by Mike Bond
“Blue on blue!” Ortiz screamed into the radio, “Blue on blue you assholes!”
“Mac!” Jack ran through smoke and debris toward the still-falling classroom from which a trooper staggered dreamlike holding an arm in his hand and fell to his knees, blood pouring from his severed shoulder.
Another rocket howled in knocking Jack sideways into the wall and all that mattered was to stumble across this cloud of shrapnel and maybe Mac was fine, the others – but no, one had died already, without the arm – another trooper digging at the chunks of roof and walls that filled the center of the building. “Down there!” he screamed. “They’re down there!”
Ortiz got the radio working and called off the A-10s. He came up with tears streaking his blackened cheeks and they brought in a Humvee to winch away the tons of sharp-edged concrete. Jack dug as if Sophie and the kids were under the rubble, as if they were expiring every second and he still might save them.
They placed the pieces of Mac and two of his men together on camo tarps, pulled the biggest chunks of concrete out of their flesh, tied them up and another Humvee from Mudge’s command drove them away.
Jack sat in the blasted building with his M-4 in his hands and emptiness everywhere. Sunset lay like orange sludge across the peaks. The wind prowled, hungry and cold. Mac was everywhere, his wide cheery face with his two-days’ graying beard, his reddish Santa cheeks, his burly good-natured laugh, the affectionate grip of his thick-knuckled hands, his bright eyes, his huge body that at first one might mistake for soft, the rolling walk that belied his strength, the kindness that masked a lack of fear.
Now he was dead and the wound too great to feel.
“IT’S GOD’S WILL.” Mudge sat beside Jack with two MREs in his hand. “Much as it hurts, we have to realize that. That gives us comfort.”
Jack stared at him. “What would you know about God’s will?”
Mudge filled his mouth with cheese crackers. “Well, if God hadn’t wanted them to die, they’d still be here.”
“My family was murdered by people who believed in God. And just like you they were sure what they did was right.”
Mudge stirred powdered chocolate in a cup of water heated by C-4. “This,” he nodded his chin at the tangle of buildings and tawdry desert, “it’s all going down to everlasting fire.”
“Isn’t that what the Air Force’s trying to do?”
Mudge cleared his throat, spit. “What killed Mac and his men was an IED – there wasn’t any blue on blue.”
“You nuts? I saw that A-10 come in – we all saw it.”
“I’ve talked with the men. We’ve concluded it was an IED.” He gave Jack a patient look. “We don’t want to aid’n comfort the enemy with crazy stories about us bombing our own men, now do we?”
“You’re afraid it won’t look good on your record? Is that it?”
“You oughtta focus on this war. On how we can win. Instead a causin problems.”
“You try to cover up what happened to Mac and his guys and I will end your career. You’ll never get that pension you hitched up for.”
Mudge poured the dregs of his chocolate on the sand. “When Jesus returns, He’ll take all of us who believe in Him, who’ve lived by His Word, up to Heaven. And leave the rest of you behind.” His feet crunched on glass as he crossed to his sleeping hole beside a Bradley.
As Jack drifted into sleep he remembered a long-ago rock crevice in Afghanistan where he’d lain up for an hour out of the snow. Even a moment’s safety and peace...
He woke at dawn from dreams of lying half-crushed under concrete and of trying to rescue Mac while strange officers kept saying He’s not there, soldier, it’s your imagination.
The first fighters were flying north. Bombs shook the desert. Smoke blotted out the last stars and the macabre violet of dawn. To the north red tracers chased each other down the green pit of night. Mudge stood. “Thank you good Lord,” he mumbled as he pissed, “for this new day.”
ACROSS THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY they drove, twirling a half-mile high dust plume up the plains and hills between the Tigris and Euphrates.
At moments Jack could see this land before agriculture and civilization had destroyed it: tall grass, glinting cold rivers, trout like shadows across bright stones, antelope and deer herds to the horizons, the thunder of bird chant and scented cool air. Then it shifted back to hot dusty horizons where nothing grew, and the air burned the insides of his nostrils and parched his throat.
