Just Another Soldier
Page 12
I was looking at the dead guy’s face and noticed two deep cuts in his brow. They were not bloody. I wondered how he got those wounds and if maybe they’d played a role in his death. Then I realized that since they weren’t bleeding it must have happened postmortem—shit—and that I had probably done it getting him onto the hood. I felt bad that I had inflicted a wound on him that would normally have caused him to be scarred for life, but right now it didn’t really matter because his lifespan was a number less than zero. I guess at worst I slightly fucked up the open-casket thing for his mom. I don’t know how to express that I’m genuinely sorry without sounding like an asshole.
We had to wait longer than I care to mention, but our CASEVAC escort finally made it to our location with the field ambulance to evacuate the wounded. Out of the sight of the others, we transferred the dead guy to a body bag. We then loaded the body onto the back of an ICDC truck, a compact white Toyota with a machine gun shoddily mounted over the cab, a stand-in hearse that just seemed cheap and undignified, but oh well. At least we had a body bag. This is not an item you really want to make a priority to remember when you load up the vehicles. But lugging a body around in a poncho that’s on the verge of bursting apart, lifeless limbs dangling out the sides, is not a cool way to roll.
The wounded were escorted to our base to be treated, and the dead guy was dropped off at the ICDC station. We opened the body bag to search for ID. The bag was full of blood now and the guy’s white shirt was almost completely saturated in red. Whiskey did the searching, a guy I love for not being one to ever back down from the most repulsive of tasks. There was no ID, so we took a few pictures of the dead guy’s face in hopes of being able to ID him later. The two places where I cut his head were now a blackish red. Damn.
The first thing we wondered once we got the chance to was, Why had these men been shot? Who would have done something like this? Had these men refused to cooperate with the local Al Sadr guys or something? Then we thought maybe it was an Arab thing, a score that needed to be settled, a family or clan issue—none of our business! Then we wondered if maybe the men were child molesters and the father and brothers of their victims had done this. This gave us temporary solace. After all, we did see what looked like a young boy’s bloodied underwear; the symbolism was all there. But the answer, we would later find out, was pretty much our first guess, the most obvious and, the least original.
When we got back to our bunker, my hands and arms still smelled of this guy’s blood. And his sweat. I took a thorough shower. I felt guilty washing his smell off me.
This afternoon, once we returned from the unsuccessful mission to snatch the local politician, we got some follow-up information on the three men. They were local contractors who were painters for the major base up the street from us. While leaving the base, they were carjacked by people who were none too pleased with their working for the coalition. They were then driven to a remote gully far from any base, an excellent location to kill someone. It’s near a major road, and therefore an escape route, but completely out of sight. The last thing one of these men did was take that long walk down the gulley. Then each of them was shot and left for dead. They could have been shot in the head and killed on the spot, but they weren’t. They were all shot in the legs, forcing them have to fight to live. And to suffer. And if they survived, to remember.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’ve realized that I was so overly concerned about the dead guy, the guy I couldn’t save, the one I didn’t save, that I hadn’t realized until now that I had saved someone’s life, or rather that I had helped save someone’s life, that we had saved someone’s life. I’ve never saved someone’s life before.
June 27, 2004
HOW TO BLOW UP TRUCKS, DOGS, AND MOSQUES
A couple of days ago me and about fifteen guys from my platoon were doing our NAI (“named area of interest”) run along with the EOD (“blow shit up”) guys. There was an alleged cache of mortar rounds or something near the NAIs that the EOD guys wanted to blow up. So we drove to the first one, dismounted, checked things out, mounted up, and moved out. We came to the area where the cache was supposed to be, but we didn’t find shit. Then we went to the second NAI.
The NAIs are somewhat large areas of real estate, so each time we go, we try to inspect a different part of them. This time, while tooling around, we found an abandoned tractor trailer. Abandoned vehicles are never a good thing in Iraq, so we usually destroy them when we have the means. Since we never found the cache of mortar rounds we were looking for, EOD was happy knowing they now had something to destroy.
First we had Johnny-O, one of our .50-cal gunners, unload a few bursts into the tractor trailer. For you non-killers out there, mounted machine guns have a device on them called a T&E, which controls the weapon’s traversal and elevation. Basically it’s just a thing that keeps the gun from climbing up as you fire it while allowing it to swing freely from side to side. When Johnny-O shot the truck, he didn’t have the T&E engaged. It’s fine that he chose to free-gun it—it was good experience—but it made it so he could put only a short burst into it before it started to climb. We try to be careful about this sorta thing because, after all, there are people living all over the place, and collateral damage from errant bullets isn’t cool. Free-gunning is cool when you need the freedom of movement—say, for a close-range engagement on a highway—but if you want to actually put lead into something accurately with nice long bursts, use the damn T&E.
After shooting the truck, EOD got ready to blow it up. They had several bricks of some Russian explosives they wanted to expend, so they put the whole shit in the cab of the truck on a timed fuse. We then drove several hundred meters away and waited patiently.
