The sound of it hit us, vibrating through our bodies, down deep in our chests and in our guts and in the back of our teeth. I could taste the gunpowder in the air. As the guns fired, the barrels shot back like pistons and reseated, the force of each round going off kicking up smoke and dust into the air. When I looked down the line, I couldn’t see six guns. I just saw fires through the haze, or not even fires, just flashes of red in the dust and the cordite. And I could feel the roar of each gun, not just ours, as it fired. And I thought, God, this is why I’m glad I’m an artilleryman.
Because what’s a grunt with an M16 shooting? 5.56? Even the .50-cal., what can you really do with that? Or the main gun of a tank. Your range is what? A mile or two? And you can kill what? A small house? An armored vehicle? Wherever we were dropping these rounds, somewhere six miles south of us, those rounds were striking harder than anything else in ground warfare. Each shell weighs 130 pounds, a casing filled with eighty-eight bomblets that scatter over the target area. Each bomblet has a shaped explosive charge that can penetrate two inches of solid steel and send shrapnel flying over the battlefield. Putting those rounds downrange takes nine men moving in perfect unison. It takes an FDC, and a good spotter, and math and physics and art and skill and experience. And though I only loaded, maybe I was only one-third of the ammo team, but I moved perfectly, and the round went in with that satisfying ring, and the round went off with that incredible roar, and it shot out into the sky and hit six miles south of us. The target area. And wherever we hit, everything within a hundred yards, everything within a circle with a radius as long as a football field, everything died.
Voorstadt had the lanyard unhooked and the breech open before the gun had fully reseated, and he washed the bore with the chamber swab and we loaded another round, the second I had fired at a human target that day, although by this point, surely, there were no more living targets. And we fired again, and we felt it in our bones, and we saw the fireball burst from the barrel, and more dust and cordite went into the air, choking us with the sand of the Iraqi desert.
And then it was done.
Smoke surrounded us. We couldn’t see beyond our position. I was breathing hard, taking in the smell and taste of gunpowder. And I’d looked at our gun, standing above us, quiet, massive, and felt a kind of love for it.
But the dust began to settle. And a wind came and started picking at the smoke, tugging it and lifting it over us, then higher, into the sky, the only cloud I’d seen in two months. And then the cloud thinned, disappearing into the air, blending with the soft red Iraqi sunrise.
Now, standing before the guns with the sky a perfect blue and the barrels piercing up into the air, it doesn’t seem as though any of it could have happened. No speck of this morning remains in our gun. Sergeant Deetz made us clean it after the mission was over. A ritual, of sorts, for our first kill as Gun Six. We’d taken apart the ramming rod and the cleaning swab, attached the two poles together, along with a bore brush, and drenched the brush in CLP. Then we’d all stood in line behind the gun, holding the pole, and in unison had rammed it through the bore. And then we’d repeated the process, and black streaks of CLP and carbon snaked down the pole, staining our hands. We’d kept at it until our gun was clean.
So there’s no indication here of what happened, though I know ten kliks south of us is a cratered area riddled with shrapnel and ruined buildings, burned-out vehicles and twisted corpses. The bodies. Sergeant Deetz had seen them on his first deployment, during the initial invasion. None of the rest of us have.
I turn sharply away from the gun line. It’s too pristine. And maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. Somewhere, there’s a corpse lying out, bleaching in the sun. Before it was a corpse, it was a man who lived and breathed and maybe murdered and maybe tortured, the kind of man I’d always wanted to kill. Whatever the case, a man definitely dead.
So I walk back to our battery area, never turning around. It’s a short walk, and when I get back I find a couple of the guys playing Texas hold ’em by a smoke pit. There’s Sergeant Deetz, Bolander, Voorstadt, and Sanchez. Deetz has fewer chips than the others and is leaning his bulk over the table, scowling at the pot.
“Oo-rah, motivator,” he says when he sees me.
“Oo-rah, Sergeant.” I watch them play. Sanchez flips the turn card and everybody checks.
“Sergeant?” I say.
“What?”
I’m not sure where to start. “Don’t you think, maybe, we should have a patrol out, to see if there were any survivors?”
“What?” Sergeant Deetz is focused on the game. As soon as Sanchez flips the river, he throws his cards in.
“I mean, the mission we had. Shouldn’t we go out, like, in a patrol, to see if there are any survivors?”
Sergeant Deetz looks up at me. “You are an idiot, aren’t you?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“There weren’t any survivors,” says Voorstadt, tossing his cards in as well.
“You see al-Qaeda rolling around in tanks?” says Sergeant Deetz.
“No, Sergeant.”
“You see al-Qaeda building crazy bunkers and trenches?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“You think al-Qaeda’s got some magic, ICM-doesn’t-kill-my-ass ninja powers?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“No, you’re goddamn right, no.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
The betting is now between Sanchez and Bolander. Sanchez, looking at the pot, says to no one in particular, “I think the 2nd and 136th does patrols out there.”
“But, Sergeant,” I say, “what about the bodies? Doesn’t somebody have to clean up the bodies?”
“Jesus, Lance Corporal. Do I look like a PRP Marine to you?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“What do I look like?”
“Like an artilleryman, Sergeant.”
“You’re goddamn right, killer. I’m an artilleryman. We provide the bodies. We don’t clean ’em up. You hear me?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
He looks up at me. “And what are you, Lance Corporal?”
“An artilleryman, Sergeant.”
“And what do you do?”
“Provide the bodies, Sergeant.”
“You’re goddamn right, killer. You’re goddamn right.”