by Klay, Phil
Who would have done that, in those days, violent as things were? Only a crazy person. But half of them were at the BAS with their dicks oozing. They had to be fucking somebody. And the one thing everybody wanted to know was, Where is it? Where is it? I’ll wear a condom, I’ll be fine. But none of them said a word. They’d get mad, tell us to fuck off. I cornered one of the guys, this shifty-looking PFC. I told him, Everybody knows what you’re doing, we just want to know where. He told me if I didn’t quit asking, he’d face fuck me with his KA-BAR. I left him alone after that. I wasn’t really serious anyway.
We shouldn’t have bothered. The next day, the CO had all the herp cases called to the BAS and the doc said, “All right, guys, where’s the whores? You ain’t leaving till we figure out this goddamn dick epidemic.”
They all looked at the ground and their faces turned red, and after a while one of them finally admitted, “Doc. Ain’t no whores. We been sharing a pocket pussy.”
“Jesus,” said the doc. “Clean the fucking thing out, boys.” And he got that platoon issued a pallet of hand sanitizer as a joke. For the rest of us, we had something to laugh about the next couple days.
Then the mortar attack came where the mortars wouldn’t fucking stop, mortar after mortar after mortar, and we just cowered there, wondering, Aren’t we getting place of origin on these fucks? Isn’t somebody targeting them? West was still alive, then, and he started praying, freaking everyone out because you’d hear, “O Lord in heaven—” Boom. “Forgive us, God, us sinners—” Boom. “Sinners—” Boom. “West! Shut the fuck up!” Boom.
No injuries, and afterward I had an erection that could bust concrete. So hard, it hurt. And I went up to the roof, and Flores was up there with Old Man, and they looked the other way while I jerked off on the roof, looking out at Haditha, wondering, Is there a sniper out there, scoping in to shoot me, dick in hand?
At first I put some tits in my brain and the idea of me fucking someone, anyone, but toward the end my mind was blank, just me scratching an itch, and I heard small-arms fire off in another section of the city and I kept jerking, faster and faster, almost coming with the thought floating in, as it always did when I heard gunfire, that maybe somebody I knew was dying.
• • •
First female I saw after that, I smelled first. The whole table of us, at the chow hall at Al Asad, and the smell of her short-circuited our collective brain and the conversation stopped and we all turned to her at once and she walked right by, neither pretty nor ugly but a woman, not seen through a scope, close enough to reach out and touch. Close enough to smell.
Me and Flores got into a conversation about what we’d like to do to her. I mean, things we didn’t even want to do, just us competing with each other for the dirtier thing. Flores won when he said, “I’d let her piss in my mouth just for a sniff of her snatch.”
“Who wouldn’t?” said Old Man.
“You guys are idiots,” said West. Later, though, West got all motherly and told me how much he missed his family, and he asked me, “You got any girls back home you’d like to see?”
“Not really,” I said.
“You know,” he said, “sometimes, girls who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you were in high school change their minds once you’re a war hero.”
• • •
I didn’t feel like a war hero when I got back to Lejeune, especially not after the memorial service for West and for Kovite and for Zapata. It was a lot to take. Everybody got drunk afterward. Flores couldn’t deal and went to the barracks to be alone. I wanted to go with him, but I stayed with Old Man. He needed looking after. And Old Man wanted to go to the Pink Pussycat, this strip club in a double-wide trailer, painted pink. The Pussycat was off-limits for Marines, but Old Man said it was the best place for what we wanted, and Old Man was the one to know.
“So there’s whores in there?” I asked him when we pulled into the parking lot, which was nothing more than a mud-and-grass field. I thought I knew the answer to that. Whores was the whole purpose of the trip.
“They don’t think they’re whores,” he said. “They think they’re dancers who sometimes fuck their clients.”
I laughed, but he stopped me.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You fuck this up, you aren’t getting laid. They don’t see themselves as street whores.”