“Thirty seconds!” the EOD guy yelled.
So we’re all watching the truck, waiting for the fireworks display, when, Hey, wait a second, is that a dog? Oh, shit! What are you doing? Get the fuck away from there, you stupid mutt!
A dog had wandered toward the truck right as it was about to explode. I’ve never seen so many dogs get fucked up in my life as I have over here. This one had the luckiest day of his life, though. However, I don’t think he’ll be answering to any more whistles. The truck blew right next to him, then he tucked tail and ran. Aside from the fact that innocent animals (almost) dying is not cool, it was pretty damn funny.
Then, on the way back, while we’re driving through a little neighborhood, I notice all these bricks and rubble strewn across the road. I thought to myself, Hmm, what’s all this shit? I look out the front of the Humvee (I was in the backseat, so my sector of fire was out the window) and thought, Is something missing? Holy shit! That one mosque is gone!
This small village had a mosque that was now no more. We stopped and got out to investigate. It was handy that we had EOD with us because they were able to poke around the rubble and determine that the explosion had come from the inside (as opposed to an air strike or an exterior detonation). The locals who came out told us that someone was seen planting the bomb that destroyed the place. It must have been a good amount of explosives, because the place was leveled. As you may well know, I’m no fan of religion, but it still made me really sad to see this. The mosque was Shiite. What’s strange, too, is that this area is considered to be less than friendly to us, so for it to have been a retaliatory strike against the local people for being sympathetic to the coalition didn’t make any sense. The mosque and the village are within the boundaries of a different unit’s area of operations, so we reported it up and headed home. We may never know what the story was. What can I say? The Iraqis are as busy being assholes to each other as they are to us.
July 9, 2004
ALL HAIL WILLY! THAT BASTARD! PART ONE
My girlfriend Heather and I were expelled from high school less than a week before graduation. This is because the First Amendment does not protect suburban Utah high school students. Our parents were heartbroken and wouldn’t speak to us, and we became pariahs in our own town.
But these were the least of my worries. Heather had already been accepted to Utah State University, in Logan, and they would never be the wiser that the girl whom they would eventually graduate with honors in psychology and sociology had never technically finished high school. But this created a serious problem for me, because I couldn’t leave for infantry school until I had a diploma. And I wasn’t just expelled from my high school, I was expelled from the whole goddamned school district, something that I think was unprecedented. I tried to get my diploma through the alternative high school—the one where the criminal, sociopathic, drug-addicted, and pregnant students went—but they wouldn’t take me in. I made an appeal to the superintendent of the Murray school district. He was the first government administrator I ever met who could talk and talk and talk and never actually say anything. “Something must be done. We are going to have to decide what should be done. Something will have to be done,” he droned on ad nauseam. There was a special meeting of the school board to determine my fate. That’s when they decided to boot me from the district and, according to the superintendent, to actively pursue barring me from transferring to any district in the state of Utah. He broke the news to me when I called his office from my work, a telemarketing job, an unfortunate trade I acquired that would help me pay my way through college, hone my verbal communication skills, and eventually cause me to develop a love for New Yorkers. That day at work, after all his blathersome circumlocution and beating-around-the-bush, the superintendent finally gave me the verdict. “After much deliberation, blah blah blah, the school board and I, blah blah blah, regret to inform you, blah blah blah…” I then told him, as professionally as I could, to go fuck himself. “Sir, Heather and I would like to cordially invite you and the school board to go have sex with yourselves.”
To give you a proper background, I feel compelled to tell you my entire goddamned life story and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but nothing is quite so boring as having to endure an autobiography. It’s like looking at the personal photographs that cubicle dwellers put up next to their computers or deployed soldiers put up around their bunks. You don’t know the people in the photographs and you don’t know the stories in them. It’s totally abstract. And if you’re like me, you couldn’t care less. For example, I have two photos on the bookshelf next to my bunk. One is of me lying on a bed in an apartment in New Paltz with two girls, Wazina and Rachel. The girls are spooning and looking at me. I’m looking at them. We had just finished our first performance of the Vagina Monologues for the weekend. I had performed the only male monologue that is allowed when universities do the show—original material on the subject of What the World Would Be Like Without Violence. (I started my monologue with a joke about how Michael Bolton would never have to worry about getting his ass kicked in bars, but no one laughed.) The other photo is of another pair of girls, Erin and Kristin, my roommates in New Paltz. I stole the photo out of one of their albums from our apartment when I realized before I deployed that I didn’t have any pictures of them. These photos, or rather the memories captured by each photo, mean volumes to me. To you, they mean absolutely nothing. (Unless, of course, you are Wazina, Rachel, Erin, or Kristin.) It’s like trying to explain a dream where the emotions are intense and poignant, and you want so badly to try and get these feelings across to whomever is your unfortunate audience, but trying to explain how you fell in love with a girl you met on a spaceship run by lizard dogs really kinda kills the delivery.
