by Nico Walker
I moved the leg. I felt it. I listened for crepitation. I got the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing. I said, “It might be fractured.”
Moving the leg caused him pain.
He was still naked.
I said, “Can somebody please get a fucking man dress or something for this guy?”
I told the interpreter to say the haji needed to go to a hospital.
The interpreter was wearing a ski mask.
I gave the haji some 800mm ibuprofens. Miller had wrapped a man dress around his waist. I put a few more ibuprofens in a little Ziploc bag for him and I laid the little Ziploc bag beside him on the floor because his hands were Zip-Cuffed behind his back.
The hajis were sitting on the floor, covered by rifles and looking sullen. The joes smoked cigarettes and the first sergeant did his questions.
The radio said don’t detain anybody.
It was time to go.
“No harm, no foul,” said the first sergeant.
* * *
—
WE LEFT and moved on to the next house.
The sun had come up. Some of us got to meet the new platoon leader for Third Platoon. Second Lieutenant Evans. He was sort of a tall goofy-looking motherfucker, like a young Tom Hanks. But he seemed reasonable enough.
We were at the assembly area in the desert outside of town. I was in the troop compartment of the Bradley that was now Evans’s, and I was listening to the battalion net. Miller was there too, in the back of the track. The radio said one of our guys had got fucked up somewhere. The battle roster number went out: hotel hotel charlie echo yankee tree tree six six.
I said, “That’s Yuri!”
Miller didn’t know who Yuri was.
We cleared house all day.
Borges shot a dog in the face.
Seven. Six. Two.
Nothing else happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The last day of Operation Honor Bright some of us were sent to a schoolhouse to set up a clinic for the hajis. A lot of hajis were lined up outside. One old haji had deep lacerations on his wrists. He said the lacerations were from when he’d been Zip-Cuffed a few days back. I washed the lacerations out with saline and dressed them with bacitracin and gauze. One of his hands was swollen and shaking real bad. To me it looked like it was serious. But I didn’t know and I didn’t know what to tell him either. So I went to ask the two senior medics, two sergeants from HHC who had come along to help with the clinic. They were asleep in a five-ton outside. I woke them up and told them about the old haji and asked them what they thought was wrong with him. The senior medic said it was cellulitis.
I said, “I don’t have antibiotics or anything. Do you?”
He said, “No.”
“What can I do for this guy?”
“Nothing.”
“What should I tell him?”
“Tell him to eat shit and die.”
I went back and I told the interpreter to tell the old haji to go to a hospital and try and get some antibiotics from a doctor because I didn’t have any medicine.
I didn’t have anything.
I didn’t know anything.
A mother had brought her kid in. The kid was about seven. He had a deep laceration on his right hand. There was nothing I could do but bandage it. A photographer from the Army Times took our picture when I was putting the bandage on. This was the kind of shit that happened.
The infantry were pulling security outside. About a dozen kids were hanging around, and Borges was teaching them the shocker. He arranged his fingers just so.
He said, “Two in the pink. One in the stink.”
They went, “YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYA!”
* * *
—
WE WERE on the road heading back to the FOB. I was in the troop compartment of Evans’s track and I realized I was by myself for the first time since I’d left Fort Hood. So I jerked off into some MRE toilet paper. Then I pissed into a liter water bottle. I filled it up pretty far and I put the jizz in the bottle with the piss and threw everything out the hatch on the ramp. I went to sleep. I didn’t dream. When I woke up we were stopped. I banged on the turret door. It opened and I asked the gunner why we were stopped. The gunner said we’d run over an IED but it hadn’t gone off. The track had crushed the battery so the bomb couldn’t detonate. EOD was taking it apart with a robot. “Three one-five-fives,” he said.
Jesus.
CHAPTER THIRTY
PFC Cecco and Specialist Greenwald were in the aid station overnight. Black Hawks would take them to Baghdad in the morning. From Baghdad they’d go to Kuwait, Kuwait to Germany, Germany to the States. They’d get their coffins somewhere on the way.