They took a short halt on the road to Ramadi. “I keep having this dream,” Tony turned aside to spit, “we going to die here.”
“Everybody always thinks that.” Jack listened to the uneven rattling of the Humvee’s diesel. “Years ago in Afghanistan I used to all the time.”
“In this dream you get pinned and I try to save you and we both get wasted. I see my blood pouring on top a this dirt –”
The Humvee’s engine died. Ortiz cranked on it, revving it hard to keep it going. A samarra, Jack remembered, was the cloak victims of the Inquisition wore to their executions.
It didn’t matter about Tony’s dream. Except for Tony.
Mudge came up, his rifle slung upside down over one shoulder. He knelt to retrieve something, peered at it in his hand. “Look at this willya –”
A small chunk of clay with thickly compressed writing. “A cuneiform tablet,” Jack said. It felt sacred in his palm. “Five thousand years old. From Ur, oldest civilization on earth. The first writing.” He could almost reach the person who had made it.
“Your timing’s off,” Mudge smiled.
The column ahead was taking machine gun fire and they called in CAS. For an hour the town boiled under black and red smoke and phosphorent flashes, the thud of bombs and rockets shivering the earth where they waited, two miles away.
Moving in next morning they split up to check the ruined streets. As Jack paused in a courtyard he heard a bell sound, looked up to see a bamboo wind chime hanging from a wrecked trellis. Ortiz came out of the house, heavy under his vest and ammo belts, boots crunching the courtyard’s painted tiles. “Clear,” he said. “They’re all dead.”
There must be, Jack thought, some respite from this horror. In books there might be periods of violence or sorrow, but then the author would toss in some humor or joy so the reader wouldn’t lose faith – comic relief, wasn’t it called? But where, here, was the comic relief?
The wind chime rang melodically, making him think of the family that must have lived here and how familiar that sound had been.
You can check out any time you like. But how could he leave these men?
They waited three days in the sun drinking Kool-Aid in recycled water. Other columns passed, dust so thick it coated their eyes and lungs, faces and uniforms; you could wipe it away but it came right back.
ONE AFTERNOON they scouted a town near Samarra that had been bombed before a Marine advance column had hit it – narrow streets of caved-in houses under splintered palms, the Humvees’ tires crushing oranges that had been blasted from the trees.
The dust and smoke were so thick it seemed a dream where wraithlike soldiers flitted, where walls and trees slid out of the mist then vanished. In the center stood a ruined museum where a stone torso lay blackened by bullets and a disembodied marble head stared at the sky. Inside the walls a marble hand lay in a welter of glass and plaster; there were rows of shattered vases where someone had blasted all the display cases with an M-4 on auto.
Amid the crump of tank fire came the whistle of jets, and he wondered what it looked like to the pilots way up there, the smoking ground and tiny mutilated houses.
The toxic smoke made him cough. They went out through the museum across a field, boots crunching on shards, here and there a naked tree, once the body of an old man holding a rope with nothing tied to it.
They came to some berms, the sand collapsing at the edges, but there was no one and they took no fire. Returning through the museum he heard a scraping down a corridor, like a
wounded soldier dragging across the floor.
It was Mudge shoving things from a display case into a camo sack. His rifle lay ten feet away. Surprised by Jack, he jumped up clasping a black marble head with a tight curling beard, strong nose, and high eyebrows. “Lifting this thing, whew,” he mumbled. “Must weigh fifty pounds.”
Three small sculptures lay next to Mudge’s pack, one a perfect lion with an arrow in its chest. “These are Assyrian,” Jack said. “Three thousand years old. Put the damn things back.”
“It’s a lie, science.” Mudge peered at him intensely. “Can’t you see?”
“I’ll have you busted for pillaging. You know the force order on that.”
Mudge glanced across the floor at his rifle. As Jack turned away for the first time in his life he felt fear of being shot in the back by one of his own men.
Fragged. He walked out of the museum toward the line of Humvees.
