Cherry

by Nico Walker

  On the other side of the rear Humvee there was a hole in the road and farther on a Humvee was burning. A charred seat was lying on its side on the road. Specialist Farley was standing there looking. I said, “Where are the casualties?” He said, “They’re all dead, you fucking asshole.” I looked again at the body of the gunner. He was burned away, scraps of IBAS clung to his torso, legs folded up, femurs and tibias and fibulas with black tissue, arms melted, body eviscerated and lying on its guts, face gone, head a skull. The smell is something you already know. It’s coded in your blood. The smoke gets into every pore and into every gland, your mouth full of it to where you may as well be eating it. Soldiers are getting water out of the paddies on either side of the road with a Gatorade cooler, ammo cans, whatever else and making a chain from the water to the fire. The fire extinguishers are used up quick. First Platoon’s new medic, a lifer named Jackson, is yelling about how somebody needs to pull security. He’s the only one on the road who gives a fuck about security, and he’s right but nobody gives a fuck. I’ve got my helmet off and I’m going back and forth with it from the water to the fire, carrying water in it, and it’s not registering with me that this is idiotic, but we are all obsessed with getting the fire out even though everybody’s fucking dead and there’s really no reason to hurry. The fire’s out and the three dead make four counting the one on the road: Caves, Rodgers, Clover, and I don’t know who the fourth is. Half the battalion is lined up on the road. I go down the road and wave at the gunner of the first track I see. I hold four fingers up to the gunner, and I mouth the words body bags. I go to turn back, but I look twice because Clover’s walking up the road. I say, I thought you were dead. I say I thought he had been in the truck. He says he was supposed to go on midtour leave this morning. Says the flight out got canceled though. I say, Fuck, I thought he was a ghost just now, and fuck, sorry about those guys because I know they were tight and who was the gunner? He says Easton. I say, Fuck. What about the fourth guy? He says Dewitt. The four body bags come. The captain is there by the truck now. Dewitt is curled on the platform under the turret. The face is gone so you couldn’t know who it was unless you knew because Clover just told you. A burned-up hot-white skull, empty sockets, teeth clenched like they’ll shatter. The captain gives a look to say, Pick up the body. I take it by the top half and he takes it by the legs. Muscle tissue is slick black, hot enough that the latex gloves break on contact. Hands burning too much, I’ve got to set him down. Set the body down. Set him down. Pick it up again. Somebody helps, supports the body under the ass burnt off. The penis and testicles, his dick and his balls, are burned off, and it’s a tab of flesh there, not a centimeter of it. We shuffle back some steps to the body bag laid open on the ground. Lay him in the bag. Close the bag. Go to the water. Throw away what’s left of the latex gloves. Back on the road some guys are picking up Easton. They stop and one’s saying, Holdupholdupholdup. His guts are coming out. They have Easton on his back now. The part of his face that was lying against the pavement hasn’t burned away. It’s a circle of flesh. The right eye hasn’t burned away. You can tell just from the eye that it’s Easton—blue eye—and this kid looking down crying says, “That’s Easton. That’s my friend.” Caves and Rodgers are in the front seats, Caves leaning forward against the dash. It’s easy getting him out because his IBAS is mostly intact and it keeps his guts where they are. The hand grenade is still attached to his IBAS. I don’t remember that it’s there. I send him back to the aid station with the hand grenade strapped to him. They have to call EOD to deal with it. Rodgers is in the driver seat and I know because he was Caves’s driver. Otherwise I wouldn’t know. Caves and Rodgers have no faces. All faces burned off. No faces anymore. Rodgers is in the body bag. A shook-up sergeant named Edwards tells me he thinks there’s some more of him still in the truck. He points to a string of fat running along what’s left of the driver seat, the frame of it. I don’t know what to do. I skim it off with my fingers, roll a ball of it, and throw it in the water. Then I walk down the road, gory as fuck, not making sense.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  I went home on midtour leave in May. Two weeks. And I got disappointed: Emily was only around a little while. She said she couldn’t hang around too long in Cleveland because she had got a job in Washington State somewhere and it couldn’t wait. Something to do with Nature. Whatever it was she couldn’t miss it. There were other girls who’d have fucked me. And they were beautiful. I should have fucked them all. But I didn’t because I was supposed to be married, even though I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. I went back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Some nights we walked what seemed like forever; some nights we didn’t walk far; some nights somebody shot a dog out of boredom. This night there were five of us, a fire team. North was leading it. We took the road as far as OP1, the first observation post, then veered off to the right and down into the fields between Route Martha and Route Polk.

  We settled into an empty field from which we could see neither of the two roads. North wasn’t interested in the roads. He thought he could catch a haji out in the fields. The curfew was sundown, and our ROE was to shoot anybody we caught out after dark. Even with the sand flies it was easy to fall asleep. Night vision was tedious and all this was nothing. We sat still for some hours. Nobody talked. Nobody moved. The bugs ate us.

  North got up to leave and we followed him. We filed to the edge of the field and brushed through the tall grass and into a dooryard. There was a haji on a bed outside in front of the house. I heard him breathe and stumble when he took off running. North radioed the company TOC and the TOC said go ahead and shoot him.

