Then sure as hell you’d find yourself up to your ass in IEDs and RPGs, and you did the best you could with your pickup team. You relied on the training and experience you hoped they had to get you through the shit. Nick Galloway had been an Army Ranger tested in Afghanistan, and that was good enough for me. The Ranger tab and airborne wings tattooed on his shoulder above his dead buddies’ names were all the documentation I needed.
I pulled the nine-to-twelve watch so that after midnight I could catch a little shut-eye on a steady and predictable leg of the trip. At midnight I was in the cockpit with Nick, doing the turnover. Everything would be situation normal, with Rebel Yell carrying on under autopilot for the next three hours. I slept all the way aft, so it took only a rap on the deck alongside the cockpit for a watch stander to get my attention.
It was a fine starry night, no moon. Just that upside-down black velvet bowl pricked by a billion stars. A few of the constellations were old friends, up for a seasonal visit. At sea, with no light pollution or particulate smog within hundreds of miles, the constellations weren’t just a few of their brightest stars prying their way down through the urban haze and murk. They were Rembrandts and Vermeers in their full glory. “The sky all hung with jewels,” in the words of an English master.
Cockpit speakers were turned low, to not disturb the others who were sleeping below. An old CD from the box that I’d found on Rebel Yell was playing on repeat mode, its second or third time around. Cool, smooth jazz was my preferred night music. Sade sang, “Hang on to your love.”
It was warm enough to be on deck barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt. Comfortable offshore sailing weather. Cori always melted against me in the cockpit on warm nights like that, during easy sailing. God knows you spent enough time in foul weather gear with icy salt spray coming over the foredeck. So it was a good night. Some moon would have been welcome. It was too dark to see the waves, but there was nothing out there that Rebel Yell couldn’t shoulder aside with ease. Sixty feet of steel with a long keel isn’t much for speed, but it gives you a Cadillac ride offshore.
It was my first nighttime watch change with Nick, so after talking about the beauty of the sky and our phosphorescent wake, we went over a few issues related to his upcoming three hours on deck. We were sitting sprawled out on opposite seats in the cockpit, mostly looking past each other up at the sky. Rebel Yell’s cockpit had two parallel bench seats, each long enough to stretch out on if that’s what you wanted to do. The seats and seat backs had padded cushions that stay outside in nice weather, making the cockpit a comfortable lounging and generally hanging out place.
The pilothouse is in front. The big stainless steel steering wheel is between the benches, at the back of the cockpit. The compass binnacle is on top of the post where the wheel is attached, but instead of a magnetic compass, which is a problem on a steel boat, I had mounted a GPS there. It had a circular screen that was tilted back for easy viewing by the helmsman or other watch stander. You could make it look like a digital version of the old magnetic compass if you wanted, but I preferred the glowing arrow that pointed straight ahead when the boat was on course.
The leather-covered wheel made slow quarter turns back and forth as if driven by a ghost. Actually, the ghost was the electric-hydraulic autopilot down below deck driving the rudder and, by extension, the wheel. A soft glow emanated from the GPS in front of the wheel and from the other instruments mounted on the back of the pilothouse. They provided enough illumination on dark nights so that you could accomplish small chores in the cockpit without resorting to flashlights.
Nick knew what to do. Check the radar and the big GPS chart screen in the pilothouse now and then. Keep an eye on our course, using the smaller GPS in front of the wheel. Be alert to shifts in wind direction. Keep an eye out for shipping traffic or approaching squalls. The routine stuff an offshore sailor like Nick already knew, but I did want to regularize a few protocols in order to avoid surprises.
I stood behind the wheel and took a last look around the horizon for the red or green lights of passing ships. There were none. I was just about to head below to get my rack time when Nick reached out and touched the ring of paracord encircling my right wrist. The illumination cast by the GPS shone on my hands while my fingers tapped the wheel in time to the music.
“What’s the deal with that?” He knew it obviously had some significance to me; otherwise, why would I wear it?
