TEN KLIKS SOUTH
This morning our gun dropped about 270 pounds of ICM on a smuggler’s checkpoint ten kliks south of us. We took out a group of insurgents and then we went to the Fallujah chow hall for lunch. I got fish and lima beans. I try to eat healthy.
At the table, all nine of us are smiling and laughing. I’m still jittery with nervous excitement over it, and I keep grinning and wringing my hands, twisting my wedding band about my finger. I’m sitting next to Voorstadt, our number one guy, and Jewett, who’s on the ammo team with me and Bolander. Voorstadt’s got a big plate of ravioli and Pop-Tarts, and before digging in, he looks up and down the table and says, “I can’t believe we finally had an arty mission.”
Sanchez says, “It’s about time we killed someone,” and Sergeant Deetz laughs. Even I chuckle, a little. We’ve been in Iraq two months, one of the few artillery units actually doing artillery, except so far we’ve only shot illumination missions. The grunts usually don’t want to risk the collateral damage. Some of the other guns in the battery had shot bad guys, but not us. Not until today. Today, the whole damn battery fired. And we know we hit our target. The lieutenant told us so.
Jewett, who’s been pretty quiet, asks, “How many insurgents do you think we killed?”
“Platoon-sized element,” says Sergeant Deetz.
“What?” says Bolander. He’s a rat-faced professional cynic, and he starts laughing. “Platoon-sized? Sergeant, AQI don’t have platoons.”
“Why you think we needed the whole damn battery?” says Sergeant Deetz, grunting out the words.
“We didn’t,” says Bolander. “Each gun only fired two rounds. I figure they just wanted us all to have gun time on an actual target. Besides, even one round of ICM would be enough to take out a platoon in open desert. No way we needed the whole battery. But it was fun.”
Sergeant Deetz shakes his head slowly, his heavy shoulders hunched over the table. “Platoon-sized element,” he says again. “That’s what it was. And two rounds a gun was what we needed to take it out.”
“But,” says Jewett in a small voice, “I didn’t mean the whole battery. I meant, our gun. How many did our gun, just our gun, kill?”
“How am I supposed to know?” says Sergeant Deetz.
“Platoon-sized is like, forty,” I say. “Figure, six guns, so divide and you got, six, I don’t know, six point six people per gun.”
“Yeah,” says Bolander. “We killed exactly 6.6 people.”
Sanchez takes out a notebook and starts doing the math, scratching out the numbers in his mechanically precise handwriting. “Divide it by nine Marines on the gun, and you, personally, you’ve killed zero point seven something people today. That’s like, a torso and a head. Or maybe a torso and a leg.”
“That’s not funny,” says Jewett.
“We definitely got more,” says Sergeant Deetz. “We’re the best shots in the battery.”
Bolander snorts. “We’re just firing on the quadrant and deflection the FDC gives us, Sergeant. I mean…”
“We’re better shots,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Put a round down a rabbit hole at eighteen miles.”
“But even if we were on target…,” says Jewett.
“We were on target,” says Sergeant Deetz.
“Okay, Sergeant, we were on target,” says Jewett. “But the other guns, their rounds could have hit first. Maybe everybody was already dead.”
I can see that, the shrapnel thudding into shattered corpses, the force of it jerking the limbs this way and that.
“Look,” says Bolander, “even if their rounds hit first, it doesn’t mean everybody was dead, necessarily. Maybe some insurgent had shrapnel in his chest, right, and he’s like—” Bolander sticks his tongue out and clutches his chest dramatically, as if he were dying in an old black-and-white movie. “Then our round comes down, boom, blows his fucking head off. He was dying already, but the cause of death would be ‘blown the hell up,’ not ‘shrapnel to the chest.’”
“Yeah, sure,” says Jewett, “I guess. But I don’t feel like I killed anybody. I think I’d know if I killed somebody.”
“Naw,” says Sergeant Deetz, “you wouldn’t know. Not until you’d seen the bodies.” The table quiets for a second. Sergeant Deetz shrugs. “It’s better this way.”
“Doesn’t it feel weird to you,” says Jewett, “after our first real mission, to just be eating lunch?”
Sergeant Deetz scowls at him, then takes a big bite of his Salisbury steak and grins. “Gotta eat,” he says with his mouth full of food.
“It feels good,” Voorstadt says. “We just killed some bad guys.”
Sanchez gives a quick nod. “It is good.”
“I don’t think I killed anybody,” says Jewett.
“Technically, I’m the one that pulled the lanyard,” says Voorstadt. “I fired the thing. You just loaded.”
“Like I couldn’t pull a lanyard,” says Jewett.
“Yeah, but you didn’t,” says Voorstadt.
“Drop it,” says Sergeant Deetz. “It’s a crew-served weapon. It takes a crew.”
“If we used a howitzer to kill somebody back in the States,” I say, “I wonder what crime they’d charge us with.”
“Murder,” says Sergeant Deetz. “What are you, an idiot?”
“Yeah, murder, sure,” I say, “but for each of us? In what degree? I mean, me and Bolander and Jewett loaded, right? If I loaded an M16 and handed it to Voorstadt and he shot somebody, I wouldn’t say I’d killed anyone.”
