The Last Magazine

by Michael Hastings

  There’s the large southern redneck, with a neck red from the sun, from Arkansas. A pair of black kids from Brooklyn and Jersey, who even today make jokes about the white man, though there is the double irony that they really don’t feel very oppressed. The young lieutenant, an intellectual sort from one of the Ivy League schools who went against the grain and signed up to learn about war because, as he puts it, “it was such a part of human history, the human experience, and to understand myself and the world, I need to understand war,” with whispers that he is thinking about a career in politics.

  And then there is the quiet loner, non-aggressively awkward, effeminate, near pretty, always a half step behind, not on the ball, with a silent mystery hinting at some hidden depth, some sensitivity in a very insensitive environment—and in this unit, that soldier’s name is Justin Salvador. From what Peoria has gathered, he’s Puerto Rican, though he’s often called Mexican or Honduran or Panamanian, and his nickname—as most in the unit have a nickname, just like soldiers in the movies—is Chipotle. He is the soldier the conversation seizes on in moments of silence. Rather than talk about the weather, a joke thrown Salvador’s way acts as the icebreaker.

  Salvador, slight and fair-skinned, is fumbling with the ball flap.

  In the silence, the velcroing and unvelcroing can be heard.

  Yelks turns to Salvador.

  “Now Chipotle over there, he being a Mexican, it might not be a bad thing for him, you know, since his race breeds like field mice. We don’t want your spawn taking over the country now, do we, Chipotle? New order—only the Mexicans don’t need to wear the ball flap.”

  Everyone laughs, and Salvador mumbles a “Go fuck yourself” or something to Yelks.

  The lieutenant walks up.

  “Okay, guys, we got the word. We’re gonna be going first. The convoy is gonna stay a couple klicks behind us. We’re clearing the way. I remind you we are about to enter hostile territory, but we are liberators. As such, we will kill, but we will kill only those who are trying to kill us. Shoot if you are shot at, shoot if you are threatened. Make sure you get a positive ID. The S-2, the intel that we got, says there are unfriendlies. No shit, right? Sergeant Phelps will brief the ROEs and EOFs. All that being said, it is a free-fire zone, meaning, if you feel yourself threatened, do not hesitate.”

  Peoria is in the first vehicle, sitting on the hard metal seat behind the driver. Yelks is driving; Salvador stands on the .50 caliber machine gun; the lieutenant sits shotgun. The engine starts, the trucks roll off, kicking up dust.

  The invasion is under way.

  At the border, over the radio, the lieutenant announces, as hundreds of others did, “Welcome to Iraq.” He smiles as he turns to Peoria, marking the time.

  Two-thirty p.m., March 19, the year of our lord 2003.

  The Humvees follow a main highway for a few hours.

  There is dust, hundreds of vehicles, armored machines, loaded up, snaked out, rolling, churning a magnificent storm, choking, eye-irritating. Brown dust, and of course the dust is brown, brown dust hit by light particles, particles of sand and light, and the sun is rising up, the sun rising up in the east, and the dust becomes less brown and the dust becomes a big vocabulary word: translucent.

  A road sign: BABYLON, 312 KM.

  And over the radio, the redneck from Arkansas, who is also a Baptist, who also studies the Bible and knows it by heart, starts to recite:

  “Thus saith the Lord, Behold I will rise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me, a destroying wind, And will send unto Babylon fanners that shall fan her and shall empty her land, for in the day of trouble they shall be against her round about and spare ye not her young men, destroy ye utterly all her host. . . . I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter, like rams with he goats. Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwell, neither doth any son of man pass nearby. And thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her: and they shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah.”

  A.E. Peoria is taking notes, thinking he needs to check that passage, or have someone in New York check it for accuracy. He doesn’t want to interrupt the poetic moment by asking an intrusive journalist a question, but he does.

  “That’s, uh, Old Testament?” Peoria says over the net.

  The redneck doesn’t answer directly.

  “And he cried mightily with a strong voice saying, Babylon the great is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird . . . And the light of the candle shall shine no more, and in her was found the blood of the prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.”