  The haji had gone left and we spread out in a line to turn him up. I was scanning a ditch, hoping I wouldn’t see him as I didn’t feel especially ready to shoot him right that minute. It was Sullivan who spotted him, and he called out as much. The haji was up and running, 30 meters in front. Private Dallas—a brand-new cherry we had with us—went chasing after him. Dallas crossed into my line of fire and I didn’t shoot. But the rest of the fire team opened up. Never mind the cherry.

  We came up with our rifles shouldered, and the haji was laid out on his back. He had blood on his white tank top. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He was good-looking, young. Twenty-five at most. He was quiet—eyes staring—thinking probably he was going to die.

  I was supposed to work on him. The entry wound might have been over his stomach. I didn’t know. There was a splash of blood from the wound, but there was no blood coming out of it now. Just fat pushed out of it. I balled up some gauze and pressed it into the wound. I covered the gauze with a Ziploc bag, taped the plastic down on three sides, and asked Sullivan to keep pressure on the dressing for me. I was looking for an exit wound. There wasn’t any exit wound I could see on the upper body, and since five-five-six rounds tumble, I could only guess where the bullet might have gone once it was in. I cut the haji’s sweatpants off with trauma shears. The haji had a big dick and he was shaved. That got a laugh out of Sergeant Bautista. But there was no exit wound.

  I should have packed the haji full of gauze. I should have kept packing the wound till I couldn’t pack it anymore, till it was packed tight. But I didn’t. I should have had him lie on the side he was wounded on. But I forgot. I said I was going to prop the haji’s feet up on my helmet because the haji could go into shock if his feet weren’t propped up like that. And even though this was true I was only saying it just to say things because there was no exit wound and I didn’t know what to do. The haji’s eyes rolled up in his head and then came back, focused again, rolled up again. I was trying to start a line but his veins were flat. I said I was going to give him morphine to keep him from going into shock.

  North said, “Do what you have to do, doc. You don’t have to tell us.”

  I gave the haji morphine, so I could look like I was doing something right. I stuck him on his right thigh and went back to working on a line. His arm was thin. I
couldn’t get a flash. Then I got a flash, but he moved and I lost it.

  I said, “Keep still, you fuck! I’m trying to help you!”

  North said, “Be quiet, doc.”

  North had called for a medevac. That was one of the first things you were supposed to do. I’d told him to call it in as an urgent surgical. But the medevac wasn’t coming.

  The haji started choking on vomit. The vomit was white and viscous, and I was clearing it out of his throat with my fingertips when he lost consciousness.

  He had no breath. No pulse. I put the bag ventilator together with the CPR mask. I had Bautista do the chest compressions and I did the ventilations. A little of that and the haji came back and he was breathing on his own again.

  Then he croaked.

  We tried CPR another few minutes. His ribs were broken from the chest compressions and you could hear them popping. It was over with.

  North radioed back to the company TOC and said the haji was dead and we didn’t need the medevac anymore. The haji was a corpse, and we had no practical way of taking him back to the FOB with us. We needed QRF to come out and get us, and they’d need to bring a body bag with them because we didn’t have one of those either. The TOC said QRF wouldn’t come out till after the sun was up. Better they be able to see the road, better safe than sorry. We stayed put.

  The sun came up. That’s when I saw the other house. An old lady in black came out of the house and she saw the naked haji laid out on the ground.

  North called to her, “Do you know him?”

  He indicated the naked corpse.

  She turned away and went back inside the house.

  North said, “She knows him.”

  The dismounts from QRF showed up. Castro was the first to reach us. He saw how I was looking and he said to me:

  “This your first dead body, doc?”

  I said no. Like he was asking.

  Somebody gave me a body bag. I spread it out on the ground next to the dead naked haji and rolled him up inside it. That was when things got worse.

  The old lady came out of the house again and was screaming her fucking head off. She tried to get to the body bag but a couple soldiers pulled her back and she fell on her knees and screamed some more and kept screaming. She started taking handfuls of dirt and pouring them over her head. She hit her face against the ground. Then she rose back up on her knees and went through the whole thing again. I closed the body bag. A young woman, real pregnant, had come out of the house, and she started doing the same shit the old lady was doing. And there were two boys. Very young. And they were screaming. Four soldiers took the body bag, and the old lady got up and ran after them. She tried to pry the body bag away from them. I was about to cry and maybe shoot myself when the AK-47 let loose. Full-automatic. Three long bursts. Stopped all that. Everybody scattered.

  We took cover in a ditch. The infantry were returning fire. I was on the far left of our line, scanning the left flank because I thought a haji might try and pick some of us off that way.

  Castro was in charge because his date of rank went back further than North’s did. He was on the radio and the radio told him to secure the dead haji. He called cease-fire: “THEY SAY WE HAVE TO GET THE BODY. GIVE ME FOUR VOLUNTEERS.”

  Only three hands went up. I waited. Still no more hands. So I added a fourth since, all things considered, I had to.