IN THE BATTLE for Falluja the bullets came from everywhere, off buildings and cars, sparking the street, rat-tatting off tanks, screams and yells through smoke, the thunder of bombs jerking the earth back and forth under his feet as he ran down an alley of bullets spattering off walls. He leaped over a woman dragging herself sideways toward a child with no head. Up front Ortiz tossed in another grenade and the shock knocked him into a wall. The alley opened into a concrete pentagon between five buildings – blackened windows and cars burnt down on their rims – a place many guys could die if he didn’t do this right – and he wanted to tell the men run back up that alley, back through the smashed streets, get in the trucks to Baghdad and fly back to America.
“Rake those windows!” he yelled at Tony and Ortiz, pointed at a wall and sprinted for an archway on the far side, boots crunching concrete and glass, body armor heavy and hot, helmet slipping, everything happening slowly, plenty of time for anyone to shoot him down.
He reached the archway and spun round firing on the windows spattering splinters and concrete with Ortiz close behind him, and after him Tony running awkward and fast then like a doll yanked sideways falling against the wall, his blood graffiti down it, Ortiz calling for a Cobra and Jack jammed in another magazine and ran across the square expecting the bullet’s crushing pain, wanting it for what he’d done to Tony, dragged Tony to the archway and sprayed the windows thinking Fucker’s gone now, heard the chopper coming, and knelt down and saw that the bullet had cut through Tony’s neck shattering the spine.
“We’re in the alley on the north side,” Ortiz repeated into the radio, on his hands and knees twisting the map this way and that to read it. “This square’s in front of us, to the south. Hit the building on the west side, we’re taking small arms from there – no wait!” He shuffled the map, “Can you see it? Ali Darfour it says, some shit –”
Something was wrong in the approaching thunder of the Cobra. “No we’re on the west side,” Jack yelled. “Call him off!” Ortiz shook his head under the bulky helmet as Jack grabbed the radio and called it off, the gunship hovering.
That night in the light of a fire of a broken dining room set he tried to write,
Dear Mrs. Decourt,
I sent Tony to his death and nothing can alter that. There seems no purpose to this, but perhaps life to him was less important than what he did...
Jason Ortiz came in shaking dust off his helmet. “What ya writin’, Sir?”
“Bullshit.” Jack tossed the letter on the coals.
“You oughtta email,” Ortiz said. “It’s faster.”
Punishment of God
ON THE THIRD DAY they turned back toward Ramadi, crossing from Salahuddin province toward the Euphrates. The villages they passed had not yet been hit but seemed haunted as if everyone had already died.
How sadly strange here with Mac and Tony gone. Dead, he told himself. Not gone.
It was better not to believe in God, even if there were a God. For what virtue was there in following a moral code because you’d be eternally punished if you didn’t? What counted was to develop your own moral code, an innate hewing to the good.
The inverse of Pascal – if there were a good and loving God, wouldn’t that God be more drawn to us by our natural goodness than by any obedience to “His” handed-down laws?
At the Baghdad cutoff a mile-high wall of brown sand roared over them cutting off the sky. They shut down and waited, the men uneasily spread out on the perimeter, squinting through sand-blistered goggles at swirling phantoms.
The wind howled, screeched and pummeled their faces and knocked them down, hailing sand across the Humvees. Once the ground quivered like an earthquake.
The sandstorm thundered away, dust tornadoes and debris chasing after it. The radio screamed, “They’re hit! They’re hit, Callahan’s hit!” and Jack ran back to Callahan’s Humvee half-crushed, twisted and smoking, a hand sticking through the roof. “A rocket,” a trooper said, a kid he didn’t know. “I heard it hit, from back there –” he pointed to the next truck.
“Where from?”
The kid nodded at the desert. “Out there.”
Jack walked into the desert not caring where the Iraqis were, happy to die locating them. So his men could kill them.
There were no tracks, no tire treads. Helmet tipped back, panting and sweating in the heat, lungs full of fine sand, Jack glanced back. The Humvee lay crumpled sideways, the rest of the convoy like a great worm that has suddenly been truncated.
“They couldna been this far,” the kid said. “We’re beyond RPG range.”
“No sign anywhere.”
“Never is, Sir. We’re shooting at phantoms. Getting killed by phantoms.”
