A Hard and Heavy Thing

by Matthew J. Hefti

  White ran a few steps into the field. He threw a smoke grenade in a high arch. The spoon flew off and bright purple smoke began pouring out of the spinning grenade before it hit the ground. The purple smoke floated into the air and merged with the deep reds and oranges of the dusky sky.

  The LT emerged from behind the wrecked Humvee and began pointing and shouting, offering further direction to those aiding the wounded. Levi forced himself to turn around, to focus on his sector, to do his job. The thought crossed his mind that the battle was over. Those brave enough to stay and fight were dead. Those too scared to fight were long gone. Yet, he would not allow himself to grow complacent. He thought of how quickly so many had been lost. It had all happened in one apocalyptic trumpet blast, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye. They had not expected it.

  He looked at his watch. It had only been twelve minutes since the IED detonated on Nick’s truck. Something could happen again at any time.

  He forced himself to pay attention, to look for threats, to keep his mind from wandering and imagining. He served as the watchman and protector. He did not allow himself the luxury of looking over his shoulder as they brought his friend to the edge of the road on a litter. Even as the helicopter roared behind him and threatened to blow him over, he kept his eyes on the tree line and on the field. Even as the helicopter carrying his friend lifted away, he vowed not to look inward. From now on, he would keep his eyes out, where they belonged.

  It was only after the lieutenant called him back over the radio that he allowed himself to turn around again. By then, the helicopter was gone, the night was still, and there was nothing left of the sun.

  After reaching the road, he broke into another coughing fit and collapsed to all fours. When he stopped coughing, he turned and sat down with his back against the tire of a Humvee. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Hey, Sergeant Hartwig,” he heard. He didn’t want to open his eyes again. He didn’t want to be Sergeant Hartwig. He just wanted to rest, to be Levi for a few hours.

  “Sergeant Hartwig, c’mon.”

  He didn’t want to go anywhere, but he opened his eyes.

  White held out a bottle of water. Levi shook his head back and forth. White raised his eyebrows in concern. “I don’t want you to go into shock, Sar’nt.”

  Levi laughed. He was going to tell him it was too late. He started coughing again.

  White knelt down.

  “What are you doing?” Levi asked.

  “Nothing, Sar’nt.”

  “Why are you just kneeling there?”

  White said nothing, making it obvious he would not depart from Levi’s side.

  “Just give me a minute.”

  “I have time.”

  “You’ll be waiting a while.”

  “I abide,” said White.

  Levi stared at the slow stream of smoke still coming out of the turret of the Humvee tipped over in front of him. He brought a shaking hand to his mouth and started chewing hard on the corner of a fingernail.

  “Sergeant Hartwig, please don’t do that,” White said. “Don’t chew on your fingers. Hold out your hands.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hold out your hands. Please. Just for a second.”

  Levi held out his shaking hands.

  White opened the bottle of water and poured some on Levi’s hands. “Now rub them together.”

  Levi did as he was told. As he rubbed them together, White poured more water on them. Levi watched the blood rinse off into the road. He looked up at White, who was nodding at him in encouragement.

  “That’s right,” White said.

  Levi rubbed his hands together harder. He took his thumbnails and scraped at the brown that had dried on the back of his hands. White pulled another bottle of water from his cargo pocket and he continued washing the blood off Levi’s hands.

  When the second bottle was gone, Levi looked at his pants and saw that they, too, were covered in blood. “Guess I can’t dry my hands on my pants, huh?” he said, trying to force a laugh. He shook them off and looked into White’s eyes. “Thank you.”

  He spread his legs and lifted his knees. He rested his arms on them, folding his hands between them. He bowed his head. He breathed deeply, trying to stop his shaking. He closed his eyes, but felt dizzy and nauseous so he opened them again. You can do this, he thought. Just a few more hours. A few more hours, God. A few hours.

  White nudged him and tempted him with a cigarette.

  Levi shook his head. He closed his eyes and eased himself up. When he opened them, the world shook under his feet. He looked down at White, who still knelt while cupping and lighting his cigarette. “Screw it. I got time for one.” He sat back down and took a cigarette.

  He pulled deeply from it and watched the cherry glow and change shades of orange.

  “What brand do you usually smoke?” asked White.

  “This is fine,” Levi said. He knew what White was doing. He was just trying to keep him talking. Keep him from getting too deep into himself.

  “Man, I’m hungry. You hungry?”

  Levi grunted.

  “I can’t wait to get out of this hellhole. Get back to real work.”

  Levi didn’t say anything.

  “I’m a horticulturist,” said White.

  Levi laughed. “Horticulture? Is that code for something? You grow bud back home?”

  White smiled, as if he had heard all this before. “No, actually. May sound strange, but I think that a well-maintained lawn is an incredible work of art. There’s so much that goes into it. I’d like to be a groundskeeper for a ball club someday. I think keeping the field for a pro baseball team would be my dream job.”

  Levi didn’t respond, lost in his own thoughts. He wished someone would have tried harder to talk him out of all this.

  “What about you, Sergeant Hartwig?”

  “What about me?” he mumbled.

  “What do you do in your civilian life?”

