Redeployment(97)

“Thanks,” he says.

“I should go,” I say.

“You should,” he says.

I turn quickly, open the door, and step out into the oven air. I walk away slow, back straight, controlling my steps, and I walk with my right hand over my left, worrying at my wedding band, twisting it around my finger.

I’d told the gunny I would do it, so as I walk I work at my ring, getting it off my finger. It feels like bad voodoo, to put it with my dog tags. But I take them from around my neck, undo the snap clasp, slip the ring onto the chain, redo the clasp, and put the dog tags back around my neck. I can feel the metal of the ring against my chest.

I walk away, not paying attention to where my steps are leading me, passing under the palm trees lining the road around the Battle Square. I’m hungry, and it should be time for chow, but I don’t go that way. I go to the road by Fallujah Surgical and I stop.

It’s a squat, dull building, beige and beaten down by the brightness of the sun like everything else. There’s a smoke pit nearby and two Corpsmen are sitting there, talking and dragging on cigarettes, sending faint puffs of smoke into the air. I wait, looking at the building as if something incredible might emerge.

Nothing happens, of course. But there in the heat, standing before Fallujah Surgical, I remember the cooler air of the morning two days before. We’d been going to chow, all of Gun Six, laughing and joking until Sergeant Deetz, who was yelling something about the Spartans being gay, stopped midsentence. He froze, then shifted, straightened to his full height, and whispered, “Ahhh-ten-HUT.”

We all snapped to attention, not knowing why. Sergeant Deetz raised his right hand in a salute, and so did we. Then I saw, off in the distance, well down the road, four Corpsmen coming out of Fallujah Surgical carrying a stretcher draped with the American flag. Everything was silent, still. All down the road, Marines and sailors had snapped to.

I could barely see it in the early morning light. I strained my eyes looking at the outline of the body under the thick fabric of the flag. And then the stretcher passed from view.

Now, standing there in the daytime, looking at the two Corpsmen in the smoke pit, I wonder if they’d been the ones carrying that body. They must have carried some.

Everyone standing on the road as the body went past had been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the Corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It’d been an image of death from another world. But now I know where that corpse was headed, to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would have gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


This book could not exist without the work of a large group of people who have been incredibly generous with their time. Foremost are the people who read and gave me extensive feedback on every story and as such have had a tremendous influence on the shape of this book. I generally gave early drafts to Christopher Robinson, then to Lauren Holmes and Roy Scranton. After they’d finished, I’d send newer versions to Patrick Blanchfield and my wife, Jessica Alvarez. And then finally it went to my incredible editor at The Penguin Press, Andrea Walker, who had a fine-tuned sense for what I wanted to accomplish. These stories would not be worth reading without all of their intelligence and insight.

I also received intensely valuable input, be it through editing stories or helping with technical details or simply through sharing war stories, from Ellah Allfrey, Carmiel Banasky, Vincent Biagi, S J, Anna Bierhaus, Peter Carey, Kevin Carmody, Bill Cheng, Scott Cheshire, John Davis, Alex Derichemont, Wayne Edmiston, Nathan Englander, Eric Fair, Matt Gallagher, Michael Green, Thomas Griffith, Jonathan Gurfein, Jason Hansman, Josh Hauser, Ryan-Daniel Healy, David Imbert, Mariette Kalinowski, Andrew Kalwitz, Gavin Kovite, Molly Wallace Kovite, Jess Lacher, Christopher Lindahl, Matt Mellina, Colum McCann, Patrick McGrath, Perry O’Brien, Evan Pettyjohn, Virginia Ramadan, Adam Schein, Carl Schillhammer, Jacob Siegel, Jeremy Warneke, Matt Weiss, and others.