“It’s a crew-served weapon,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Crew. Served. Weapon. It’s different.”
“And I loaded, but we got the ammo from the ASP,” I say. “Shouldn’t they be responsible, too, the ASP Marines?”
“Yeah,” says Jewett. “Why not the ASP?”
“Why not the factory workers who made the ammo?” says Sergeant Deetz. “Or the taxpayers who paid for it? You know why not? Because that’s retarded.”
“The lieutenant gave the order,” I say. “He’d get it in court, right?”
“Oh, you believe that? You think officers would take the hit?” Voorstadt laughs. “How long you been in the military?”
Sergeant Deetz thumps his fist on the table. “Listen to me. We’re Gun Six. We’re responsible for that gun. We just killed some bad guys. With our gun. All of us. And that’s a good day’s work.”
“I still don’t feel like I killed anybody, Sergeant,” says Jewett.
Sergeant Deetz lets out a long breath. It’s quiet for a second. Then he shakes his head and starts laughing. “Yeah, well, all of us except you,” he says.
When we get out of the chow hall, I don’t know what to do with myself. We don’t have anything planned until evening, when we have another illum mission, so most of the guys want to hit the racks. But I don’t want to sleep. I feel like I’m finally fully awake. This morning I’d gotten up boot-camp-style, off two hours of sleep, dressed and ready to kill before my brain had time to start working. But now, even though my body is tired, my mind is up and I want to keep it that way.
“Head back to the can?” I say to Jewett.
He nods and we start walking the perimeter of the Battle Square, shaded by the palm trees that grow along the road.
“I kind of wish we had some weed,” says Jewett.
“Okay,” I say.
“Just saying.”
I shake my head. We get to the corner of the Battle Square, Fallujah Surgical straight ahead of us, and turn right.
Jewett says, “Well, it’s something to tell my mom about, finally.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Something to tell Jessie about.”
“When’s the last time you talked to her?”
“Week and a half.”
Jewett doesn’t say anything to that. I look down at my wedding band. Jessie and I’d gotten a courthouse wedding a week before I deployed so that if I died, Jessie’d get benefits. It doesn’t feel like I’m married.
“What am I supposed to tell her?” I say.
Jewett shrugs.
“She thinks I’m a badass. She thinks I’m in danger.”
“We get mortared from time to time.”
I give Jewett a flat look.
“It’s something,” he says. “Anyway, now you can say you got some bad guys.”
“Maybe.” I look at my watch. “It’s zero four, her time. I’ll have to wait before I can tell her what a hero I am.”
“That’s what I tell my mom every day.”
When we get near the cans, I tell Jewett I left something at the gun line and peel off.
The gun line’s a two-minute walk. As I get closer, the palm trees thin out into desert, and I can see the Camp Fallujah post office. Here the sky expands to the edge of the horizon. It’s perfectly blue and cloudless, as it has been every day for the last two months. I can see the guns pointing up into the air. Only Guns Two and Three are manned, and their Marines are just sitting around. When I got here this morning, all the guns were manned and everybody was frantic. The sky was black, with just a touch of red bleeding in from the rim of the horizon. In the half-light, you could see the outline of the massive, forty-feet-long, dark steel barrels pointed into the dark morning sky and below them the shapes of Marines hustling about, checking the guns, the rounds, the powder.
In the daylight, the guns shine crisp in the sun, but earlier this morning was dark and dirty. Me and Bolander and Jewett stood in the back right, waiting by the ammo, while Sanchez called out the quadrant and deflection they were giving to Gun Three.
I had put my hands on one of our rounds, the first one we sent out. Also the first I’d ever fired at human targets. I’d wanted to lift it up right then and there, feel the heft of it tug on my shoulders. I had trained to load those rounds. Trained so much that I had scars on my hands from when they had slammed on my fingers or torn my skin.
Then Gun Three had fired two targeting rounds. Then: “Fire mission. Battery. Two rounds.” Then Sanchez had called out the quadrant and deflection and Sergeant Deetz had repeated it and Dupont and Coleman, our gunner and A-gunner, had repeated it and set it and checked it and had Sergeant Deetz check it and Sanchez verify, and we got round and time and Jackson had gotten powder and we moved smooth, like we trained to, me and Jewett on either side of the stretcher holding the round, Bolander behind with the ramming rod. Sergeant Deetz checked the powder and read, “Three, four, five, white bag.” Then, to Sanchez: “Charge five, white bag.” Verified.
We moved in with the round, up to the open hatch, and Bolander shoved it in with the ramming rod until we heard it ring, and Voorstadt closed the hatch.
Sanchez said, “Hook up.”
Deetz said, “Hook up.”
Voorstadt hooked the lanyard to the trigger. I’d seen him do it a thousand times.
Sanchez said, “Stand by.”
Deetz said, “Stand by.”
Voorstadt pulled out the slack in the lanyard, holding it against his waist.
Sanchez said, “Fire.”
Deetz said, “Fire.”
Voorstadt did a left face and our gun was alive.