Cherry

by Nico Walker

  Jimenez was a cherry. He was one of the replacements who had come to the company after First Platoon lost the four guys killed out on Route Polk. He hadn’t been around two months and he was dead. It was unlucky.

  Sometimes the dead guy was really an asshole, or you could make the case that he was. Not so with Jimenez. For all intents and purposes Jimenez was a saint. That’s why he stuck out like a sore thumb in an infantry company.

  The thing is your average infantryman is no worse than your garden-variety sonofabitch. But he talks in dick jokes and aspires to murder and it doesn’t come off as a very saintly mode of being. Yet Jimenez was a saint. It wasn’t like he was soft or anything like that; he was a tough kid. He’d only just turned 19 but he was strong with a deep chest and the kind of unbreakable wrists one gets from working with his hands. And he’d work. The sergeants liked him for that. But he was so goddamn nice that he drove people crazy sometimes. Like he’d play poker with the poker players and he’d play bad hands. Dealt a queen-four off-suited, he was liable to call two preflop raises and hit a boat on the river. And when people got mad at him for playing garbage he’d apologize and try to give them back their chips. But it didn’t work like that.

  The last time I saw Jimenez was about eight hours before Haji killed him. He’d been boxing Staff Sergeant Castro in the weight room, sparring, and Castro had popped him on the nose pretty good so his nose was bleeding—not broken or anything, just bleeding. And Castro told him to go see a medic and Jimenez did what he was told and when he came around looking for a medic I gave him a hard time. I said, “What the fuck are you coming to me about a bloody fucking nose for, cherry?”

  And he didn’t say anything. He just smiled, all awkward, like he was embarrassed for me.

  I said, “C’mon, cherry. I’m tired. Please don’t come to me with dumb shit, okay? I’m really fucking tired, you know?”

  He went out with a fire team in the morning. They set up a TCP on Route Martha. They’d gone out when it was still dark and they hadn’t had a good look at the spot where they were set up and they didn’t know Haji had laid a one-five-five round underneath the road there. The road was just a paved berm and it was easy to mine. And the Haj was watching them. He saw Jimenez stand on the spot he had mined.

  I heard Koljo talk about it. It was later that same day. He was telling some joes what it had been like. He said, “It looked like something out of a horror movie.”

  The one-five-five round took off both Jimenez’s legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming. The fire team traded shots with two fucking murderers, but the murderers got away, north through a palm grove. The fire team couldn’t go after them because they couldn’t leave Jimenez there by himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A lot of Internet pornography went around the FOB. The biggest file had been passed down to us from the Mississippi Rifles, who had inherited it from the Marines, who had inherited it from the 10th Mountain Division, who had inherited it from whomever. We watched the Fuck Van a lot. The Fuck Van was the last thing we needed to see. The way the Fuck Van worked was the Fuck Van would cruise around looking for young women to video getting fucked in the Fuck Van. Several bros would ride in the Fuck Van and they’d be on the lookout. Then one bro would go “look!” and he’d point out a young woman walking down the side of the road and maybe she’d have a bag of groceries or something like that. It would always begin innocently enough. The bros would call out to the young woman and offer her a ride. At first she’d be reluctant to accept the ride because the Fuck Van was a panel van and she associated this type of van with rapists and laborers and these were strange bros. But the bros would overcome her misgivings with their bro charms and she’d inevitably accept the ride. Once they got her in the Fuck Van the bros would make fun of the young woman and call her stupid so as to make her feel insecure about herself and they’d ask her questions that got rather personal and after a few minutes they’d ask her to take off her shirt. She would decline at first. So the bros would offer her cash. Once the cash came out things changed. Before long the woman would be completely naked, sucking off several bros at once, and they’d have her do things like say the ABCs with a dick in her mouth and she’d do it. When the bros were done with her they’d take turns coming on her face. Then she’d get dressed and the Fuck Van would pull over at a random spot where the bros would kick the young woman out of the Fuck Van and throw her groceries at her and call her a whore and drive away.

  One day the Fuck Van happened to be playing on a laptop on the card table and Sergeant Thorpe happened to see it. A young blond woman with a British accent was getting double-penetrated by some bros in the Fuck Van. Thorpe noticed something and he stopped the video.

  “She’s a slut,” he said. “Look! The slut’s wearing a wedding ring!”

  He dragged the timer back to a point in the video when there was a close-up of the young woman fingering her clitoris, and you could definitely see she was wearing a wedding ring.

  A married woman in the Fuck Van!

  Thorpe couldn’t watch the Fuck Van after that.

  It was too bad for Thorpe. He was still all fucked up from what his old lady had done to him. It was sad as fuck. And he wasn’t the only one. A lot of us were getting fucked around.

  The Fuck Van was bad for morale. Guys argued about whether the Fuck Van was actually real. But it had to be real because it was there and we could see it. And we knew then that life was just a murderous fuckgame and that we had been dumb enough to fall for some bullshit.