“This thing? It’s a souvenir I picked up in the sandbox. It’s Marian’s bracelet.”
That’s how I thought of it, even though she’d never seen it. Marian’s bracelet. I wear it on my right hand opposite my watch, and have for a number of years. It’s made of tan paracord, also known as five-fifty cord for its breaking strength of 550 pounds. It took a few yards of paracord hand-woven in a tight pattern to create it. It was pretty cool, but still masculine and not at all ostentatious. Low profile against my skin, like the digital triathlon watch on the other wrist.
I didn’t wear a “hog’s tooth” as many former Marine scout-snipers did. This was a .308 bullet—just the bullet, not the entire cartridge—worn around the neck as a pendant. The paracord bracelet was enough of a military keepsake for me. To people who understood these things, it suggested that I’d been there, but without the implied braggadocio. It was old enough to be faded and a little worn at the edges.
“Paracord is pretty damn strong. Don’t you worry about it getting snagged on deck? You might end up hanging by a halyard or getting dragged overboard.”
“No, that can’t happen. It looks like a continuous weave, but there’s a spot where it’s connected by just some thread. It’ll break away if it ever gets yanked hard enough. I just sort of forget about it most of the time.”
“So, who’s Mary Ann?”
“Marian, one word. Marian Gemayel. A girl I knew in Baghdad for a little while.” I sat down again at the front of the cockpit, leaning back against the pilothouse, legs out along the bench, arms folded. One of my favorite cockpit spots. From there I could look aft and watch the glowing wake unspooling from our stern. On this tack I was on the low side of the cockpit, so it made a comfortable little nest, out of the wind.
Nick was sitting on the other side of the wheel at the back of the cockpit, so the GPS’s light reflected off his teeth and eyes and I could see he was grinning. “So, was she as hot-looking as Cori?”
I laughed. “Almost nobody is as hot-looking as Cori, but yeah, she was attractive. Not as tall. Marian’s hair was a little wavier than Cori’s. Her eyes were super pretty. Great smile. But I never saw her in a swimsuit or anything like that, much less naked. I mean, we never went on dates; Baghdad was still a war zone then. You know how it was over there.”
“I was only in Ass-crackistan.”
“That counts too. Baghdad was better than Afghanistan, but it wasn’t exactly Miami Beach, either.”
“So, what happened to Marian?”
I took a breath and said the words. “Oh, she’s dead.”
“The war?”
“Sort of. Yeah. The war.” The longest war ever.
“Man, that’s messed up.”
“Tell me about it, Nick. It was a real messed-up place.”
“I heard that, bro. I sure heard that. So, she made the bracelet before she…?”
“What? No. She didn’t. Marian didn’t make it. A girl in Afghanistan made it, but that was later. On my last tour.”
“Damn, how were you managing to hook up in that shit-hole?”
His remark made me smile. “I wasn’t ‘hooking up,’ trust me. The girl who made it lived in a women’s shelter in Khandahar. We sort of adopted the place while we were there, and kept an eye on it. The Taliban hated it. Hated the girls, for wanting to be free. They did weaving and stuff like that to support themselves. They made souvenirs from cast-off junk, or from stuff we gave them. Mostly we just wanted to help them out. I don’t even know the name of the girl who made it. Some Air Force zoomie loadmaster-type donated a big spo
ol of coyote-brown paracord to the cause, and for a while they made them like this one.”
“I guess you had to be there.”
“Yep. You had to be there. A time and a place.”
“Some of our guys made those paracord things. That’s why I asked.”
“Some of our guys did too.”
“So, why do you call it Marian’s bracelet if you got it in Afghanistan?”
“Why? I guess because I don’t really have anything else to remember her by. I had some pictures of her on my camera, but it got ripped off before I could download them.”
“That sucks,” he said.
“Yeah. Small stuff like cameras and ipods got stolen all the time over there. ‘Gear adrift, looks like a gift.’ Sometimes the band of brothers was a band of thieves. So, no pictures of Marian.” At least, none that I wanted to remember.
