Redeployment(91)

I wait for more, but nothing’s coming.

“Well then,” I say, “that’s what it looks like. At least, to shoot a bad guy.”

He looks at the screen again. “Nah.”

“But that’s an actual firefight.”

“Fuck, dude,” he says. “Whatever.”

“That’s a f*cking video camera shooting an actual f*cking firefight.”

He looks at the screen for a long time. “Camera’s not the same,” he says, and he taps his head and smiles at me crooked.

I look back at the screen, which has recommendations for other videos, mostly war related, though for whatever reason one of them is a screenshot of some Japanese writing and a cartoon squid.

“I’d never let them put a camera on me,” he says.

His skin is waxy, sallow. I want to ask if Vockler had an open casket or if his body was too damaged, though of course I can’t.

“Iraq,” I say instead. “What do you think? Did we win?”

“Uhh… we did okay,” he says, looking at the screen of combat videos and one cartoon squid.

The first time I met Boylan, he was in his Alphas and the Bronze Star with the V was right there on his chest for anybody to see. I’d gone and looked it up immediately, but now I can’t remember exactly what it had been for. Boylan hadn’t meant much to me then, and the citation wasn’t as exciting or clear as Deme’s, since for Boylan it’d been a slow accumulation of minor heroic actions taken over the course of a long and hellish day, rather than the sort of intense crucible that makes for great drama. At least he got it, though. Vockler died in an IED, like the majority of combat casualties in these wars, a death that doesn’t offer a story younger Marines can read and get inspired by. IEDs don’t let you be a hero. That’s what makes Deme so important. The cold, hard courage that sends veterans like Vockler back to war is not what makes teenagers join the Corps in the first place. Without the rare stories like Deme’s, who’d sign up?

Eventually, Boylan is sleeping on my floor and I’m sitting by his side, drinking whiskey slow and envying him from the depths of my noncombat heart. I don’t know why. He’s not proud of his Bronze Star. He refuses to tell the story. “It was a bad day,” is the most I’ve ever heard from him. I don’t even know what it is he has that I want. I just know I want it. And he’s right here in front of me, close enough that I’ve spilled whiskey on him twice.

Agamben speaks of the difference between men and animals being that animals are in thrall to stimuli. Think a deer in the headlights. He describes experiments where scientists give a worker bee a source of nectar. As it imbibes, they cut away its abdomen, so that instead of filling the bee up, the nectar falls out through the wound in a trickle that pours as fast as the bee drinks. You’d think the bee might change its behavior in response, but it doesn’t. It keeps happily sucking away at the nectar and will continue indefinitely, enthralled by one stimulus—the presence of nectar—until released by another—the sensation of satiety. But that second stimulus never comes—the wound keeps the bee drinking until it finally starves.

I splash a little more whiskey on Boylan, halfway hoping he’ll wake up.





TEN KLIKS SOUTH




This morning our gun dropped about 270 pounds of ICM on a smuggler’s checkpoint ten kliks south of us. We took out a group of insurgents and then we went to the Fallujah chow hall for lunch. I got fish and lima beans. I try to eat healthy.

At the table, all nine of us are smiling and laughing. I’m still jittery with nervous excitement over it, and I keep grinning and wringing my hands, twisting my wedding band about my finger. I’m sitting next to Voorstadt, our number one guy, and Jewett, who’s on the ammo team with me and Bolander. Voorstadt’s got a big plate of ravioli and Pop-Tarts, and before digging in, he looks up and down the table and says, “I can’t believe we finally had an arty mission.”

Sanchez says, “It’s about time we killed someone,” and Sergeant Deetz laughs. Even I chuckle, a little. We’ve been in Iraq two months, one of the few artillery units actually doing artillery, except so far we’ve only shot illumination missions. The grunts usually don’t want to risk the collateral damage. Some of the other guns in the battery had shot bad guys, but not us. Not until today. Today, the whole damn battery fired. And we know we hit our target. The lieutenant told us so.