  Levi shook his head and let out a single bitter laugh. “I don’t have a civilian life. I dropped out of college and joined the active duty army in a fit of stupidity after 9/11 so I could go to Afghanistan. Wasted away in garrison for my first two years learning how bad the real army sucks. Details, CQ duty, drills, training, the whole bit, but no real work. After I realized my mistake, I enrolled in school again and took night classes. Then I heard from my mom that the National Guard unit from back home was headed over to Afghanistan. I called up a recruiter and told him I had joined to go to Afghanistan, not to do details for two years. He told me that it would be no problem. All I had to do was take the remaining time on my commitment, double it, and I could be off active duty and in the Guard in no time.”

  “So you did it then?”

  “It was a no-brainer. I’d get to do what I came in to do so it wasn’t all a waste, and with the one-weekend-a-month gig, I’d still have the money and time to finish my last year of school when I got back from Afghanistan. And here we are. In Iraq.” He laughed, which made him cough again. He leaned over and spit. “So I guess I’m here because I was tricked. Or because I’m an idiot. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Right?”

  White had no response except, “That sucks.”

  Levi nodded and thought, yeah it does. It does suck. And it sucks worse that I had to drag Annie along with me for all of it, and now he’s dying in some field hospital in the middle of Iraq.

  2.10 THEY SHALL BEAR THEE UP

  IN THEIR HANDS

  Nick was not in fact dying, but he did not know this. He felt no corporeal sensation because he was under the influence of heavy sedation after his first emergency surgery, although he would later determine the sedatives and painkillers were not nearly enough. He had the airy feeling that he was now a weightless ethereal being, floating through time and space while simultaneously existing independent of both. What he actually felt was his litter moving along the Balad Air Base flight line from the field ambulance to th
e waiting C-17 aircraft, a litter that was flanked by a physician’s assistant and a cart containing various monitors, fluids, and medical apparatuses. Two air force financial officers, a navy chaplain, and a marine helicopter mechanic, who all believed volunteering to move casualties was a much better use of their down time than was flamenco night at the morale tent, carried his litter with all the pitying intensity they could muster.

  Because both Nick’s eardrums had blown, he could not register the roar of the propellers, the yelling of the loadmasters, and the bustling of the medical technicians and field nurses who swarmed around him as soon as his litter was lifted and locked into its position in the rear of the plane’s cargo bay. This deafness kept him from grounding himself in any sort of physical reality, despite his progressive cognitive awakening. It also kept him from hearing the voices of the entire host of heaven singing praises to his Lord, which he had expected to hear now that he was dead. Of course, neither did he hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  The sudden realization that he was a conscious, sentient being with no physical perception sent him into a deep and shocking moment of total despair in which he believed he had been cut off and cast into the depths of a dark and limitless Sheol, where he feared he would languish indefinitely, or worse, eternally. This moment soon passed as he became aware of the burning in his throat and the tube pulling at the corner of his mouth. He struggled to open his eyes, but he found himself stuck in a painful form of sleep paralysis. This paralysis, although initially preferable to his moment of disembodiment, soon became a veritable living hell because he could feel his muscles flexing, but he could not move them; he could feel his heart pounding with his growing anxiety, but he could not breathe as he wished; he could feel a distinct pressure on the lower half of his body that did not reach a level he considered painful, but it was odd and unexpected and, therefore, no less terrifying; and he could feel his eyes scraping rapidly back and forth behind his eyelids, but they, too, burned and he could not open them.

  After a thousand years of this tribulation, his eyes opened to a flood of light. He was not in a Humvee, he was not on the side of a gravel road by a grove of palm trees, and he was not in his plywood bedroom nestled deep in an old ammo bunker. He found himself in a gray cylinder with a trough of white fluorescent lights extending above his body. The lights shone into his stinging eyes, which he would not close for fear that they would remain so.

  He tried turning his neck, but could not. He rolled his eyes and turned them to the left. He saw a woman rushing toward him with her own eyes wide open and frantic. She opened her mouth and yelled over her shoulder without making a sound. She put her face next to his and moved her lips and nodded her head. She took a step backward and tapped a hypodermic needle. Her mouth was tight and she had permanent wrinkles around her lip, the kind that come from smoking. She wore a tan flight suit and her dark hair was pulled into a severe bun. She wore no makeup and her cheeks were haggard. She was not aesthetically pleasing, but she was beautiful. Nick realized with a growing euphoria and rapid drowsiness that although he was not dead, he was nevertheless in the company of angels.

  2.11 THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

  The men of Archer platoon did not crack jokes or whoop it up as they rolled into the gate of FOB O’Ryan. Their minds did not immediately wander to chow, video games, and showers. Crickets and charging handles made the only sounds as they cleared their weapons. Levi stood in the dark, shining his flashlight into the chambers of his men’s rifles when all he wanted was sleep.

  After the MEDEVAC took off, they had spent another six hours on Route Boa. Using chains and two Humvees to pull, they had been able to bring the flipped truck off its side and back onto what was left of its tires. It didn’t take them long to find that the vehicle was beyond towing. The hull had been breached and the rear wheel well had been completely destroyed. After extricating Weber and Jalaladin and sealing them in body bags, they had no choice but to wait for battalion to send out a wrecker.

