Sergeant Deetz turns back to the game. I use the opportunity to slip away. It was stupid to ask Deetz, but what he said has me thinking. PRP: personnel retrieval and processing, aka Mortuary Affairs. I’d forgotten about them. They must have collected the bodies from this morning.
The thought of PRP works and worms through my brain. The bodies could be sitting here, on base. But I don’t know where PRP is. I’d never wanted to know, and I don’t want to ask anyone the way, either. Why would anyone go there? But I leave the battery area and walk around the perimeter of the Battle Square, over to the CLB buildings, dodging officers and staff NCOs. It takes a good half hour, sneaking around, reading the signs outside of buildings, until I find it, a long, low, rectangular building surrounded by palm trees. It’s offset from the rest of the CLB complex, but otherwise just like every other building. That feels wrong—if they cleaned up from today, severed limbs should be spilling out the door.
I stand outside, looking at the entrance. It’s a simple wooden door. One I shouldn’t be in front of, one I shouldn’t open, one I shouldn’t step through. I’m in a combat arms unit, and I don’t belong here. It’s bad voodoo. But I came all this way, I found it, and I’m not a coward. So I open the door.
Inside is cool air, a long hallway full of closed doors, and a Marine at a desk facing away from me. He has headphones on. They’re plugged into a computer that’s playing some sort of TV show. On the screen, a woman in a poofy dress is hailing a cab. She looks pretty at first, but then the screen cuts to a close-up and it’s clear she’s not.
The Marine at the desk turns around and takes off his headphones, looking up at me, confused. I look for chevrons on his collar and see he’s a gunnery sergeant, but he seems far older than most gunnys. A trim white mustache sits on his lip and he has a white fuzz of hair over the ears, but the rest of his head is shiny and bald. As he squints up to look at me, the skin around his eyes scrunches into wrinkles. He’s fat, too. Even through the uniform, I can tell. They say PRP is all reservists, no active duty undertakers in the Marine Corps, and he looks like a reservist for sure.
“Can I help you, Lance Corporal?” he says. There’s a soft, southern drawl in his voice.
I stand there looking at him, my mouth open, and the seconds tick by.
Then the old gunny’s face softens and he leans forward and says, “Did you lose someone, son?”
It takes me a second to figure it out. “No,” I say. “No. No no no. No.”
He looks at me, confused, and arches an eyebrow.
“I’m an artilleryman,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
We look at each other.
“We had a mission today. Target was ten kliks south of here?” I look at him, hoping he’ll get it. I feel constricted by the narrow hallway, with the desk squeezed in and the fat old gunny looking at me quizzically.
“Okay?” he says.
“It was my first mission like that… .”
“Okay?” he says again. He leans forward and squints up at me, like if he gets a better look, he’ll know what the hell I’m talking about.
“I mean, I’m from Nebraska. From Ord, Nebraska. We don’t do anything in Ord.” I’m fully aware I sound like an idiot.
“You all right, Lance Corporal?” The old gunny looks at me intently, waiting. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass by now. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass as soon as I walked through the door, waltzing into someplace I didn’t belong. But this gunny, maybe because he’s a reservist, maybe because he’s old, maybe because he’s fat, just looks up and waits for me to get out what I need to say.
“I just never killed anybody before.”
“Neither have I,” he says.
“But I did. I think. I mean, we just shot the rounds off.”
“Okay,” he says. “So why’d you come here?”
I look at him helplessly. “I thought, maybe, you’d been out there. And seen what we’d done.”
The old gunny leans back in his chair and purses his lips tight. “No,” he says.
He takes a breath and lets it out slow.
“We handle U.S. casualties. Iraqis take care of their own. Only time I see enemy dead is when they pass in a U.S. med facility. Like Fallujah Surgical.” He waves his hand in the general direction of the base hospital. “Besides, TQ’s got a PRP section. They’d probably have handled anything in that AO.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
“We didn’t have anything like that today.”
“Okay,” I say.
“You’ll be all right,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, Gunny.”
I stand there, looking at him for a second. Then I look down at all the closed doors in the hallway, doors with nothing behind them. On the computer screen behind the gunny, a group of women drink pink martinis.
“You married, Lance Corporal?” The gunny is looking at my hands, at my wedding band.
“Yeah,” I say. “About two months now.”
“How old are you?” he asks.
“Nineteen.”
He nods, then sits there as though turning some hard thing over in his mind. Right when I’m about to take my leave, he says, “Here’s something you could do for me. Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Gunny.”
He points at my wedding band. “Take that off and put it on the chain with your dog tags.” He scoops at the chain around his own neck with two fingers and pulls out his dog tags to show me. There, hanging next to the two metal tabs with his kill data, is a gold ring. “Okay?…
“We need to collect personal effects,” he says, putting his dog tags back in his shirt. “For me, the hardest thing is taking off the wedding rings.”
“Oh.” I take a step back.
“Can you do that?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “I can do that.”
“Thanks,” he says.
“I should go,” I say.
“You should,” he says.
I turn quickly, open the door, and step out into the oven air. I walk away slow, back straight, controlling my steps, and I walk with my right hand over my left, worrying at my wedding band, twisting it around my finger.
I’d told the gunny I would do it, so as I walk I work at my ring, getting it off my finger. It feels like bad voodoo, to put it with my dog tags. But I take them from around my neck, undo the snap clasp, slip the ring onto the chain, redo the clasp, and put the dog tags back around my neck. I can feel the metal of the ring against my chest.
I walk away, not paying attention to where my steps are leading me, passing under the palm trees lining the road around the Battle Square. I’m hungry, and it should be time for chow, but I don’t go that way. I go to the road by Fallujah Surgical and I stop.
It’s a squat, dull building, beige and beaten down by the brightness of the sun like everything else. There’s a smoke pit nearby and two Corpsmen are sitting there, talking and dragging on cigarettes, sending faint puffs of smoke into the air. I wait, looking at the building as if something incredible might emerge.
Nothing happens, of course. But there in the heat, standing before Fallujah Surgical, I remember the cooler air of the morning two days before. We’d been going to chow, all of Gun Six, laughing and joking until Sergeant Deetz, who was yelling something about the Spartans being gay, stopped midsentence. He froze, then shifted, straightened to his full height, and whispered, “Ahhh-ten-HUT.”
We all snapped to attention, not knowing why. Sergeant Deetz raised his right hand in a salute, and so did we. Then I saw, off in the distance, well down the road, four Corpsmen coming out of Fallujah Surgical carrying a stretcher draped with the American flag. Everything was silent, still. All down the road, Marines and sailors had snapped to.
I could barely see it in the early morning light. I strained my eyes looking at the outline of the body under the thick fabric of the flag. And then the stretcher passed from view.
Now, standing there in the daytime, looking at the two Corpsmen in the smoke pit, I wonder if they’d been the ones carrying that body. They must have carried some.
Everyone standing on the road as the body went past had been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the Corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It’d been an image of death from another world. But now I know where that corpse was headed, to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would have gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.