Redeployment(44)

I turned back to Haupert, in the midst of his own sermon, a simple sermon but one buttressed by the experience of daily patrols. “What do we do?” Haupert was saying to the loose assembly of 2nd Platoon members. “We come here, we say, We’ll give you electricity. If you work with us. We’ll fix your sewage system. If you work with us. We’ll provide you security. If you work with us. But no better friend, no worse enemy. If you f*ck with us, you will live in shit. And they’re like, Okay, we’ll live in shit.” He pointed off to the direction of the city, then swatted with his hand, as if at an insect. “Fuck them,” he said.





? ? ?


I retreated back to the chapel, which was where Rodriguez found me. I was organizing all our candy in the walk-in closet off to the side, stacks of candy and jerky and Beanie Babies sent by grateful Americans to the troops, care packages I often ended up distributing to the platoons. Chaplains receive more care packages addressed to “Any Marine” than we know what to do with, but the excess can be useful because coming to get goodies is one inconspicuous way Marines can talk to the chaplain without announcing to their unit that they have an issue.

Rodriguez entered the small space silently. He didn’t have the same level of intensity as the first time we talked, though it was there, in his eyes and in his hands, in the way he couldn’t just stand still but had to always move. They say that on patrol in Ramadi, you don’t walk, you run.

“You know what we were doing,” he asked, “when Fuji got shot?”

“No.”

“Nobody does,” he said. He looked around suspiciously, as if someone might break in on us. “Nobody thought I should talk to you,” he said. “What’s a f*cking Chaps gonna say? What’s anybody gonna say? You know nobody respects chaplains, right?”

“Their mistake.”

“I respect priests,” he said. “Most priests. Not the little-boy f*ckers. You ain’t a little-boy f*cker, right?”

Rodriguez was testing me. “Why? Are you?” I said. I folded my arms and made a point of sizing him up, giving him a look to let him know I wasn’t impressed. Normally I’d be more aggressive, maybe even pull rank, but I couldn’t after a memorial service.

Rodriguez held up a hand. “I respect priests,” he said again. “Not the faggots and the boy f*ckers, but, you know, priests.”

Rodriguez looked around and took a breath.

“You know we get hit like every f*cking day,” he said.

“I know you’ve got a violent part of the city.”

“Every day. Shit, they used to come at us in the Government Center three times a week. Suicide assaults. Crazy. It’d end with air strikes on Battleship Gray or Swiss Cheese. Allah’s f*cking Waiting Rooms. Killing motherf*ckers. And you go out on the street, you go on a raid. You stop for a minute too long, you’re getting lit the f*ck up.”

His face contorted into one of those quick snarls of rage I’d seen before. “You remember Wayne?” he said. “Wayne Bailey? You remember him?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. I made a point of remembering the full names of all the dead. And Bailey was one of the fallen I’d actually interacted with before he died. That made it easier.

“We were checking on a f*cking school. And they made us stay. We’re on the radio telling them we gotta go and they’re like, No, stay there. We’re like, We stay here too long, something’s got to happen. But the Iraqis are late and we got to follow orders. And there’s a group of kids and the first RPG lands smack in the group of kids.”

I could remember seeing the ComCam photos. I’d seen sick and dying children before, but that had shaken me. It’s strange how a child’s hand is so easily identifiable as a child’s hand, even without a frame of reference for size or a recognizable body for it to be attached to.

“Then Wayne gets hit. Doc was pounding his chest and I was holding his nose, doing rescue breathing.”

Wayne, everybody said, was a popular man in the platoon.

“My last deployment,” Rodriguez said, “IEDs, IEDs, IEDs. Here there’s still IEDs, but them suicide assaults are coming every week. We’re getting shot at every week. More firefights than any unit I ever heard of. And Captain Boden, he puts up a board listing all the different squads. The Most Contact Board.”

Rodriguez lifted a tightly clenched fist to his face and looked down, baring his teeth. “The Most Contact Board,” he said again. “You get a hash mark every firefight. IEDs don’t count. Even if somebody dies. Just firefights. And it’s like, whoever has the most contact, they get respect. ’Cause they been through the most shit. You can’t argue with that.”