Redeployment

by Klay, Phil

  “Their mistake.”

  “I respect priests,” he said. “Most priests. Not the little-boy fuckers. You ain’t a little-boy fucker, right?”

  Rodriguez was testing me. “Why? Are you?” I said. I folded my arms and made a point of sizing him up, giving him a look to let him know I wasn’t impressed. Normally I’d be more aggressive, maybe even pull rank, but I couldn’t after a memorial service.

  Rodriguez held up a hand. “I respect priests,” he said again. “Not the faggots and the boy fuckers, but, you know, priests.”

  Rodriguez looked around and took a breath.

  “You know we get hit like every fucking day,” he said.

  “I know you’ve got a violent part of the city.”

  “Every day. Shit, they used to come at us in the Government Center three times a week. Suicide assaults. Crazy. It’d end with air strikes on Battleship Gray or Swiss Cheese. Allah’s fucking Waiting Rooms. Killing motherfuckers. And you go out on the street, you go on a raid. You stop for a minute too long, you’re getting lit the fuck up.”

  His face contorted into one of those quick snarls of rage I’d seen before. “You remember Wayne?” he said. “Wayne Bailey? You remember him?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. I made a point of remembering the full names of all the dead. And Bailey was one of the fallen I’d actually interacted with before he died. That made it easier.

  “We were checking on a fucking school. And they made us stay. We’re on the radio telling them we gotta go and they’re like, No, stay there. We’re like, We stay here too long, something’s got to happen. But the Iraqis are late and we got to follow orders. And there’s a group of kids and the first RPG lands smack in the group of kids.”

  I could remember seeing the ComCam photos. I’d seen sick and dying children before, but that had shaken me. It’s strange how a child’s hand is so easily identifiable as a child’s hand, even without a frame of reference for size or a recognizable body for it to be attached to.

  “Then Wayne gets hit. Doc was pounding his chest and I was holding his nose, doing rescue breathing.”

  Wayne, everybody said, was a popular man in the platoon.

  “My last deployment,” Rodriguez said, “IEDs, IEDs, IEDs. Here there’s still IEDs, but them suicide assaults are coming every week. We’re getting shot at every week. More firefights than any unit I ever heard of. And Captain Boden, he puts up a board listing all the different squads. The Most Contact Board.”

  Rodriguez lifted a tightly clenched fist to his face and looked down, baring his teeth. “The Most Contact Board,” he said again. “You get a hash mark every firefight. IEDs don’t count. Even if somebody dies. Just firefights. And it’s like, whoever has the most contact, they get respect. ’Cause they been through the most shit. You can’t argue with that.”

  “I suppose not.” Suffering, I thought, has always had its own mystique.

  “Four months in, them suicide assaults stop coming. Hajjis got smart. We were chewing them up. And now it’s just IEDs. And Second Squad”—he slapped his chest—“my squad, we were the leaders. Not just in the platoon, in the whole fucking company. Which means battalion, too. Probably the whole fucking Corps. We were top. Most fucking contact. Nobody could touch our shit.”

  “And then . . . ,” he said, and stopped for a second, as though to gather courage. “Attacks fall off. Our squad’s stats fall off, too. Staff Sergeant gave us shit for it.” Rodriguez scowled and then, imitating Haupert’s gruff, confident voice, said, “You pussies used to find the enemy.” He spat at the ground. “Whatever. Fuck that. Fuck firefights. Firefights are fucking scary. I don’t get off on that shit.”

  I nodded, trying to hold his eyes, but he looked away.

  “What were you doing,” I said, “when Fujita got hit?”

  Rodriguez looked around at the stacked-up care packages all around him. Our closet was crammed with rows of wooden shelves filled with M&M’s, Snickers bars, individually wrapped brownies, Entenmann’s cakes, and other goodies. Rodriguez dug his hand into a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pulled one out, inspecting it in his hand. “You know this is Sergeant Ditoro’s first deployment?” he said.

  “No,” I said. I figured he was talking about his squad leader, though I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to stop his flow of words by asking.

