Redeployment (11 page)

“What?” I said.

He pulled a blue baseball helmet out of the green bag and put it on my desk. “G. G. Goodwin wants a picture of kids playing baseball.”

•   •   •

The next two times
I went outside the wire, I went out with a baseball helmet, mitt, and bat. No uniforms in sight, though.

•   •   •

“I know what you’re doing,”
said Chris Roper over the phone, “and this bullshit is not going to stand.”

“What?”

“You want to push the money for the clinic through the women’s association? You know ninety percent of it, if not more, is gonna go right into Abu Bakr’s pocket.”

“You wanted me to keep them going,” I said, “even knowing that. So why not have some of the money going to something real.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Very clever.”

“Something is better than nothing,” I said, “and funding for the clinic runs out next month.”

“Wow,” said Roper. “Honesty. How refreshing.”

“The clinic is big in the community,” I said. “It’s not a bad thing if the sheikh takes ownership of it.”

“It’s big for the women,” he said. “Have you met an Iraqi who gives a fuck about women?”

“There is a direct link,” I said, “between the oppression of women and extremism.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” he said.

“This is real,” I said. “And he’ll keep it going. It’ll hurt his reputation if he stops it.”

“Any buy-in from local councils?” he said.

“It says in the—”

“I know what it says,” he snapped. “Is there real buy-in?”

“Yes,” I said. “Minimal financial support. As long as we’re funding something, the Iraqis don’t want to step in and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but the bit in there about the distribution network—”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna sit on this and think it over.”

It was more than I had any right to hope for.

•   •   •

The next week,
while meeting with Sheikh Umer about the beekeeping project, I saw three children, two of them in uniforms. One gray, one blue. Perfect.

“Holy shit!” I said. “Professor, tell him I need to get a photograph with those children.”

Much explaining later, along with the understanding that I now owed a favor, I had one extremely confused child wearing a baseball helmet and another with a glove on his hand. I also had one highly irritated translator.

“I hate you more than I have ever hated you right now,” the Professor said, rubbing his glasses hard enough that I thought they might break.

“Why do you even work for us?” I said.

“Forty. Dollars. A day.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re risking your life for us.”

He sized me up for a second. “There was hope at the
beginning,” he said. His face softened a bit. “Even without hope, you must try.”

I smiled. Eventually, he smiled back.

After another bout of more or less patient explanations, we had the children lined up right, the one crouched like a pitcher and the other standing as if at bat. I saw a woman hurrying toward us out of the corner of my eye, but Sheikh Umer cut her off and began speaking to her in Arabic.

“Tell him to swing,” I said.

The kid swung as though he were using the bat to beat someone to death, lifting it overhead and bringing it brutally down. I wanted to send that shot to G.G., but instead I showed the kid how to swing correctly and went back to taking photos. The timing was difficult, but after about twenty swings I got it perfect, the bat blurry, the batter’s face pure concentration, and a look of worry from the catcher, as if the batter had just connected with a pitch. I turned the camera’s display around and showed the picture to the Professor and the kids.

“Look at that,” I said.

The Professor nodded. “There you are,” he said. “Success.”

My dad only told me
about Vietnam when I was going over to Iraq. He sat me down in the den and he took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a few cans of Bud and started drinking. He’d take long pulls of the whiskey and small sips of the beer, and in between sips he’d tell me things. The sweatbox humidity in the summers, the jungle rot in the monsoons, the uselessness of the M16 in any season. And then, when he was really drunk, he told me about the whores.

I guess at first the command organized monthly trips to town, but it didn’t last because everybody’d get too crazy. Once the trips stopped, the brothels moved in next to base and Marines would either bust through the wire at night or invite girls in as “local national guests” during the day. Those girls, he said, you’d treat more like girlfriends, which made it better.

