Chapter Twenty-two
You and Mr. Holden bump along the dirt road for a while and then you hit the black top and you stop the HUMVEE and pull out the map and show it to Mr. Holden and say sir it looks like a left to me and he says I got to trust you petty officer and then you notice he’s wearing a .45 in a holster and you point to it and he says the master sergeant signed it out to me at the fort just in case and you ask you qual’d with that sir and he says once and you say we’re well and truly fucked if something happens and he laughs and says yessir petty officer, yessir and then a A-10 comes humming over with that evil big cannon sticking out of its nose and a shitload of rockets and bombs under its wings and those two big engines over the nail howling and Mr. Holden says I am awful uncomfortable trusting in the Air Force.
And so you laugh and pull the big fucking truck out on to the Iraqi highway and shift gears and stomp on the pedal until the bastard is rolling at 50 with the big fucking tires humming on the blacktop and the wind whistling through the canvas and you drive out on the endless highway that runs between the mountains and the oil wells and the flattened forts every one hundred yards along the road, with the A-10s overhead and the oil heads burning in the distance and it is a beautiful afternoon with the sun slanting in and the sky blue as hell.
After a while you come to a crossroads and turn right and then start climbing up into the mountains through a pass, and you climb and climb up the side of the hill past the brown grass hillsides and the tumbling rock walls, and then past a fort that was just fucking flattened by some big ass bomb in the war with a huge steel I-beam bent up out of the blasted roof toward the sky, and you can see inside some black things that might be bodies like road signs along the Thruway, and you climb up into the mountains shifting and grinding the gears.
You come to the spot marked on the map and look up to see the top of the pass and at the top there’s a comms station so you pull the HUMVEE over and park it, set the brake and get out and you and Mr. Holden load up with a couple of cartons of smokes and an armload of candy and you walk up the hill and surprise the Marines there, and a couple of Brits who are living in old refrigerator cartons and little corrugated tin hooches in this bombed out shelter on top of the mountain, and guarding the comms link between Denton and the main camp outside of Mosul, and you sell them some shit and throw in the smokes for free and they take a picture of you on top of the hill with your M-16 and throw you your camera.
And one guys says can he grab a ride with you guys cause he stepped on nail or some shit and it’s all fucked up and pus-y and he need to see the corpsman, and he takes off his sock and shows you the foot and you can see the nasty black mark where the nail or whatever jammed in and how there’s a black line running from it up his shin, and you say sure hop in and the Marines and the Brits are calling out pussy-pussy-pussy and he throws them the finger and hops in to the HUMVEE and crawls into the back, and breaks out a carton of smokes and says I’ll get you later for this right and you say right, and then Mr. Holden climbs in and you start the HUMVEE and pull back on to the road and start down the mountain.
About halfway down the Marine says stop the truck and you pull over and he gets out and looks around and says come here I want to show you something and you and Mr. Holden get out of the truck and follow him up the hillside with the dirt crumbling under your feet and then you run into a string of foxholes and little forts with tin roofs and there’s about a million RPGs laying around and a whole hole full of bullets in rusting cans and an old helmet you pick up.
The Marine says watch your ass here boys these things have been lying around in the rain and then he takes you up to a little cave where there are four bodies lying there like mummies with their bodies all twisted up and the blood dry on their shirts and their mouths open and their ears rubbed raw and red and their eyes still staring up, and he says they are still looking for the bastard who did this to them and you can see how someone rattled up this hillside at about 400 miles an hour and dropped a whole string of some kind of bomb on them and just blew these guys into the next world.
You can see one guy kind of off to the side like he was crawling and scrambling when he bit it and you can see his shirt ripped off his body on one side and still perfect on the other and when you bend down to look down where his shirt open was you can see his guts lying on the dirt all dried out like a model from 10th grade biology and you don’t feel sick at all not at all like you expected.
You Are Free Page 22