There was a battalion formation on the LZ. It was only our second time taking dead, and the lifers were still making a big deal out of it like somehow you were the asshole. And you went along with it.
Cecco and Greenwald. They were just names to me. I hadn’t ever talked to them. If I’d ever seen them before I didn’t know. It was IPs who’d done it. It had happened on Route Carentan. The EFP went through the up-armor no problem. It smashed Cecco’s head. It cut Greenwald at the waist—he spilled on the gunner’s platform.
The Black Hawks didn’t spend two minutes on the LZ. Some medics carried the body bags out. When the medics were clear the Black Hawks went on their way. The battalion sergeant major told us to fall out. Then two other helicopters were coming in. They showed up a ways off against the grey sky, and we stayed around to see what they were about.
The second pair of Black Hawks landed, and all these beautiful women came out of them. And the women waved and bounced and they had white teeth. And they didn’t know or whatever but still it was goddamn awful.
The Denver Mustangs Cheerleaders were on display at the DFAC for an hour, talking to the soldiers, taking pictures with the soldiers. Beautiful women with skin like expensive cream. And they were there, albeit not for long.
I didn’t go see them. It wasn’t like they were going to fuck you. And that was what this was all about: you were supposed to want to fuck them and they were supposed to not fuck you.
If you were a ballplayer they’d fuck you.
If you were a ballplayer they’d let you do everything to them.
They’d let you disgrace them.
But you weren’t a ballplayer.
* * *
—
WE NEVER did anything to the IPs. But some of us from Echo were put out on a cordon on the edge of the Big Shia City one night about a week after Cecco and Greenwald. We were supposed to block anyone from going in or out while Special Forces raided a Mahdi compound.
A voice came over the net, sounded like death metal, said they were ready.
And they killed a lot of hajis, 40 of the poor motherfuckers. It only took a few minutes. We didn’t do anything but stay in place. We didn’t even hear it. I wouldn’t ever have known about the 40 dead hajis if I hadn’t read about them on Yahoo! News the next morning. I wondered how it was they’d done it.
Anyway. That’s when I figured out we weren’t there to do shit. We’d do for getting fucked-up-or-killed-by-bombs purposes, and everyday-waste-of-your-fucking-time purposes, but no one thought we could do the actual fighting, whatever that was.
* * *
—
SINCE YURI was done, as in all fucked up and not going to be back, First Platoon was without a medic of their own for a while, and I ended up on most of their patrols, on top of the ones I was doing with Third Platoon. So I was on a fuckload of patrols. I was getting pretty dull already from exhaustion, but then again I was on edge all the time because I was waiting for the war to happen to me.
When I went out with First Platoon I usually rode in Sergeant Caves’s truck. Private Rodgers did the driving. Specialist Clover did the
gunning. They were all tough guys and they weren’t trying to lie about shit. They said they wanted to kill somebody, really anybody if it came to it. It was that simple. But there wasn’t anybody for them to kill, so we just rode around, and when we weren’t on the move we’d talk about what drugs we had done and what shit we had done and what we had paid for ecstasy when we were in the world, things of that nature. Clover had got his ecstasy the cheapest. But Rodgers had seen a guy get Uzied to death one time. So he was the winner.
I took my helmet off. Clover looked down from where he was, up in the turret, and he saw the card I had taped on the front of the inside of my helmet.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Herman Thompson,” I said, “the running back.”
“Why do you have Herman Thompson taped inside your k pot?”
“My wife used to have a crush on him back when she was in grade school, back in the early nineties when he ran the ball for Buffalo and they were in the championship every year. I made fun of her about it once, so she sent me this card with a letter the other day telling me to be careful cuz if I got killed she was gonna fuck Herman Thompson. So I have the card taped in the front of my helmet as a sort of reminder for me not to get killed.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“I paid a hundred and ten dollars for an orchid on Valentine’s Day and she gave it to her grandmother.”
