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I wasn’t getting good sleep. Neither was Timhead.
Didn’t matter if we had a mission in four hours, we’d be in our beds, on the video games. I’d tell myself, I need it to come down. Some brainless time on the PSP.
Except it was every day, time I could be sleeping spent coming down. Being so tired all the time makes everything a haze.
One convoy we stopped for two hours for an IED that turned out to just be random junk, wires not going anywhere but looking suspicious as hell. I was chugging Rip Its, jacked up so much on caffeine that my hands were shaking, but my eyelids kept sliding down like they were hung with weights. It’s a crazy feeling when your heart rate is 150 miles per hour and your brain is sliding into sleep and you know when the convoy gets going that if you miss something, it will kill you. And your friends.
When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.
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I told Timhead, “I never even liked people calling me ‘killer’ before this bullshit.”
“Okay,” he said, “so suck it up, vagina.”
I tried a different tack. “You know what? You owe me.”
“How’s that?”
I didn’t answer. I stared him down, and he looked away.
“You owe me,” I said again.
He laughed a weak little laugh. “Well, I ain’t gonna let you suck my dick.”
“What’s going on with you?” I said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. What?”
“You know.”
He looked down at his feet. “I signed up to kill hajjis.”
“No, you fucking didn’t,” I said. Timhead signed up because his older brother had been in the MPs and got blown up in 2005, burns over his whole body, and Timhead joined to take his place.
Timhead looked away from me. I waited for him to respond.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“You fucked in the head, man?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“My little brother’s in juvie.”
“I didn’t know that.”
There was a loud boom somewhere outside our can. Probably artillery going off.
“He’s sixteen,” said Timhead. “He set a couple fires.”
“Okay.”
“That’s some dumb shit. But he’s a kid, right?”
“Sixteen’s only three years younger than me.”
“Three years is a big difference.”
“Sure.”
“I was crazy when I was sixteen. Besides, my brother did it when he was fifteen.”
We didn’t say anything for a bit.
“How old you think that kid I shot was?”
“Old enough,” I said.
“For what?”
“Old enough to know it’s a bad fucking idea to shoot at U.S. Marines.”
Timhead shrugged.
“He was trying to kill you. Us. He was trying to kill everybody.”
“Here’s what I see. Everything dust. And the flashes from the AK, going wild in circles.”
I nod my head.
“And then I see the kid’s face. Then the mom.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the shit, right there. I see that too.”
Timhead shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. After a minute, he went back to his game.
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Two days later Jobrani and me opened up on a house after a SAF attack in Fallujah. I don’t think I hit anything. I don’t think Jobrani did either. When the convoy was done, Harvey gave Jobrani a high five and said, “Yeah, Jobrani. Jihad for America.”
Timhead laughed and said, “I’m pretty sure you’re still sleeper cell, Jobrani.”
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Afterward, I went and talked to Staff Sergeant. I told him everything Timhead said about the kid, but like it was me.
He said, “Look, it fucking sucks. Firefights are the scariest fucking thing you’ll ever fucking face, but you handled it, right?”
“Right, Staff Sergeant.”
“So, you’re a man. Don’t worry about that. Now all this other shit”—he shrugged—“it don’t get easier. Fact you can even talk about it is a good thing.”
“Thanks, Staff Sergeant.”
“You want to go see the wizard about it?”
“No.” There was no way I was going to let myself be seen going to Combat Stress over Timhead’s bullshit. “No, I’m fine. Really, Staff Sergeant.”
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to. Not a bad thing, but you don’t have to.” Then he gave me a grin. “But maybe you get religious, start hanging with the chaplain.”
“I’m not religious, Staff Sergeant.”
“I’m not saying really get religious. Just, Chaps is a smart guy. He’s good to go. And hey, you start hanging with him, everybody’s just, maybe you found Jesus or some bullshit.”
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A week later another IED hit. I heard the explosion and turned back. Garza was listening to the lieutenant screaming something on the radio. I couldn’t see to where they were. Could have been a truck in the convoy, could have been a friend. Garza said Gun Truck Three, Harvey’s. I swiveled the .50-cal. around, looking for targets, but nothing.
Garza said, “They’re fine.”
That didn’t make me feel better. It just meant I didn’t have to feel worse.
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Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren’t an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.
