by Matt Young
My grandfather wasn’t in World War II. So he never talked about it. But I bet if he had been there in the shit, and I could ask him now how he stayed awake in the fighting holes on Peleliu, he wouldn’t tell me it was because he was so scared of dying he couldn’t sleep or that it was his sense of duty and righteousness.
He’d say, Imagine us, only boys, in fighting holes waiting for the Japs to make a banzai charge in the complete dark on a tiny coral island in the middle of the Pacific. You can’t imagine dark like that, Grandson. We hadn’t had food or fresh water for days. There was dysentery pooling in our grenade sumps. Got that we were so exhausted we forgot about dying and didn’t even know half the time if we were awake or asleep. Some boys, their eyes would close, and they’d wake up stabbed in the gut with a goddamn samurai sword. Fear only gets you so far, Grandson, he’d say.
What really kept all those grunts on point was jerking off to fantasies of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth and whoever else.
We’ve been in Zaidon a month and I haven’t killed anyone. It’s been a month and all I’ve done is stand on this fucking roof and jerk off. My fastest time so far is forty-three seconds. Mostly I’m too tired to concentrate so I just end up rubbing myself raw for hours at a time.
I’m jerking off when Sergeant Mars walks up next to me and sits in a decaying captain’s chair removed from some kind of vehicle.
I don’t move; my hand stays on my dick.
What the fuck are you doing, Young?
Sergeant?
I mean, what are you looking at?
I tell him my sector of fire is from the northeast corner of the roof to the southeast corner and that mostly I’m watching the small tree line about two hundred meters out next to the irrigation canal that runs perpendicular to the road leading to the house where we currently reside. My dick is still in my hand.
He grunts. What do you think about war, Young?
It’s not like I thought it would be, Sergeant.
Didn’t I fucking tell you that? Didn’t we all tell all you boots that? Goddammit you don’t fucking listen.
I’m silent.
Then he says, You’re lucky. We’re all lucky. I don’t know if you heard about LT and what he did on the last deployment.
No, Sergeant.
He stands up and stretches and out of the corner of my right eye I can see he’s not wearing body armor or a helmet.
Fuck, he says. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’ll go wake up your relief. Who is it? Charlie Beaston? He says Charlie’s full name using his impression of Charlie’s Oklahoma drawl, like we all do, and in that moment I feel close to him even with my hand still on my dick. And then I wonder if I’m gay and then I know I’m not and then I know if I move my hand now he’ll see and I’ll never hear the end of the queer jokes and what I think I know about my own sexuality won’t mean a thing.
Then there are more footsteps on the roof and a voice.
Sergeant Mars. What the fuck are you doing on this roof without your gear?
Sorry, sir. Just checking on Young. I—
I do not give one single fuck, Sergeant. Outside the walls you are not protected. What if we took a mortar round right now? What if there was a sniper? What if we were ambushed? You’d be fucked, Sergeant. Right in the ass.
I don’t turn around. I’m still staring out at the field and the tree line and the road and the canal and my hand is still on my dick, but now I’m imagining the LT’s geared girth. I imagine he’s standing with his hands on his hips and his well-over-six-foot frame is towering over Sergeant Mars’s well-under-six-foot frame. I imagine the LT’s immaculately shaved face shadowed in the ambient light and his wide monkey mouth and gapped front teeth covered in angry spittle. I imagine all his ass-related innuendos and what he’ll change his call sign to next—it’s gone from Hammer to Salsa in the time we’ve been here.
Sergeant Mars sighs.
You better unfuck yourself, Sergeant. Real goddamned quick. These Marines look up to you. Young looks up to you.
There’s nothing going on out here, sir, says Sergeant Mars. We’re standing here with our dicks in our hands not doing a goddamn thing.
