Redeployment(53)

“I don’t know if any of you know Wilfred Owen. He was a soldier who died in the First World War, a war that killed soldiers by the hundreds of thousands. Owen was a strange sort. A poet. A warrior. A homosexual. And as tough a man as any Marine I’ve ever met. In World War One, Owen was gassed. He was blown in the air by a mortar and lived. He spent days in one position, under fire, next to the scattered remains of a fellow officer. He received the Military Cross for killing enemy soldiers with a captured enemy machine gun and rallying his company after the death of his commander. And this is what he wrote about training soldiers for the trenches. These are, by the way, new soldiers. They hadn’t seen combat yet. Not like he had.

“Owen writes: ‘For 14 hours yesterday I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirsts until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.’”

I looked up from my sermon and looked hard at the audience, which was looking hard back at me.

“We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.”

I felt flushed, triumphant, but my sermon hadn’t gone over well. A number of Marines didn’t come up for Communion. Afterward, as I was gathering the leftover Eucharist, my RP turned to me and said, “Whoa, Chaps. That got a bit real.”





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Our fifteenth casualty was from Charlie. Nikolai Levin. The Marines were enraged, not only because of the death, but because the sergeant major had told them it was Levin’s fault.

“I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to keep Marines alive,” the sergeant major said, haranguing the men only a few days afterward, “and the fact of the matter is, when a Marine comes in and he wasn’t wearing his PPE when he was hit, because it’s hot, and he doesn’t want to wear it while he’s at the OP, I’m the one who’s got to say the thing nobody wants to say.”

Levin had been hit in the neck. PPE wouldn’t have helped. But I guess the sergeant major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I’d seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces, His fingers deep into the sides of the world.





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By the end of the deployment, we had well over a hundred men injured. Sixteen total dead. George Dagal was the first. Then Roger Francis Ford. Johnny Ainsworth. Wayne Wallace Bailey. Edgardo Ramos. William James Hewitt. Hayward Toombs. Edward Victor Waits. Freddie Barca. Samuel Willis Sturdy. Sherman Dean Reynolds. Denton Tsakhia Fujita. Gerald Martin Vorencamp. Jean-Paul Sepion. Nikolai Levin. Then what we thought would be the last: Jeffrey Steven Lopinto.

I went through their names over and over on the flight back, a sort of prayer for the dead. We touched down and were processed. I watched the Marines hug their parents, kiss their wives or girlfriends, and hold their children. I wondered what they would tell them. How much would be told and how much could never be told.

My biggest duty stateside was planning the memorial service for all sixteen. I struggled to write out something satisfactory to say. How could I express what those deaths meant? I didn’t know myself. In the end, yielding to exhaustion, I wrote an inoffensive little nothing, full of platitudes. The perfect speech for the occasion, actually. The ceremony wasn’t about me. Better to serve my function and pass unnoticed.





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Jason Peters succumbed to his injuries two months after the service, bringing the list of the dead to seventeen. Those who’d visited Peters generally agreed this was a good thing. He was missing both hands and one leg. The IED had burned off his eyelids, so he had goggles on that misted his eyes every few seconds. His body was in a mesh, his kidneys had failed, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and he went through constant fevers. There was little indication Peters had much awareness of his surroundings, and those who’d seen him couldn’t talk about it without going into a rage. His family had taken him off all life support, had the doctors give him an IV drip, and let him die with some measure of dignity.