Redeployment(63)

“Was he alive?” Zara asked.

“The corpse?” I said. “If he was, it wasn’t for long. The little Marine put me back on the optic and it did look darker. That’s what I told them. And the corporal told the little Marine he did good, while I stared into the scope and tried to see the life going out of him. Or the heat, I guess. It happens so slow. Sometimes I’d ask the little Marine if he wanted to look, but he never did. He was an unusual sort of Marine. The adrenaline was fading and he was just left with this thing he’d done, and he didn’t want to watch.”

We took in the late afternoon for a moment.

“So that’s yours now,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You watched him die.”

“Just the heat signature,” I said.

“That’s yours now,” she repeated. “You took it from him so he wouldn’t have to watch.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither of us had used the hookah in a while, so I grabbed the hose and started pulling smoke into my lungs.

“And now you’re telling me,” she said.

I blew out smoke.

“Why are you telling me this?” she said.

“You asked me how I could kill my people,” I said.

“And what?”

I put down the hose and she picked it up. I didn’t have a real answer for her, and now that I’d told the story, I didn’t feel I’d actually told her anything at all. I think she knew it, too, that the story hadn’t been enough, that something was missing and neither of us knew how to find it.

“Who do you think he was?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The guy that Marine shot,” she said.

I shrugged. “Some kid,” I said. “A stupid death. That’s what we were out there to prevent.”

She let out smoke in a slow, sensual way, but her face looked concerned. Upset. “What do you mean, ‘prevent’?”

“I was PsyOps,” I said. “Psychological Operations. I was supposed to tell the Iraqis how to not get themselves killed. And I actually spoke the language, so it was me on those loudspeakers, not a translator.”

“Right,” she said. “You spoke Arabic growing up.”

I shook my head. “Egyptian Arabic,” I said. “The soaps and the movies mean a lot of non-Egyptians understand it, but still, it’s different.”

She nodded. “I knew that.”

“The Army didn’t,” I said. “My unit thought they’d hit the jackpot. They didn’t even have to send me to language school. I tried to argue that they should, but then Sergeant Cortez came back from Monterrey speaking Modern Standard Arabic and I realized that U.S. Army mental retardation was a general problem.”

“So what, you learned Iraqi on your own?”

“Yeah, I got books from an office friend of my father’s,” I said. “And I’d go out and tell the Iraqis what was what. These imams were up there getting everybody excited, telling them to fight us. And the teenagers ate that shit up. You’d have a bunch of kids with no military training who’d seen too many American action movies try to go Rambo. It was crazy. An untrained kid against a Marine squad in camouflaged positions with marked fields of fire?”

“But of course that’s gonna happen,” she said, “when you send an army through a city.”

“We tried to limit the damage. The generals had a bunch of meetings with the imams and sheikhs to tell them, ‘Stop sending your stupid f*cking kids against us, we’re just going to kill them.’ But it wouldn’t change anything.”

“In their eyes the problem wasn’t the kids,” she said.

“Things were crazy then. And we were f*cking that city up.”

“I’ve read there were hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians killed.”

“There was propaganda on both sides. But I was trying to help people avoid getting killed. And not everybody was kids.”

“But a good number were.”

“Some,” I said. “That one I saw fade, it was a small body. Hard to tell. But I always think, That was one I was supposed to save.”

“Save?” she said. “By convincing him not to fight the soldiers invading his home?”

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “It was such bullshit. The Marines would be sitting there waiting, hoping some dumb muj would make a suicide assault. Nobody wants to be the guy in the squad who hasn’t killed anybody, and nobody joins the Marine Corps to avoid pulling triggers.”