Jessica Goodell & John Hearn

by Shade It Black: Death

  From: “Police Find 9 Severed Heads in Iraq,” Associated Press, June 6, 2006

  When we would go on a convoy to pick up remains, sometimes it was easier than other times, sort of. Sometimes it was a body and we would put the body in a body bag. Sometimes body parts were severed, but we could still pick them up and put them in a body bag. If it was one person, it would be easy. All the remains were put into one body bag and it would all be shipped together. Sometimes there was more than one person and the cause of death was an explosion. There would be many body parts and they would be strewn all over, all along the ground, and we would have to pick them up. When we were at these sites, often times, the remains were still hot, which meant that the fire fight just finished. Other times we would go on a convoy because they said they had a fallen Marine and we would have to wait for the fire fight to finish before we could even go in to retrieve them.

  On occasion, we would scoop the remains by hand, scoop the flesh, handfuls of flesh, and place it into a body bag. We tried to get every piece of remains so that the extremists couldn’t parade through town with whatever had inadvertently been left behind. We tried our very best to get every single remain.

  Not all of us went on every single convoy. Maybe half of us went. When they came back, the half that didn’t go processed the remains.

  One time several Marines were killed at once and we had a slew of body bags flood the bunker. This would happen. There had been seven Marines killed and our Marines returned to the bunker with seven or eight body bags filled with flesh. We opened the bags and tried to sort out and organize the body parts and bits and pieces into coherent wholes. There was a foot still in a boot that still had a dog tag, and that went into one body bag. A leg, with that portion of the trousers intact that carried the Marine’s name, was placed in another body bag.

  Our goal was to separate and classify the remains in a way that resulted in the right body being sent home to the families, even though we all knew that, from the Marine’s perspective, it didn’t matter. If one of my Marines blew up and if I did too, we could be buried together. That’s how we Marines are. We labored over this for the families’ sake.

  The Marines who didn’t go on the convoy would never know what to expect when a body bag was opened. Anything could be found. One time Pineda and I pulled back the flap of a bag and found only mounds of shapeless flesh which we scooped out with our hands. Everything looked the same. There weren’t four hands or a whole leg or a foot in the bag. It was all vaporized mush. We sorted through it all, doing our best to find anything we could identify that would help us.

  At times we found gear in the flesh: Kevlar and an ammo pack and once, a radio. I pulled at a line that came up out of the goop, a phone cord with a receiver on the end. I untangled it from the mounds of liquidy flesh but couldn’t remove it. It was stuck. Pineda helped me locate the rest of the phone inside the portion of torso itself.

  We found a dog tag here and a blouse name tag there and color and texture helped us with sorting by race. Finally, we were able to arrange it all into seven portions, seven Marines, but we could tell we didn’t have all of the remains, that parts were missing, though we weren’t sure what.

  A couple of Marines went back out to the vehicles to make sure that they had brought in all of the body bags. They found one more and brought it into the bunker. When we pulled back the flap of this last bag, we were looking into the eyes that stared back from severed heads. The bag contained only heads. We were not expecting that. At all. We removed them from the bag and placed each with the rest of its remains. We could tell they were all Marines. Their haircuts were high and tight.

  By now it was almost impossible for us to look at the faces. We couldn’t look at the faces anymore. The faces were looking back at us.

  Certainly, we were always tired and we couldn’t hold down our food, so maybe we weren’t as sharp as we might have been earlier in the deployment, but the heads were staring back at us. We’d look away, then glance back to record any tattoos or scars or specific wounds or other identifying traits, and they’d catch us and stare us down. We’d have to cover their faces to process the rest of them.

  We saw so much throughout the eight months of the program, and we managed to get used to a lot of it. A situation that may have made us throw up more or less continually early on, may have had the same effect only once at this point in time. But the heads worked the other way. They seemed to affect us more strongly as time passed. It was powerful and real and something we couldn’t shake.

  I sent an email to my mother about what was happening with the faces. Not wanting to alarm her, I was a little vague about the impact they were having upon us. I did, however, tell her about one Marine in particular who had been at the bunker for a couple of days and how I was getting a very bad feeling from him. Well, my mother assumed I was talking about a live Marine and offered me advice on what I should do to avoid him and how I should report him to the higher ups. Later, when I read her email, I saw mine to her below it and noticed that I’d addressed it to “Mommy.”

  18

  The Girls’ Generation

  Just two hours ago, Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak …

  While the world waited, Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation no threat to his own. He subjected the people of Kuwait to unspeakable atrocities, and among those, maimed and murdered innocent children …

  When the troops we’ve sent in finish their work, I’m determined to bring them home as soon as possible. Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers.

  May God bless each and every one of them, and the coalition forces at our side in the Gulf, and may He continue to bless our nation, the United States of America.

