In fact, sitting in that little meeting room in the public library, Wild Turkey was having a very similar experience of confusion due to the particular arrangement of chairs. These same chairs, in this very same formation, were used in the fake/real base near the fake village in Arizona, in the fake (real?) chapel area for the fake/simulated funeral service that they were all required to attend during the exercise. Presumably this was held in order to prepare the men for attending the same thing in reality, in the Shit. They’d been very thorough, Wild Turkey remembered, with a chaplain and soldiers speaking and eulogies that managed to work in vague references to the details of the casualty.
But Wild Turkey had later found, after Googling the name on the fake funeral program, that the service was in fact held for a real soldier, for a real person who’d been killed in Iraq (IED), which made the fake funeral not so much a simulation of a memorial service (as the officers insisted) but a reenactment of it, a doubling, technically a recurrence. It was unclear if the ranking organizers (let alone the chaplain and the volunteer eulogizers) of the fake/real base near the fake village even knew that it was a real person they were memorializing: the fact that the biographical information on the fake funeral program didn’t match what Wild Turkey could find about the real soldier killed in action suggested that they didn’t know. This also brought up the possibility of sheer coincidence, of the chance that the master designers of the fake Iraq experience had chosen by accident the name of a victim of the real Iraq experience in order to simulate the loss of a real person. The whole thing was very similar, Wild Turkey felt, to the real video of the execution they’d received on their comms link that was supposedly of the fake execution he’d watched through the night optics the night before.
In the library Tow Head finished up, getting to the point that functioned as the end of the story, where the main character finally completes the wooden electric guitar amplifier only to realize that he does not, in fact, own an electric guitar, or even know how to play. In the applause afterward, Tow Head had caught sight of Wild Turkey and waved, compelling Wild Turkey to stay for the reception, where Tow Head hatched the shooting range plan.
Now they’re parked at the edge of the wide field that serves as the range, and Wild Turkey is leaning against the side of the truck, watching Tow Head carefully reload the rifle, bobbing his head to the pulsing techno music coming from the huge boom box he’s set up by his feet on the little shooting platform. This is really a skeet range, and Tow Head has insisted that Wild Turkey sling the clay pigeons out into the white plane of the snowed-over field and washed-out winter sky. They only have one of the cheap plastic hand-throwers so for an hour now Wild Turkey has made the strange sidearmed motion, skipping the bright orange clay disks out onto the currents of air. Tow Head is an excellent shot. He’s hit each one, the disks wobbling or splitting cleanly in half, their flight turned to mere gravity. He seems to be enjoying himself.
The landscape does in fact resemble Normandy in winter, which is fitting for the rifle, though since Wild Turkey has never actually seen Normandy in winter he supposes it really just resembles what he thinks it would look like. He wants it to look like Normandy in the snow for Tow Head, though, even if it did, Tow Head wouldn’t know it.
Tow Head is ready again and Wild Turkey flicks away his cigarette and steps forward. “Ready,” Tow Head says, then, “Pull!” and Wild Turkey whips his arm, sending the clay disk high into the air. Tow Head fires, missing, but at the sound of the rifle’s report a raft of geese rise into the air from some hidden tufts in the field, their winged shapes very dark against the air. Wild Turkey realizes Tow Head is screaming before he realizes that Tow Head is firing, though the two actions are concurrent. But Tow Head is screaming and Tow Head is firing, and firing, and firing, until Wild Turkey hears the small metallic clink of the ammunition cartridge going empty and there are no more birds in the air. Then Tow Head is running out into the field, slipping, falling down, getting up, still running, still yelling, though now laughing too, the techno music throbbing very loudly, and finally Tow Head reaches the area of bloodied snow where he has expertly dropped what must be at least ten birds, and Wild Turkey can see him lifting the rifle, holding it at either end above his head like he’s wading a river, and Tow Head is dancing and laughing wildly, the sound rising and rising in joy, and Wild Turkey, watching, loves him, loves him, loves him.