  Now, after all they had been through, they got word to form up in front of the TOC so the commander could see and debrief them. And what did that mean anyway? Did a man who sat in a secure building watching Predator drone feeds while annoying the radio operator for updates really know something that they didn’t about what had transpired? About what they had been through? What could he possibly tell them that would make it okay?

  The lieutenant walked up to Levi before they mounted up again. Levi wasn’t sure if his face was already bruising from the blow he had inflicted or if the dark spot on his face was nothing more than soot or dirt. Levi put his head down, not in the mood for the chewing out that was sure to come. “Lead us home, Hartwig. I told the old man he could brief us down there.”

  Levi looked up from the ground. It was as if the young officer had read his mind.

  “He didn’t much care for that idea, I don’t think, but he’s not in much of a position to argue. Have to take what I can get, right?”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  They silently stopped at the fuel point. At the old bunker they called home, they went through all the motions they always did. They doffed their body armor, but the near weightlessness that came with its absence left them unfulfilled. The drivers backed the Humvees into their parking spots with the aid of spotters so they were ready to leave at the first call. They washed their windshields. They gathered their MRE wrappers, spit bottles, and bottles of sunflower seeds and threw them in the trash. They wordlessly carried their weapons, helmets, and body armor into the bunker.

  Sergeant Havens held the door open. As the men passed, he muttered bromides like, “Keep your heads up, guys,” and, “Tomorrow’s another day.”

  When Levi passed and looked up to make eye contact, Sergeant Havens didn’t say a word. Their interaction, or lack thereof, left Levi’s imagination to run wild with all the ways the platoon sergeant was judging him, all the ways he was regretting that he didn’t put up a bigger fight that morning when the LT had promoted Levi for the day, and all the ways he could have kept the same thing from happening. But Sergeant Havens was too polite to say all those terrible things aloud, so he simply nodded.

  Each man retreated to his own bed, little private caves of plywood. Staff Sergeant Roper, the sick truck commander Levi had replaced that day, leaned against the frame outside his own room. Roper held a hand over his stomach and he wore a frown, but his skin held no distinct pallor and he did not look particularly ill, despite the attempt of his body language to convey otherwise. In fact, his cheeks emanated a rosy hue and his eyes glowed with the lively spark common in those rejoicing in the near miss of misfortune.

  “Hartwig,” he said. “I’m sorry, man. If I could have been out there, I would have been.”

  Levi made eye contact, but said nothing.

  Roper smooshed his face and wrinkled his eyebrows into a grotesque mask. “I wish I were out there. If I could take their spots, all their spots, I would.”

  Levi walked on without paying heed to the empty words. He didn’t doubt the heart from which the words came, but they were words spoken in ignorance. Staff Sergeant Roper did not know the difficult thing for which he wished, and he had no frame of reference from which to contextualize his expressed desires. And even if he did, Levi figured, it did no good to wish for that which could never be. And even if it were possible, no one—not one person he could think of—would willingly trade places with any of them. If they were all truly honest with themselves, they would say they were all glad to be alive. All were glad that it wasn’t they who were dead, locked in an embrace with another dead man in a wrecked and burning Humvee. As guilty as it made them feel, they were all glad they weren’t lying twisted and dead on the side of some unnamed dirt road in Iraq, traveling home in a steel box with a detached arm in a red bio-hazard bag. Despite the shame in it, they were all glad they were not sedated and strapped to a stretcher in a C-17 flying to Germany sans leg or covered in burns. And though they’d never say so al
oud to each other or anyone else for as long as they lived, they all said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever or whomever they believed in, the words of which went something like this: Better him than me.

  Levi passed the lieutenant’s room on the way to his own. The officer sat on an ammo box. He had his head down, his eyes closed, and his hands folded. His closed mouth twitched furiously, praying silently to an unseen God. Levi paused and hovered at the doorway. He wanted to say something, to offer some comfort, but he didn’t know how to offer comfort for something that had been all his fault. He dropped his vest and helmet on the ground.

  He knocked on the frame to the LT’s cubicle. Lieutenant Michaels didn’t move. Levi waited. After what felt like forever, the LT took a deep breath and, without opening his eyes, he said, “What can I do for you, Sergeant Hartwig?”

  Levi put his feet together, his fists at his side, and he stood at the position of attention. Standing in this manner, which he thought absurd under most conditions, was his personal act of humility, and it was the only way he could think to outwardly signify his submission. “Sir,” he said, his voice quivering.

  The lieutenant opened his eyes. “Why are you standing like that? Knock it off. Stand at ease.”

  Levi moved to a stiff parade rest. “Sir, I just wanted to,” he paused and looked down. “I want to say I’m sorry. For hitting you.”

  Lieutenant Michaels took another deep breath and his mouth turned up in a placid smile. “You hit me?”

  “Sir?”

  He lifted a hand and gave a little wave. “It’s fine. Whatever. That was retarded out there—what you did. Running down there, that is. But it’s fine. Whatever. I get it.”