“Sir, I found another wound!”
“Roger 2–7, I copy: compound clear and secure, be advised I’m bringing in the MEDEVAC birds. DOC! Let’s fucking go!”
I sat back on my heels as two Rangers stepped in and scooped the wounded onto a litter. In an instant he was strapped in, and the three of us sprinted toward the HLZ. The Rangers strained with the load until Sergeant Deke appeared and grabbed a handle. We ran faster then. I held the IV bag high, ashamed of its paltry weight.
I forgot myself and looked down. It was Peters. I found it strange that his screams had been indistinguishable from the others.
* * *
I approached the lieutenant’s entourage in the courtyard of the target house. With the raid over, everyone had gathered to listen to the radio chatter.
“Line four: two EKIA, two AK-47s, two PTT radios, eight pressure plate boards,” the lieutenant reported. “One room with leather straps, chains, electric prods, pliers, hammers, saws.”
Two EKIA. At least the hunters would be happy.
“Line eight: Requesting HLZ Rooster for exfil, nothing follows. Over.”
What had it been, two hours? Three?
“Roger, I copy: Dead on arrival. We’re moving to the exfil. 2–6 out.”
That was Peters. The mountains seemed to fade in the distance, like wine dissolving into water. Everything got tight on me, my armor, my face. When I found I could breathe again, I realized I couldn’t look at the other Rangers, so I turned around and looked for Omar. He was off to one side, sitting on a stone ledge, arms crossed, watching the proceedings.
He must have noticed something when I came over and sat down next to him. “What happened?” he asked.
“Peters” was all I could say.
“God grant his soul rest. He was a warrior.”
“He was a motherfucking Ranger, you traitorous piece of shit.”
“Alright, Doc. He was a motherfucking Ranger.” Omar stood up. “You know what’s funny though?”
I looked up at him, thinking what it would feel like to have his neck clenched in my hands.
“Charon 8.”
“What?”
“Charon split, Doc. We’ll be back.”
“Fuck me. Who were the two EKIA?”
“Associates.” Omar smirked. “Some motherfuckers die.”
Then he walked off and I just watched him. Then the men moving around me. Then the stars glimmering watery in the distant, icy black, feeling the air go out again, amazing, the second time in one night. That was new. Then Sergeant Deke knocked me on the helmet and said time to move. The platoon filed out of the compound. I followed the body in front of me because I was a Ranger and that was what Rangers did.
We arrived at the HLZ. As if cast down, the heavy birds materialized from the pitch-black sky, singing their unearthly refrain. They were coming to take us home. Home, where Peters lay waiting.
7
PLAY THE GAME
Colby Buzzell
THE HAT’S GOT THREE RIBBONS embroidered on the front, which all pretty much get handed out to everybody now: a National Defense Service Ribbon, a Global War on Terrorism Service Ribbon, and a Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Ribbon. Though inside the tag read “Made in China,” I thought it looked kinda cool anyway. I especially liked how it read in bright yellow: OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM COMBAT VETERAN. I went ahead and tossed it in my shopping cart and pushed toward the PX checkout.
Days later, as main post receded in the rearview one last time, I caught a look at myself in that hat. My blue infantry cord dangled from the mirror, somehow sad, like a limp-hanging flag. Was I making a mistake?
Fuck it, I thought, then turned on the radio. It was this song I’d never heard before, something about how there was this girl and everything was different now. I chuckled to myself, thinking about how my platoon sergeant kept hassling me those last months, trying to get me to re-up, always asking what kind of job I thought I’d get once I got out, if I was gonna put “shoot, move, and communicate” on my résumé, and saying, “You’ll be back. I was just like you once, I got out too, and guess what happened? That’s right. You’ll see.”
* * *
Six months later, I got out of bed and stumbled over to the window. Out on the street corner stood a little blonde-haired girl, dressed like she was on her way to Sunday school. Was today Sunday? I thought about that a minute.
Wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, a black metal bracelet around my right wrist with some names and dates engraved onto it, and my dog tags, I watched the little girl as she started to cross the street.
Out of nowhere, a beat-up Ford pickup whipped around the corner and slammed on its brakes, smashing right into the girl and sending her flying onto the pavement.
The truck idled for a couple seconds, then started to move again. Slowly it turned onto a side street and drove off. I tried to catch the license, one of those old black-and-yellow plates, but it was too late. It was gone before I could make the numbers.
I looked back at the girl again, and stared at her lying there in the middle of the road. Then I felt kind of tired, so I got back in bed and went to sleep.
* * *
The next morning I woke up with a throbbing headache. I reached out and picked up my grungy cargo shorts and an empty beer bottle to use as an ashtray. Thank god I still had a couple cigarettes left in the pack half-crumpled in my shorts.
Just as I was starting to feel the smoke get inside me, my cellphone buzzed. The screen read RESTRICTED NUMBER.
When I pressed call, the guy on the other end said, “Hello, is this Specialist Dunson?”
I paused and said, “Let me guess, you’re Army, right?” He laughed and said he was. He introduced himself and asked how I was doing. I told him I’d been fine until he called. “What you need, Staff Sergeant Jessup? You low for your quota or something, you gotta call up med discharges?”
I couldn’t figure out what was so goddamn funny about that as he chuckled. Then he wanted to know how things had been going since I got out.
Now I’m pretty sure when this guy signed up, he didn’t request to be put on that shit detail, so I let him do his spiel about inactive ready reserve and the National Guard and all that. When he asked me if I was in college or what, I asked him how he got put on this assignment.
He let out a sigh and said, “You know how it is.”
Yeah, I laughed. I know exactly how it is.
We went back and forth for a minute, but when he realized there was no way in hell I’d come back, he got all confrontational and started saying if I didn’t sign up for the Reserves, the Army’d probably call me back up anyway, and if I didn’t go then, I’d go to jail.
That was when I hung up on him. I stubbed out my cigarette and made my way to the window and stared at the street for a while.
* * *
I live up on the fifth floor of one of those weekly-monthly low-rent hotels you find all over Los Angeles, one of the old-school ones with the rusty neon signs hanging down the corner of the building. Liquor store on the corner, gang graffiti on the walls, homeless human trash leering over the bus stop bench all hours, church a block away, basically an “up and coming” neighborhood, ripe for gentrification.
It’s temporary. Soon as I get a job, the plan is, I’ll move someplace nice.
On my way down the stairs and out my building I salute the girl working behind the front desk. She sits there behind bullet-proof glass chain-smoking like she does all day.
Outside the warm sun felt good hitting my skin, and after taking that in for a second I lit up. That’s when I noticed my car wasn’t parked across the street where I’d left it. I walked over to the empty spot where I always parked and looked around like I’d find some kind of a clue.
No evidence of theft, like shattered glass, car parts, or a hostage note, just a huge oil stain on the ground, either from my POS or from junkers long gone. I could have sworn I parked it here, but maybe not. Maybe I parked it somewher
e else and forgot, which I’d done before, I think, I’m not sure. I went looking, up and down every single street around my hotel, two or three times each street just to make sure, and an hour and a half later concluded that my car must have been stolen.
* * *
The nearest precinct was just a few blocks south of world-famous Hollywood Boulevard. The sidewalk is set up just like the Walk of Fame, only instead of stars immortalizing famous people like Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Donald Duck, they have stars for cops nobody ever heard of.
Inside, the walls were covered with LAPD recruitments posters, no doubt putting grand ideas in the mind of the room’s one non-cop inhabitant, a Hollywood runaway in a filthy blue hoodie sitting on a duffle bag. The kid looked up at me with hateful eyes burning in a greasy, acne-scarred face, and I gave him a little salute.
The blond officer working behind the counter eyeballed my OIF hat and sat up a bit in his seat, puffing out his chest, and said, “Nice hat.”