This is six months before Tow Head, who has this day refrained from his usual running obsession with the possibility that he suffered an undiagnosed Traumatic Brain Injury at some forgotten point during his deployment, will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheekbone, perhaps purposefully making his theory impossible to ever disprove or confirm.
•
Wild Turkey jars awake. He’s in his position, last in the tactical column, crouched against a low mud wall in a residential compound in Ramadi. The target, Wild Turkey knows (the drone’s heat-imaging burned into the inside of his eyelids), is sleeping in the small house just ahead. The team pads forward quietly in its line. They pause, waiting for the radio signal.
Inside the house, Wild Turkey mentally recites, there will be two civilians (a middle-aged male and a female, presumably his wife) and the target, whom they’ve previously claimed is a cousin but who is actually a low-level messenger between militias. All are asleep. The operational information has been confirmed, according to the radio clearance an hour earlier, presumably by more drone imaging.
In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.
There is the sound of the steel ram battering the door open, the loud flash of the tactical stun grenade, the shadowy flow of the bodies in front of Wild Turkey funneling into the house, the shouted commands for the occupants to lie flat on the ground. From all corners of the house, from its four separate rooms, Wild Turkey hears the voices of the team confirming that the rooms are clear. “One female in northwest bedroom,” Wild Turkey hears someone tell him either over the radio or the night air. “Holding.”
There are several things that are wrong, Wild Turkey thinks as he stares at the lone male lying face down in front of him on the carpets of the main room. One is that this male is clearly not either of the males (not the target, and not the middle-aged man) from the assignment profile. Wild Turkey will have to go through the standard procedures to confirm this, but he can see, even in the dark, that the man in front of him is very, very old. The extraction clock in Wild Turkey’s head is ticking, ticking. The rest of the team stands, idly tensed, adjusting their equipment. Wild Turkey tells them he needs to go see about the female.
In the back bedroom, Specialist Freidel is standing inside the doorway, watching a teenaged girl, who is naked, cower in the far corner.
“What the fuck?” Wild Turkey says.
Freidel shrugs. The girl in her crouch seems almost feral, eyes flashing. Wild Turkey, in his real-time catalogue of the operation, struggles to age her, distracted by the combination of her child’s face, her dirty thighs and half-hidden, adolescent breasts.
“Did two men leave this house tonight?” Wild Turkey asks in half-hearted Arabic. “Where is your mother? Where is your father? Was there a houseguest tonight? Did he leave?”
The girl doesn’t answer, but winces sharply at Wild Turkey’s voice, showing her teeth.
“Bring her into the main room,” Wild Turkey says, frustrated. Freidel steps forward and grabs the naked girl by the upper arm. He begins to drag her, but then she stands up, still resisting.
“I think they gave us the wrong fucking house,” Wild Turkey says (to whom?), and Freidel turns, or starts to turn, starts to say to Wild Turkey, “What?” when the naked girl rears back, sending one hand with its nails arcing over, digging into Freidel’s neck.
“Goddamnit,” Freidel says, or starts to say, as he turns and brings his weapon’s thick stock up and around possibly more swiftly than he means to, and there is a single sound, something like a crack, and the naked girl is on the flo
or at both Freidel and Wild Turkey’s feet. Her head is unmade: the upper left quadrant of her skull collapsed, blood very dark on the floor, a jagged-edged concavity with a fleck of white bone just visible in Wild Turkey’s flashlight here and there, the wound tangling with her hair.
“Fuck!” Freidel says.
“Fuck,” Wild Turkey says.
Wild Turkey helps drag the girl’s body out into the dirt-floored courtyard, thinking maybe he can radio for a medical addition to the extraction, once he gets clear just what the fuck is going on, but Wild Turkey can see—the girl’s complete limpness, eyes lolling with the dragging motion between whites and wide, black, fixed pupils; the lack of any rising or falling of the small breasts, now bared where she lies on her back in the pitch of the night and the dirt—that she is gone.