  Speech to the nation by President George H.W. Bush, January 16, 1991

  Dark black-blue concord grapes thrive along Lake Erie’s southeastern coast. It has to do with the hills and valleys, warm days and cool nights, and the Great Lake itself. A few miles south of this coastline sits the nearly twenty-mile long Chautauqua Lake, with its eastern and western shores almost touching at its midsection. The Chautauqua Lake area has long been regarded as an ideal place to raise a family. It has to do with the relative absence of big city problems, the close, generations-long ties among community members, and, perhaps, the persistence of small, organic, social rituals, such as Christmas and Memorial Day parades. These typically feature neighbors walking down the middle of Main Street, followed by a fire truck and a tractor-pulled wagon. Members of the previous season’s high school football division champions, or Missy, the young girl from around the corner who won last summer’s 4-H Dairy Princess competition, usually ride proudly atop the wagon.

  It was here, a mile up the hill from Chautauqua Lake, where we lived in a comfortable middle class house, and where my mother stayed home when I was growing up. As a family, we spent many of our summer days on Chautauqua’s gentle waves, boating, tubing, and skiing. My cousins and I enjoyed playing a version of “king of the hill,” but without the actual hill. We had a raft with metal barrels as flotation devices which we climbed onto from the water, and from which my cousins and I would try to push each other off. In this hill-less version of “king of the hill,” we would each try our best to establish sovereignty over our slippery, twelve-foot square kingdom. At the end of many of these halcyon days, we’d picnic on the lawn of my grandmother’s house, with the waves lapping at our feet. Every Friday evening, regardless of the season, we would get pizza and wings and rent two movies which we’d watch as a family.

  I played the piano at a young age. My father had played the tuba in high school and college and he somehow saw to it that I also developed a love of music. I practiced in the late afternoons as my mother prepared dinner. She was always preparing dinner, or breakfast or lunch, or she was baking cookies or cakes. When I’d hear Dad’s car rolling down the gravel dri
veway, I’d hop off the bench and hide. Our hide-and-seek ritual required that he, immediately after removing his coat, search the usual nooks and crannies looking for his young daughter. Only after some time had passed and he audibly expressed his puzzlement over where I could possibly be, would he spot my feet protruding from under the drapes, my hair falling out from behind his favorite chair, or my tilted face, with its eyes closed, sitting atop a pile of dirty laundry. In high school, I switched to the saxophone and played in concert bands, pit bands, jazz bands, brass ensembles, and a saxophone quartet. After each recital I’d hear my father’s booming voice from the back of the hall shouting, “Great job, Jess!”

  Soccer became my favorite sport at age nine, at about the same time that Mia Hamm helped to win the women’s World Cup in 1991. Mia, the Michael Jordan of girls from my generation, was the proof that our parent’s exhortations to greatness were grounded in reality. Mom drove me to my games, stationed her folding lawn chair close to the sidelines and cheered me on. Before the first half ended, my father’s voice would roll across the field. “Com’on Jess, keep it close,” he would shout, as I ran by tap-tap-tapping the ball toward the goal. The discovery that I was a competent runner led, years later, to a spot on the high school track and cross country teams.

  The same summer I started playing soccer, I was the only girl on a Little League baseball team. I showed up to every game ready to play and I watched every game from the bench. The only exception was the one day I was put into a game for another player. I got to the plate once and hit a single.

  Education was another value instilled in me at an early age. I studied, always did my homework, and, of course, read. And then read some more. A special emphasis was placed on math and science courses and I took to them easily. Though still a child, I decided I wanted to become an attorney, like my Dad.

  “When I get out of law school, we can work together,” I’d tell him, although it was really a request. “We’ll call our firm ‘Goodell and Goodell,’ I’d add, thinking I had come up with a clever name, or that he might have had in mind an alternative, like Goodell and … Jessica.

  “Only if you’re good enough,” he would reply, “only if you’re good enough.”

  The core of my universe fractured on the day my parents divorced, when I was sixteen. The familiar and comforting rhythmic patterns that were my life came to an abrupt end, though I was somehow able to continue the motions of everyday existence. During my senior year, I enrolled at Ithaca College, a small, upstate, liberal arts school a four hour drive from home.

  In the spring of 2001, with high school graduation only a few days away, I sat with my classmates waiting to hear the bell signal the end of the period, when a uniformed Marine walked into the classroom and began organizing literature on a table in front of us.

  “Why are you here?” I asked him.

  “I’m meeting with a group of young men in this room in just a few minutes,” he replied. “I’m going to ask if they want to become Marines.” He emphasized that he wanted only tough men as the Marines are hard core.

  “Tough men?” I asked. “What about tough women?”

  “So you think you have what it takes to become a United States Marine, young lady?” he challenged.

  “I know I can do what any guy can do!” I shot back.

  Later that day, in the Marine recruiting office in nearby down-town Jamestown, I was shown color photographs of Marines in a wide variety of MOSs, or jobs. In one, an M1A1 Abrams tank raced across the sands of Twentynine Palms, California, with two Marines jutting out of the top, one from the turret and behind an M68 rifled cannon.

  “That’s what I want to do!” I exclaimed.

  “That’s not going to happen,” the Sergeant said. “Females aren’t allowed to be part of a tank crew.”

  After scanning photos of the other MOSs, I spotted a lone Marine, in the desert, standing beside a truck-like vehicle from which sprung a huge hydraulic arm at the end of which were two smaller forklift arms. I decided I would become a heavy equipment mechanic. I knew absolutely nothing about mechanics.