  “Embassy duty.” Rodriguez shook his head and tossed the candy back into the bag. Then he quickly wiped at his face. It took me a second to realize he was wiping away tears. In relation to what, I wasn’t sure. “You know, if I hadn’t been busted down after that DUI, I’d probably be leading this squad.”

  “What happened,” I asked again, “when Fujita got hit?”

  “About a month back,” he said, “Corporal Acosta was buzzing off Ambien. That shit gives you a body high, and it’s like being a little drunk. Maybe he’d taken something else, too.”

  “He get Ambien from the Combat Stress team?”

  Rodriguez laughed. “What you think?” He pulled a plastic sandwich bag full of little pink pills out of his cargo pockets and held it at eye level. “How you think any of us sleep?”

  I nodded my head.

  “We set up an OP,” he said, “and we just trash it. I mean, insurgents like to destroy any place we use as an OP anyway, so might as well go crazy. And Ditoro, he doesn’t have respect. Acosta, though, he’s good to go.”

  “Even on drugs?”

  Rodriguez kept going. “Last deployment, I saw what he did. Suicide bomb, and Acosta was helping wounded and the motherfucker was on fire. He didn’t even realize. He was actually burning and he was running around helping wounded kids and shit. Man could have gotten a medical discharge, one hundred percent disability, but after burn unit he stayed in to do another deployment. Man’s got fucking respect.”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “So Ditoro ain’t saying shit to Acosta. And Acosta is buzzing. We’re not even looking and he strips to his underwear and Kevlar and goes out on the roof like that, dick hanging out, and he starts doing jumping jacks, screaming every Arabic curse word he knows.”

  It wasn’t the craziest thing I’d heard of Marines doing.

  Rodriguez smiled, his eyes dead. “They started shooting at us within five minutes.”

  “Who’s they?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Who’s shooting at you?”

  He shrugged. “Insurgents, I guess. I don’t know. Honestly, Chaps, I don’t care. They’re all the same to me. They’re all enemy.” He shrugged again. “We lit them fuckers up. And we get back and it was, you know, another hash mark. On the Most Contact Board. We went out and found the enemy, instead of waiting for him to IED us. And our stats went up.”

  “Ah,” I said. “So you did it again.”

  “Sergeant Ditoro would make the junior Marines play rock-paper-scissors, see who goes.”

  It was starting to make sense. “Fujita was a junior Marine.”

  “When he got here,” he said, “Ditoro used to make him sing, ‘I am the new guy and I am fucking gay.’” Rodriguez laughed. “It was funny as shit. Fuji took it well. He played the game. It’s why we liked him. But he didn’t like us setting up contact bait. He said it was fucked up. That if it was his neighborhood, he’d take a shot at some asshole on the roof. But we did it anyway.”

  Rodriguez paused. “Fuji played the game,” he repeated. “You know we’re back up top for most contact?”

  “And the day Fujita died . . .”

  “There was a sniper. There wasn’t shooting. There was one shot. I helped Ditoro put Fuji’s pants back on while Acosta tried to stop the bleeding.”

  “And then Garrett . . .”

  “They IED’d us while we were bringing Fuji back.”

  Rodriguez lowered his head and stared at the ground, clenching and unclenching his fists
. He grimaced, then looked straight at me, challenging.

  “If you killed somebody,” he said, “that means you’re going to hell.”

  Marines had asked me about that before, so I thought I had an answer. “Killing is a serious thing,” I said, “no doubt about that. And—”

  “I mean”—Rodriguez looked away, down at the candy—“somebody you’re not supposed to.”

  That brought me up short. At first I didn’t understand what he was talking about, though I suppose it should have been obvious. “You’re not responsible for Fujita’s death—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Rodriguez snapped, eyes back on me, angry. “I mean, not Marines. I mean, out in the city.” He took a breath. “And, if other people did it, too, when you’re out there, and you don’t stop them. Do you go to hell, too?”