“But . . .” I pointed at the trailer.
He laughed. “I bet there’s girls that fuck at the Driftwood, too. There’s girls that fuck at the nicest strip clubs in the world. And there’s a few girls here that don’t.”
“All right,” I said. “So why’re we here?”
He started counting out reasons on his fingers. “Most of the girls here fuck,” he said. “It’s less expensive. These girls treat you better because they aren’t hot and they want repeat customers. You and I are just back from deployment, so really hot women are wasted on us. Also, there’s no dress code.” He pointed to his crotch. “There’s a reason I’m wearing sweatpants.”
Old Man saw me shudder at that, and he laughed again. If I’d felt like I had a choice, I would have walked away. Something about the sad little parking lot, with a few busted-up Buicks and trucks lined out in front of the pink trailer, it was too far away from what I hoped I’d get. Some hot young chick who was doing it for the money, yeah, but maybe one who really liked me, too. Old Man headed over to the door, and since he had the car keys, I followed him.
We walked in and there they were. Naked women. It was a small space, smelling of beer and sweat, with seventies rock blaring. There were only seven or eight customers in there, all but two of whom were definitely civilians. The chairs and couches all looked like they’d been picked up off the side of the road. We stood at the back for a few seconds, and then we went to the front and sat down together in a pleather, zebra-print love seat by the side of the stage, which was a little square about a foot off the ground at the end of the trailer. Old Man got me a beer and I drank it quick, taking small but quick sips and looking around at the girls and the customers, trying to figure how the whole thing worked. Then the dancer onstage got down in front of me and I stared straight ahead, into the tiny strip of fabric between her legs. She was an older woman who didn’t have the greatest body but didn’t have any scars that I could see and who looked like she’d probably been pretty when she was younger. I didn’t breathe for a bit. When she got up, I asked Old Man how we got the girls alone.
He could see how I was, and he smiled. He pulled two twenties out of his wallet and gave them to me. Then he pulled out a one, folded it, waved it in front of the dancer, and tucked it in her G-string.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m gonna buy you a lap dance. Then you ask the girl to take you to the VIP room.”
I looked around.
“It’s in another trailer,” he said. “You get there, she gives you another lap dance, you ask her if there’s anything else she could do. You tell her you like her so much and she’s so great and you just got back and is there anything else.” He pointed to the two twenties in my hand. “Don’t give her more than that. And don’t give it to her until after. And don’t settle for her letting you grope her.”
I looked down at the money. Two hours earlier, I’d spent more on whiskey at Alexander’s.
“It’s good here,” he said. He pointed to the corner of the room, where a tired-looking woman was standing, waiting to take the stage. “That’s my girl. She’s real sweet. We’re like an old married couple—we only fuck once every seven months.” He paused for a second. “She’s good. After I finish, she stays with me till the time is up.”
I nodded. When the first girl got off the stage, Old Man paid for my lap dance. Then I did what Old Man had said.
The VIP lounge was a white trailer about fifty yards from the main one. We stepped out of the music into the fresh air, and I was excited, walking a step ahead of her. Ins
ide, the trailer had a corridor and a bunch of little rooms. There was loud music in that trailer, too, so you mostly couldn’t hear what was going on in the rooms around you.
The woman was very polite. We settled on forty. I felt bad arguing for less than that, and she pulled down my pants. I wasn’t hard, but she took me in her mouth in a very professional way and then she put a condom on me and then we had sex and then I paid her the money Old Man had given me.
As I walked back to the main trailer, I didn’t feel anxious anymore. She had been a little dry, which made sense, but it had felt great right until the moment that I came and the world crashed back into focus.
Inside the trailer, Old Man was getting a lap dance, his face buried in the stripper’s tits. It wasn’t from the one he’d called his girl. It was another woman. This one looked something like my mother, before she’d died. When she finished, he whispered to her and they got up. He nodded to me and walked over.
“How was Nancy?” he said.
