Redeployment (25 page)

“I got this at a thrift store for twenty-five bucks,” he says, grabbing his lapel and spinning to show off his sartorial splendor.

“Why are you in a suit?” I say, and his face registers a moment of confusion.

“You said you’d take me to the Yale Club.”

It takes me a moment, but I realize I had indeed said that, three years ago. Funny what people remember.

“You don’t want to go there,” I say. “You don’t want to be anywhere around here.” I raise my arms to indicate Grand Central, the teeming masses, the cathedral beauty of it, with its constellation map gilt backward on the ceiling and its tasteful Apple
store discreetly occupying the top of the east staircase. “Midtown’s got no life to it. Just seventeen-dollar drinks and the assholes that can pay for them.”

“That’ll be you soon, Mister Hundred Sixty Thousand.”

“Not yet,” I say. “And since I’m buying all drinks tonight—no, I am—we’re getting the fuck out of here.”

We take the 6 train to Astor and head to a dive bar with an all-night special of $5 for a can of PBR and a shot of what they call “Jameson.” I figure we won’t be able to spend more than $80 before going into comas. We head in and sit at the bar, and I order the first round as Boylan untucks his shirt and loosens his tie.

“I’m glad . . . ,” I start to tell him, and I want to say I’m glad he’s alive, but that’s too maudlin even if it’s true, so I finish with, “To see you,” and he grins. Once the drinks arrive, he clinks his whiskey to mine and we shoot them back.

“Why didn’t you stay in the Corps, man?” he says.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent Boylan is already a bit drunk, and I wonder who, if anyone, he could have been drinking with. Near most stations they sell plastic bottles for the commuters to get hammered on the train. If that’s what he was doing, he wouldn’t be the only one.

“Why not, man?” he says. “You were good. Everybody says you were good.”

“Because I’m a pussy,” I say. “When you getting promoted to major?”

“Never. I got a DUI.” He gives a sheepish grin and before I can respond says, “I know, I know, I’m an idiot. No more drunk driving for me.” And then he starts asking me about law school, about if I’m dating anybody, about all sorts of shit, and I realize
that as much as I want to hear about his war shit, he wants to hear some civilian shit.

So we talk civilian shit. I tell him about my girl and how the sex was good and the rest was bad but I wish her the best. And I tell him I’m going to go corporate and then figure shit out, because it’s impossible to figure out now. “A lot of people, their careers ping-pong back and forth between government and Big-law. Do something to feel good about yourself for a while, then go back and make money. Then feel good about yourself again. Then go back to Big-law and make some money. It’s like a karmic binge-and-purge.”

We get drunker, and eventually Boylan says, “You want to see a trick?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he crams the edge of the PBR can against his incisors, cutting into the aluminum. He rotates the can quickly, spinning it against his teeth until he slices it in a perfect circle, mouthfuls of beer spilling out the sides and onto his suit.

“Ha!” he says, holding the two halves out to me. “Whaddaya think?”

“Impressive,” I say. I notice he’s missing his tie, and I wonder if he knows where it is.

The bartender walks over and says, “Don’t do that,” and Boylan tells him to fuck himself. Then he looks at me like, “You gonna back me up on this?”

Long story short, we head to my apartment and start in on some whiskey, and when we get drunk enough, we finally get to war.

I bring up the videos of air strikes they’d show us at the Basic School, grainy videos of some hajji hot spot and then,
boom, dead hajjis. Though the explosions are never as big as you think they should be. Hollywood fucks that up for you.

I tell Boylan, “It was like video games,” and he gets animated.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “You see any of the helmet cams?”

I haven’t, so he gets on my computer, standing by my desk and swaying back and forth while he tries to type into the YouTube search engine, his meaty hands spilling over and hitting multiple keys at once.

“Dude, this is cool,” he says.

Eventually he finds it, POV-style footage taken with a camera strapped to a Marine’s head during a firefight in Afghanistan.

“Now this is like a video game,” he says, and as the video plays, I realize he’s right. The Marine ducks behind a wall and I see the barrel of his rifle cutting across the screen in the exact same way it does in
Call of Duty
. And then he pops up and lets off a few rounds, just like
Call of Duty
. No wonder Marines like that game so much.