  The silence held for a moment. “What are you telling me, Lance Corporal?” I said it in an officer voice, not in a pastoral voice. Immediately, I knew it was a mistake.

  “I ain’t telling anything,” he said, drawing back. “Just asking.”

  “God always offers forgiveness,” I said, softening my tone, “to those who are truly sorry. But sorry isn’t a feeling, you understand. It’s an action. A determination to make things right.”

  Rodriguez was still looking at the ground. I was cursing myself for fumbling the conversation.

  “A lance corporal,” Rodriguez said, “don’t have the power to make anything right.”

  I tried to explain it wasn’t about outcomes, which you can’t control, but about the seriousness of intent. Rodriguez cut me off.

  “If this is confession,” he said, “that means you can’t tell anybody what I said, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s not confession. I’m not confessing shit. I ain’t sorry for shit. You can tell anybody you want.”

  • • •

  I spent that night thinking over what Rodriguez had told me, parsing the words until I wasn’t sure he’d said anything at all. I kept thinking, They only shot when shot at. That seemed to be what he said. Maybe he was talking about a traffic stop where they killed a family that failed to brake in time. That sort of thing tore Marines up.

  “Don’t let this upset you,” David had said about the death of Uriah, “the sword devours one as well as another.” I built up a scenario where Rodriguez was talking about a bad judgment call, not a real violation of the ROE. That story ran through my mind enough to let me know I was avoiding the issue. By the next day, during morning prayers, I found my resolve. A coward, I thought, would tell himself it was all right. So I had to talk to someone or be a coward. Less than a priest. Less than a man.

  But who to talk to? The obvious choice was to go to the company commander, who’d have the authority to step in. But Rodriguez’s company commander was Captain Boden, and Boden was a lunatic. And if the rumors my RP told me were true, he was an alcoholic as well. Possibly self-medication for PTSD. Boden’d been in Ramadi in 2004, and his unit held the record for most casualties in the division. When you were in conversation with him, the first thing you’d notice was the abnormal eye contact—aggressive staring and then quick, paranoid looks around the room. His affect was off, too, alternating between quiet periods of deep sadness and barely suppressed rage. And he had vicious scars across his face—battle scars that gave him immediate credibility with his Marines. The man knew combat.

  I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something off with Boden. He’d seriously disturbed the trainers at Mojave Viper, the month-long predeployment workup in the California desert that the Marine Corps uses to prepare units for war. “These are a people who do not understand kindness,” he’d told his company during a brief on Iraqi culture. “They see kindness as a weakness. And they will take advantage of it. And Marines will die.” Charlie Company took his advice to heart, roughing up several role players during training. These were Iraqi Americans who dressed up and strolled through fake villages, playing either civilians or insurgents. If you followed Charlie on a practice cordon-and-search, you’d hear Marines screaming, “Put that bitch in the chair!” or, “Shut that motherfucker up!” to the civilians. When one of them lectured Charlie on how that style of counterinsurgency wasn’t likely to win hearts and minds, Charlie found the complaints funny. Even funnier was the trainer from Civil Affairs who told the whole assembled battalion, “I’m very concerned that this battalion is overly focused on killing people.”

  You could see smirks everywhere. “I guess that pogue thinks he joined the fucking Peace Corps,” I heard Boden stage-whisper to his first sergeant, loud enough for the Marines around him to hear. “Oh no,” he continued in a mocking, high-pitched voice, “some real men might go out and kill some al-Qaeda. But I just wanna be friends.”

  That was his attitude before his company got dropped in the most violent sector of the most violent city in Iraq. I couldn’t go to Captain Boden. He wouldn’t care, and he wouldn’t want me, a chaplain of all people, meddling.

  Who else? The battalion commander wasn’t much better. Lieutenant Colonel Fehr was universally loathed among the staff and paid attention to none of them. Before the deployment, before I’d even met him for the first time, our operations officer, Major Eklund, had felt the need to prepare me.

  “He’s gonna do this handshake,” the major said. “It’s called the dominance shake. He does it to everybody.”

