My heart jumps out of my chest, but I keep my shit together. Stop dead, back against the wall. Look up to the rooftops, look in windows. Shooter couldn’t be this close, but there could be another one. They know we’re here. Maybe knew all along and were just waiting. That thought must have come. Valancia would be shitting his pants. This was his first real mission, and he was a little bit of a pussy. We keep moving.
The session would go on like this until we got to the place where the bomb went off. We had an actual image of that street and the red doorway where he and Hector Valancia were found. The marines did not find any debris indicating where the bomb had been hidden. There was speculation that it had been cleared before they arrived. It had taken close to twenty minutes to secure the area. They were both presumed dead.
“There are people on the street. You’re getting close to the red door. The red door is the location of the insurgent you’ve come to capture or kill. It’s just you and Valancia now. Six men are down. The marines are on the way.”
Valancia’s telling me to pull back. I know he is. I can picture him, his face. He’d be tugging at my sleeve, saying something like, “This is no good, man. No good.”
“Let’s be clear, though. You don’t remember him saying that, but it’s likely he would have wanted to leave.”
Yeah. More than likely. We’d been in there for five minutes, and we had six men down. Valancia would cut and run. I know what I’d be thinking.
“What is that?”
Kill this motherfucker or die trying.
“And Valancia would follow you?”
Sean would pause here, close his eyes, and swallow it down. Yeah. He would follow me. And then he would get his fucking head blown off.
We would go through the data we had, reliving each moment the best we could. Looking for these memories, these files, was maddening at times. It was like looking for lost car keys in a cluttered house. You retrace your steps, try to recall the last time you used them. You tear up the place, looking under couch cushions and carpets and in the pockets of every jacket and pair of pants. Sometimes we found traces, the equivalent of loose change. He remembered Valancia tripping in a small hole along the dirt road. And the smell of meat cooking, though he could not recall looking for its source, something he surely would have done. An open window, perhaps. But the big event had evaded him. Evaded us. At least with car keys, you know they didn’t “vanish into thin air.” With Sean’s memories, and later Jenny’s, there was always that possibility, and so we never knew when it was time to stop and give up the search. I will just say that the process of looking seemed to help both of them, and this made it easier to continue the work.
There were fifteen seconds between Sean’s radio report that they had a visual on the red door and the next communication. That second report, the last one, indicated that there were seven civilians in the street, women, children, old men. Sean said this would have made him extremely nervous. That he would have been tempted to turn back then.
I would have thought it was off, you know. Every other street empty after the sound of the gunfire. But on this street, the street where our target was supposedly hiding, no one’s afraid? Mothers don’t bring their babies inside? Even after they see us, they don’t run and hide? I reported it, so I must have seen it. And if I saw it, I would have thought about leaving.
“Would you have? Or would you have died trying to kill that motherfucker?”
This was the question he couldn’t answer. His conscience wanted to believe that he had tried to retreat; that he hadn’t let his ego and his anger at knowing these people had killed six men in his unit cloud his judgment and put Valancia’s life on the line. That he would have considered his wife and son and even the war, because surely he was not going to get inside and complete his mission if they knew he was coming. He would be another dead soldier to drag through the street. A dead soldier can’t fight. Yet, he could feel himself charging for that door, screaming and firing his gun and not caring how many of those people he killed. He could feel that rage. And he had been found there, by that door and not several yards away.
We were stuck in this place, and I became convinced that it was this place we needed to stay in until he remembered enough to know what had happened. Would he have to learn to forgive himself for leading Valancia into a death trap? Or would he have to learn to live with his decision to retreat, and not take out some of the insurgents who had killed his friends? I came to believe that his anger, his rage at his wife and son, was grounded in guilt. He felt unworthy of being loved, of having these gifts, and so being with them triggered self-hatred. Without knowing, without remembering, the “ghosts” would keep roaming.