  The Humvees are so enveloped in the dust that they can keep an eye only on the vehicle in front of them, staying a safe three hundred feet apart.

  “He’s fucking playing you, sir. Redneck can’t even do a fucking briefing and he’s saying he can say all that from the Bible by memory,” says Yelks. “He’s reading that fucking Bible of his, I bet.”

  The dust clears.

  The lieutenant’s five-Humvee reconnaissance convoy has put enough distance between itself and the main route of hundreds of vehicles that Peoria can now see clearly, and what he sees is shocking. He sees blue sky, an overwhelming blue above the desert.

  He has a strange tingling sensation and a sentence goes through his head that takes him a second to place.

  “Beware of blue skies and open horizons.”

  And A.E. Peoria remembers 9/11. 9/11 was a blue-sky day. In New York, he grabbed his notebook and jumped in a taxi and went down there to Chambers Street, and he stood next to a woman, a stranger, who had grabbed his arm as the two of them watched dark figures, one after the other, jump, fall, and the woman saying, Oh my god, oh my god. The woman gripped his arm tightly, but he didn’t notice or didn’t say anything, because he felt like he should be feeling pain. A terrifying rumble. Let’s go, let’s go, and that’s when he started to run through the canyons of Lower Manhattan, and the dust was coming, the dust was coming. A man in a coffee shop kept the door open and yelled, “Get in here, get in here!” Everything was dark for forty-three seconds. Car alarms and coughing. Light came back in. He saw fingernail marks on his arm, deep cuts. He looked around for the woman, but the woman was gone.

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7. A passage from From Here to Eternity, something about the skies not showing any hint of clouds over the Pacific, clear blue.

  He recalls an eyewitness at Nagasaki. A clear day. The city was the second choice—the first, Kokura, was covered in clouds. The bomber commander said he headed toward the blue skies. You could drop the atomic bomb only on a day that had excellent visibility.

  Exterminate all the brutes, he thinks, remembering his Conrad. Exterminate all rational thought, he thinks, remembering his Burroughs. And between those two lines written sixty years apart, you have the entire canon of Western liter . . .

  Dozing off.

  Awake again.

  Wake up, wake up, Peoria thinks, though nothing is happening. Here he is, in war, on the frontline of history, and there is just the dull engine noise that puts him to sleep, the helmet on his head, the body armor, the heat.

  His senses are heightened and he looks around and the air seems much clearer, and he feels there should be ringing in his ears, an acute ringing in his ears, all the alarm bells in his mind, his senses overloading, like one of those hearing tests, an invisible high-pitched sound, as the truck bumps up and down. He has his helmet on; he has his body armor; the standard blue issue with the word PRESS across the front; he has his digital recorder, which he fumbles with as he forces himself to take notes and he feels so clumsy. There he is in war, fussing around in the backseat, with his seat belt, with his sunglasses, with his
tape player, with a pen—why doesn’t his pen work? The ink is not coming out of his pen, and he scribbles, and scribbles again, finally sticking the dead pen in his pocket and fishing out a new pen from his black shoulder bag—his larger backpack with his equipment is in the trunk of the Humvee. His shoulder bag, which has his satellite phone, computer, and extra pens, is at his feet. He finds another ballpoint, hits the record button, and writes down, “Welcome to Iraq, two-thirty pm, march 19, the year of our lord—” He realizes he has taken only a few notes since the invasion started, he didn’t keep up with his system, he is far behind. He looks out the window and he sees dead cars and a dead tank from the previous war, and he sees shitty little mud huts with threadlike power lines, and he notes more road signs—BAGHDAD 400 KM, NAJAF 220—and tunes out the voices over the radio. He thinks to himself, Man, I am glad I’m not leading this convoy. I am glad all I have to do is watch. I am already disoriented. I have no idea where I am. I’m just along for the ride, and then he looks at his watch. Five hours have passed.

  It is almost dark.

  He feels something nudge his shoulder.

  “Sir, excuse me, sir?”

  It is Salvador, tapping him with his boot from his position in the machine-gunner slot.

  “Sir, could you pass me a Mountain Dew? The cooler’s behind you.”