  I didn’t know where the shooter was, so I emptied a magazine into a cow standing in front of the house, figuring this was the safest course of action. Private Dallas was to my left, on his knees, firing an M14. He said, “DOC, I’VE GOT A WOODY!”

  I left my aid bag in the ditch and threw red smoke as far ahead as I could get it. When the smoke popped we went. It was 20 meters to the body bag. The old lady was there. She was black cloth on the ground.

  Running there wasn’t bad. Coming back the other way was more interesting. I was waiting on an AK round to come along and punch my brain out through my face. Yet I was calm, hadn’t ever been so calm. I closed my eyes and I saw Emily, clear as day.

  No such round and I was back in the ditch. More firing. We did the bounding overwatch routine to the next ditch back. Dallas left off shooting and ran back to where I’d got to. He had my aid bag with him. I’d fucked up real bad and left it in the first ditch. My NVGs were in the bag, and if I’d left that shit out there I’d have never lived it down. The cherry just saved my ass.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  We fell back some more, shooting everything and nothing in particular. I shot the cow some more with a new magazine. Apaches were in the air now and the shooter was long gone and we were making fools of ourselves. No one was shooting back at us.

  On the way back to the road there was a shit canal. So we made a bridge out of some branches and tried to drag the body bag across. But the body bag rolled off the branches and fell into the shit canal. I went in after it. It wasn’t easy getting it out of the water. The body was heavy and there were holes in the bag and the water ran out of the holes and into my face, like the dead haji was pissing on me.

  We were nearly back to the road and I was dragging the body bag behind me with the haji in it and I could feel his head bounce in and out of the furrows in the field and we were out in the open and my hands were full, my rifle slung, and we’d just been shot at and my karma was fucked and I was jumpy. Dallas said something to me. But I didn’t know what he was saying. I said, “Don’t fucking talk to me! Pull fucking security!”

  You weren’t supposed to let your nerves show like that.

  When we got back to the road somebody told me to drape the dead haji on the front of one of the QRF tracks so no one would have to ride back to the FOB with the dead haji in the troop compartment with him.

  * * *

  —

  I MISSED breakfast because I was up at the Main Gate waiting for the IPs to come and get the dead haji. Sergeant Castro was there too. He’d stayed to see that it went alright. I was so tired that my face hurt. I had just done my ninth patrol in four days. The IPs arrived.

  Nobody said anything. I opened the body bag. We looked at the dead haji. The IPs took him and loaded him up and left. Castro saw how I was looking and he said, “You did what you could for him, right?”

  I said I had.

  “Then don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  Evans was the first guy I saw when I got back to the company. He said he’d been in the company TOC when we’d been out there killing the haji.

  “I know it’s a lousy thing to say,” he said, “but I was hoping that the guy wouldn’t make it. Who knows what kind of stuff he would have said.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s understandable.”

  “The people up there are making a fuss,” he said. “They say we left another body up there.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know. But we’re going back up there tonight. I’m taking two squads up there myself. We’re expecting retaliation. Will you be ready to go?”

  I said, “Yeah, no problem.”

  And we were back out that night.

  And nothing happened.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS Sullivan who told me how he’d seen the old lady get hit with our fire that morning. And I knew it was true because Sullivan didn’t lie and he wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The battle roster number was EAJ-0888, and we were trying to think of who that was. We knew it was a guy from First Platoon because Staff Sergeant White had called it in. We knew it wasn’t Specialist Jackson, First Platoon’s medic, since line medics were attached to Bravo from HHC and if the dead guy were Jackson the battle roster number would have started with HHC and not E. The first initial being A wasn’t much help as we weren’t in the habit of calling one another by our first names. It t
ook us the better part of ten minutes to come up with a guy from Third Platoon whose last name started with the letter J.

  Private Jimenez.

  We cleared houses like we normally did when these things happened. It had been just a klick away, south of us, past the bend in the road, down a little past OP1, so we didn’t need to go anywhere. And with nothing to the west but a short field and the river, we turned east off the road and went about it.

  A blind retard was chained to a palm tree in front of the first house we came to. An old woman, presumably the retard’s mother, stood near the gate of the courtyard, and some of us filed in. There were four rooms around the courtyard so we split off to see about each one and I kicked a door in and went into an unlit room. The room was empty except for a haji lying on the floor with his eyes closed. I said, “Get the fuck up, motherfucker.”

  But he didn’t move.

  I moved closer to him, rifle trained down on him. “GET THE FUCK UP, MOTHERFUCKER.”

  He opened one eye and looked at me, stayed unmoved, closed the eye. So I had my mind made up to kick him in the face. I didn’t go around kicking hajis in the face for no reason and I didn’t know anyone who did, but Jimenez was dead and I was going to kick the haji in the face. I brought the kick as hard as I could, aiming center mass. But I stopped halfway to connecting. It was all I could do to stay on the one foot and not fall on my ass. The haji got up and stretched and he shuffled out of the room. I can’t remember when it had occurred to me that maybe he was also retarded. I unfucked myself and went outside to see where the haji had gone. He was heading off into the fields, looking up into the sun. Nobody touched him.