Redeployment(45)

“I suppose not.” Suffering, I thought, has always had its own mystique.

“Four months in, them suicide assaults stop coming. Hajjis got smart. We were chewing them up. And now it’s just IEDs. And Second Squad”—he slapped his chest—“my squad, we were the leaders. Not just in the platoon, in the whole f*cking company. Which means battalion, too. Probably the whole f*cking Corps. We were top. Most f*cking contact. Nobody could touch our shit.”

“And then…,” he said, and stopped for a second, as though to gather courage. “Attacks fall off. Our squad’s stats fall off, too. Staff Sergeant gave us shit for it.” Rodriguez scowled and then, imitating Haupert’s gruff, confident voice, said, “You pussies used to find the enemy.” He spat at the ground. “Whatever. Fuck that. Fuck firefights. Firefights are f*cking scary. I don’t get off on that shit.”

I nodded, trying to hold his eyes, but he looked away.

“What were you doing,” I said, “when Fujita got hit?”

Rodriguez looked around at the stacked-up care packages all around him. Our closet was crammed with rows of wooden shelves filled with M&M’s, Snickers bars, individually wrapped brownies, Entenmann’s cakes, and other goodies. Rodriguez dug his hand into a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pulled one out, inspecting it in his hand. “You know this is Sergeant Ditoro’s first deployment?” he said.

“No,” I said. I figured he was talking about his squad leader, though I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to stop his flow of words by asking.

“Embassy duty.” Rodriguez shook his head and tossed the candy back into the bag. Then he quickly wiped at his face. It took me a second to realize he was wiping away tears. In relation to what, I wasn’t sure. “You know, if I hadn’t been busted down after that DUI, I’d probably be leading this squad.”

“What happened,” I asked again, “when Fujita got hit?”

“About a month back,” he said, “Corporal Acosta was buzzing off Ambien. That shit gives you a body high, and it’s like being a little drunk. Maybe he’d taken something else, too.”

“He get Ambien from the Combat Stress team?”

Rodriguez laughed. “What you think?” He pulled a plastic sandwich bag full of little pink pills out of his cargo pockets and held it at eye level. “How you think any of us sleep?”

I nodded my head.

“We set up an OP,” he said, “and we just trash it. I mean, insurgents like to destroy any place we use as an OP anyway, so might as well go crazy. And Ditoro, he doesn’t have respect. Acosta, though, he’s good to go.”

“Even on drugs?”

Rodriguez kept going. “Last deployment, I saw what he did. Suicide bomb, and Acosta was helping wounded and the motherf*cker was on fire. He didn’t even realize. He was actually burning and he was running around helping wounded kids and shit. Man could have gotten a medical discharge, one hundred percent disability, but after burn unit he stayed in to do another deployment. Man’s got f*cking respect.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“So Ditoro ain’t saying shit to Acosta. And Acosta is buzzing. We’re not even looking and he strips to his underwear and Kevlar and goes out on the roof like that, dick hanging out, and he starts doing jumping jacks, screaming every Arabic curse word he knows.”

It wasn’t the craziest thing I’d heard of Marines doing.

Rodriguez smiled, his eyes dead. “They started shooting at us within five minutes.”

“Who’s they?” I said.

“What?”

“Who’s shooting at you?”

He shrugged. “Insurgents, I guess. I don’t know. Honestly, Chaps, I don’t care. They’re all the same to me. They’re all enemy.” He shrugged again. “We lit them f*ckers up. And we get back and it was, you know, another hash mark. On the Most Contact Board. We went out and found the enemy, instead of waiting for him to IED us. And our stats went up.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you did it again.”

“Sergeant Ditoro would make the junior Marines play rock-paper-scissors, see who goes.”

It was starting to make sense. “Fujita was a junior Marine.”

“When he got here,” he said, “Ditoro used to make him sing, ‘I am the new guy and I am f*cking gay.’” Rodriguez laughed. “It was funny as shit. Fuji took it well. He played the game. It’s why we liked him. But he didn’t like us setting up contact bait. He said it was f*cked up. That if it was his neighborhood, he’d take a shot at some * on the roof. But we did it anyway.”