I nodded. What the fuck do you say to that? Then he tried again: “Were you over there?”
“Came back about nine months ago,” I said. Then he told me how he had some buddies over there right now, Reservists who got called up, and asked me what branch I was in. I said Army, and he shook his fist at me and shouted back: “Hoo-ah!”
Runaway teen looked over, confused.
I didn’t know what to say back—I sure as hell wasn’t going to return the hooah—so I just got down to business, the status of my vehicle. We went back and forth and he asked me if I was sure, and I told him positive, I’d checked every street in the neighborhood and it wasn’t anywhere, and I’d called downtown and had them run the description and it came back negative.
As I was explaining all this to him, I couldn’t help but notice the silver airborne wings clipped to his left shirt pocket. This confused me because, even though the LAPD sometimes ran like a military outfit, I was almost positive they didn’t have an airborne unit. After he directed me to the Missing and Stolen Vehicles Department, I pointed at his pin and asked when the LAPD started jumping out of airplanes. He chuckled and told me no, but he’d gone to Airborne school years ago, when he was in the National Guard.
“LAPD lets you wear military badges?”
He sort of hemmed and hawed and said no, not really, but at the same time nobody ever said anything. So I asked him, “You think if I became a cop, they’d let me wear my CIB?”
Standing in front of that recruiting poster, he turned serious. “Why? You interested in being a police officer? We could use men with your training.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m gonna go back to school one of these days. For now I just want a part-time thing, just something to keep me busy.”
He shrugged and told me to think about it.
* * *
The Missing and Stolen Vehicles Department office was decorated with movie posters: Dick Tracy, Beverly Hills Cop II, Red Heat, Miami Vice, all framed. Then there was a marker board with make, model, location, and date of a bunch of missing vehicles.
Some mustached Tom Selleck–looking guy in civilian clothes greeted me: “How can I help you?”
I told the same exact story I told Airborne, and Tom Selleck pulled out some forms and the two of us went through them. Basic questions like what type of car, when and where did you park it, and so on, and does anybody else have keys?
You could tell he’d done it a million times and could probably do it in his sleep. When he was done he handed me his card and a photocopy of the paperwork so I could file an insurance claim and said if for whatever reason the car did turn up, to not touch it, but to immediately call them, so they could run prints on it. If they found the vehicle they’d call me. He repeated himself: “We’ll call you.”
Then he said that’s that.
I asked what my chances were of getting my car back. He told me you can’t predict these kinds of things. “Sometimes a couple days, sometimes a couple months, sometimes never.”
* * *
On the way home, I got some coffee and sat in the park, taking a moment to reflect on how shitty my day was going. I was just beginning to wonder if there was maybe something wrong with my life, or with me even, when a large, filthy, middle-aged woman carrying eight or ten plastic bags filled with clothes and trash sat her fat ass on the bench next to me.
She stared at my hat for a minute then asked if I’d served in Iraq. I nodded yes and lit another smoke. She said, “You shouldn’t do that,” and I threw her a please, lady, don’t fucking talk to me vibe. Then I took a sip of coffee and she said, “You shouldn’t do that either.”
I turned and stared. “Can I help you?”
“I’m a vet, too,” she said. “I was in the first Gulf War, back in ’92. I came back all messed up, and it took ’em three years to figure out I had PTSD and Gulf War Syndrome. How you like that? Three years! Now the goddamned VA’s all I got. I bet you smoked a lot in Iraq.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“And I bet you drink more coffee now than you used to, huh?”
I thought about that, then told her I did—I was drinking at least a pot a day.
She said I looked hung over and asked if I drank more booze now. I told her, “Yeah, I drink a hell of a lot more now, but maybe that’s because I didn’t drink at all for a fucking year and now I’m catching up.”