“Nancy?” I said.
“That’s her real name,” he said. “She’s good, but she can be kind of a bitch sometimes.”
“It was good,” I said.
He patted me on the shoulder. “Take your time with it,” he said. “Talk to the girls.” And he went back to where he was sitting and motioned to the one who looked like my mother. She climbed on top of him again and I looked away.
Nancy walked back into the trailer and started working the room. She smiled at me as she passed and then climbed on the lap of some civilian. I looked away from that, too.
Old Man had the keys in the pocket of his sweatpants, and there was no easy way to get them, so I waited in the back while he had his fun. I had a whiskey, then another beer. I was pretty far gone at this point, but I kept drinking. I waited and waited and I looked at the sad women onstage. Some looked zoned out. On something for sure. Old Man took his time. When he went to the VIP trailer with his girl, I counted the money in my pocket. I had more than enough. If I let myself get into it again, it’d be almost as good as not being there.
PRAYER IN THE FURNACE
Rodriguez didn’t approach me because he wanted to talk to a chaplain. I don’t think he even recognized who I was until I stood up straight and he saw the cross on my collar. At first, he only wanted a cigarette.
He had blood smeared across his face in horizontal and diagonal streaks. His hands and sleeves were stained, and he wouldn’t look at me directly, his eyes wild and empty. Violent microexpressions periodically flashed across his face, the snarling contortions of an angry dog.
I handed him a cigarette and lit it against mine. Rodriguez drew in, let the smoke out, glanced back to his squad, and his face again turned to violence.
Twenty years ago, well before I became a priest, I used to box light heavyweight. Rage is good for amping you up before a fight, but something different happens once the fighting begins. There’s a kind of joy to it. A surrender. It’s not a particularly Christian feeling, but it’s a powerful one. Physical aggression has a logic and emotion of its own. That’s what I was seeing on Rodriguez’s face. The space between when rage ends and violence begins.
I didn’t even know his name then. We were four months into our deployment, standing outside of Charlie Medical, where the surgeons had just called time of death for our battalion’s twelfth KIA, Denton Tsakhia Fujita. I’d learned Fujita’s name that day.
Rodriguez was wire thin, his body taut and electric. I was huddled against the wind, clutching my cigarette as if it could calm my nerves. Ever since my hospice days working with children, I’ve had difficulty with hospitals—the sight of needles turns me pale and weak, as if the blood is slowly draining out of all my limbs at once—and there was a leg amputation going on. Another of Rodriguez’s friends, John Garrett, had been injured at the same time as Fujita. I’d just learned Garrett’s name that day as well.
Rodriguez smiled. There was no warmth to it.
“Chaps,” he said. He looked back at his squad, all of them waiting for word on their friend’s condition. They were a few yards away, out of earshot. For a second, Rodriguez seemed nervous. “I want to talk with you.”
After attacks, sometimes Marines will want to talk to the chaplain or to Combat Stress. They’re enraged, or grieving, or oscillating between the two. But I’d never seen a Marine like this, and I didn’t really want to be alone with him.
“I’ll tell them I’m going to confession,” he said. His eyes were pinpricks. It occurred to me that he might be on drugs. Alcohol, marijuana, heroin—these were available if you knew the right Iraqi.
Rodriguez smiled again, the corners of his mouth tight. “He was a pretty good shortstop,” he said. At first I didn’t realize who he was talking about. “Not great, but good.”
“I should go in,” I said, “see how the docs are doing.”
“Okay, sir,” he said, “I’ll come find you.”
After the amputation, though, Rodriguez had disappeared.
• • •
At Fujita’s memorial service, I read from Second Timothy: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” During memorials, I try as best I can to set an appropriate tone.
