Redeployment (15 page)

I kept the letter with me throughout the rest of the deployment—always in the breast pocket of my uniform, always in plastic to protect it from sweat. There was a human warmth to the paper. It was signed, “Your Brother in Christ.”

•   •   •

“Who here thinks,”
I asked the small group of Marines who’d gathered for Sunday Mass, “that when you get back to the States no civilians will be able to understand what you’ve gone through?”

A few hands went up.

“I had a parishioner whose six-month-old son developed a brain tumor. He watched his child go through intense suffering, chemotherapy, and finally a brutal, ungraceful death. Who would rather go through that than be in Ramadi?”

I could see confusion on the faces of the Marines in the audience. That was good. I didn’t intend this to be a normal homily.

“I spoke to an Iraqi man the other day,” I said. “A civilian, who lives out there in that city I’ve heard Marines say should be razed. Should be burned, with everyone in it perishing in the flames.”

I had their attention.

“This Iraqi man’s little daughter had been injured. A cooking accident. Hot oil spilled off the stove, all over the girl. And what did this man do? He ran, with her in his arms, to find help. And he found a Marine squad. At first, they thought he was carrying a bomb. He faced down the rifles aimed at his head, and he gave his desperately injured daughter, this tiny,
tiny girl, to a very surprised, very burly corporal. And that corporal brought him to Charlie Medical, where the doctors saved his daughter’s life.

“That’s where I met this Iraqi man. This man of Ramadi. This father. I spoke to him there, and I asked him if he felt grateful to the Americans for what we’d done. Do you know what he told me?”

I held the question in the air for a moment.

“‘No.’ That’s what he said. ‘No.’ He had come to the Americans because they had the best doctors, the only safe doctors, not because he liked us. He’d already lost a son, he told me, to the violence that came after the invasion. He blamed us for that. He blames us for the fact that he can’t walk down the street without fear of being killed for no reason. He blames us for his relatives in Baghdad who were tortured to death. And he particularly blames us for the time he was watching TV with his wife and a group of Americans kicked down his door, dragged his wife out by the hair, beat him in his own living room. They stuck rifles in his face. They kicked him in the side. They screamed at him in a language he did not understand. And they beat him when he could not answer their questions. Now, here’s the question I have for you, Marines: Who would trade their seven-month deployment to Ramadi for that man’s life, living here?”

No one raised a hand. Some Marines looked uncomfortable. Some looked angry. Some looked furious.

“Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if this man supported the insurgency. The translator said the man was a bad guy. An ‘ali baba.’ But clearly, this man has suffered. And if this man, this father, does support the insurgency, it’s because he thinks
his
suffering justifies making
you
suffer. If his story about his
beating is true, it means the Marines who beat him think
their
suffering justifies making
him
suffer. But as Paul reminds us, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one.’
All
of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we’re part of a community. A church. That father in my parish felt as if no one could understand him and it wasn’t worth the effort to make them try. Maybe you don’t think it’s worth trying to understand the suffering of that Iraqi father. But being Christian means we can never look at another human being and say, ‘He is not my brother.’

“I don’t know if any of you know Wilfred Owen. He was a soldier who died in the First World War, a war that killed soldiers by the hundreds of thousands. Owen was a strange sort. A poet. A warrior. A homosexual. And as tough a man as any Marine I’ve ever met. In World War One, Owen was gassed. He was blown in the air by a mortar and lived. He spent days in one position, under fire, next to the scattered remains of a fellow officer. He received the Military Cross for killing enemy soldiers with a captured enemy machine gun and rallying his company after the death of his commander. And this is what he wrote about training soldiers for the trenches. These are, by the way, new soldiers. They hadn’t seen combat yet. Not like he had.

“Owen writes: ‘For 14 hours yesterday I was at work—teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirsts until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.’”

I looked up from my sermon and looked hard at the audience, which was looking hard back at me.

“We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.”

I felt flushed, triumphant, but my sermon hadn’t gone over well. A number of Marines didn’t come up for Communion. Afterward, as I was gathering the leftover Eucharist, my RP turned to me and said, “Whoa, Chaps. That got a bit real.”

•   •   •

Our fifteenth casualty
was from Charlie. Nikolai Levin. The Marines were enraged, not only because of the death, but because the sergeant major had told them it was Levin’s fault.

“I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to keep Marines alive,” the sergeant major said, haranguing the men only a few days afterward, “and the fact of the matter is, when a Marine comes in and he wasn’t wearing his PPE when he was hit, because it’s hot, and he doesn’t want to wear it while he’s at the OP, I’m the one who’s got to say the thing nobody wants to say.”

Levin had been hit in the neck. PPE wouldn’t have helped. But I guess the sergeant major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I’d seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize
it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces, His fingers deep into the sides of the world.

•   •   •

By the end
of the deployment, we had well over a hundred men injured. Sixteen total dead. George Dagal was the first. Then Roger Francis Ford. Johnny Ainsworth. Wayne Wallace Bailey. Edgardo Ramos. William James Hewitt. Hayward Toombs. Edward Victor Waits. Freddie Barca. Samuel Willis Sturdy. Sherman Dean Reynolds. Denton Tsakhia Fujita. Gerald Martin Vorencamp. Jean-Paul Sepion. Nikolai Levin. Then what we thought would be the last: Jeffrey Steven Lopinto.

I went through their names over and over on the flight back, a sort of prayer for the dead. We touched down and were processed. I watched the Marines hug their parents, kiss their wives or girlfriends, and hold their children. I wondered what they would tell them. How much would be told and how much could never be told.