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I didn’t go to the chaplain. But a few days after Harvey got hit the chaplain came to me. That day, we’d waited three hours outside of Fallujah while EOD defused a bomb I’d spotted. The whole time I sat there thinking, Daisy chains, daisy chains, ambush, even though we were in the middle of fuck-all nowhere desert with nowhere to ambush us from and if the IED had been daisy-chained to another one, it would have gone off already. Still, I was stressed by the end. More than usual. When Corporal Garza reached up to grab my balls, which he sometimes does to fuck with me, I threatened to shoot him.
Then we got back and the Chaps just happened to drop by the can, and I thought, I’m gonna shoot Staff Sergeant, too. We went and talked by the smoke pit, which is a little area sectioned off with cammie netting. Somebody’d put a wooden bench there, but neither of us sat down.
Chaplain Vega’s a tall Mexican guy with a mustache that looks like it’s about to jump off his face and fuck the first rodent it finds. Kind of mustache only a chaps could get away with in the military. Since he’s a Catholic chaplain and a Navy lieutenant, I wasn’t sure whether to call him “sir,” “Chaps,” or “Father.”
After he tried to get me to open up for a bit, he said, “You’re being unresponsive.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Just trying to have a conversation.”
“About what? That kid I shot? Did Staff Sergeant ask you to talk to me about it?”
He looked at the ground. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I didn’t want to. I thought about telling him that. But I owed it to Timhead. “That kid was sixteen, Father. Maybe.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I know you did your job.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s fucked with this country.” I realized, a second too late, I’d used profanity with a priest.
“What’s fucked?” he said.
I kicked at a rock in the dirt. “I don’t even think that kid was crazy,” I said. “Not by hajji standards. They’re probably calling him a martyr.”
“Lance Corporal, what’s your first name?” he said.
“Sir?”
“What’s your first name?”
“You don’t know?” I said. I wasn’t sure why, but I was angry about that. “You didn’t, I don’t know, look me up before you came over here?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Sure I did,” he said. “I even know your nickname, Ozzie. And I know how you got it.”
That stopped me. “Ozzie” came from a bet Harvey made after Mac’s lizard died in a fight with Jobrani’s scorpion. Fifty bucks that I wouldn’t bite its head off. Stupid. Harvey still hadn’t paid me.
“Paul,” I said.
“Like the apostle.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, Paul. How are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. How was Timhead doing? That was what he was really about, even though he didn’t know it. “I usually don’t feel like talking to anyone about it.”
“Yeah,” said the Chaps, “that’s pretty normal.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re a Catholic, right?”
That’s what’s listed on my dog tags. I wondered what Timhead was. Apathetic Protestant? I couldn’t tell him that. “Yeah, Father,” I said. “I’m Catholic.”
“You don’t have to talk to me about it, but you can talk to God.”
“Sure,” I said, polite. “Okay, Father.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “Prayer does a lot.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It sounded like a joke.
“Look, Father,” I said. “I’m not that much for praying.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“Father, I don’t even know if it’s that kid that’s messing with me.”
“What else is there?”
I looked out at the row of cans, the little trailers they give us to sleep in. What else was there? I knew how I was feeling. I wasn’t sure about Timhead. I decided to speak for myself. “Every time I hear an explosion, I’m like, That could be one of my friends. And when I’m on a convoy, every time I see a pile of trash or rocks or dirt, I’m like, That could be me. I don’t want to go out anymore. But it’s all there is. And I’m supposed to pray?”
“Yes.” He sounded so confident.
“MacClelland wore a rosary wrapped into his flak, Father. He prayed more than you.”
“Okay. What does that have to do with it?”
He stared at me. I started laughing.
“Why not?” I said. “Sure, Father, I’ll pray. You’re right. What else is there? Keep my fingers crossed? Get a rabbit’s foot, like Garza? I don’t even believe in that stuff, but I’m going crazy.”
“How so?”
I stopped smiling. “Like, I was on a convoy, stretched my arms out wide, and a minute later a bomb went off. Not in the convoy. Somewhere in the city. But I don’t stretch out like that anymore. And I patted the fifty, once, like a dog. And nothing happened that day. So now I do it every day. So, yeah, why not?”
“That’s not what prayer is for.”
“What?”
“It will not protect you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. “Oh,” I said.
“It’s about your relationship with God.”
I looked at the dirt. “Oh,” I said again.
“It will not protect you. It will help your soul. It’s for while you’re alive.” He paused. “It’s for while you’re dead, too, I guess.”
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