By his second tour, he said, the whole thing was a pretty smooth machine and there was a wide range of services, even different brothels for white and black Marines. If a girl who worked in a white brothel ever got found out servicing a black man, she’d wind up dead or at least beat till she couldn’t
work anymore. He didn’t agree with that, but it happened, and he said it amazed him, to think you could just do that to somebody.

Then he told me about one place where they had dancers and a stage where the girls would do this trick to make a little extra money. Customers would put a stack of quarters on the bar. Then the girls would squat down over the stack, drop their vag on top of it, and pick up as many quarters as they could. That was the thing at that bar.

Dad was pretty well gone at this point, but he didn’t stop knocking them back, pulling on the whiskey and taking those small sips of beer. He looked so old, deep wrinkles running down his face and little gray spots on his hands.

“I had this friend,” he said, and one time this friend goes to that bar and drinks, all night, not talking to anybody. And he takes out a stack of quarters and puts it on the bar, and then he hunches over with his arms around it so no one can see, and he takes out his lighter and holds the flame on those quarters till they’re branding iron hot. Then he calls over a girl. “Just any girl,” said my dad, “my friend, he didn’t care which.” My dad took another pull of the whiskey. “It smelled like sizzling steak,” he said.

I was like, Jesus. All right. Well, thanks, Dad. That was helpful.

We didn’t keep drinking much beyond that. Dad was too drunk to even sit right. Before I brought him to his bed, he mumbled to me about being careful and gave me a tiny metal cross, the sort you’d wear on a necklace. He said it carried him through Vietnam. A few weeks later I was overseas.

•   •   •

We weren’t in Iraq
long before I told Old Man my dad’s story. In the team, Old Man was the one you’d go to with things like that. West, our team leader, would have thought badly of me. With West, you were either a hundred percent or you were a piece of shit. Old Man was different. He’d joined the Corps late in life, so he had age and, we thought, wisdom. When I told him, all Old Man did was laugh and say, “Yep. In Vietnam they had whores. I guess that’s one thing they had over us.”

I thought about that the first time I jerked off in a sandstorm. Being nineteen and seven months without getting laid makes you all kinds of crazy. I thought about it again when West died, and Old Man said he wished to God he knew where the Iraqi whorehouses were, ’cause he’d get himself a big fat whore who’d let him cry into her tits.

But we didn’t know where the whores were, and that convinced me we didn’t know anything about Haditha. In training we’d learned to observe our environment, get the rhythms of city life. A man who walks this way every day is suddenly avoiding a particular street, an unusually tall woman you’ve never seen before strolls through the market in a hijab and people get out of her way. A bunch of kids that used to play soccer in a dirt patch near the road don’t play there anymore. I spent so much time looking at women through scopes. Sometimes I’d switch from eye to eye, closing one and then the other. Look at women through my bare eye. Look at women through the sights. Human, animal, human, animal. Me and my dad used to hunt.

But I never scratched the surface. I never had a chance to look at a woman and think, There is a whore.

First Platoon, though, in Kilo Company, we were sure they’d found a place. They got herpes all at once, and we thought, That’s it. They’re going on patrols and visiting a brothel when they’re supposed to be meeting sheikhs and drinking tea.

Who would have done that, in those days, violent as things were? Only a crazy person. But half of them were at the BAS with their dicks oozing. They had to be fucking somebody. And the one thing everybody wanted to know was, Where is it? Where is it? I’ll wear a condom, I’ll be fine. But none of them said a word. They’d get mad, tell us to fuck off. I cornered one of the guys, this shifty-looking PFC. I told him, Everybody knows what you’re doing, we just want to know where. He told me if I didn’t quit asking, he’d face fuck me with his KA-BAR. I left him alone after that. I wasn’t really serious anyway.

We shouldn’t have bothered. The next day, the CO had all the herp cases called to the BAS and the doc said, “All right, guys, where’s the whores? You ain’t leaving till we figure out this goddamn dick epidemic.”

