Redeployment(67)

“Propaganda is sophisticated,” I said. “It’s not just pamphlets and posters. As a PsyOps specialist, as anything in the Army, you’re part of a weapons system. Language is a technology. They trained me to use it to increase my unit’s lethality. After all, the Army’s an organization built around killing people. But you’re not like an infantryman. You can’t think about the enemy as nothing but an enemy. A hajji. A gook. A bad guy needing a bullet. You’ve got to get inside their heads.”

The night had come in force while we talked, and there was a full moon lying low in the sky. The streets were quiet. I felt close to her because she’d listened, and I’d told everything straight, pretty much, with a minimum of artifice. It made me want to go further, but that would require careful packaging.

“You know,” I said, “I lied to you before. A little.”

“How?”

“I did kill people.”

She was very still.

“I didn’t shoot anybody, but I was definitely responsible.”

The two of us let that hang in the air for a while.

“The last person I told this to was my dad,” I said. “It got me kicked out of the house.”

Zara looked down at her hands, folded in front of her, then up at me. She gave a little smile. “Well, I couldn’t get you kicked out of here if I tried.”

“And you sure have,” I said.

She shook her head. “It wasn’t a formal complaint,” she said. “My friends wanted me to make a formal complaint, but all I wanted was for you to have to listen. You’re not very good at that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly.”

She shrugged. “Tell your story.”

“I was in the Battle of Fallujah,” I said. “We did a lot of crazy stuff there. We’d play shit just to f*ck with the muj. Real loud Eminem and AC/DC and Metallica. Especially when they’d try to coordinate over their own loudspeakers. We’d play shit to drown them out, hurt their command and control. Sometimes we’d roll up to a position and play the Predator chuckle. You ever see that movie?”

“No.”

“It’s this deep, creepy, evil laugh. Even the Marines didn’t like it. We’d have something going on all the time. And the muj would play shit, too. Prayers and songs. There was one that cracked me up. It was like, ‘We fight under the slogan Allahu Akbar. We have a date with death, and we’re going to get our heads chopped off.’”

“Very poetic,” she said.

“It was horrible. There was gunfire and explosions and the mosques blaring messages and Arabic music and we were blaring Drowning Pool and Eminem. The Marines started calling it Lalafallujah. A music festival from hell.”

“In a city,” she said, “filled with people.”

“But it wasn’t just music,” I said. “The Marines, they’d compete to find the dirtiest insults they could think of. And then we’d go scream over the loudspeakers, taunting holed-up insurgents until they’d come running out of the mosques, all mad, and we’d mow them down.”

“Out of the mosques?” she said.

“You’re in this crazy city, death everywhere, and you see a lieutenant go to his men, as if it was the most serious thing in the world, and ask, ‘Do we go with, “You suck your mothers’ cocks,” or, “You f*ck dogs and eat the shit of children”?’”

“Really? Out of the mosques?” she said again.

“Sure,” I said. “What? Are you kidding me?”

She shook her head. “So how did you kill people?” she said.

“The insults,” I said. “And of everything we did, that got the most satisfying feedback. I mean, the muj would charge and we’d listen as the Marines mowed them down. Sergeant Hernandez called it ‘Jedi mind trick shit.’”

“Okay,” she said.

“It’s brilliant,” I said.

“Unless your average schoolyard bully is brilliant,” she said, “it’s not. But I get why it worked.”

“Worked almost too well. We spent the next couple months trying to get the same f*cks we’d riled up to stop charging because a lot of them were just teenagers. Marines don’t like killing children. It f*cks them up in the head.”

“What’d it do to you?” she said.

“I feel good about what I’ve done,” I said.