My biggest duty stateside was planning the memorial service for all sixteen. I struggled to write out something satisfactory to say. How could I express what those deaths meant? I didn’t know myself. In the end, yielding to exhaustion, I wrote an inoffensive little nothing, full of platitudes. The perfect speech for the occasion, actually. The ceremony wasn’t about me. Better to serve my function and pass unnoticed.

•   •   •

Jason Peters succumbed
to his injuries two months after the service, bringing the list of the dead to seventeen. Those who’d
visited Peters generally agreed this was a good thing. He was missing both hands and one leg. The IED had burned off his eyelids, so he had goggles on that misted his eyes every few seconds. His body was in a mesh, his kidneys had failed, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and he went through constant fevers. There was little indication Peters had much awareness of his surroundings, and those who’d seen him couldn’t talk about it without going into a rage. His family had taken him off all life support, had the doctors give him an IV drip, and let him die with some measure of dignity.

Over the following months and years, there were other deaths. One car accident. One Marine who got into a fight on leave and was stabbed to death.

There were crimes and drug use, too. James Carter and Stanley Phillips, of Alpha Company, murdered Carter’s wife and then mutilated her body trying to get it into the too-small hole they dug. Another Marine, high on cocaine, shot at a nightclub with an AR-15 and seriously injured one woman. Cocaine makes you feel invulnerable, which I suppose hypervigilant war vets must like. They don’t like what comes after, though, when they get kicked out of the Corps and denied VA health services for their PTSD. That sort of thing happened to five or six Marines from the battalion, so the men started switching to substances that couldn’t be easily picked up in a piss test.

Aiden Russo was the first of the suicides. He did it on leave, with his personal handgun. After Russo’s death, the incoming chaplain, Reverend Brooks, gave a suicide prevention speech to the battalion. In his speech, he claimed America’s suicide rates were a result of
Roe v. Wade
. Apparently, abortion was degrading our society’s respect for the sanctity of life. Brooks was one
of the hordes of born-again chaplains coming not from established churches, but from the loosely organized Independent Baptist Churches. My RP told me that after his talk, the Marines joked about how they thought I was going to punch him out midspeech.

Five months later, Albert Beilin killed himself with pills. Both Beilin and Russo were from Charlie Company.

A year later, José Ray, back in Iraq for the third time, shot himself in the head.

•   •   •

Two years later,
Alexander Newberry, formerly of Charlie Company, appeared in an event called Winter Soldier, organized by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War. The event was supposed to prove the illegality of the war, and since a Marine from my old battalion was taking part, I watched most of it on YouTube. The panel of veterans was of varied quality. Many were vague and unconvincing, and what they complained about seemed more like the standard horror of war than any particular pattern of misconduct. Newberry, however, had brought a camera to Iraq and used photos and video to accompany his testimony. He claimed to have abused Iraqis and shot some just to take out aggression. He claimed Captain Boden congratulated every Marine on their first kill and told everyone that if a Marine got their first kill by stabbing someone to death, they’d get a ninety-six-hour pass when they got back. It sounded right.

Newberry had a series of slides he flipped through that were projected behind him, and he brought up pictures of two people he had killed, both of whom he claimed were innocent. He showed a video of Marines firing on mosques and talked about
conducting “recon by fire,” where he said they would shoot up a neighborhood in order to start a firefight.

The comments section beneath the video was a mess of antiwar and human rights folks either congratulating Newberry or calling him scum. A few posts seemed to be from Marines, and even Marines from the battalion. “I was there. Alex no telling the whole story.” “This guy was the biggest shit bag ever.” “boohoo they had to kill some people. what did he think was gonna happen when he became a MACHINE GUNNER IN THE MARINE INFANTRY.” “It’s the commanders fault don’t feel bad Alex.” “No one told him to kill innocent people he did it himself and blames the Corps he committed war crimes what a nut and its not true this happens often i know im a Marine.”

At this time, I was still serving as a chaplain at Camp Lejeune. I’d done a stint at Base and then ended up transferred to a new battalion. While there, I’d occasionally run into Staff Sergeant Haupert, who’d been transferred to the same unit and whose Ramadi days were clearly still with him. He’d tattooed the name of every Marine from his company who’d died on his right arm. Combat deaths and suicides. He was widely respected in the unit.

The one time we discussed Winter Soldier, Haupert spoke of Newberry with intense hatred. “It’s not whether it happened or not. You don’t talk about some of the shit that happened. We lived in a place that was totally different from anything those hippies in that audience could possibly understand. All those jerks who think they’re so good ’cause they’ve never had to go out on a street in Ramadi and weigh your life against the lives of the people in the building you’re taking fire from. You can’t describe it to someone who wasn’t there, you can hardly
remember how it was yourself because it makes so little sense. And to act like somebody could live and fight for months in that shit and not go insane, well, that’s what’s really crazy. And then Alex is gonna go and act like a big hero, telling everybody how bad we were. We weren’t bad. I wanted to shoot every Iraqi I saw, every day. And I never did. Fuck him.”

•   •   •

The next suicide
was Rodriguez’s old squad leader, Sergeant Ditoro. He did it around the time Lieutenant Colonel Fehr was promoted and made a regimental commander. Not long after, Rodriguez showed up at the base chapel. I didn’t recognize him at first. He was pacing up and down the walkway to the chapel, and when I stepped outside to speak with him, he looked up, startled, looking lost and childlike. So different from before.

Haupert had already told me a little of Ditoro’s story. In the last month of the deployment, an IED had blown Ditoro’s arm off. Though he’d intended to be a career Marine, after a year in the Wounded Warrior Regiment he’d gotten out of the Corps and gone on to live in New Jersey for a few years. And then he’d shot himself, left-handed, in the head.