They all looked at the ground and their faces turned red, and after a while one of them finally admitted, “Doc. Ain’t no whores. We been sharing a pocket pussy.”

“Jesus,” said the doc. “Clean the fucking thing out, boys.” And he got that platoon issued a pallet of hand sanitizer as a joke. For the rest of us, we had something to laugh about the next couple days.

Then the mortar attack came where the mortars wouldn’t fucking stop, mortar after mortar after mortar, and we just cowered there, wondering, Aren’t we getting place of origin on
these fucks? Isn’t somebody targeting them? West was still alive, then, and he started praying, freaking everyone out because you’d hear, “O Lord in heaven—” Boom. “Forgive us, God, us sinners—” Boom. “Sinners—” Boom. “West! Shut the fuck up!” Boom.

No injuries, and afterward I had an erection that could bust concrete. So hard, it hurt. And I went up to the roof, and Flores was up there with Old Man, and they looked the other way while I jerked off on the roof, looking out at Haditha, wondering, Is there a sniper out there, scoping in to shoot me, dick in hand?

At first I put some tits in my brain and the idea of me fucking someone, anyone, but toward the end my mind was blank, just me scratching an itch, and I heard small-arms fire off in another section of the city and I kept jerking, faster and faster, almost coming with the thought floating in, as it always did when I heard gunfire, that maybe somebody I knew was dying.

•   •   •

First female I saw after that,
I smelled first. The whole table of us, at the chow hall at Al Asad, and the smell of her short-circuited our collective brain and the conversation stopped and we all turned to her at once and she walked right by, neither pretty nor ugly but a woman, not seen through a scope, close enough to reach out and touch. Close enough to smell.

Me and Flores got into a conversation about what we’d like to do to her. I mean, things we didn’t even want to do, just us competing with each other for the dirtier thing. Flores won when he said, “I’d let her piss in my mouth just for a sniff of her snatch.”

“Who wouldn’t?” said Old Man.

“You guys are idiots,” said West. Later, though, West got all motherly and told me how much he missed his family, and he asked me, “You got any girls back home you’d like to see?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes, girls who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you were in high school change their minds once you’re a war hero.”

•   •   •

I didn’t feel like a war hero
when I got back to Lejeune, especially not after the memorial service for West and for Kovite and for Zapata. It was a lot to take. Everybody got drunk afterward. Flores couldn’t deal and went to the barracks to be alone. I wanted to go with him, but I stayed with Old Man. He needed looking after. And Old Man wanted to go to the Pink Pussycat, this strip club in a double-wide trailer, painted pink. The Pussycat was off-limits for Marines, but Old Man said it was the best place for what we wanted, and Old Man was the one to know.

“So there’s whores in there?” I asked him when we pulled into the parking lot, which was nothing more than a mud-and-grass field. I thought I knew the answer to that. Whores was the whole purpose of the trip.

“They don’t think they’re whores,” he said. “They think they’re dancers who sometimes fuck their clients.”

I laughed, but he stopped me.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You fuck this up, you aren’t getting laid. They don’t see themselves as street whores.”

“But . . .” I pointed at the trailer.

He laughed. “I bet there’s girls that fuck at the Driftwood,
too. There’s girls that fuck at the nicest strip clubs in the world. And there’s a few girls here that don’t.”

“All right,” I said. “So why’re we here?”

He started counting out reasons on his fingers. “Most of the girls here fuck,” he said. “It’s less expensive. These girls treat you better because they aren’t hot and they want repeat customers. You and I are just back from deployment, so really hot women are wasted on us. Also, there’s no dress code.” He pointed to his crotch. “There’s a reason I’m wearing sweatpants.”

Old Man saw me shudder at that, and he laughed again. If I’d felt like I had a choice, I would have walked away. Something about the sad little parking lot, with a few busted-up Buicks and trucks lined out in front of the pink trailer, it was too far away from what I hoped I’d get. Some hot young chick who was doing it for the money, yeah, but maybe one who really liked me, too. Old Man headed over to the door, and since he had the car keys, I followed him.