A Bradley was dragging the Humvee off the road when they got back. “Flyboys see no one,” Ortiz said. “Just sand and wadis for miles and miles.”
The three dead soldiers were bagged and boarded and the convoy headed southwest again. The men’s mood was hurting, angry.
By late afternoon the air had cleared. A red pickup truck drove toward them trailing a tuft of dust. “Bad guys!” Mudge screamed.
Jack grabbed the radio. “Maybe civilians! Turn aside! Go out on the desert!”
Mudge’s Humvee rocked to a stop, the .50 cal rotating like an ugly stinger toward the approaching pickup.
“Move into the desert!” Jack yelled. “Do not engage unless he follows you.”
The second and third Humvees behind Mudge pulled away from the road. The pickup neared, slowing. Its rear bed was canvas-covered.
Red tracers spat from Mudge’s Humvee to the pickup, which reared up and half-spun, slowly falling on its side, shivering as the bullets blasted through it. “No!” Jack screamed into the radio. “Drive!” he yelled at Ortiz. “Drive out there!”
“I don’t want to see,” Ortiz said.
“Mudge!” Jack radioed. “Get out here.”
“I don’t take orders from you. It could be a suicide –”
Jack stopped Ortiz a hundred yards short of the pickup. He walked to it across the sand, heard a strange keening like a dying engine that became a woman’s voice.
Three men sprawled in the bloody cab. Jack eased to the rear where a woman knelt on the bloody sand, bleeding from the head and chest, cradling a bloody child in her arms. A younger woman and two other children lay dead and spattered, half in and out of the truck.
Ortiz held a fist across his mouth. As Jack turned toward Mudge’s Humvee, Ortiz fell to his knees and threw up.
The gun was tight in Jack’s fist and he smelled blood and the bile and excrement of the dead Iraqis. “S-S-Sir!” Brad Wiley grabbed his arm. “S-S-Shit happens!”
Jack switched his weapon to his other hand. “Get back with the men.”
As he walked across the desert a strange memory returned: he sat astride a surfboard rising and falling with the sea, and a fine spray touched his face. He remembered, thinking to re-member is to make whole again, seeing so clearly before him the line of humpback whales against the setting sun.
Mudge backed away. “What
are you doing?”
“It was a farm truck full of people.”
“Could’ve been a technical.” Mudge watched Jack’s gun. “How could I know?”
“You killed them because you wanted to.”
“Jack, they’re Arabs.”
Jack raised his gun slowly and Mudge held out his hands as if to block the bullets. The trigger was fire-hot against Jack’s finger. Mudge knelt begging. “Remember, Jack, Christ loves me. What will He do if you kill me?”
That was it, the deepest reason to kill him, that he was not only evil but that he believed his own evil to be good. Jack jabbed the barrel into Mudge’s cheek.
“Jack!” Ortiz came up. “This shit happens every day. Let’s move on.”
Mudge grinned at Jack. “See – Christ wouldn’t let you kill me!”
Jack glanced back at the crumpled pickup. “Call a medic for the woman.”
“She’s gone, Sir,” a trooper said. “Nothing we can do.”
He wanted to walk into this desert, walk till the world’s end. He feared throwing up, bit back tears, thought of Isabelle, felt her hand on his brow, the tug of her scarab on his neck.
You can’t fight the world’s ills. All you can do is not add to them.
He’d become a soldier because he loved America and wanted to defend it. But soldiers have to follow orders no matter what. No matter if the order’s insane.
We must never give our souls to someone else, control of our lives, our deaths.
He would go back to the Green Zone. Like Medieval occupiers we hide behind thick walls and free-fire zones. Install ourselves in the palace of the dictator we deposed. And wonder why the people fear and hate us just like him.
He’d make his report to HQ, Timothy, Ackerman, Szymanski, the others: How do we get out of this? What did the Germans think, at Stalingrad?
What would he have done at Stalingrad? Do you turn your back, imagine you can walk away?
If a man believes in a war his country wages but does not fight, he is a coward. But if he doesn’t believe and does fight he is also a coward.