Redeployment(40)

I was like, Jesus. All right. Well, thanks, Dad. That was helpful.

We didn’t keep drinking much beyond that. Dad was too drunk to even sit right. Before I brought him to his bed, he mumbled to me about being careful and gave me a tiny metal cross, the sort you’d wear on a necklace. He said it carried him through Vietnam. A few weeks later I was overseas.





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We weren’t in Iraq long before I told Old Man my dad’s story. In the team, Old Man was the one you’d go to with things like that. West, our team leader, would have thought badly of me. With West, you were either a hundred percent or you were a piece of shit. Old Man was different. He’d joined the Corps late in life, so he had age and, we thought, wisdom. When I told him, all Old Man did was laugh and say, “Yep. In Vietnam they had whores. I guess that’s one thing they had over us.”

I thought about that the first time I jerked off in a sandstorm. Being nineteen and seven months without getting laid makes you all kinds of crazy. I thought about it again when West died, and Old Man said he wished to God he knew where the Iraqi whorehouses were, ’cause he’d get himself a big fat whore who’d let him cry into her tits.

But we didn’t know where the whores were, and that convinced me we didn’t know anything about Haditha. In training we’d learned to observe our environment, get the rhythms of city life. A man who walks this way every day is suddenly avoiding a particular street, an unusually tall woman you’ve never seen before strolls through the market in a hijab and people get out of her way. A bunch of kids that used to play soccer in a dirt patch near the road don’t play there anymore. I spent so much time looking at women through scopes. Sometimes I’d switch from eye to eye, closing one and then the other. Look at women through my bare eye. Look at women through the sights. Human, animal, human, animal. Me and my dad used to hunt.

But I never scratched the surface. I never had a chance to look at a woman and think, There is a whore.

First Platoon, though, in Kilo Company, we were sure they’d found a place. They got herpes all at once, and we thought, That’s it. They’re going on patrols and visiting a brothel when they’re supposed to be meeting sheikhs and drinking tea.

Who would have done that, in those days, violent as things were? Only a crazy person. But half of them were at the BAS with their dicks oozing. They had to be f*cking somebody. And the one thing everybody wanted to know was, Where is it? Where is it? I’ll wear a condom, I’ll be fine. But none of them said a word. They’d get mad, tell us to f*ck off. I cornered one of the guys, this shifty-looking PFC. I told him, Everybody knows what you’re doing, we just want to know where. He told me if I didn’t quit asking, he’d face f*ck me with his KA-BAR. I left him alone after that. I wasn’t really serious anyway.

We shouldn’t have bothered. The next day, the CO had all the herp cases called to the BAS and the doc said, “All right, guys, where’s the whores? You ain’t leaving till we figure out this goddamn dick epidemic.”

They all looked at the ground and their faces turned red, and after a while one of them finally admitted, “Doc. Ain’t no whores. We been sharing a pocket *.”

“Jesus,” said the doc. “Clean the f*cking thing out, boys.” And he got that platoon issued a pallet of hand sanitizer as a joke. For the rest of us, we had something to laugh about the next couple days.

Then the mortar attack came where the mortars wouldn’t f*cking stop, mortar after mortar after mortar, and we just cowered there, wondering, Aren’t we getting place of origin on these f*cks? Isn’t somebody targeting them? West was still alive, then, and he started praying, freaking everyone out because you’d hear, “O Lord in heaven—” Boom. “Forgive us, God, us sinners—” Boom. “Sinners—” Boom. “West! Shut the f*ck up!” Boom.

No injuries, and afterward I had an erection that could bust concrete. So hard, it hurt. And I went up to the roof, and Flores was up there with Old Man, and they looked the other way while I jerked off on the roof, looking out at Haditha, wondering, Is there a sniper out there, scoping in to shoot me, dick in hand?

At first I put some tits in my brain and the idea of me f*cking someone, anyone, but toward the end my mind was blank, just me scratching an itch, and I heard small-arms fire off in another section of the city and I kept jerking, faster and faster, almost coming with the thought floating in, as it always did when I heard gunfire, that maybe somebody I knew was dying.