  He looks up at Salvador, taking a few seconds to shake off the sleep. So he has been sleeping again. Dozed off in the back of the Humvee. It is hot, for sure, and with the weight of the helmet on his head, and the fact he’s been awake for, like, twenty hours, it all keeps putting him to sleep, sleeping right through the story.

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  He unstraps himself, turning in his seat to open the metal panel that divides the backseat from the trunk. He puts his notebook and tape recorder down on the floor. He uses both hands to pull it open. There is a red cooler in the back, the kind at every Fourth of July picnic. The ice hasn’t melted yet, and he plunges his hand in, bobbing past water bottles and searching for a soda can.

  “I think we’re lost, sir.”

  It isn’t Salvador speaking, but Yelks, to the lieutenant.

  “This fucking GPS is shit.”

  Peoria doesn’t know if he’s heard correctly—he’s not too concerned, after all, these guys are professionals. He feels the soda can. He succeeds in the small task of finding it, and is proud how quickly he did—prying open the sliding metal door to the trunk, having to find the right bolt to pull. The small satisfaction of accomplishing a simple physical action. He takes the soda can out of the cooler.

  “Salvador, here you go.”

  Peoria doesn’t get an answer.

  The war is no longer silent.

  “Engage, engage, engage,” the lieutenant yells.

  The machine-gun fire opens up three feet above his head. He sees the tracers flash, slanting down from the side window. There is a loud crash and a scream. He is thrown against the front seat, and because he is facing the wrong way, he feels the back of his helmet knock heads with Yelks, the driver. He is facing backward. The Humvee, he notices, is no longer moving. The other new sound is spinning tires in dirt.

  Then the pings start.

  PING, PING, PING.

  “That’s fucking incoming. That’s fucking incoming.”

  Scrunched up on the floor of the backseat, Peoria looks around for his tape recorder and notepad. They are somewhere on the floor. He finds the can of Mountain Dew. Where the fuck are they? WHOOSH. The Mountain Dew explodes; there is wet stickiness all over his hand.

  Oh shit, hunh. So this is what combat is like.

  He realizes the lieutenant has opened the front door, sticking his M-16 out. He is firing, and saying, “Yelks, you okay, man? Yelks, you okay?”

  Peoria finds his notepad. Next to it is his tape recorder. He fumbles with it, pressing Play, then Stop, and then finally hitting Record in time to hear the lieutenant scream to Salvador, “Yelks is hit. Keep firing. I’m going to drive.”

  Peoria watches the lieutenant get out of the Humvee. He sees him run around the front, the truck’s headlights lighting him up before he suddenly falls out of view and on the ground, the bullets passing through his body and shattering the windshield of the Humvee.

  That is when he hears the first shriek. It is not human: it is the shrieking of explosives, in a shell, dropping down from the sky and dangerously close to the truck. Again, he is surprised about how accurate the movies really are in terms of sound effects. There is another shriek, and another. Peoria judges the situation, he assumes, rationally. He has heard that the Iraqis have poor aim, yet he senses that whoever is flinging those mortars his way knows what they are doing. It feels to him like he should get out of the Humvee. The engine has gone silent, but the headlights for some reason are on. They were supposed to tell him what to do if something like this happened, but no one is telling him what to do. He senses too, and then sees, that Yelks is dead, and he hasn’t heard anything in a few seconds from the lieutenant either.

  Then Salvador’s machine gun stops, and the Puerto Rican is inside the truck, very close to his face, and telling him they have to get out, they have to get out of the Humvee now.

  “Push in, then pull the handle, push in, then pull it toward you.”

  Peoria stuffs his tape recorder in his pocket with his notepad, and keeps trying the door, but it isn’t budging, not giving as easily as the sliding metal one he had successfully opened to access the cooler.

  “It’s not working.”

  The Puerto Rican leans over him, the muzzle of his rifle hitting Peoria in the mouth, cutting his lip. He yanks on the door handle and pushes it open, almost falling out of the truck.

  “Sir, we have to move, we have to move, come on.”