  “This is it,” I said to the recruiter, as I tapped the photo with my finger. “I want to fix heavy equipment.”

  He smiled and subtly shook his head as he jotted my preference on the form before him.

  A face-to-face confession was out of the question, so immediately after enlisting, I called my father and told him what I had done. He said nothing. Not a word. I hung up and called my mother with the news. Her response was the same as Dad’s.

  Looking down a row of Tent City, which was built on the runway of an airport with each tent surrounded by sand bags. (Author collection)

  19

  Life and Death

  The battle has taken a horrific toll. Doctors in Falluja say up to 600 people have died. The US military says more than 100 of its troops have been killed in combat in Iraq since April 1, many in the battle for Falluja. More American soldiers have died in Iraq this month than in the war against Saddam Hussein a year ago …

  “I wanted to cry. It looked like a city of ghosts,” said the doctor, who was too frightened of the resistance fighters to give his name …

  —Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, April 24, 2004

  The line separating life and death continued to blur. I would see the living as dead, as remains I was processing; and the dead were alive all around us, especially in our bunker. By now, Marines were returning to base talking of “ghost towns,” and some were referring to fallen Marines as “fallen angels.” McLaughlin was learning and sharing more and more with me about the land and its history and the widespread beliefs about its disembodied souls.

  One night Bucket somehow got himself locked inside the reefer which was at that point full of remains. Apparently, he was in there for hours, and when he got out the next morning, he wasn’t the same. He didn’t look the same, talk the same, or act the same, and even he knew it. “Being in that reefer messed me up,” he kept saying. “Way more than the brains had,” he added, referring to the day a couple of weeks earlier when a Marine’s brains spilled out of his head and onto Bucket’s trousers and boots. We agreed, not doubting for a minute that there were spirits among us who were messing with us and who were most active in and around the reefer.

  On another night, Pineda and I were assigned to process a Marine who had been brought in by his unit. We had the remains on a litter next to a table on which we had our supplies: gauze, dressing, scissors, face masks, and gloves. I turned away to start the paperwork and as I did I asked Pineda if he would do the fingerprints. He did, and as I was getting the sheet for the fingerprints, Pineda was moving the arms and working his way to the hands when he said, “Jess, something’s not right.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  We were both expecting the man to be stiff. By the time we received most bodies, they’re often “stuck,” stiff with rigor mortis. When there’s a firefight and a man gets hit, we can’t always get to him right away. We have to, by order, wait until the fire fight stops and is broken up before we can get whomever it was who fell. If it is a lethal battle, it makes sense that you won’t risk the lives of eight Marines to pull out one dead. By the time we obtain the remains, it’s not uncommon to find that rigor mortis had already started.

  This was different. Here the problem was not rigor mortis; it was the absence of rigor mortis.

  “Look, I can move everything around easy. Too easy,” Pineda said.

  I glanced over and sure enough, the Marine’s arms moved easily. Then, when Pineda let the arms go, they continued to settle. On their own. They didn’t just fall back down, they moved, this way and that. We both jumped back and stared and for a moment I thought of what McLaughlin had told us about spirits in Iraq seeping from dying bodies.

  I always pay attention to breathing. I always have, and I know I always will. It’s when I can tell if someone is about to talk; I wait and I hear that deeper than normal breath and I know that someone is about t
o say something. I like to listen to the way people breathe because I know how they are truly feeling. I can tell if someone says that they feel a certain way yet their breathing is different … that their breathing is incongruent with what they’re saying, then something’s amiss. Instantly, I looked at the young Marine’s chest and saw that it was moving and that the lungs were still breathing. The chest was going up and down, up and down. I spun around and hid. Without thinking, I scurried to the other side of the table and hid on the back side of the partition coming up from the table’s side. We had built this work station with a section of plywood that ran the length of the back side and that continued three feet up from the table top. That allowed us to hang our tools and paperwork on the board. I crouched behind the plywood, peeking around it, staring at what was left of this Marine, and watching his chest rise and fall while his arms lifted with each breath. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead and I didn’t know what to do.

  “What are we supposed to do, Jess?” Pineda asked disbelievingly.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  In a moment, we regained a hint of composure and decided to get The Sir, who called the Doc, and the Doc said, “Just wait.”

  “Just wait? Wait for what?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” the Doc said. “Just wait.”

  “People don’t wait for this sort of thing,” I protested to Pineda. “What are we waiting for? What if this Marine were your brother, would we wait?”

  The Sir and the Doc left and Pineda and I stood there for a couple of minutes that passed like hours, until the young man died. I couldn’t process what had happened. Weren’t we Marines? Aren’t we supposed to save every one of our own, or to die trying?

  I stormed out of the bunker. I just walked out, which is something Marines cannot do. If you’re on duty, on post, you cannot just leave. Marines can’t protest a commanding officer’s orders, either. But I was so angry. And I was just a kid who two or three years earlier had been playing the saxophone in high school band. And I was so angry. And this was Mortuary Affairs. And The Sir had told us, on the very first day, that our job was a difficult one, and there would be times when we’d have to leave the bunker. As always, he was right: this was one of those times.