Redeployment

by Klay, Phil

  “Sure you do,” I said. “You asked.”

  “I’m not asking now,” she said.

  We stared at each other, each of us still.

  “What if I want to tell you?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Why?”

  I took a breath. “Because I like you,” I said. “Because you never give me any fucking respect. And because I want to level with you.” I pointed back toward Potato Head’s office in Converse Hall. “But without any of that lame bullshit.”

  “This isn’t how you talk to people,” she said. “Why do you talk to people like this?”

  “I know how to talk to people,” I said. “I can spin you some bullshit if you want. I’m good at that. But I don’t want to lie. At least, not to you.”

  “I’m not your friend,” she said.

  I put up a hand to cut her off.

  “I never killed anyone,” I said. I let that hang for a moment, and once she nodded I said, “But I did see somebody die. Slowly.”

  That made her still. Then I said, “I’d like to tell you about it.”

  I wasn’t PsyOpsing her into it, so I didn’t know how she’d react. Or if I was PsyOpsing her, since you’re always exerting some kind of pressure even when you’re laying yourself bare, then it was the least conscious maneuvering I could do.

  There was a long silence. “Why,” she said, “do you think I would want to hear about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I let her see, in my face, that it was important to me. PsyOps works best when you mean it.

  There was another long silence. “Fine,” she said, and motioned with her hands. “What happened?”

  I looked around at the sunlight and the college students. Khakis and polos. Shorts and sandals. “Not here,” I said. “This is a sit-down conversation. I don’t just talk about this stuff to anyone.”

  “I’ve got to get breakfast,” she said. “Then I’ve got class.”

  I thought for a moment. “Have you ever smoked shisha?” I asked. “You know, hookah. Muslims love that shit, right?”

  She rolled her eyes and let out a short laugh. “No,” she said, and I knew she’d come.

  • • •

  After classes I went back to my apartment and brought the hookah to the porch. I sat down on my ratty couch, looked out at the street, and I waited.

  When she arrived, ten minutes late, I already had the coals going. She’d had a full day to think it over and seemed restless and a little suspicious, settling herself in the chair with the rigid posture of someone who doesn’t intend to stay long.

  I asked her if she wanted rose- or apple-flavored tobacco, and when she said rose, I told her apple was better and she rolled her eyes and we went with that. I told her the rules of hookah—no pointing the mouthpiece at anyone, no left hand—and as I got out the tobacco she said, “So. You want to tell me a story.”

  I said, “Yes. And you want to hear it.”

  She smiled. “Possession of a hookah is against the student honor code,” she said. “It’s considered ‘drug paraphernalia.’”

  “Clearly,” I said, “I don’t follow the student honor code.”

  The hookah was ready. I pulled on it a couple times and held the smoke in my lungs before letting it out. It had a sweet, smooth flavor and feel, and it relaxed me.

  I told her, “You know, technically I didn’t even watch him die. It just felt that way,” and she didn’t say anything in response. She just looked at me, so I passed her the pipe and she took a pull.

  “It’s sweet,” she said, breathing the smoke out with her words. She pulled again and let a slow curl ripple over her lips. Then she put the hose back down, pointed away from both of us.

  I didn’t know how to start, which was unusual. I’d told the story before. In bars, most times, and then it was all about the money shot, the death. But that was one death among hundreds of thousands. Meaningless to all but a few people. Me. That child’s family. Perhaps, I thought, Zara.

  I needed to ground myself. I began, as you do in the military, with geographic orientation. I told her about East Manhattan, which was a section of Fallujah north of Highway 10. A few weeks earlier, Marines from 3/4 had swept through the neighborhood, jumping roof to roof and clearing houses while thousands of civilians fled the city and the disorganized resistance tried to come up with some kind of plan. A lot of the fighting happened on Easter Sunday, which everybody thought was significant, even me. It was 2004, the third time in my life I could remember American Easter falling on the same day as Coptic Easter, and I spent that day watching a city explode.

  But then the battle was called off and 3/4 wound up sitting in houses turned into defensive positions, sniping insurgents. Every fourth house had a sniper team. In the early part of the siege, they’d kill a dozen every day.

  I tried to give Zara the feel of the city—not just the dust and the heat and the terror, but also the excitement. Everyone knew the ax was going to fall, it was only a question of when and how many would die.

  “Each night,” I said, “the mosques would blast the same messages over the adhan speakers. ‘America is bringing in the Jews of Israel to steal Iraq’s wealth and oil. Aid the holy warriors. Do not fear death. Protect Islam.’”

  As PsyOps, I told her, part of our job was to counter those messages. Or at least to fuck with the insurgents and make them scared. Explaining that Islam was a religion of peace wasn’t likely to work, but explaining that we would definitely kill you if you fucked with us might convince a few folks to chill out.

  I told her how we used to go out in a Humvee strapped with speakers so we could spew our own propaganda. We’d dispense threats, promises, and a phone number for locals to call and report insurgent activity. We always got shot at. I didn’t tell her what that felt like, hiding in a vehicle with nothing but your voice while you’re taking fire, helpless and angry, depending on the grunts for safety. I just told her that I hated those missions.

