Redeployment(14)

“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.”





? ? ?


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.





? ? ?


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.





? ? ?


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 f*ck-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 f*ck 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 f*ck 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 f*cked with this country.” I realized, a second too late, I’d used profanity with a priest.

“What’s f*cked?” 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.