I’d been excited on the drive north from Camp Habbaniyah, in the back of a seven-ton truck, but now my mind strained. No one had told Weapons we’d be standing post on Echo’s perimeter for the duration of the operation so I’d thought my platoon would help hunt the Bomb Maker—ten days in and I’d already spent over 150 hours on post. During the day the sun and heat made thoughts jumbled and confused in my head. I would sit on post and think back to before I joined, what I thought war would be like. I’d envisioned the desert version of Vietnam, which, in hindsight, didn’t make any sense since the environments stood in near diametric opposition to each other. Vietnam seemed like the Wild West compared to Iraq’s Rules of Engagement and Escalation of Force—it was like bureaucrats wrote the rules this time around with future legalities in mind. When I’d enlisted at seventeen, I’d felt like I was fighting for a righteous cause, back when 9/11 was still fresh in my memory. I imagined the towers falling again and again, but unlike years before I didn’t focus on planes gliding into obelisks of steel and concrete; instead I focused on the aftermath—the great fall of debris and bodies, the tumult of smoke and great cloud of dust that rose when everything crashed into the ground. This war seemed like a perpetuation of the devastation in the impact, forever, in all directions, until I wonder if that very devastation didn’t lie before me in the desert. The mission in Iraq when I’d come over with Echo had been to snuff out the insurgency through what amounted to an occupation turned witch hunt. And here a Bomb Maker was, hunted down in desert bad at the ends of the earth.
The man on his knees in front of me was not a civilian to my mind. I could sympathize with his drive to fight for his peoples’ sovereignty, even as his country was on its back in a pool of blood. I’d felt much the same feelings when I’d first left the States and arrived in Iraq—an event that was so remote in my memory it seemed like some kind of creation myth. This was the endgame, taking down the Bomb Makers with terrain models in their lawns. The resistance to Allied presence in the al-Anbar province would be less capable of doing heavy damage to our vehicles. A plan to attack an Iraqi Police station had been thwarted. I continued to toe the party line that had us calling POWs PUCs and handing them over to Iraqi Army nut-zapping butchers. I acquiesced because it would have been hugely unpopular—some would have called it treason—to protest. My dissenting voice would have been crushed by the boots of Marines.
No one in my squad ever regaled the new joins with the story of the man on his knees who cried all night, whose prayers to Allah were filled with snot and salt. After the war our memories seemed to become selective, and the VA hospitals would ask us if we thought we were blocking out parts of the war. Some of us would answer yes, because on dark nights alone with our drink, or smoke, or whatever poison we chose to numb the sleepless hours and ward off nightmares, in those moments some of what we pushed down deep would come bubbling up out of our unconscious. The crying Bomb Maker was one of those memories; the trouble with memories like that was oftentimes they slipped away again, like the tide. I would try to hold on to them by writing them down. I had tried before, but the journal I kept in Iraq wrote right around the memories worth keeping. I penned out how awful a given day was, how my eyes strained on patrol, but not until years later would I glance back through it and wonder why I hadn’t written down any of the important stuff. Maybe I couldn’t.
The man shifted from one knee to the other, trying to ease the pain of kneeling on rocks. The desert plain we stood on had cracked like a dried-up pond in the hot sun. At some point in months prior, puddles had covered much of the plain. I looked at the man, then Ulrich, and then back to the man.
“Has anyone shown him the shallow graves?” I asked Ulrich.
Ulrich laughed and lit his own cigarette.
“I doubt it,” Ulrich said. “Third had him blindfolded the whole time.”
Two shallow graves, half-dug, lay just beyond to the southeast. They were the only change on the desert for miles in any direction. I’d first seen the graves by the ruined walls of a brick house when Echo staged its vehicles single file before orchestrating them into a circle. The twin graves were fair warning, and as the trucks circled in a defensive posture the imagery wasn’t wasted on me; it made me think of the old Chinese adage, “When embarking on a quest for revenge, dig two graves.” Echo’s higher-ups hadn’t mentioned revenge and probably didn’t look at it as any more than another mission in the desert, but we were a part of 2/24 Battalion, and Fox, one of our sister companies, had suffered three KIAs from an IED in the northern part of our Area of Operation.