  * * *

  —

  THIRD PLATOON was on QRF1 the night that Haji took some paratroopers alive at an OP north of Checkpoint 9. It was a straight shot up Route Martha to get there, and we could have made it fast, but we were held up on account of a lot of last-minute additions to the patrol roster. Then the blue force tracker went down. That was our GPS, and we weren’t allowed to leave the FOB without it working. So we were stuck waiting with the trucks staged at the North Gate.

  Specialist Jeffries said, “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

  Jeffries was a little fucker and he didn’t know how ate-the-fuck-up he was. He thought he was alright because he’d been in the 82nd Airborne once. But nobody gave a rat’s ass that he’d been in the 82nd Airborne. The only reason Jeffries was on the roster that night was the captain’s usual driver was on midtour leave and they’d had to have somebody fill in. And Jeffries was worried about light discipline.

  “I’ve got to say something!” he said. “I’ve got to!”

  He went to tell whomever that we were sitting ducks. When he came back he was looking chastised.

  “I can’t believe this!” he said. “Freaking amateurs!”

  It was more than an hour before we were on our way. We went up north, past Checkpoint 9. The trucks stopped to let us out. Hueso-Santiago led a squad into some fields west of the road. North led a fire team heading northeast. And Lieutenant Evans, First Sergeant Hightower, Castro, and I went off due east of the road. There was no shortage of aircraft above us. Through one came word of a target house. We were going to clear it.

  Evans said, “This is the target house.”

  The first sergeant asked if he was sure.

  “They say we’re right on top of it.”

  The target house was twenty-five meters away. No lights on. Without any words it was determined that the lieutenant and the first sergeant would cover Castro and me from the tall grass on the edge of the yard while we kicked the door in and cleared the house. So Castro and I crossed the yard and stopped next to the door. I’d kick the door in. I was pretty sure I was about to die but it would have been lame if I’d pussied out, so I flicked the safety switch to burst and I didn’t think about it. We went in. I went left and Castro went right. There was nobody in the entire room. I scanned
a smaller room from a doorway and again there was nobody. There was a stairway in the back corner of the room and we saw it and we didn’t hesitate before we were going up because we didn’t give a fuck about dying and really we had figured out by then that this target house was bullshit.

  Back at the road, Greene was giving Jeffries a hard time. He said he’d personally shoot Jeffries if Jeffries ever touched a radio again. He said he was serious.

  I asked Sullivan what it was about.

  He said, “Numbnuts over there green-lighted an airstrike on Hueso’s squad. Almost got them all killed.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. Hueso’s people don’t have IR beacons on their shit because they’re all from fucking Bradley crews. The aircraft thought they were the Haj. But that’s what happens when you send Bradley crews out as dismounts. Ate. The fuck. Up. The fucking aircraft radioed the captain to see if all our people were accounted for, but the captain wasn’t in his truck and numbnuts, fucking Jeffries, radioed back on his own and said all our people were accounted for. Meanwhile Hueso’s out there and this big IR beam comes down on him like some shit out of a fucking UFO and he radios on the company net and says, Um, I think I’m about to get lit up by one of our aircraft. So Greene figures out what’s going on, and he runs over to the captain’s truck, yelling like he’s fucking gone crazy, and he pulls numbnuts off the radio, calls the fucking shit off, thank God.”

  “Fuck.”

  We regrouped at the road. The target house had been cleared. So there was nothing left to do but search everywhere else till somebody found the missing paratroopers.

  Everywhere else was connected by paths through tall grass and palm groves and shit canals. The paths were very narrow and turned a lot and you couldn’t tell what was around the bends. We cleared some houses. Most of them were empty. We found nothing. A group of soldiers moved on a house about fifty meters north of us. We had run out of houses where we were, so we thought to move up that way and see what was going on there. North and I went ahead while the first sergeant got the rest of our people together. By the time North and I reached the house it had been cleared. Some hajis were sitting on the living room floor. There were three young children, a boy and two girls, and a mother and a father. The television was on. Four paratroopers and an interpreter were in the room as well. And one of the paratroopers, a sergeant, an E-5, took an asp off his gear and flicked it out. He took the boy from off the floor and shoved him into a wall. He grabbed the boy by the back of his neck and he said, “I’m looking for some friends of mine.”

  He jabbed the boy three times hard in the ribs with the butt end of the asp. The boy’s father, the mother, the two girls: not one of them so much as blinked.

  He said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”

  He hit the boy some more. The boy took it quietly. His legs buckled but the sergeant had him by the neck. No one said anything. The sergeant hit the kid some more. He had his mind made up to hit the kid for a while, so he did. And it was meaningless because we were looking for some dead men. They’d died and gone to the Internet. That’s where people go when they die these days. At least when they die like that.

  I walked out of the house and I ran into Lieutenant Evans.

  I said, “You probably shouldn’t go in there, sir.”

  He said, “Why not?”

  I said, “One of the Airborne guys is beating up a kid.”

  He said, “Oh.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  After we had been in Iraq awhile, it became apparent that they weren’t about to piss-test any of us. Something decent they’d done for us, I imagine.

  So you could get high.

  But there was the question then of how.