There’s a lot of yelling going on as well, and I catch a few commands but nothing clear. At the end of the video, one soldier has been shot, but not seriously.

“So this is what it’s like,” I say.

“Huh?”

“You’ve been in combat. This is what it’s like?”

Boylan looks at the screen for a second. “Nah,” he says.

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 fucking video camera shooting an actual fucking 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.

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.

Jewett, who’s been pretty quiet, asks, “How many insurgents do you think we killed?”

“Platoon-sized element,” says Sergeant Deetz.

“What?” says Bolander. He’s a rat-faced professional cynic, and he starts laughing. “Platoon-sized? Sergeant, AQI don’t have platoons.”

“Why you think we needed the whole damn battery?” says Sergeant Deetz, grunting out the words.

“We didn’t,” says Bolander. “Each gun only fired two rounds. I figure they just wanted us all to have gun time on an actual target. Besides, even one round of ICM would be enough to take out a platoon in open desert. No way we needed the whole battery. But it was fun.”

Sergeant Deetz shakes his head slowly, his heavy shoulders hunched over the table. “Platoon-sized element,” he says again. “That’s what it was. And two rounds a gun was what we needed to take it out.”

“But,” says Jewett in a small voice, “I didn’t mean the whole battery. I meant, our gun. How many did our gun, just our gun, kill?”

“How am I supposed to know?” says Sergeant Deetz.

“Platoon-sized is like, forty,” I say. “Figure, six guns, so divide and you got, six, I don’t know, six point six people per gun.”

“Yeah,” says Bolander. “We killed exactly 6.6 people.”

Sanchez takes out a notebook and starts doing the math, scratching out the numbers in his mechanically precise handwriting. “Divide it by nine Marines on the gun, and you, personally, you’ve killed zero point seven something people today. That’s like, a torso and a head. Or maybe a torso and a leg.”

“That’s not funny,” says Jewett.

“We definitely got more,” says Sergeant Deetz. “We’re the best shots in the battery.”

Bolander snorts. “We’re just firing on the quadrant and deflection the FDC gives us, Sergeant. I mean . . .”

“We’re better shots,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Put a round down a rabbit hole at eighteen miles.”

“But even if we were on target . . . ,” says Jewett.

“We were on target,” says Sergeant Deetz.

“Okay, Sergeant, we were on target,” says Jewett. “But the other guns, their rounds could have hit first. Maybe everybody was already dead.”

I can see that, the shrapnel thudding into shattered corpses, the force of it jerking the limbs this way and that.

“Look,” says Bolander, “even if their rounds hit first, it doesn’t mean everybody was dead, necessarily. Maybe some insurgent had shrapnel in his chest, right, and he’s like—” Bolander sticks his tongue out and clutches his chest dramatically, as if he were dying in an old black-and-white movie. “Then our round comes down, boom, blows his fucking head off. He was dying already, but the cause of death would be ‘blown the hell up,’ not ‘shrapnel to the chest.’”

“Yeah, sure,” says Jewett, “I guess. But I don’t
feel
like I killed anybody. I think I’d know if I killed somebody.”

“Naw,” says Sergeant Deetz, “you wouldn’t know. Not until you’d seen the bodies.” The table quiets for a second. Sergeant Deetz shrugs. “It’s better this way.”

“Doesn’t it feel weird to you,” says Jewett, “after our first real mission, to just be eating lunch?”

Sergeant Deetz scowls at him, then takes a big bite of his
Salisbury steak and grins. “Gotta eat,” he says with his mouth full of food.

“It feels good,” Voorstadt says. “We just killed some bad guys.”

Sanchez gives a quick nod. “It
is
good.”

“I don’t think I killed anybody,” says Jewett.

“Technically, I’m the one that pulled the lanyard,” says Voorstadt. “I fired the thing. You just loaded.”

“Like I couldn’t pull a lanyard,” says Jewett.

“Yeah, but you didn’t,” says Voorstadt.

“Drop it,” says Sergeant Deetz. “It’s a crew-served weapon. It takes a crew.”

“If we used a howitzer to kill somebody back in the States,” I say, “I wonder what crime they’d charge us with.”

“Murder,” says Sergeant Deetz. “What are you, an idiot?”

