Redeployment(18)

As I tell the story, the lieutenant colonel’s a large, arrogant bear of a man with fresh-pressed cammies and a short, tight mustache.

“He’s got huge hands,” I’d say. “And he comes up to us and says, ‘Here, Marine, let me help you with that.’ And without waiting for us to respond or warn him off, he reaches down and grabs the body bag.”

Then I’d describe how he launches up, as though he’s doing a clean and jerk. “He was strong, I’ll give him that,” I’d say. “But the bag rips on the edge of the truck’s back gate, and the skin of the hajji tears with it, a big jagged tear through the stomach. Rotting blood and fluid and organs slide out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag. Human soup hits him right in the face, running down his mustache.”

If I’m telling the story sad, I can stop there. If I’m telling it funny, though, there’s one more crucial bit, which Corporal G had done when he’d told the story to me for the first time, back in 2004, before either of us had collected remains or knew what we were talking about. I don’t know where G heard the story.

“The colonel screamed like a bitch,” G had said. And then he’d made a weird, high-pitched keening noise, deep in his throat, like a wheezing dog. This was to show us precisely how bitches scream when covered in rotting human fluids. If you get the noise right, you get a laugh.

What I liked about the story was that even if it had happened, more or less, it was still total bullshit. After our deployment there wasn’t anybody, not even Corporal G, who talked about the remains that way.

Some of the Mortuary Affairs Marines thought the spirits of the dead hung about the bodies. It’d creep them out. You could feel it, they’d say, especially when you look at the faces. But it got to be more than that. Midway through the deployment, guys started swearing they could feel spirits everywhere. Not just around the bodies, and not just Marine dead. Sunni dead, Shi’a dead, Kurd dead, Christian dead. All the dead of all Iraq, even all the dead of Iraqi history, the Akkadian Empire and the Mongols and the American invasion.

I never felt any ghosts. Leave a body in the sun, the outer layer of skin detaches from the lower, and you feel it slide around in your hands. Leave a body in water, everything swells, and the skin feels waxy and thick but recognizably human. That’s all. Except for me and Corporal G, though, everybody in Mortuary Affairs talked about ghosts. We never said any different.

In those days I used to think, Maybe I’d handle it better if Rachel’d stayed with me. I didn’t fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The smell of it gets into your skin. Putting down food is hard after processing, so by the end of the deployment we were gaunt from poor nutrition, sleep deprived from bad dreams, and shambling through base like a bunch of zombies, the sight of us reminding Marines of everything they know but never discuss.

And Rachel was gone. I’d seen it coming. She was a pacifist in high school, so once I signed my enlistment papers the thing we had going went on life support.

She would have been perfect. She was melancholy. She was thin. She always thought about death, but she didn’t get off on it like the goth kids. And I loved her because she was thoughtful and kind. Even now, I won’t pretend she was especially good-looking, but she listened, and there’s a beauty in that you don’t often find.

Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody, there’s a real community you don’t get in other places. If you’re like me, though, and you don’t fit in, it’s a prison. So our relationship was half boyfriend/girlfriend, half cell mates. For my sixteenth birthday, she blindfolded me and drove me twenty miles out of town, to a high point off the interstate where you could watch the roads stretch out forever across the plains toward all the places we’d rather be. She told me her gift was this, the promise to come back here with me someday and keep going. We were so close for two years, and then I signed up.

It was a decision she didn’t understand much more than I did. I wasn’t athletic. I wasn’t aggressive. I wasn’t even that patriotic.

“Maybe if you’d joined the Air Force,” she’d said. But I was tired of doing the weaker thing. And I knew that her talk about the future was just that, talk. She’d never leave. I didn’t want to stay with her, work in a veterinarian’s office, and be wistful. My ticket out of Callaway was what passed in our town for first class. The Marine Corps.