More nodding. Then she said to me that when she was getting treated for PTSD at the VA, she learned the reasons why I drank, smoked, and caffeinated so much more since coming back. She explained that while I was in the combat zone, my body, without me knowing it, was releasing a ton of endorphins and adrenaline, even when we weren’t doing anything. When I came back, my mind and body were still on that high. My body still needed those endorphins, she said. And so I was seeking out stimulants like caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol to compensate for having lost that feeling.
I thought about that for a second. I wanted to ask her if she was a fat, homeless slob because of the endorphins, but I didn’t—maybe if I’d been drinking whiskey instead of coffee. She told me she missed the war and wished she could go back. I wanted to ask her what she could’ve possibly done in that bullshit conflict that had anything to do with me, but I just thanked her for her time and excused myself.
As I walked off, she yelled at me that I should get some counseling. “It’ll change your life!” she screamed.
* * *
Later on that evening, sometime after my sixth or tenth beer, I started hearing them again.
The first couple nights I moved in, I couldn’t sleep until they went away. I’d lay down in bed with my eyes closed and just listen. Laughter, giggling, females, conversations, carrying on . . . every now and then you’d hear somebody drop their glass, shattering it into a million pieces, and then they’d laugh.
The nightclub is down on the first floor next door. It has one of those monosyllabic names that’s in all lowercase and in the back they have an outdoor patio smoking section. You can’t see it from my window, but you can definitely hear it. Last call is always the loudest part of the night, and shortly after that the noise fades and finally disappears. You get so used to the noise, some nights the silence wakes you up, but mostly you just learn to sleep through it. After those first couple nights, I got used it; it was just background noise I hardly paid attention to, like the news about Iraq on TV, but every now and then I’d tune in, wondering what it was like.
Over cigarettes and another beer, I debated for a couple of minutes whether or not to go down and check it out. Finally I said fuck it.
* * *
As the harsh light burned into my sleeping eyes the next morning, I decided to work through my hangover by finding a job. A friend of mine had told me about a website that specialized in helping vets get work, which I thought was a brilliant idea and a great way for people to support the troops. My screen flashed with potential:
Cashier (gas station) $8/hr; Telemarketer (must be b
right, cheerful and helpful, and punctual!) $11/hr; Office Assistant (Candidate must have prior office experience and possess a professional appearance and attitude) $9/hr; Shipping & Receiving Clerk (Use safety gear, gloves, ear and eye protection in accordance with Company policy) $9.50/hr; Assembly (entry level candidate must be mechanically inclined, have a working knowledge of hand tools, and have the ability to solve simple math problems) DOE Immediate opening!; Warehouse Workers (must have experience working in warehouse) $9–11/hr DOE.
The website also had a feature where you could post your résumé and employers would contact you if they were interested. I set up a profile, posted my résumé, and spent the next hour or so applying for nearly every job posted, then checked out some other listings on Craigslist. I spent most of the day online and slowly, one by one, each one e-mailed me back to tell me the position had been filled, or I didn’t have enough experience. Some of them were kind enough to thank me for my service and wish me luck on my search. Some said they’d keep my résumé on file and contact me if anything opened up.
The next day I logged on to see if I’d received any messages. There were two. The first was from the Army National Guard. “Subject: Make Your Next Job the Adventure of a Lifetime!” The other was for a part-time weekend position that paid $9 an hour, holding a sign by the side of the road. “Get paid while listening to music!”
The message said to call if I was interested, so I did. They asked if I could start this weekend. I told him I could. Basically they needed somebody to hold a sign on a street corner downtown to try to get people to stop and look at the open house for these new condos. The job paid cash at the end of the day. They asked if I was interested in this particular line of work, and I said yeah, it sounded great.
They said they needed somebody who was enthusiastic and had a positive attitude, so I told them I possessed both those personality traits. They said that was great and told me where to be on Saturday morning at 8 a.m. They said they looked forward to meeting me. I said I did too.
That night I celebrated by drinking most of a bottle of Dewar’s.
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