Captain Boden, the Charlie Company commander, came after me and told the assembled Marines that they’d “get them motherfuckers back for Fujita.” The men listened with surly acceptance. Little more was expected from Boden. This was the man who would announce, straight-faced, that his idea of leadership was “taking my Marines to the field and beating the shit out of them.” It’s a leadership style that goes over well with nineteen-year-olds before they’ve actually been to war. When their lives are on the line, Marines learn to want more than pure, unthinking aggression. Unthinking aggression can get Marines killed. In this deployment, it had already killed more than a few.
Rodriguez spoke next, in the role of the best friend. He was calmer than when I’d last seen him, and he spoke of how Fujita actually liked the Iraqis. That he was the one guy in the squad who thought the country wouldn’t be better off if we just nuked it until the desert turned into a flat plane of glass. Then Rodriguez gave a bitter smile, looked out at the crowd, and said, “Guys teased him, said Fuji’d been out fucking hajjis, and they could smell it.” It felt like Rodriguez was berating the audience. Marines from his squad looked at each other uneasily. For a moment I wondered if I’d have to step in, but Rodriguez went on, the remainder of his remarks in a more traditional, hagiographic vein.
The rest of the service was standard, insofar as it was heartbreaking. When the first sergeant did the roll call, a number of Marines put their faces into their hands and a number openly wept.
When Fujita’s squad approached the battle cross, they knelt close together, their arms over one another’s shoulders, leaning into one another until it was one silent, weeping block. Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children. Then one by one they stood up, touched the helmet, and walked to where Captain Boden stood in the back, grim, stupid determination set on his thick, square face.
After the service, Staff Sergeant Haupert held court in the smoke pit behind the chapel. Haupert was the acting platoon commander of 2nd Platoon. Their original platoon commander, Lieutenant Ford, had been killed in an IED blast in the first month of the deployment.
From the smoke pit, you couldn’t see to the city, but I turned away from Haupert and looked out toward it anyway. The men in Charlie Company spent every day in Ramadi. I went out regularly, too, but always to an outpost. Never on a combat mission. I ministered. Always busy, always overworked, but still, most days I woke up in my bed on base, prayed in relative safety, and only listened for violence in the distance. Augustine, sermonizing from safety about the sack of his beloved Rome, repeated only what he could not know for sure: “Horrible it was told to us; the slaughter, burning, pillaging, the torture of men.
It is true, many things we have heard, all filled with bellowing, weeping, and hardly were we comforted, nor can I deny, no, I cannot deny we have heard many, many things were committed in that city.” I had the same problem.
I turned back to Haupert, in the midst of his own sermon, a simple sermon but one buttressed by the experience of daily patrols. “What do we do?” Haupert was saying to the loose assembly of 2nd Platoon members. “We come here, we say, We’ll give you electricity. If you work with us. We’ll fix your sewage system. If you work with us. We’ll provide you security. If you work with us. But no better friend, no worse enemy. If you fuck with us, you will live in shit. And they’re like, Okay, we’ll live in shit.” He pointed off to the direction of the city, then swatted with his hand, as if at an insect. “Fuck them,” he said.
• • •
I retreated back to the chapel, which was where Rodriguez found me. I was organizing all our candy in the walk-in closet off to the side, stacks of candy and jerky and Beanie Babies sent by grateful Americans to the troops, care packages I often ended up distributing to the platoons. Chaplains receive more care packages addressed to “Any Marine” than we know what to do with, but the excess can be useful because coming to get goodies is one inconspicuous way Marines can talk to the chaplain without announcing to their unit that they have an issue.
Rodriguez entered the small space silently. He didn’t have the same level of intensity as the first time we talked, though it was there, in his eyes and in his hands, in the way he couldn’t just stand still but had to always move. They say that on patrol in Ramadi, you don’t walk, you run.
“You know what we were doing,” he asked, “when Fuji got shot?”
“No.”
“Nobody does,” he said. He looked around suspiciously, as if someone might break in on us. “Nobody thought I should talk to you,” he said. “What’s a fucking Chaps gonna say? What’s anybody gonna say? You know nobody respects chaplains, right?”