“Yeah, murder, sure,” I say, “but for each of us? In what degree? I mean, me and Bolander and Jewett loaded, right? If I loaded an M16 and handed it to Voorstadt and he shot somebody, I wouldn’t say I’d killed anyone.”

“It’s a crew-served weapon,” says Sergeant Deetz. “Crew. Served. Weapon. It’s different.”

“And I loaded, but we got the ammo from the ASP,” I say. “Shouldn’t they be responsible, too, the ASP Marines?”

“Yeah,” says Jewett. “Why not the ASP?”

“Why not the factory workers who made the ammo?” says Sergeant Deetz. “Or the taxpayers who paid for it? You know why not? Because that’s retarded.”

“The lieutenant gave the order,” I say. “He’d get it in court, right?”

“Oh, you believe that? You think officers would take the hit?” Voorstadt laughs. “How long you been in the military?”

Sergeant Deetz thumps his fist on the table. “Listen to me. We’re Gun Six. We’re responsible for that gun. We just killed some bad guys. With our gun. All of us. And that’s a good day’s work.”

“I still don’t feel like I killed anybody, Sergeant,” says Jewett.

Sergeant Deetz lets out a long breath. It’s quiet for a second. Then he shakes his head and starts laughing. “Yeah, well, all of us except you,” he says.

When we get out of the chow hall, I don’t know what to do with myself. We don’t have anything planned until evening, when we have another illum mission, so most of the guys want to hit the racks. But I don’t want to sleep. I feel like I’m finally fully awake. This morning I’d gotten up boot-camp-style, off two hours of sleep, dressed and ready to kill before my brain had time to start working. But now, even though my body is tired, my mind is up and I want to keep it that way.

“Head back to the can?” I say to Jewett.

He nods and we start walking the perimeter of the Battle Square, shaded by the palm trees that grow along the road.

“I kind of wish we had some weed,” says Jewett.

“Okay,” I say.

“Just saying.”

I shake my head. We get to the corner of the Battle Square, Fallujah Surgical straight ahead of us, and turn right.

Jewett says, “Well, it’s something to tell my mom about, finally.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Something to tell Jessie about.”

“When’s the last time you talked to her?”

“Week and a half.”

Jewett doesn’t say anything to that. I look down at my wedding band. Jessie and I’d gotten a courthouse wedding a week before I deployed so that if I died, Jessie’d get benefits. It doesn’t feel like I’m married.

“What am I supposed to tell her?” I say.

Jewett shrugs.

“She thinks I’m a badass. She thinks I’m in danger.”

“We get mortared from time to time.”

I give Jewett a flat look.

“It’s something,” he says. “Anyway, now you can say you got some bad guys.”

“Maybe.” I look at my watch. “It’s zero four, her time. I’ll have to wait before I can tell her what a hero I am.”

“That’s what I tell my mom every day.”

When we get near the cans, I tell Jewett I left something at the gun line and peel off.

The gun line’s a two-minute walk. As I get closer, the palm trees thin out into desert, and I can see the Camp Fallujah post office. Here the sky expands to the edge of the horizon. It’s perfectly blue and cloudless, as it has been every day for the last two months. I can see the guns pointing up into the air. Only Guns Two and Three are manned, and their Marines are just sitting around. When I got here this morning, all the guns were manned and everybody was frantic. The sky was black, with just a touch of red bleeding in from the rim of the horizon. In the half-light, you could see the outline of the massive, forty-feet-long, dark steel barrels pointed into the dark morning sky and
below them the shapes of Marines hustling about, checking the guns, the rounds, the powder.

In the daylight, the guns shine crisp in the sun, but earlier this morning was dark and dirty. Me and Bolander and Jewett stood in the back right, waiting by the ammo, while Sanchez called out the quadrant and deflection they were giving to Gun Three.

I had put my hands on one of our rounds, the first one we sent out. Also the first I’d ever fired at human targets. I’d wanted to lift it up right then and there, feel the heft of it tug on my shoulders. I had trained to load those rounds. Trained so much that I had scars on my hands from when they had slammed on my fingers or torn my skin.