“What do we do with this?” Freidel says, voice taut with desperation, and Wild Turkey can feel the stares of the rest of the team, gathered near the doorway out to the courtyard.
Wild Turkey is not afraid. He can write the report exactly as it really happened, he knows, and it will more than likely simply be forgotten, lost, after a brief bureaucratic murmur, to the labyrinth of operational After Action Reports. They’d be more interested in how the team was given the wrong house, the wrong info from the drone, more interested in the failure to extract the messenger man than anything else. Even if the report caught the eye of some officer worried about exposure, all that would happen would probably be that Wild Turkey would be rotated back home, though he didn’t want to go back home. Wild Turkey knows all this, looking down at the naked girl with the ruined head, knows that he can report it or not report it, but he can’t leave the body as it is. Not to be found, and photographed. Not to be seen. This is when he says it, when he raises his eyes to Freidel’s and the others.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
He helps them prepare the body. He gets the jug of kerosene from the house’s tiny kitchen. He has Freidel get the bed sheets from the room they found her in. The sheets are stained with the blood that has spread on the floor. Freidel deposits them next to the body, which Wild Turkey is pouring the kerosene over. Wild Turkey straightens up. He’s holding the tactical phosphorous strobe grenade in his hand.
And does Wild Turkey smell, cut by the fumes of the kerosene, that rank, fetid waft from the girl’s bed sheets? Does he feel himself falling for just a second into that complex of faintly vaginal, excretory musk—does it seem familiar to him? And the girl’s naked body, shining with the wetness of the kerosene there on the ground before him—what is it that strikes him as so oddly sexual about it? Is it what he saw Freidel doing as Wild Turkey entered the room? Did he see Freidel wrestling with the girl—in what, an effort to restrain her? Did he hear him laughing?
Wild Turkey has the team clear the courtyard and prepare for egress to the extraction point. He will experience this night twice, have two simultaneous nights: the one that now occurs and the one that occurs on paper. He will be honest in his report, but in his honesty he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memory, of narrative memory, which was coeval with the experience itself. And so the truth of the night will forever feel to Wild Turkey somewhere in between the fragmentation of experience and what he remembers: he will have both seen and not seen what he saw, what he smelled. All of this with one lone exception: the moment when the phosphorous strobe, nestled underneath the naked girl’s back and buried beneath the shroud of the soiled bedclothes, ignites, and shatters the night into pulses of pure white light, and the absence of it.
And already, as Wild Turkey watches (though the strobe cannot be watched, though “watching” the strobe would render him temporarily blind, as is the tactical strobe’s function), the team, and Wild Turkey along with it, is leaving, clearing the buildings in the neighboring compound just in case, only to discover empty room after empty room of desks, of broken chalkboards (the mistaken compound a school, apparently). Already they are clear of Ramadi’s outskirts and jogging into the field where the helicopter will briefly land and collect them; already they are back at the operations base, going to sleep; already Wild Turkey is waking in mid-fuck with Jeannie; waking in the invigorated air of Merry’s room after a punch; already he is waking to the town’s lights buzzing with the edge of his pills. He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes on his second tour in Iraq, on a pile of rubble in Fallujah, the roar of heavy metal being pumped at the insurgents, a roaring room of sound all around him, as he closes his eyes again and falls back into the city air’s approximation of Mrs. Budnitz’s rankness; he wakes on the adolescent night he loses his virginity to a sweet-faced girl named Helen, who, out of fear of it hurting too much, gets him off manually and only then, as Wild Turkey drifts on the edge of sleep, mounts him unexpectedly; he wakes in the overgrown baseball field outside the country school, remembering the spring afternoon he woke in the outfield years ago in the middle of a game, the air heavy and perfect with the rumor of rain; in the desert, in the lightning, in his crumbling duplex, in the field, in the many rooms of night, Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up.