“Fuck.”
Rodgers asked me if I was scared of getting hit. I said I’d prefer not to get hit if I had any say in it. Rodgers said he wanted to get hit because he’d get free hunting and fishing licenses for life if he had a Purple Heart.
“You don’t want a Purple Heart, doc?” Clover asked.
“Not especially.”
“Hey, doc,” Caves said, “check this out.”
He was holding a hand grenade by the pin.
I said, “Nice hand grenade.”
He said, “I brought it back with me from Afghanistan.”
I knew why they were fucking with me. They thought I was an asshole. I’d been fucking up and they’d heard about it. I had gone out with QRF a few nights before when one of the battalion’s snipers had fallen down and said he was hurt. He’d said he was hurt so bad that he needed morphine before he could be evacuated to the aid station. I wasn’t the type to deny anyone morphine and I was going to stick him in the leg with a 15mm auto injector of it, but I was holding the fucking thing backwards and the needle shot through my thumb and came out my thumbnail, spraying morphine on the ground. A number of people had seen this happen. And there’d been another fuckup whereby I came to appreciate how difficult it could be to start an IV on a real-life heat casualty. You got a real heat casualty and his skin was like rubber, and the needle as dull as a spoon. Evans had seen me stick the same heat casualty five times in a row without starting a line. I was sure I’d get sent back to the aid station. But I stayed where I was.
* * *
—
ALL OF us cherries got our combat patches on Easter. The combat patch wasn’t like a CIB or a Combat Medic Badge or something that you at least had to get shot at or whatever to get. The combat patch had nothing to do with actual combat, not even pseudocombat. It was just a unit patch, usually a division patch, that you wore on your right sleeve so everybody would know you’d been deployed to a theater of operations and stayed a little while once. In short it was a big fucking nothing. But all of us in the company who weren’t outside the wire, who were just hanging around waiting, maybe getting some sleep or cleaning weapons or breaking track or watching porno or playing cards or huffing duster, got rounded up by the squad leaders and told to stop whatever it was we were doing and go up to the motor pool and form up as a company.
They’d brought a boom box out. It was on the pavement, hooked up to an extension cord that ran from the mechanics’ shed. So we knew something was up, and then we found out we were getting our combat patches. No one gave a shit. Really this was an inconvenience. So we bitched. Rodgers said real loud that they could keep the patch if he could get to see some combat.
First Sergeant Hightower came out and called the company to attention; then the captain came out to say a few words. He thanked us for our hard work, said some other things. And when he’d said all he was going to say, he had the first sergeant hit the play button on the boom box and the Toby Keith song started playing. Then right when it got to the big crescendoing part where Toby gets to talking about putting boots in people’s asses and that’s what Americans do, the captain gave the order: “Present…patches!”
It was too fucking funny and we couldn’t help laughing in his face. We didn’t want to do it; just it couldn’t be helped. The patches went around. It was awkward but they went around and we got them. You could see the first sergeant was upset about us not being as solemn as he’d have liked, and after all the patches were passed out he had us close ranks and he right-faced us and marched us to the back of the motor pool, where he went about smoking the dogshit out of us for a while on the blacktop in the noon heat. He really gave us the works: Front-Back-Go’s and Starmans—Starmans being a simply infamous form of exercise. He had us do that shit, and what was crazier was everybody staff sergeant and below got caught up in it. That was about the craziest shit in the world to us joes since none of us had ever seen an NCO get misused like that before.
* * *
—
I DON’T know if it was two weeks after that. I went out on a census patrol with Third Platoon. Cheetah was driving. Cheetah was a shitbag. He was big into Faces of Death and what was almost certainly child pornography. He would buy all the stupid gaudy knives the haji shops sold and mount them on the plywood wall above his bunk. He was driving that morning, and I thought it was stupid since he wasn’t even a grunt. He was the lowest ranking of three supply POGs in the company, and he wasn’t even good at that because he kept getting himself Article-Fifteened for being a moody knife-pulling shitbag. Yet he was leaving the wire with us and he was even driving. It was something to do with him having assured the first sergeant that he wouldn’t be such a shitbag all the time if he could only leave the wire a little and feel like part of the team.