“How did you meet her? I never met one single girl in Afghanistan. Well, you know, a girl over about ten or twelve. If we ever saw them, they were wearing those blue burqas with a face grill. You couldn’t tell if they were eighteen or eighty. When we went on patrols, it wasn’t a social opportunity. We were always in full battle rattle when we interacted with the local population—and that meant the men.”
5
“Well, this was in Baghdad, early on. It was pretty hopeful for a while, if you can believe it. Marian was a shopkeeper’s daughter. A Christian, obviously, with a name like that. Most of the time she didn’t wear a head scarf. They sold beer and wine at their shop. Always had, under Saddam at least. It was something Christians could do to make an honest dinar. Most of the customers were Muslims.”
“I’ll bet that made her real popular with the mullahs.”
“To say the least. But she was pretty feisty. Westernized, you might say. Not a pushover for anybody. She dealt with the public all the time. And she spoke pretty good English. She went to a private school and she had relatives in the States. Their store was in our area of operations, in South Baghdad. She liked to practice her English with us. They had a little place where a few of us could sit and have a soda and some cookies or other geedunk. We taught her a lot of jarhead slang, and she taught us how to curse in Arabic. For a while things were fairly slack there, and we could chill out a little. Maybe even ditch the body armor and wear soft covers. Sneak a cold Heineken. But you know how it was—things could change in a minute, and then the shit was flying again.”
“So, what happened to her?”
“A really nasty bunch of Shi’ite militia moved into her neighborhood and sort of requisitioned space for themselves. More of a street gang than a militia. Bad went to worst. Her neighborhood used to be mostly Christians. Chaldean Catholics who’d been there for two thousand years straight. Now they’re all gone. But this was at the beginning, after Baghdad fell and while the new lines were being drawn. We were still figuring the place out, and they were going at each other’s throats. Mostly it was Sunni versus Shi’ite, but the Christians got it from both sides. Marian couldn’t come out of her house at all. Her family’s store was only a block from her house. She was basically in hiding, but she still got grabbed and raped. I didn’t get the particulars, but I heard she wound up at this sister’s church basement, and I went there. I’d only seen her at her family’s store before then.”
“Marian had a sister?”
“No, a Catholic sister. A nun. Old, over seventy. Sister Katterina. Five-feet-nothing. She was from Germany but she could speak perfect Arabic. Perfect. And English. She went there for a tour of missionary duty during the Saddam days and ended up staying on. Then after we got there, they killed the priest and there were really no parishioners left—they were too afraid to be seen around the church—but Sister Katterina hung on. When I was there, the church was burned out and it looked abandoned, but it wasn’t. Not quite. It’s made of big stones about a thousand years old, so even the occasional RPG round didn’t really wreck it. Not completely. But there was Sister Katterina, hiding in the basement of another little building behind the main church. Like a little parish hall and offices. She was holding down the fort.”
“Why?” asked Nick with a note of incredulity. “What’s the point, if they didn’t have church services?”
“Sister Katterina’s basement was a hiding place for runaway girls who’d been through every sort of hell. Nick, you just wouldn’t believe it, what they do to girls over there.”
“Hey, you don’t need to tell me. Shitcanistan is probably worse. A lot of the men get raped when they’re little boys, so they grow up thinking rape is a normal thing. Rape is sex and sex is rape. Love has nothing to do with it. That’s why they do that genital mutilation deal on the girls. Cut off their clits. They don’t want their women to have any pleasure. Hell, they probably like it better if their women suffer. Most of the men would rather do it with a boy anyway. Or a goat, I swear.”
Improbably, this reminded me of a sandbox joke. “What do you call ten Afghan soldiers in a tent?”
“An orgy. That’s an old one.”
“Yeah, but it’s still true. Did you ever catch them at it?”
“All the time,” said Nick. “Smoking hash and humping each other was just about all the Afghan soldiers were really good at. They sure didn’t want to chase the Taliban.”
