Redeployment(96)

The Marine at the desk turns around and takes off his headphones, looking up at me, confused. I look for chevrons on his collar and see he’s a gunnery sergeant, but he seems far older than most gunnys. A trim white mustache sits on his lip and he has a white fuzz of hair over the ears, but the rest of his head is shiny and bald. As he squints up to look at me, the skin around his eyes scrunches into wrinkles. He’s fat, too. Even through the uniform, I can tell. They say PRP is all reservists, no active duty undertakers in the Marine Corps, and he looks like a reservist for sure.

“Can I help you, Lance Corporal?” he says. There’s a soft, southern drawl in his voice.

I stand there looking at him, my mouth open, and the seconds tick by.

Then the old gunny’s face softens and he leans forward and says, “Did you lose someone, son?”

It takes me a second to figure it out. “No,” I say. “No. No no no. No.”

He looks at me, confused, and arches an eyebrow.

“I’m an artilleryman,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

We look at each other.

“We had a mission today. Target was ten kliks south of here?” I look at him, hoping he’ll get it. I feel constricted by the narrow hallway, with the desk squeezed in and the fat old gunny looking at me quizzically.

“Okay?” he says.

“It was my first mission like that… .”

“Okay?” he says again. He leans forward and squints up at me, like if he gets a better look, he’ll know what the hell I’m talking about.

“I mean, I’m from Nebraska. From Ord, Nebraska. We don’t do anything in Ord.” I’m fully aware I sound like an idiot.

“You all right, Lance Corporal?” The old gunny looks at me intently, waiting. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass by now. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass as soon as I walked through the door, waltzing into someplace I didn’t belong. But this gunny, maybe because he’s a reservist, maybe because he’s old, maybe because he’s fat, just looks up and waits for me to get out what I need to say.

“I just never killed anybody before.”

“Neither have I,” he says.

“But I did. I think. I mean, we just shot the rounds off.”

“Okay,” he says. “So why’d you come here?”

I look at him helplessly. “I thought, maybe, you’d been out there. And seen what we’d done.”

The old gunny leans back in his chair and purses his lips tight. “No,” he says.

He takes a breath and lets it out slow.

“We handle U.S. casualties. Iraqis take care of their own. Only time I see enemy dead is when they pass in a U.S. med facility. Like Fallujah Surgical.” He waves his hand in the general direction of the base hospital. “Besides, TQ’s got a PRP section. They’d probably have handled anything in that AO.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“We didn’t have anything like that today.”

“Okay,” I say.

“You’ll be all right,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, Gunny.”

I stand there, looking at him for a second. Then I look down at all the closed doors in the hallway, doors with nothing behind them. On the computer screen behind the gunny, a group of women drink pink martinis.

“You married, Lance Corporal?” The gunny is looking at my hands, at my wedding band.

“Yeah,” I say. “About two months now.”

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Nineteen.”

He nods, then sits there as though turning some hard thing over in his mind. Right when I’m about to take my leave, he says, “Here’s something you could do for me. Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure, Gunny.”

He points at my wedding band. “Take that off and put it on the chain with your dog tags.” He scoops at the chain around his own neck with two fingers and pulls out his dog tags to show me. There, hanging next to the two metal tabs with his kill data, is a gold ring. “Okay?…

“We need to collect personal effects,” he says, putting his dog tags back in his shirt. “For me, the hardest thing is taking off the wedding rings.”

“Oh.” I take a step back.

“Can you do that?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, “I can do that.”