My dick is still in my hand and my platoon leader and my squad leader are squabbling and there are more footsteps and then more voices join and the entire time I’ve still got my dick in my hand and I’m thinking about those home videos our seniors showed us of Fallujah being destroyed round by round and building by building, of dead bloated bodies, of heat and sweat and blood, and how different my own home movies will be, and how confusing it is to be sad about that, and the arguing is still going on, and my dick is still in my hand.
Coming to Terms
Enter a moment in time, mid-January 2006, in which a first lieutenant dictates that the end state of his platoon’s mission is to disrupt and interdict enemy activity in an area known as Zaidon, specifically in an area known as the Lightning Bolt—three roads whose shape resembles a lightning bolt. Also, in which said lieutenant decides the best way to interdict said enemy activity is to first divide his forces into three sections and then have them cover diverging sectors of the Lightning Bolt on foot, in Humvees, and in a static observation position.
Now enter the moment in which the platoon separates.
In which the dismounted foot patrol steps off at zero four as planned. In which it is February and there are intermittent rains that slow the patrol, put them behind schedule.
In which the mounted Humvee patrol is on the move at its given time to conduct its screen of the area and ultimate extract of the dismounted patrol.
In which, due to slowed progress, the dismounted patrol misses the target extract time and instead is forced to deviate from the original patrol route to meet with the mounted patrol elsewhere.
Now enter the moment in which everything becomes a massive clusterfuck.
In which the lack of situational awareness of the area where said lieutenant’s section has only been operating for three weeks becomes as apparent as a festering wound. In which said lieutenant decides to issue a fragmentary order where he dictates that the Humvees are to pull off the alternate supply route and into a fallow mud field and form a coil. Once in this coil, said lieutenant orders the team leaders to drape camouflage netting over their trucks to break up silhouettes.
Now enter an imagined moment in time in which some holes in the FRAGO could have been questioned: How will desert-colored cammie netting break up our silhouettes against black dirt, sir? Should we send a dismounted patrol to clear the area and set an overwatch in those farm buildings across the field, sir? Should we regroup with the observation post before continuing on with the mission, sir? What about the lack of visibility from both the cammie netting and the inclement weather, sir?
Now enter a real moment in time in which the dismounts become surly in the back of the high-backed Humvee—no more than a glorified pickup truck—stuffed together like cold sardines.
In which the dismounts become complacent and leave only one private first class on guard. In which all the dismounts’ weapons, aside from the private first class’s, are leaning on the outside of the truck so that when whiz-pops start zipping through the cammie netting no one can get to their rifles. In which the back door to the high back is open, and bullets are pinging off it like so much hail. In which there is nothing for the dismounts to do but pile on top of one another and laugh like banshees. In which a lance corporal reaches out to try to close the door and takes a bullet through the sleeve. In which the dismounts all thank whomever they thank that the lance corporal’s arms are noodle thin.
Now enter a moment in time in which no one shoots back because no one can tell where the shooting is coming from because of the cammie netting and the inclement weather. In which the spray and pray hits two horses and some goats who scream their dying-animal screams, causing the dismounts to laugh harder to drown out the noises.
Now enter a moment in time afterward in which a plan has gone to shit and confid
ence in the ability to carry out the mission has wavered. In which the fluidity of the platoon’s bodies as well as Command’s indifference to the platoon’s familial bond becomes apparent. In which, upon examining the hole in the lance corporal’s blouse sleeve, all the dismounts begin to understand that it is not just matters of task organization in which they are not in control but all matters concerning their own lives, and that in all actuality they never were in control of their lives—not even as civilians—and that when presented with an infinite number of life scenarios, all those scenarios will end the same.
A New Species of Yucca
The leg juts up at an unnatural angle from a mound of dirt in the middle of the rolling hills of Iraqi-desert hardpan. We have not slept in some hours. We have been rained on for days. We have not been warm in weeks. We are out of the cigarettes Cheeks gave us when we stopped at Entry Control Point Five to stock up on water and MREs. Then we traded our last MREs to a village child, who could have been an adult, for a pack of Gauloises and our makeshift tarp roof collapsed from collected water and soaked the pack. We tried to salvage the cigarettes but the filament-thin paper disintegrated, leaving our fingers sticky with tobacco shavings. MacReady, Fredericks, and Sherburne in the lead truck have cigarettes, but they won’t share.