  There is another shriek. Peoria is outside, on his feet and running, or he is following, quickly following Salvador, down an embankment of pebbles and sand, moving through what feels like bushes, away from the road, and the next shriek he hears—he is losing track of how far he has run—seems far away, and the firing also seems distant. It is quiet again, until all he can hear is swearing in Spanish.

  “Hey, hey, Salvador, where are we, man?”

  “Shut up, shut up. We’ll stop here.”

  There is no moon, or any stars. What happened to the blue sky at night? The two men are lying next to each other. Salvador is aiming his rifle in the direction they came from. Peoria looks at the Puerto Rican closely and sees that something is a little off. He isn’t lying on his belly in the normal prone position, but off to one side.

  “Where did the other guys go?” Peoria whispers.

  “What?”

  “The other Humvees. Where did they go?”

  “They’re gone, they’re gone. You didn’t see them? They kept driving.”

  “What?”

  “Shit . . .”

  Salvador has dropped his rifle, is clasping his hand across his belly.

  More shooting starts. Peoria thinks the bullets are coming toward him. He finds it funny that his life actually does flash before his eyes. As if there is a chemical in the blood that is released only at certain moments in life, an endorphin with the flashback function. He sees things, collapsed, in seconds. Toddler. Graduation. Cambodia. Chambers Street. Dad and Mom.

  He doesn’t understand why they are shooting at him. He wants to stand up. He feels this urge to stand up and explain himself. He wants to tell them to stop shooting. You’ve got the wrong guy. There’s no need to shoot at me. This is silly, you trying to shoot at me. This powerful urge to stand up and explain to the attackers that this must all have been some gigantic, enormous misunderstanding to have brought us to this point in time. It is counterintuitive—self-preservation would suggest hiding, but then why the desire to ask them to stop, to give up, to surrender?

  But he sees Salvador lying there
, and he knows that he can’t stand up. If I stand up, he thinks, they will shoot me. So I must not stand up. I must stay here, down, hidden, and hope that they will go away.

  Five minutes? Ten minutes?

  No more shooting.

  “The flashlight, get the flashlight. It’s in my pocket, on my jacket.”

  Peoria inches closer to the Puerto Rican, placing his hand on his chest. He can feel his heart beating fast and is comforted by how warm the body feels. He touches a hard, round piece of metal through the cloth of the shirt. He unbuttons the pocket and pulls out the flashlight. Salvador makes a gurgling sound and wheezes.

  “Sir, man, sir. I think I’m bleeding. I think I’m hit.”

  Peoria flicks the flashlight on, making sure to aim it down. A coffee-stained circle appears on the Puerto Rican’s chest. As he moves the circle lower, the beam becomes darker. The beam lights up the top of a stain on the tan, desert camouflage uniform, right above the belly button. The beam follows the stain, which gets bigger, and he stops on the belt buckle. He doesn’t want to look farther down. He knows it is blood. He knows there is a lot of blood.

  “Sir, what’s wrong, am I hit?”

  Peoria nods.

  The flashlight is now on Salvador’s groin. The buttons on the pants are wet, and he catches the sight of flesh. It looks disfigured. He frowns. He starts to undo the buttons on the pants. Salvador groans.

  “Oh god, not there.”

  “I need to administer, uuh, first aid.”

  Peoria’s mind goes through the procedures he’d studied. He remembers the class he took in Virginia. An Australian special forces instructor, six-foot-four with a blond crew cut, saying: First, make sure there is no danger. Yell, “Clear.” All clear, Peoria says to himself. Second, do a sweep of the body to make sure there are no other wounds and to find out where the bleeding is from. Peoria figures he’s already done that. In his mind, he sees the instructor’s PowerPoint presentation flip to the third slide—something about a tourniquet. The fourth slide has a picture with it—a picture that was jarring at the time, as it was shown in such a clean and peaceful conference room, usually reserved for marketing presentations, and learning about war in that environment did feel a little odd. But that fourth PowerPoint slide and the Australian accent are coming back to him now, as big letters, big letters that say STOP THE BLEEDING. How do you do this, mate? You apply pressure. Does he have his first-aid kit? No, of course not—it’s back in the truck. Salvador doesn’t have one on him either.