“You think he should be shot and thrown in one of those little graves out there?” Ulrich asked, giving his cigarette’s butt end a couple of flicks with his thumb. Ulrich wasn’t one for mercy, but when he looked up at me like he was going to continue, he didn’t. Instead, he just laughed a sad laugh.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “I’m just saying it seems like much ado about nothing to keep him like this, on his knees crying, if all that is going to happen tomorrow is us handing him over to the IA.”
Ulrich’s cigarette cast his face in a red hue when he dragged on it.
“I’ve heard things could get rough for him,” Ulrich said. “Intel has been calling in from battalion trying to see if they could see him before we turn him over to the IA.”
“Funny how they make zombies look like walking corpses in the movies,” I said. “This dude’s as close to the living dead as we’ll come, and he isn’t green or trying to bite people.”
“Do zombies drink water?” Ulrich asked. “I’m pretty sure real zombies don’t drink water. This guy keeps whining about how the water is hot. Gunny had me rig up some 550 cord to hang a bottle of water in front of the air conditioner in an MRAP. I’m not sure if it cooled it down very much, but that’s what I’ve been giving to him.”
“Is that what the hullabaloo was about earlier?” I asked. “When some of the guys from Third were yelling about POWs getting treated better than Marines?”
“PUC,” Ulrich said. “He’s a PUC.”
I took a drag of my cigarette as my eyes narrowed on Ulrich.
“Who gives a fuck?” I asked. “I could boot this dude in the face and no one would touch me for it.”
Ulrich laughed grimly.
“Look at you,” I said. “All standing guard in the shadows like a salty devil warrior, ready to defend this man’s status as a PUC from those who would accidentally give him rights by calling him a POW.”
“Semper,” Ulrich said. “Semper fidelis.”
Always faithful. The Marine Corps motto. I continued without missing a beat.
“Oh yeah, look at you, young warrior from the sea. Between these two Humvees with your head down and your dick hard. You steely-eyed killer. You’re going to make sure this guy gets enough to drink so he can keep crying. Devil Dog, you’re going to hang water from the ceiling of the MRAP so this motherfucker here can sip on some cool wat —”
“Arment,” the Company Gunny bellowed, walking up behind Ulrich. “What the fuck are you doing talking to this Marine while he stands post?”
“Gunny, Sergeant Prockop sent me to see how Ulrich was doing on post. He wanted to make sure he didn’t need any food or water.”
The Company Gunny walked out from behind Ulrich to stand facing the man bound on his knees, who was still crying softly and whispering prayers. New black spots appeared on the sand as the old dots faded to the color of the desert.
“How long has he been crying for?” Gunny asked.
“As long as I’ve been here guarding him, Gunny. So about eight hours,” Ulrich said.
“Fucking Christ,” Company Gunny said. “Keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t shuffle off somewhere on his knees.”
“Aye, aye, Gunny,” Ulrich said as Gunny Vance turned and started walking away from us.
I feigned a gesture of masturbation at Ulrich while keeping a serious look on my face.
“Arment,” the Gunny yel
led without turning around. “Stow that shit. We don’t need another Abu Grave on our hands.”
I stood dumbfounded for a few moments; the Gunny didn’t usually have a flair for puns.
“How the fuck can he see me?” I muttered to Ulrich.
“Arment!” Gunny Vance bellowed, turning to face me this time.
“Yes, Gunny,” I said.
“Ulrich is fine,” Vance said. “Now I know you Machine Gunners are thick as thieves, but you are interfering with this Marine’s ability to stand post, so I suggest you go back to yours.”
So I did.
Back in my post, behind a machine gun in a turret of a seven-ton, I watched the truck’s shadow stretch longer and longer before me. I counted myself lucky to be facing outward on the eastern part of the 360-degree perimeter. I didn’t envy evening shifts of looking into the sun while it set. My mornings of watching the sunrise left my eyes so fatigued the horizon blurred and twisted. But the first few moments of the sun breaking over the crags of desert crust in the distance made me feel connected to the rest of the world. I thought about how people back home were watching it rise as well, even though in reality it was night in the U.S.
