Via Dolorosa(67)
Hidenfelter, lacing his boots, voiced, “I’m going to drink whatever booze I can get my filthy little hands on. I’m gonna drink it till my eyeballs are floating.”
“Cheesecake,” said Myles Granger.
“I’m gonna get laid,” Karuptka volunteered. “I’m gonna get laid like a dog who’s been chained for a month to a post. Then,” he went on, “I’ll hit some of that booze with you, Oris, man. Get my eyeballs floating, too.”
Some of them laughed.
They departed for recon, which amputated them from the 44-man platoon. Their objective rally point established them just outside the city of Fallujah. There were six of them in the team, and Nick had requested Oris Hidenfelter, their seasoned sergeant, commit to the recon. Nick had personally selected all of them in his head some time ago. When the time came, he had summoned each of them individually. War, it seemed, was nothing more than an alternating succession of collectivity and individualism.
They crossed into the city in the midst of daylight. It already reeked of gunpowder. Marines had preceded them by two full days to this point of the city…but that did not mean the city was safe and clean. The cities were never truly safe and clean, no matter how many men soldiered through them. There were always nests. You could never pause and breathe deep because nothing was ever safe and clean.
It was a slow, tedious campaign. Typically, the high road found Nick and one or two other men moving up, flank-side, searching for dens of insurgents. High roads were particularly dangerous. This part of the city had not evacuated, even after all the damage caused by the battle between insurgents and the Marines. There were still families here—still dirty children in filthy, faded clothing in the streets. Many houses had been reduced to rubble; dead animals, mostly dogs and goats, were landmarks throughout the hike toward the center of the village. On occasion, a few brave boys from the village would, with surprising little trepidation, approach the men, large, dark eyes with thick, full lashes powdered with debris, their hair filthy with the accumulation of so much dust and dirt and garbage and ruin. Many of the soldiers would ignore them; a few others would occasionally flick a hand at them, warding them off before they got too close. Karuptka would shoo them away like cats around a heap of garbage, baring his teeth behind lifted lips and dark, purple gums.
Nick saw her first. He saw her ahead of them—saw her emerge directly from a rundown hovel and hasten to articulate through the solid mass of crumbled debris that littered the gutters and side-streets. He watched her approach, a frantic look on her face (what he could see of her face, anyway, masked behind a partially shorn-away burka), and right away he knew this would not be good—that any one of these natives moving so quickly with any such look on their face could not be a good thing. He could see no weapons on her, but that did not discount the very real possibility that she could have explosives strapped to her body beneath her burka.
“You seeing this?” Nick said quickly to Hidenfelter, who stood directly to his right. “Lady! Lady!” Of course, it was useless to try and communicate with any of them. Even Myles Granger, who could speak the language, was useless here for the most part. They saw your uniforms and saw your Western eyes, Western face, Western nose and mouth and skin, and it did not matter what language you spoke, because to them, all Americans were the same breed of foreigner, bringing guns and ammunition and tanks and fighters into their cities and streets.
The woman did not even seem to hear or see either him or Hidenfelter; she continued moving past them along the side of the street. A few other women from the village, equally agitated but slightly more composed, attempted to wrangle her back out of the street and away from the marching soldiers, but this lone woman would not listen. She was bent on something—bent on moving forward, bent on completing her task, whatever that task might be. She continued down the length of the guttered street, her fast moving feet kicking up and stirring the smells of the dead and swollen and bloated things in the rubble. Then, at one point, as they continued to march on, she paused and began crying in hysterics. The men all kept a cautious, distrustful eye on her, though many tried not to make it so obvious. They just all continued to move along. The woman’s moans could be heard over anything else, even their footfalls, crunching the ancient powder in the streets of this holy land ravaged by war. Brazen, uninhibited, the woman actually reached out for one of the men. Nick and Oris Hidenfelter turned, their guns leveled on her. The man—an Italian kid named Angelino—pulled his arm away from her, his face white and emotionless beneath his pitted helmet. But the woman would not relent: she cried out to Angelino, who refused to acknowledge her beyond that single rejection of his arm (though it was clear, very clear, that her moans hurt him and maybe even confused him a little, too). Myles Granger moved past her next; again, she reached out, pleadingly, sobbing while two other masked women appeared behind her and at her shoulders, holding her back. Another woman, too afraid to step into the street so close to them, cried out angrily, rattling off a series of nonsensical gibberish. They were angry; they were frightened.
“Get her out of here!” Nick yelled back to them. He had paused in his stride and stood, waving a single arm at the men. “Angelino! Bowerman! Get her the hell out of the street!”
The woman grabbed Myles Granger’s arm, and the boy froze. The strap of his rifle slid slightly down the length of his shoulder. He stared at the woman, who cried inches from his face. She was not speaking words—not really, not at first—and Granger looked like he could not move. He looked frightened.