We walked in and there they were. Naked women. It was a small space, smelling of beer and sweat, with seventies rock blaring. There were only seven or eight customers in there, all but two of whom were definitely civilians. The chairs and couches all looked like they’d been picked up off the side of the road. We stood at the back for a few seconds, and then we went to the front and sat down together in a pleather, zebra-print love seat by the side of the stage, which was a little square about a foot off the ground at the end of the trailer. Old Man got me a beer and I drank it quick, taking small but quick sips and looking around at the girls and the customers, trying to figure how the whole thing worked. Then the dancer onstage got down in front of me and I stared straight ahead, into the tiny
strip of fabric between her legs. She was an older woman who didn’t have the greatest body but didn’t have any scars that I could see and who looked like she’d probably been pretty when she was younger. I didn’t breathe for a bit. When she got up, I asked Old Man how we got the girls alone.

He could see how I was, and he smiled. He pulled two twenties out of his wallet and gave them to me. Then he pulled out a one, folded it, waved it in front of the dancer, and tucked it in her G-string.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m gonna buy you a lap dance. Then you ask the girl to take you to the VIP room.”

I looked around.

“It’s in another trailer,” he said. “You get there, she gives you another lap dance, you ask her if there’s anything else she could do. You tell her you like her so much and she’s so great and you just got back and is there anything else.” He pointed to the two twenties in my hand. “Don’t give her more than that. And don’t give it to her until after. And don’t settle for her letting you grope her.”

I looked down at the money. Two hours earlier, I’d spent more on whiskey at Alexander’s.

“It’s good here,” he said. He pointed to the corner of the room, where a tired-looking woman was standing, waiting to take the stage. “That’s my girl. She’s real sweet. We’re like an old married couple—we only fuck once every seven months.” He paused for a second. “She’s good. After I finish, she stays with me till the time is up.”

I nodded. When the first girl got off the stage, Old Man paid for my lap dance. Then I did what Old Man had said.

The VIP lounge was a white trailer about fifty yards from the main one. We stepped out of the music into the fresh air, and I was excited, walking a step ahead of her. Inside, the trailer had a corridor and a bunch of little rooms. There was loud music in that trailer, too, so you mostly couldn’t hear what was going on in the rooms around you.

The woman was very polite. We settled on forty. I felt bad arguing for less than that, and she pulled down my pants. I wasn’t hard, but she took me in her mouth in a very professional way and then she put a condom on me and then we had sex and then I paid her the money Old Man had given me.

As I walked back to the main trailer, I didn’t feel anxious anymore. She had been a little dry, which made sense, but it had felt great right until the moment that I came and the world crashed back into focus.

Inside the trailer, Old Man was getting a lap dance, his face buried in the stripper’s tits. It wasn’t from the one he’d called his girl. It was another woman. This one looked something like my mother, before she’d died. When she finished, he whispered to her and they got up. He nodded to me and walked over.

“How was Nancy?” he said.

“Nancy?” I said.

“That’s her real name,” he said. “She’s good, but she can be kind of a bitch sometimes.”

“It was good,” I said.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Take your time with it,” he said. “Talk to the girls.” And he went back to where he was sitting and motioned to the one who looked like my mother. She climbed on top of him again and I looked away.

Nancy walked back into the trailer and started working the room. She smiled at me as she passed and then climbed on the lap of some civilian. I looked away from that, too.

Old Man had the keys in the pocket of his sweatpants, and there was no easy way to get them, so I waited in the back while he had his fun. I had a whiskey, then another beer. I was pretty far gone at this point, but I kept drinking. I waited and waited and I looked at the sad women onstage. Some looked zoned out. On something for sure. Old Man took his time. When he went to the VIP trailer with his girl, I counted the money in my pocket. I had more than enough. If I let myself get into it again, it’d be almost as good as not being there.