The Half Moon Martyrs’ Brigade of New Jerusalem, Kansas
Because our town was so small, the Army recruiter, Family Affairs Liaison, and Casualty Affairs Officer were all just one man, who went by the name of Douglas Reeter. This became a problem that winter, after the real fighting started and people had to stop and crane their necks whenever they saw Doug drifting down the half-plowed streets in his ancient Buick, everyone trying to get a good look in order to see by his uniform in which capacity, exactly, he was making his visit. It didn’t take long after the first few casualties for people to let the “t” in his last name slip into the “p” it already seemed to be sliding toward. This was how soft-spoken, dark-haired Doug Reeter became sober, bitter Doug the Reaper, whom no one ever wanted around much, even in off-duty hours. When I lay in bed at night that year of the deployment, I used to imagine what he’d look like in the morning if it was a bad day coming, and I’d dream him up in my room’s half-light, Doug standing before his little mirror in his Class A uniform, the thin manila envelope pale in his pocket.
Everyone could recite those first few by heart. Daniel Willis’s father (helicopter crash); P.J. Holdeman’s brother (bullet through the neck while taking a piss); Jackson Kepley’s dad (grenade dropped in his path out of nowhere during a neighborhood patrol). And everybody had their own private reels too, the confused images drifting across our minds in spare moments—the pause in a teacher’s endless afternoon grammar lesson, the wait while our mothers filled the car up at Bone’s One Stop. Suddenly the air would be full with the concussion of a listing helicopter’s blades, or the unhurried spurt of an artery bleeding out in seconds, or the path of light made by the tops of high alley walls as someone looked up at the sound of something falling. But those were the early days, before any of us knew the Arabic word for “stop” or that you couldn’t shake on anything because the Iraqis supposedly used one of their own bare hands for toilet paper (though none of us could agree as to which hand). It is true, in all eventual fairness, that those first few dead and their stories did briefly hold our imaginations, back when the men of our town were still dying exotic deaths, deaths with details and accounts, before the casualty announcements just became a series of thick letter-codes that didn’t mean anything, really; before the long paper list posted behind the scuffed glass at the armory just read KIA, and IED, IED, IED.
•
This is where we lived: New Jerusalem, Kansas. I always liked to imagine the well-meaning if already disillusioned ladies and gentlemen of the New England Emigrant Aid Society cresting Doak’s Ridge way back when and looking down upon the endless plains and the river and the space of mud where they would make their new city of God, really believing (as was their great
gift) that it would become something grand. Though they soon enough packed up their wagons and lit out, as they say, for further territories, I also like to think some of that pure hopeful spirit has hunkered down in the low places around here and stayed, however improbably, like the fog does on some familiar summer mornings. Their pluck certainly has, anyway.
Back around the time of the first war in the sand, a representative from the state tourism board convinced all four members of the New Jerusalem city council that our town could be a minor draw on the endless straight-shot of highway that filleted our state. At the town hall meeting he kept saying the word “synergy” and told everyone we needed to use what we had, which was, as of the year before, no longer the chemical plant. All we had was our name by then. So came into being The Old City at New Jerusalem, a replica of the heart of that other Jerusalem, but right here on the plains. This was also how the funds for the new church sanctuary were raised (via a questionable state grant) and a pale brick and mortar Church of the Holy Sepulcher (of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene) was built, scaled down seriously in size, on the main street off the highway. Besides the church and the “Temple Mount” building (a would-be community meeting space), everything else in the New Old City was a life-size cutout front, like on a movie set. Even our school got into the act. The New Jerusalem Knights became the New Jerusalem Crusaders (“Lest anyone think we were the bad kind,” Samuel Lincoln deadpanned later) and people painted squiggles for imitation Arabic on the signs marking the fake bazaar, which was actually the flea market. Little kids climbed the piled quarry slag of the Wailing Wall and spit down neon soda pop when their friends tried to follow.
Elegy on Kinderklavier Page 3