  The morning I saw someone die, we’d wanted to go out on the speakers again, so we staged behind a building held by 3/4. When we got there we realized the speakers weren’t working. My sergeant, Sergeant Hernandez, fiddled with them as best he could.

  When the shots rang out, the heavy burst of a Marine machine-gun section’s 240G, I was in the building, standing in a doorway. The sound turned my head around, and through the corridor I could see the Marines who’d fired. They were stretched across the room in front of me, hiding in shadows toward the back and covering their sectors of fire through the broken windows to the front. They seemed so calm. Whoever got killed probably never even knew the Marines were there. I never heard any incoming AK fire.

  “Gunfire was a part of daily life,” I started—but that sounded too hard-guy. I wanted to be honest, so I said, “The truth is, it goosed me, hearing it that close and not being able to see anything, just the Marines.”

  I remember hearing a voice from a doorway on the other side of the room say, “Good to go,” and then the response from a thin black Marine with corporal chevrons and a big enough wad of dip in his mouth to make him look deformed.

  “Yeah,” he said, “he’s gonna fade for sure.”

  A little square-bodied Marine was the one actually manning the machine gun, and he kept saying, “I got him, I got him,” like he couldn’t believe it was true.

  The thin black Marine spat and said, “Tell Gomez our section’s a hundred percent now.” That meant every man in his section had killed someone. Which meant the little square-bodied Marine had just done it for the first time.

  “And Marines think that’s a good thing,” Zara said.

  “Of course,” I said, though I realized I was simplifying. The corporal hadn’t acted like it was a big deal, and it even seemed he found it distasteful, but there was also a lanky Marine in the far corner of the room who’d been nodding, giving th
e little Marine these small, approving grins.

  I looked up from the porch. The daylight had turned soft. We were in that final hour of sun where everyone looks like the best version of themselves.

  “And then that little Marine saw me,” I said, “in my Army cammies. And he called out, ‘Hey-o! PsyOps!’ The kid was high off adrenaline. You could tell. His face was flushed. He was calling me out. And I didn’t belong there, looking in on these Marines and their, I don’t know . . . private moment.”

  “Private moment?” Zara said, curious.

  “It was their last man finally doing it,” I said.

  “Finally doing it,” she said, imitating my voice. “What? You mean he was a murder virgin?”

  “Even you don’t think it’s murder,” I said. “You’re smarter than that.”

  She sighed and made no argument, so I told her how the little square-bodied Marine’s eyes were wide, his face somewhere between terror and excitement, and he motioned to the scope as if to say, “Look into it.” Somewhere between an offer and a plea.

  The squad had been using thermal scopes because the heat signatures made it easier to tell the thin shadows of dogs from the bright white heat of humans. I told Zara how I walked into the room, where I didn’t belong. And I told her how the corporal was staring at me, like he didn’t want me there, and how I ignored him and looked out through the broken windows. The early morning was black. One or two shades of purple stretched across the landscape, but otherwise Fallujah was a dark, undifferentiated mass.

  I knelt next to the little Marine, and I looked through the optic, and then the boxy skyline of Fallujah lay out before me in heat gradations of gray and black. Some buildings had a water cistern or fuel tank on the top, and I could tell how much fluid was in the cistern because the cooling line of the water across the metal was written in a light line of gray. A few days earlier, Marines clearing houses had hit a hard point at a building with a fuel cistern, just like that. They shot holes in it, waited until the fuel trickled down all through the house, and set it on fire with the muj inside. I wondered what that would have looked like, through that scope. A lot of white, I guess.

  Closer in, immediately in front of me, was an open stretch of road and field and a bright jumble of limbs lying twenty feet out from the nearest building. A black strip alongside must have been the rifle, and I could see the poor bastard clearly hadn’t gotten off a shot. A burst would have heated up the barrel, but all I saw was cold black next to the white heat of the body.

  “Why’d you look?” Zara asked.

  “Who wouldn’t look?” I said.

  “You wanted to see.” Her voice was hard, accusing. “Why’d you look?”

  “Why are you here, listening to this story?”

  “You asked me to come here,” she said. “You wanted me to hear.”

  It was difficult to explain to her how I’d both wanted and not wanted to see, and how the little Marine so clearly didn’t. There was a mix of voyeurism and kindness in me stepping down and looking through the scope. And once I was on the scope, the thin black corporal told me to watch for the heat signature dying, the hot spot fading to the ambient temperature. He told me, “That’s when we’ll officially call in the kill.”

  A few kids on skateboards came rolling down the street in front of Zara and me. They looked young. High school, probably. Townies, definitely. You forget not everybody in Amherst is in college. I had no idea where the kids could be going, and we waited until they rolled past and the sound of them disappeared. Then I continued.

  “It happens slowly,” I said. “I’d look up for a second and then back, to try to catch a change. The corporal kept looking at the doorways, as if he were worried some senior Marine would see me there and chew us all out. The little Marine kept saying, ‘He’s dead. He’ll fade for sure,’ but I couldn’t tell, so I held my fingers out in front of the optic. They made this searing hot spot, glowing white against the grays of the background. There’s no color in the scope, but it’s not like a black-and-white movie. The scope tracks heat, not light, so everything, the shadings, the contrasts, they’re off in this weird way. There are no shadows. It’s all clearly outlined, but wrong, and I was waving these bright white fingers across the scope, my fingers—but looking so strange and disconnected. I was waving them in front of the body and trying to compare.”