  You could get narcotics from the right interpreter. But then you might have a stroke or fall out of a fucking guard tower or something else infamous. And you didn’t want that. So what you did was you’d have it sent in from the World. The mail people X-rayed the mail and they had drug dogs for it too. But it wasn’t that serious. You could get a little weed in. You could get a little powder. Prescription drugs were wide open (within reason). If you could get somebody to mail it, and if they showed a little restraint, you were good.

  Of course it wasn’t every day you got such a care package. So what ended up happening was you’d form little cliques, three or four like-minded individuals getting weed or pills or liquor or whatever sent in from the World. Liquor usually came in mouthwash bottles. Little bits of weed came in all kinds of ways.

  I’d left some money with Roy when I was home. Roy sent me an ounce baked into some brownies. He’d had his girlfriend do the baking. It was some care package: these brownies, plus Roy had thrown in a Johnny Cash poster, three packs of Winston Reds, and some Perc 10s in an Advil bottle for good measure. Real magnanimous of him. I said, Roy, you’ve done good.

  He’d sent his girl to mail it at the post office and she did and then he found out she’d put his return address on the box. So he sent her to the post office to get the package back and she did. Then she took it back to Roy and Roy changed the address on it and they sent it again, fake address this time. That was Roy.

  We had about got lynched out at the car bombing that afternoon. The car bomb did what car bombs do and four were dead in the market. It would have been more but the sheep took most of the blast. So you had flesh and blood and wool on the pavement. You had bloodstains on the pavement, little lakes of blood. And all the hajis were out there, like a macabre sort of block party. A teenage haji was punching a kid in the face. He shoved the kid down into the shins-deep garbage in the gutter. The kid came up with a splintered two-by-four, swinging it around and raving in boy-pitched Arabic that sounded like tears in his eyes. But then Teen Haji got the two-by-four away from him and beat him with it some. And the old hajis stood around and didn’t do anything, lest they should be mistaken for men unaccustomed to brutality.

  What was left of the car was there. Our patrol had been nearby when the battalion ordered us to keep the IPs from getting rid of what was left of the car before QRF could bring EOD out to look it over for indications of who had put the bomb together. So we were waiting for QRF. And more and more hajis closed in around us. There were only two dismounts in the street. I counted as one and the other guy, Lessing, was 30 meters up from where I was. The gunners and the drivers couldn’t leave the trucks. The vehicle commanders could have left the trucks, but they didn’t even though they should’ve. I was trying to watch all the rooftops and all the dark window spaces and all the corners all at once, looking for the haji who meant to shoot me in the face. It was early in the afternoon and the sky was clear so the sun had everything blinding. And all these hajis were getting out of control and I kind of wanted to just say fuck it and let them run riot all over the place so as to better illustrate for the VCs why some more help on the ground wouldn’t have been amiss.

  So Lessing and I were pissed off when we came back in, but then there was a package from Roy and there were these fucking brownies with an ounce of weed baked in them, and the fucking Winstons….It was just what the doctor had ordered.

  Lessing and I got high as shit. These were some fucking brownies. They tasted like straight weed: you could hardly taste anything else, just weed and a hint of chocolate. We got shitfaced on these fucking things. If we’d have had to deal with anybody but Borges or Burnes that afternoon we’d have been fucked. Anybody else probably would have sent us to fucking Leavenworth, or shot us on the spot, a summary execution, to make an example of us. It was that serious. We were so high.

  Burnes and Borges rolled in around when I was getting into the Percs. I said to Lessing, “You want one of these.”

  He said, “No thanks.”

  I said, “C’mon, motherfucker. Don’t disdain my favors. You always look out. What’s mine is yours.”

  He said, “I used to be addicte
d to heroin.”

  “This isn’t heroin.”

  “I robbed convenience stores.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Burnes and Borges said they’d take some Percs since I was offering. I said, “Fuck that. Have some brownies.”

  And they did. And they too got retarded. I ended up keeping the pills for myself. I did give one to Borges because I kind of had to, but that was all; the rest I kept. Still they didn’t hold me but a few days. When we didn’t have any proper drugs, there was always computer duster to huff. It was summer and people were getting killed. People got killed more in summer. And we could be killed. And we had no way to know.

  About Emily I guess I was deluding myself. Somewhat knowingly. Or just knowingly. Or maybe I didn’t know. I can’t remember.

  Often I used to come in in the mornings from IED ambushes, and I would go online and check my email. A lot of times she didn’t email, and when she did it usually wasn’t good. She’d say she was ashamed of what I was doing. But I didn’t ever tell her what I was doing. She knew as much as she had before I left.

  I’d bought a bootleg DVD from the haji shop. It was a movie about the lives of emperor penguins and what they endured so they could keep living in Antarctica and making babies and all that. I thought the world of these fucking penguins. I wrote to Emily and told her she ought to see the movie about the penguins. She didn’t. Then I said, Of course she can’t see it. She is in the fucking wilderness. So I ordered it for her on Amazon. Amazon sent the movie about the penguins to her in the wilderness. She emailed me and said the movie was stupid and the penguins were stupid. I thought, Why would she do that? Couldn’t she just pretend for me? I would have pretended for her. But she had said the penguins were stupid. That was exactly what she had said. Stupid. I thought, She is good, so I have done something wrong.