Then Gun Three had fired two targeting rounds. Then: “Fire mission. Battery. Two rounds.” Then Sanchez had called out the quadrant and deflection and Sergeant Deetz had repeated it and Dupont and Coleman, our gunner and A-gunner, had repeated it and set it and checked it and had Sergeant Deetz check it and Sanchez verify, and we got round and time and Jackson had gotten powder and we moved smooth, like we trained to, me and Jewett on either side of the stretcher holding the round, Bolander behind with the ramming rod. Sergeant Deetz checked the powder and read, “Three, four, five, white bag.” Then, to Sanchez: “Charge five, white bag.” Verified.

We moved in with the round, up to the open hatch, and Bolander shoved it in with the ramming rod until we heard it ring, and Voorstadt closed the hatch.

Sanchez said, “Hook up.”

Deetz said, “Hook up.”

Voorstadt hooked the lanyard to the trigger. I’d seen him do it a thousand times.

Sanchez said, “Stand by.”

Deetz said, “Stand by.”

Voorstadt pulled out the slack in the lanyard, holding it against his waist.

Sanchez said, “Fire.”

Deetz said, “Fire.”

Voorstadt did a left face and our gun was alive.

The sound of it hit us, vibrating through our bodies, down deep in our chests and in our guts and in the back of our teeth. I could taste the gunpowder in the air. As the guns fired, the barrels shot back like pistons and reseated, the force of each round going off kicking up smoke and dust into the air. When I looked down the line, I couldn’t see six guns. I just saw fires through the haze, or not even fires, just flashes of red in the dust and the cordite. And I could feel the roar of each gun, not just ours, as it fired. And I thought, God, this is why I’m glad I’m an artilleryman.

Because what’s a grunt with an M16 shooting? 5.56? Even the .50-cal., what can you really do with that? Or the main gun of a tank. Your range is what? A mile or two? And you can kill what? A small house? An armored vehicle? Wherever we were dropping these rounds, somewhere six miles south of us, those rounds were striking harder than anything else in ground warfare. Each shell weighs 130 pounds, a casing filled with eighty-eight bomblets that scatter over the target area. Each bomblet has a shaped explosive charge that can penetrate two inches of solid steel and send shrapnel flying over the battlefield. Putting those rounds downrange takes nine men moving in perfect
unison. It takes an FDC, and a good spotter, and math and physics and art and skill and experience. And though I only loaded, maybe I was only one-third of the ammo team, but I moved perfectly, and the round went in with that satisfying ring, and the round went off with that incredible roar, and it shot out into the sky and hit six miles south of us. The target area. And wherever we hit, everything within a hundred yards, everything within a circle with a radius as long as a football field, everything died.

Voorstadt had the lanyard unhooked and the breech open before the gun had fully reseated, and he washed the bore with the chamber swab and we loaded another round, the second I had fired at a human target that day, although by this point, surely, there were no more living targets. And we fired again, and we felt it in our bones, and we saw the fireball burst from the barrel, and more dust and cordite went into the air, choking us with the sand of the Iraqi desert.

And then it was done.

Smoke surrounded us. We couldn’t see beyond our position. I was breathing hard, taking in the smell and taste of gunpowder. And I’d looked at our gun, standing above us, quiet, massive, and felt a kind of love for it.

But the dust began to settle. And a wind came and started picking at the smoke, tugging it and lifting it over us, then higher, into the sky, the only cloud I’d seen in two months. And then the cloud thinned, disappearing into the air, blending with the soft red Iraqi sunrise.

Now, standing before the guns with the sky a perfect blue and the barrels piercing up into the air, it doesn’t seem as though any of it could have happened. No speck of this morning
remains in our gun. Sergeant Deetz made us clean it after the mission was over. A ritual, of sorts, for our first kill as Gun Six. We’d taken apart the ramming rod and the cleaning swab, attached the two poles together, along with a bore brush, and drenched the brush in CLP. Then we’d all stood in line behind the gun, holding the pole, and in unison had rammed it through the bore. And then we’d repeated the process, and black streaks of CLP and carbon snaked down the pole, staining our hands. We’d kept at it until our gun was clean.

So there’s no indication here of what happened, though I know ten kliks south of us is a cratered area riddled with shrapnel and ruined buildings, burned-out vehicles and twisted corpses. The bodies. Sergeant Deetz had seen them on his first deployment, during the initial invasion. None of the rest of us have.