So when we find the leg, we think we might be delusional from any number of things. But the leg is there and we think we can hear one another’s thoughts about the leg:
Where’d this fucking leg come from? Why’s it in the middle of the desert? Whose leg is it? It’s not mine. Is it mine? I bet whoever’s it is probably misses it. Is it wearing pants? Think there are cigarettes in the pocket? It is wearing pants. Linen maybe silk—this could be a rich leg.
There is only one leg, so the other unoccupied pant leg is bunched and flopped like a snakeskin on the mound of dirt, covered in mud and camouflaged by the recent rain.
We are in the draw where we found the leg. Behind us is a towering dune of mud and dirt and cracking desert and drying sand. We think we feel the dune shift and breathe and come alive and begin pushing us toward the leg. The leg now maybe resembles something like an altar, where we are maybe supposed to pray. We will fall at the leg altar and prostrate ourselves and throw our hands into the sky and pray to the leg to bring us cigarettes and food and a goddamned resupply.
Then, as we begin to kneel and thrust our arms toward what we think might be our new god, one of us says, Maybe I remember Bible stories about the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates. He says, Maybe I’m making up the stories entirely. He says, In the stories Southern California is one of two places where the Joshua tree grows—the other is Iraq. He says, Where the tree grows so exist the earthly gateways to Heaven and Hell, or some shit.
And so we think as the dune at our backs maybe pushes us toward the leg that it might not really be a leg but a Joshua tree. And then our tired eyes watch the leg begin to sprout limbs and nodules and fronds that resemble smaller legs.
And then we might be falling, but it feels like running. It feels like running because we are covered in sweat. But it is not sweat it is water because it is raining, and we’re running and falling while covered in mud toward a voice that might be Jehovah’s or Beelzebub’s, but might also be Sergeant Mars’s, whom we think of as both. The land has faded into the sky and the sky into the land and it feels like we are rising but with every step we still fall just a little, just a smidgeon, just a cunt hair.
Somehow we are back in the truck and our makeshift tarp roof is fixed and we sit across from one another, soaking wet knees kissing, catching on the hems of the reinforced fabric of our camouflaged utilities. Maybe we are thinking or maybe we are speaking or maybe it is just the sound of our teeth and bones chattering but it’s all saying the same thing. It comes through in layers compounding one on top of another. Like pound cake and concrete and lung tar and mud and mattresses and tree bark.
Which do you think it was?
Years later, we still ask the same question.
Gambling
Waste Management
In late March we stand around our trucks in full gear at Forward Operating Base Black having just received a warning order about a possible one-hundred-man complex attack planned by the enemy to take place at a base in Amiriya. FOB Black stinks like piss-bloated groundwater, mud dust, kerosene, and burning shit. The shit fire at FOB Black smolders around the clock. Command rotates Marines on shit detail. We evacuate our bowels into waste alleviation and gelling bags. They are biodegradable, and the chemical component of the bags solidifies excrement, making it safe for landfills. But because there is no infrastructure in Iraq there are no landfills. Or the entire country is a landfill. We are not sure. The Marines burning the plastic shit bags are from Lima Company. They wear Nomex flight suits and gloves and kerchiefs around their noses and mouths as they walk through the burn pit, a concrete-bordered twenty-by-twenty square that was probably a garden at one point. They dump kerosene in their wakes. While one dumps the kerosene the other four slog on line and rake bags, turning them for even burn potential. They step from the pit and put flame to the bags. The kerosene burns and greasy black shit smoke rises into the air. We wish we could read smoke signals. The doused bags melt and smolder while other bags nearest them swell and bulge with fecal gases. We notice a Marine standing too close and take bets on when and if he will notice the bag in time. The bag bursts, splattering the Marine’s legs with hot melted shit. We cheer, shake heads, exchange money, load our trucks, and are on the move.
