Redeployment(49)

“This is f*cking pointless,” he told me.

The lance corporal wasn’t Catholic, nor was he in need of religious counseling. He came to me when Combat Stress refused to give him what he needed—a ticket out of Iraq. I couldn’t give it to him either, but I tried.

“What’s pointless?”

“This whole f*cking thing. What are we doing? We go down a street, get IED’d, the next day go down the same street and they’ve IED’d it again. It’s like, just keep going till you all die.”

He stared at me without breaking eye contact. I thought of Captain Boden.

When I asked him why he felt the way he did, I got a long list. Since the deaths of two of his friends six weeks before, he’d been having mood swings, angry outbursts. He’d been punching walls, finding it impossible to sleep unless he quadrupled the maximum recommended dosage of sleeping pills, and when he did sleep he had nightmares about the deaths of his friends, about his own death, about violence. It was a pretty complete PTSD checklist—intense anxiety, sadness, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and, most powerfully, an overwhelming feeling of utter helplessness.

“I know I won’t make it out of combat alive,” he said. “Every day, I have no choice. They send me to get myself killed. It’s f*cking pointless.”

I tried to get him to talk about positive things, things that he liked, to determine if there was anything he was holding on to. Anything keeping him on the good side of sane.

“The only thing I want to do is kill Iraqis,” he said. “That’s it. Everything else is just, numb it until you can do something. Killing hajjis is the only thing that feels like doing something. Not just wasting time.”

“Insurgents, you mean,” I said.

“They’re all insurgents,” he said. He could see I didn’t like that and got very agitated. “You,” he said, hateful, “you want to see something?”

He pulled out a camera and started flipping through photos. When he got to the one he wanted, he turned it around so I could see.

I braced myself for something terrible, but the frame only showed a small Iraqi child bending over a box. “That kid’s planting an IED,” he said. “Caught in the f*cking act. We blew it in place right after the kid left, because even Staff Sergeant Haupert didn’t want to round up a kid.”

“That boy can’t be older than five or six,” I said. “He couldn’t know what he was doing.”

“And that makes a difference to me?” he said. “I never know what I’m doing. Why we’re going out. What the point of it is. This photo, this was early on when I took this. Now, I’d have shot that f*cking kid. I’m mad I didn’t. If I caught that kid today, I’d f*cking hang him from the telephone wires outside his parents’ house and have target practice till there’s nothing left.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Besides, some of the other guys…” He paused. “There’s lots of reasons somebody’s al-Qaeda. He’s driving too slow. He’s driving too fast. I don’t like the look of the motherf*cker.”

After the meeting, I resolved that I’d do something. It wouldn’t be like with Rodriguez. I would push.

First I spoke with his platoon commander, Staff Sergeant Haupert. He informed me that Combat Stress had diagnosed the lance corporal with combat and operational stress reaction, which was common and not a condition recognized as an ailment or a reason to remove a Marine from a combat zone. Furthermore, he said, while the lance corporal talked tough, he performed his duties fine and I shouldn’t worry.

When I spoke to Boden and the first sergeant, I got the same. When I talked to Colonel Fehr, he asked me if I was a trained psychologist. When I talked to Combat Stress, they told me that if they sent home every Marine with COSR, there’d be nobody left to fight the war. “It’s a normal reaction to abnormal events,” they said. “Ramadi is full of abnormal events.”

Finally I talked to the chaplain at Regiment, a Presbyterian minister with a good head on his shoulders. He told me that if I really wanted to piss people off, I should put my concerns in an e-mail and send it to the responsible parties so there was a clear record in case anything went wrong.

“They’ll be more likely to play the CYA game if it’s in an e-mail.”

I sent an e-mail to the colonel, to Boden, to Haupert, and even to the docs at Combat Stress. Nobody responded.