  “And?” said Zara.

  “And I thought I saw him twitch,” I said. “I jumped back and that sent all the Marines into alert, the corporal screaming at me to tell them what I saw. When I told them the corpse twitched, they didn’t believe me. The little Marine got back on the optic, saying, ‘He’s not moving, he’s not moving,’ repeating it over and over, and the lanky one asked if they had to go out and treat the hajji’s wounds. But the corporal said the corpse was probably just settling. Gas escaping or something.” I looked down at my hands. “The little Marine was angry now, they all were, and at me.”

  “Was he alive?” Zara asked.

  “The corpse?” I said. “If he was, it wasn’t for long. The little Marine put me back on the optic and it did look darker. That’s what I told them. And the corporal told the little Marine he did good, while I stared into the scope and tried to see the life going out of him. Or the heat, I guess. It happens so slow. Sometimes I’d ask the little Marine if he wanted to look, but he never did. He was an unusual sort of Marine. The adrenaline was fading and he was just left with this thing he’d done, and he didn’t want to watch.”

  We took in the late afternoon for a moment.

  “So that’s yours now,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You watched him die.”

  “Just the heat signature,” I said.

  “That’s yours now,” she repeated. “You took it from him so he wouldn’t have to watch.”

  I didn’t say anything. Neither of us had used the hookah in a while, so I grabbed the hose and started pulling smoke into my lungs.

  “And now you’re telling me,” she said.

  I blew out smoke.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “You asked me how I could kill my people,” I said.

  “And what?”

  I put down the hose and she picked it up. I didn’t have a real answer for her, and now that I’d told the story, I didn’t feel I’d actually told her anything at all. I think she knew it, too, that the story hadn’t been enough, that something was missing and neither of us knew how to find it.

  “Who do you think he was?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guy that Marine shot,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Some kid,” I said. “A stupid death. That’s what we were out there to prevent.”

  She let out smoke in a slow, sensual way, but her face looked concerned. Upset. “What do you mean, ‘prevent’?”

  “I was PsyOps,” I said. “Psychological Operations. I was supposed to tell the Iraqis how to not get themselves killed. And I actually spoke the language, so it was me on those loudspeakers, not a translator.”

  “Right,” she said. “You spoke Arabic growing up.”

  I shook my head. “Egyptian Arabic,” I said. “The soaps and the movies mean a lot of non-Egyptians understand it, but still, it’s different.”

  She nodded. “I knew that.”

  “The Army didn’t,” I said. “My unit thought they’d hit the jackpot. They didn’t even have to send me to language school. I tried to argue that they should, but then Sergeant Cortez came back from Monterrey speaking Modern Standard Arabic and I realized that U.S. Army mental retardation was a general problem.”

  “So what, you learned Iraqi on your own?”

  “Yeah, I got books from an office friend of my father’s,” I said. “And I’d go out and tell the Iraqis what was what. These imams were up there gettin
g everybody excited, telling them to fight us. And the teenagers ate that shit up. You’d have a bunch of kids with no military training who’d seen too many American action movies try to go Rambo. It was crazy. An untrained kid against a Marine squad in camouflaged positions with marked fields of fire?”

  “But of course that’s gonna happen,” she said, “when you send an army through a city.”

  “We tried to limit the damage. The generals had a bunch of meetings with the imams and sheikhs to tell them, ‘Stop sending your stupid fucking kids against us, we’re just going to kill them.’ But it wouldn’t change anything.”

  “In their eyes the problem wasn’t the kids,” she said.

  “Things were crazy then. And we were fucking that city up.”

  “I’ve read there were hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians killed.”

  “There was propaganda on both sides. But I was trying to help people avoid getting killed. And not everybody was kids.”

  “But a good number were.”

  “Some,” I said. “That one I saw fade, it was a small body. Hard to tell. But I always think, That was one I was supposed to save.”

  “Save?” she said. “By convincing him not to fight the soldiers invading his home?”

  I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “It was such bullshit. The Marines would be sitting there waiting, hoping some dumb muj would make a suicide assault. Nobody wants to be the guy in the squad who hasn’t killed anybody, and nobody joins the Marine Corps to avoid pulling triggers.”

  She nodded.

  “That’s not why I joined the Army,” I said.

  “So why did you?”

  I laughed. “‘Be All That You Can Be’?” I said. “I don’t know. That was the slogan for me, growing up. And then it was ‘Army of One,’ which I never understood, and then it was ‘Army Strong,’ which is about as good a slogan as ‘Fire Hot’ or ‘Snickers Tasty’ or ‘Herpes Bad.’ A better slogan would be, ‘You Can’t Afford College Without Us.’”

  She seemed to be sizing me up, deciding how to take what I’d told her. I sat and smoked and didn’t say anything. Eventually she leaned back into her chair and gave me the sort of straight look she’d use in class before tearing someone apart.