Despite the inherent risks of trying to explain feelings and personal histories, here’s the flashcard summary of my life: I’m born in Provo, Utah, to George and Linda. My mom would later describe George to me as a “chiseled Greek god.” The marriage ends after I’m a few months old. My mom and I move to San Leandro, California, to live with my grandparents. My grandfather, a retired Navy officer, becomes my father figure. At the age of four, my penchant for large words and all things fecal has already developed. Jim, an earnest and conservative man, starts courting my mom, despite her having a child who has a predilection for running around the yard stark naked with a yellow ribbon wedged between his little baby buttocks yelling, “DIARRHEA!!! DIARRHEA!!! DIARRHEA!!!”
Jim and Linda wed and move into a small house with shag carpeting next to a cow pasture in the hick town of Spanish Fork, Utah. I am taught to refer to Jim as my father. Small, backward working-class town plus community of religion-induced sexual repression and perversion equals five-year-old me being sexually molested by twelve-year-old boy across the street—“Let’s pretend we’re tied up…” One Sunday morning, following a day of playing in the sprinkler and getting my first sunburn, I get spanked by my new father for watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—you can’t keep the Sabbath day holy by indulging in entertainment, ya know! I would be spanked more times that I can count over the years. Oddly, I’m also taught that one should never fight, but to “turn the other cheek,” a fucking idiotic philosophy that would haunt me during my childhood and later shape my adolescence as I shed it. I start having terrifying recurring nightmares about a dragon and a mustachioed man who dwell in the foundation of an unfinished house and force me to choose a different method of death each night—“So what’s it gonna be, kid? Cut apart by the dragon’s claws or crushed to death under his feet?” My dad tells me to chant the phrase “Kook-a-munga rickety-rack, mean old dragon, never come back!” to make them go away. It doesn’t work. I finally learn to simply refuse to comply with the sinister man’s Sophie’s Choice bullshit by just letting him know that he and his dragon can go fuck themselves. I never have the nightmare again.
It finally dawns on my parents that Spanish Fork is fucked up, and we move into a new rambler style house in Murray, Utah, fifteen minutes from downtown Salt Lake City, where I make many friends and have a happy childhood, despite being sheltered and repressed. Things start getting a little sketchy between me and my father once my critical reasoning skills start to kick in, at around age twelve. I learn to play the piano. I become an Eagle Scout. By the time I am fourteen, I am well on my way to becoming a very difficult and rebellious teenager. I learn that I love to write, but my parents find what I write troubling. I will have incredibly good English teachers in Utah for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, who, simply put, will have a bigger positive influence on who I am today than anyone aside from my mom. At fifteen, I meet a transfer student with perfect skin and a Germanic face named Lori who teaches me how to skateboard and introduces me to the whole self-destructive, bad-poetry-writing, Winona Ryder–in–Edward Scissorshands smoking-clove-cigarettes thing. I go to my first concert with her—Oingo Boingo at the Salt Palace during the Boingo Alive tour—against the express instructions of my parents (girls: bad; rock-n-roll: bad; combinations of the two: total and utter damnation). I sleep at a friend’s house the night after the show.
After years of dealing with their “troubled” teenage son, my parents decide they’ve had enough. The following day, I am picked up from school by my mom, who is dressed like she is on her way to church. We meet my dad at a place called Benchmark, a mental institution north of Salt Lake. To the crowd I run with, being institutionalized is considered a badge of honor. (“They stuck me in an institution / Said it was the only solution / To me the needed professional help / To protect me from the enemy, myself.”) But “mods”—what goths were called in Utah before the word “goth” was coined—tend to go to the Western Institute of Neuropsychiatry, or WIN, at the University of Utah, while stoners and rockers go to Benchmark. I am torn. The dilemma is immaterial, because the insurance company refuses to pay for the cost of institutionalizing a noncrazy basically drug-free kid who simply doesn’t get along with his dad.
I start seeing a therapist, who diagnoses me as having an atypical anxiety disorder—bullshit psychobabble for “pissed off at his dad.” The therapist is Mormon. My whole issue is the religion shit. As a compromise, I move in with my aunt Cheryl and uncle Lauren for the second half of my tenth grade year in Alamo, California, a wealthy be
droom community on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. My aunt and uncle and cousins are another huge Mormon family, except they are eccentric, wild, and fun, like something out of a John Irving novel. At San Ramon Valley High School, I see students treated like adults. The school newspaper is remarkably good. In it, I read an editorial about the death of Jim Henson called “It’s Not Easy Being Green” that I will remember for years. The kids here are being prepared for adulthood, and it makes me feel empowered. I fail both quarters of English, however. The teacher fails all my unconventionally written essays. I write short stories instead of normal essays to fulfill the requirements. The teacher is short, pugnacious, and ugly as hell, with greasy, pockmarked skin, thinning wiry hair, and a green tongue. (She would use her tongue to scratch her chin! Blech!) We get along fairly well, and I like her.