Lieutenant Evans was riding shotgun. Perez was in the turret. I was in the back. Neither Cheetah nor Perez was an American citizen. Cheetah was from Somalia. Perez was from Mexico somewhere. I wondered about the implications of this. I think they both liked America more than I did. What was my problem? We were the lead Humvee of three that had left on the patrol. It was midmorning. The three Humvees drove north on Route Polk and took a right turn off the highway and onto a trail that hooked around a main irrigation canal. The trail ended some 150 meters short of some houses where the day’s censusing was to be done. I told Evans he shouldn’t try to drive over the ground between the trail and the houses. I said we ought to dismount and walk the rest of the way.
“Why can’t we drive?”
“The trucks can’t drive through that shit, sir. They’re too heavy. They’ll get stuck.”
“It looks fine to me.”
“It only looks fine because it’s dry on top from the fucking sun. But it’s all shit under the surface. Trust me. I’ve seen shit identical to this before. Lieutenant Heyward got four vehicles stuck trying to drive through identical shit as this. You don’t remember Lieutenant Heyward because he got fired before you came to the company, sir.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think we’ll try anyway.”
The truck didn’t go 20 meters and it was stuck. Evans told Cheetah to back out, but the truck couldn’t go back either, and it didn’t help that Cheetah didn’t know what he was doing. So then Evans wanted North’s truck to come up and pull us out, and I said, “You don’t want to do that, sir. That’s what Lieutenant Heyward did and it didn’t work. You’ll only make things harder for QRF when they get here. You need a Bradley with a tow cable.”
/> “Hush.”
So after the three trucks were stuck Evans radioed the FOB for QRF to come and fetch us out. It was either that or he could defect to the hajis.
QRF arrived. They were from First Platoon, a Bradley in front of three Humvees. The Bradley came tearing up the fucking trail and went directly into the shit and buried its track up to the skirt. So ended the rescue. It looked like we were going to be stuck awhile, like all day, and I took a turn up in the turret. A haji was watching us from where the houses were. I watched him watching us. I thought it must have been that he was amused by our situation, so I let it go. He got bored after a while and he went away.
Sergeant Caves was there. He had come up with QRF and he was bullshitting with North. They were talking about what a clusterfuck the day had turned into. They talked about where they would go hunting when they got back to the States. The battalion radioed and told QRF to return to the FOB and come back to us with a wrecker. The Bradley would have to stay put. The order went around. QRF headed back and Caves departed with them.
We heard the dull thump. We saw the smoke streaming into the sky. I asked Evans if QRF had a medic with them. He got on the radio, “Echo one six, this is echo tree six actual.”
A voice came back on the net. It was Lieutenant Nathan. “Um…this—uh—isn’t a good time.”
QRF wasn’t far away. Evans sent North with some dismounts and some fire extinguishers to try and get there and help out. The quickest way back to the hardball was across the irrigation canal. It was deep enough and wide enough that we had to get in it and swim across. We were loaded down with fire extinguishers, guns, body armor, assault packs, all that shit, and we were having a hard time not drowning in the motherfucker. Perez almost drowned and Cheetah had to pull him out. I was the first one to get across. I crawled up the bank and got to my feet just as a white bongo truck was coming down the road, going the way we were going. I pulled my rifle up and aimed where I guessed the driver’s face was. I took my left hand off the grip and signaled him to stop. If he didn’t stop I was going to try and murder him. But he stopped. I moved up to the driver door. It was two hajis in the cab. I saw North and the interpreter coming up on my right. North told the interpreter to tell the hajis to take us down the road. We piled in the truck bed. We stopped about 100 meters short of the QRF element and ran the last part of the way.