This night I thought about the man on his knees and his prayers. I recalled one of the times I had been told to get on my knees and pray. I was six, and late one night my mother decided it was time for me to accept the good Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I’d asked questions—Will God say no? What if I don’t? What if I don’t mean it?—to which my mother yelled at me to “shut up and accept the Lord or you’ll go to hell!” I accepted the Lord because my mom was yelling at me about hell, if that can be called acceptance; when I was older I realized I had to accept that some people with authority would have me say I accepted the Lord. Did the man on his knees really believe in Allah? Or was this the first time in a long time he’d gotten on his knees to pray? It stood to reason that he was devout since he actively fought against what he probably thought of as Christian forces that had come to his land. We could probably find common ground in our fighting spirits, talk about how the war hadn’t lived up to the promises of our respective prophets. But I would never really be able to feel his loss. And he would never feel the numbness I felt as I watched him cry. I wondered if the man’s faith would falter and fade like the day’s light.
I surveyed my sector of fire with care, squinting to see as far as I could across the flat, cracked desert. As night fell, Marines on perimeter were supposed to transition over to their night-vision goggles as the changing ambient light required. The NVGs were to be mounted and ready to go but not activated since their batteries drained very quickly. I didn’t bother putting mine on. If anyone crawled up the front of the seven-ton to check, I’d have them on long before they got to the top. Even with the sun just below the horizon, the desert sky held enough light to allow me to see eight hundred meters, but that gradually decreased down to fifty or so as night fell.
A few hours into night watch I noticed a pack of cigarettes on the dash below me. Quietly I squatted to lower my top half into the cab to find Huelatte, the Marine standing post behind the wheel, sound asleep. I thought about waking him but figured if anything happened my shooting would rouse him. I grabbed the smokes and stood back up and chain-smoked until the pack was empty. Forty-five minutes passed on my watch while I smoked fifteen cigarettes. My lungs felt heavy and my head light. I leaned forward in the turret and rested my helmeted head against the fifty cal’s handgrips.
The night air held the chill of a midwestern autumn. The streetlights of a small-town suburb showed broken sidewalks and dark lawns in a neighborhood that looked like any other in the Midwest. The moon hung full in the sky. People were hunting me. I wasn’t sure how I knew, but a horrifying certainty filled my mind, pushing everything else out. I looked down to find myself in a T-shirt, cutoff digital-camouflage shorts, and an M-16 slung to my body. The street stretched before me for a quarter mile before it blurred in the darkness. Behind me the street ran thirty meters before coming to a T intersection. I turned around and started walking for the intersection, then started running. My breath came in short, ragged gasps. I could hear men running through yards, kicking leaves; one of them stumbled and fell. I spun around, quickly squeezing the trigger over and over in a long arc of fire that swept through the lawns on both sides of the street. The muzzle flash left negative imprints of bright blue and green in my vision. Dark shapes of men fell down.
One of the featureless silhouettes stepped onto the sidewalk. I trained my weapon on him and pulled the trigger but nothing happened. The human form saturated with blackness sprinted at me as I frantically racked the bolt back and forth while pulling the trigger, trying to find a round that would fire. As the man leaped at me, I took a deep breath to scream and suddenly he and my rifle dropped out of existence like they had never been there at all.
I stood stunned, peering around me in the dim light. The leaves in the yards were upturned where they’d been run through. My breathing returned to normal. From one of the houses, light stretched out from the front door as it opened, like a pale carpet of light reaching out. A strange compulsion drove me toward the door, and I knew as I walked across the lawn I was dreaming. The door closed behind me as I dug in my pocket for a pack of smokes. The large entryway of the house was empty except for ascending stairs and a chandelier above me strewn with thousands of crystals. I heard a soft crying coming from upstairs, a crying that reverberated through the chandelier and made the crystals sound like hail on a tin roof. I got the pack of cigarettes out of my pocket. It was covered in bloody fingerprints. My fingers dripped red onto the carpet. I tried lighting a smoke, but the blood made it hard to work the lighter, eventually soaking the cigarette all the way through. The crying turned to a wail that oscillated the crystals into a hailstorm. Then the wail stopped and everything was still.