  Eklund was a Catholic convert and had a tendency to tell me more than he should, inside the confessional and out.

  “The dominance shake,” I said, amused.

  “That’s what he calls it. He’s going to take your hand in his, grip it real hard, and then twist his wrist so his hand is on top of yours. That’s the dominance position. And then, instead of shaking up and down, he’ll pull you in and slap you on the shoulder and feel your bicep with his free hand. It’s Fehr’s little way of peeing on your personal tree.”

  “You think he’ll do it to me? I’m a chaplain.”

  “He does it to everybody. I don’t think he can help it. He did it to my nine-year-old son at the battalion Easter egg hunt.”

  Then I met the colonel, got dominance handshook, and received the vague introductory pleasantries that let me know this commander looked at chaplains as the pray-at-ceremonies guys, not as trusted advisers. Fehr was worlds more composed than Boden, but he didn’t seem to care much for ROE either. Two months after our first meeting, I saw him interrupt a trainer at Mojave Viper going over escalation of force procedures.

  “If a vehicle is coming toward you fast,” the trainer said to the assembled Marines, “it might be a suicide bomber, or it might just be a frustrated, distracted Iraqi trying to get to work on time. If the first couple steps of EOF don’t work, you can fire a round in front of the car, not trying to injure—”

  Here’s where the colonel jumped up and stopped the lesson. “When we shoot, we shoot to kill,” he shouted. The Marines roared in response. “I’m not having any of my Marines die because they hesitated,” the colonel continued. “Marines do not fire warning shots.”

  The trainer, a captain, was stunned. You can’t contradict an O5, especially not in front of his men, so he didn’t say anything, but the whole unit had just been taught to ignore MEF policy. The Marines got the message. Kill.

  • • •

  In the end, I went to Major Eklund. I figured he’d at least hear me out.

  “I’m worried about Charlie Company.”

  “Yeah, we’re all worried about Charlie Company.” Major Eklund shrugged. “They’re led by an idiot. What are you gonna do?”

  I gave him a condensed, anonymous version of Rodriguez’s story about doing naked jumping jacks to attract fire.

  Major Eklund laughed. “That sounds like a lance corporal solution.”

  “You think this is funny.”

  “I’
ll bring it up with Captain Boden.”

  That hardly satisfied me. “The Marines don’t seem to see much difference between civilians and combatants. Some Marines have been hinting at worse than stupid tactics.”

  Eklund sighed.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “some of their firefights could be looked into a little more. To make sure we’re targeting actual enemy.”

  Eklund stiffened. “An investigation?” He shook his head. “Into what?”

  “There are some questionable—”

  “Only the commander can recommend an investigation.” He shook his head. “And Chaps, all respect, but this is way the fuck out of your purview.”

  “Marines talk to me,” I said, “and—”

  “This is nothing,” he said. “Last month Weapons Company shot two hajjis I know they didn’t follow ROE on. And Colonel Fehr didn’t think that was worth an investigation. You know what he told me? ‘I don’t want my Marines thinking I don’t have their backs. And I really don’t want them hesitating to shoot when they need to.’ And that was the end of the story, Chaps.”

  He hadn’t even paused to consider what I was suggesting. “You’re saying this is weaker than that.”

  “Weak, strong, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You think Lieutenant Colonel Fehr will ever become Colonel Fehr if he tells higher, ‘Hey, we think we did some war crimes’?”

  It wasn’t a question I wanted to answer. Eventually, looking at my feet, feeling childish, I said, “I suppose not.”

  “And he’s the one who decides if there’s something worth investigating. Look, you know how I feel about that man, but he’s handling Charlie Company about as well as anybody could. They came to Iraq to kill people, so he gave them the kill people AO. And he’s been shrinking their AO as Bravo gets better control of theirs.”

  What he was saying didn’t really register. “Bravo?” I said.

  “They’re getting more responsibility while Charlie’s getting less. And at the end of the deployment, Captain Boden will get a FITREP that makes sure he’s never given a command again. Happy?”