Thunder in the Distance
We are at the FOB in Amiriya where we have been sent to augment another company of Marines after Command received intelligence about a complex coordinated one-hundred-man attack on their FOB. An attempt to overrun, take prisoners, record beheadings. We ask our seniors what happens if the attack is real. They seem unworried. When we rotate off guard duty we shoot craps for whatever cash we have in our pockets or play blackjack or pai gow. We shoot craps and win and win and win until we don’t and lose four hundred dollars. We are not upset about the money, only that we can no longer feel the weight of the dice, their cornered symmetry and indented faces, against our dirty palms. We’ve been in country since January. It is March and still cold. Somehow even though the air is dead calm, dust plumes tinge our vision to ochre like dried blood. We have a hard time telling when the sun comes up or goes down and we lose track of how much time has passed. Outside we hear what sounds like distant thunder through the stillness and then radio chatter overwhelms our world.
After Action
At Observation Post Mansion we stand in a wide causeway between identical houses on oil-scorched sand sizzling with petrol-smelling cooked meat. Smoking twisted metal stabs the causeway between the geometric gray structures. Outside the building, the Humvees took the brunt of the blast. They are melted metal and fiberglass, bulletproof windshields spiderwebbed and dull with fragmentation and soot. Inside the building, glass shards stick into concrete walls, and rebar and chunky mortar litter the floor. A corner of the roof has collapsed, and the sandbags that reinforced the corner are broken open and sagging. No one was killed except the bomber. Ten Marines were injured, four burned—gone by the time we arrived. They were in the Humvees when the suicide bomber blew the cement truck full of hundreds of pounds of homemade explosive dousing their vehicles in flame and shrapnel—the thunder we heard from so far away. Adam, who came to fleet a few weeks after us and was the heart of our mortar team before we were separated into Mobile Assault Platoons, was in one of the Humvees on radio watch. He is all right, but will not—or maybe cannot—speak. The Marines on the roof were taking cover from incoming indirect fire. It doesn’t matter. We see ourselves, exploded bits smoking on the sand-turned-glass, impaled and shredded by window shards, crushed by falling rock. What are the odds? one of us asks.
Down the Drain
Back at Camp Mercury we are naked and freezing, vomiting our nerve-racked guts into a porcelain cessp
ool in a shower trailer that stinks like bodywash and semen and waterlog and dust. We think, Dust is just people with rotten luck. The dead from eons of civilization. Caliphs and Mongolian hordes, Jews and Christians and Muslims, and Husayn ibn Ali, and burned Blackwater contractors and the bullet-riddled Iraqis their ilk shot to death, and there are mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and revolutionaries and radicals and fundamentalists and extremists and suicide bombers. Even them, we think. The shower trailer is their tomb—our tomb. We know we are going to die here, too. Because of anger, retribution, oil, lies. When the power goes out we’re left soapy and soaking and shivering in the dark. We can hear the voices of the dead beckoning us: Who wants to take a bet on tomorrow? Who wants to put their money where their mouth is? Step right up. Step right up.
Enemies
The twin building across from what was once OP Mansion is a husk, an empty flopping lifeless body waiting to be filled and inflated with bones and gases and thoughts and emotions. It is the twin to our beloved, destroyed by a suicide bomber. To make us feel more at home, Iraq has filled the building with sand flies. They are waiting when we arrive and welcome us with grateful proboscises. They wrap themselves around our shoulders and whisper in our ears how good it is that we’ve come, how excited they are. We are unconcerned with the flies: We have been shot at and blown up; we were just meritoriously promoted; we are big men.
We set our racks along the walls. It is boiling in the husk house. Hotter inside until we go outside and realize we’re playing a zero-sum game. Soon, because we are Marines—grunts, crunchies, ground pounders—we fall asleep to the cooing of the flies as they congregate and seem to multiply through our sleep hallucinations.