“Time to face it,” I said.
Somehow I already knew what I would find upstairs, in the sole room on the second floor of the house. My left hand swung free, splattering blood on the white carpet; my right hand felt along the side of the stairwell, leaving behind a streak of blood that oozed from the wall. The chandelier’s crystals reached a frenzy as I stepped from the stairs to the second floor, dropping to thud on the carpet like pouring rain.
The man was on his knees in the room, crying and praying in Arabic. I stood in front of him, my hands still dripping. Around me on the walls hung pictures of my family. They fell from the walls, breaking on the floor. I held my hand in front of my face, feeling the slippery blood between thumb and forefinger. The man started pleading for help in English, told me how his family needed him and that he wanted to see them again.
“I can’t help you,” I said. “This is a nightmare.”
I looked up to see the first rays of the sun cresting the desert horizon. Yawning, I looked down to see Huelatte slumped over the steering wheel snoring. I gave him a few swift kicks in the head to help him get started.
“What the fuck, Big Head? You can’t wake me up like a normal person?”
“Marine,” I said, “sleeping on post is a very serious offense.”
“I woke up in the middle of the night to have a smoke. And guess what? You were having some kind of raving nightmare after smoking all of mine!”
“A pack of smokes is fifty cents in the ville,” I said. “I’ll pick some up for you next chance I get, you goddamn crybaby.”
“When is the next time we’ll be back in a town? Fucking days? Weeks? We’ve been sitting in this circle for ten days now!”
Huelatte started to say something else, but then his voice trailed off for a moment.
“The Iraqi Army is here to pick up the PUC,” he said at last.
I twisted my head to the right to see a dozen Iraqi Army vehicles headed in our direction. About the time they pulled into Echo’s circle of vehicles relief arrived for Huelatte and me. My back creaked as I crawled down from the turret; my joints were aching in a way I’
d never felt before. Now I was free to sleep on the sand, try to find an open spot in one of the trucks, eat an MRE, drink hot water, smoke, or relieve my bowels in one of the two shitters—two bags filled with a sanitizing chemical. But there was one something I could do, and it was the most interesting thing to be done. I could watch the Bomb Maker be handed over to the Iraqi Army in a culmination of the hunt. I started walking toward the center of the circle.
“Sergeant Prockop I’m going to check on Ulrich,” I yelled over my shoulder without bothering to stop and listen for a response.
Halfway to the small group of trucks that made up the COC, I realized my slow trudge was more of a stumble. Fragments of the nightmare I’d had already faded to almost nothing. A street, I remembered a street, and lawns. There had been a moon, and a man crying on his knees. Had my family been there, with the sound of rain?
When I saw the man, still on his knees, it was like remembering a forgotten face.
Ulrich stood close by the Bomb Maker, looking like hell after not having slept for over thirty hours by my estimate. He’d wiped the desert’s white dust off his face at some point, but hadn’t bothered to touch his neck. Ulrich looked at me as I approached, his face the mask of a Marine on duty. When I drew close he relaxed and exhaustion broke across his face. He tried smiling at me, but couldn’t manage more than a smirk, and I could tell that took a considerable effort.
“Time’s about here,” he said slowly. His eyes held mine, then looked over at the man.
I lit up a smoke and turned to look at the man. Ulrich walked over and pulled the sandbag off of his head.
“He won’t need that anymore,” Ulrich said.
The man looked around, blinking. In appearance he was just like any other Iraqi male so it was hard to place his age. The desert made young men seem to be about in their midthirties, old men to be really old. The man remained silent on his knees. When he looked at me I felt the same way I did when barefoot, shirtless Iraqi children with bloated bellies playing in lots filled with garbage looked at me, the same way I felt when limbless Iraqis with deep scars webbing their faces would look at me, the same way I felt when I watched Marines hit Iraqis or kill their animals—a nothingness like the cracked floor of the desert I stood on. I couldn’t look back at him, but Ulrich stared him down the entire time.
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 4