“Hey, it wasn’t just the Afghans. We even had a corpsman who was doing it with an Afghan Army colonel. They were having an affair, on and off base. Everybody knew it.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It got swept under the rug. Gays could do just about anything then. The corpsman got transferred out. That was on my last tour.”
“At least he was doing it by choice. Kids basically just get raped over there, and there’s not a thing they can do about it. Girls and boys. It’s disgusting how they treat each other.”
“Yeah. And not just in Afghanistan. Iraq too. Marian was a virgin until she got raped. After that happened, she was hiding in the church basement. They had to sneak in and out under cover of darkness. Sister Katterina wore a nun’s habit with the old-fashioned head thing. She could switch it to like a full-face-veil burqa, so she could go undercover and move around with the Muslims. Just another tiny old woman in a black burqa, totally invisible. Perfect camouflage. I think she’s the bravest woman I ever met, going out to rescue those girls. They’re just petrified, they’re in shock, and she finds them where they’re hiding and shepherds them in. All based on tips she gets. A few good people around there knew she was a saint, a living saint.”
“Sounds like Jews hiding in Nazi Germany.”
“That’s almost exactly what it was. Sister Katterina was trying to sneak Marian out of Iraq on dummied-up papers. It helped that Marian could speak English, so she could try to pass as an Iraqi-American. They had a friend at the embassy, or something. Anyway, the plan fell apart. They were going to use a ‘borrowed’ passport from a cousin who was an American citizen, but it didn’t come through. But at least while she was staying with Sister Katterina, I got to see her a few times in the church basement.”
“Now, that sounds like a hot date.”
“You had to be there. Actually, it was sort of an honor. Hell, almost nobody even knew about the place. When I could sneak out and visit her it was all very proper, of course. Sister Katterina wanted her to improve her English for her escape, so I was sort of her unofficial tutor the few times I could get there. We practiced airport-type questions. Visas and going through Customs, her family back in America, all that stuff.
“Marian was traumatized from being raped. Just holding her hands across a table was a major step. But it was still beautiful. We said we would escape together. We made up fairy tales about how my unit would sneak her out of the country in one of our flyaway containers. We’d take her to California, to Disneyland, to Hollywood. But it was all just…fairy tales.” Under cover of the night I wiped my eyes on the pulled-up collar of my T-shirt. When the memories came back they still hurt, even years later.
<
br /> After a minute I said, “I mean, what could I do? I was just a fucking corporal, even if I did run my own STA team.”
“What’s that?”
“Surveillance and Target Acquisition. A sniper, a spotter and a few guys for security. Four teams in a STA platoon. I was the lowest-ranking team leader—usually it’s a sergeant’s billet. What I mean is, I had absolutely no say in what happened to people like her. There was nothing we could do for people like Marian and her family. They were just shit out of luck.” I stared beyond Virgo and its brightest star, Spica.
“We had a special bond, even if I only saw her maybe a dozen times over a couple of weeks at her family’s store, and then in the church basement. We just clicked. All we ever did was hold hands, but…it was very special. She was a very sweet girl, but she had a tremendous spirit. She dreamed about coming to America. Then our part of the city calmed down a little, and some of the Shi’ite militia sort of faded away. Some kind of local agreement between the shot-callers. Her family thought it was safe enough for her to come back to her own house. Big mistake.”
“What happened?”
“Two days after she went home she was kidnapped off the street, on the block between her house and the store. Shoved into a car by a couple of jihad-Joes with AKs. Real heroes. There were ransom demands by cell phone. Some ridiculous amount of money. Impossible for her family. But it wasn’t about the ransom, it was about her. A filthy wine-selling Christian whore, walking right on the sidewalk with decent Muslims. And she was way too friendly with the Ameriki infidels, so she was a traitor too.”
I clenched and unclenched my fists. “The fuckers called her parents, so they could hear her screaming while she was being raped and tortured. For two days. I didn’t know about it until later, or I would have gone totally snake-shit out of my mind.” My fists were balled so tightly my arms were shaking. I was freefalling back down into bad-memory-land again. No stopping now.
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