by Matt Young
We are not near the blast and so we know none of this in the moment it happens. We only know this after the passage of time, of movement toward the future.
In the future, we want to unknow this information, or we want to travel to the past and warn Cheeks, or tell a story that will somehow bring Cheeks back to life—make him see the bomb in front of his Humvee before the tires compress the pressure plate, complete the circuit—or even raise him from the grave. We want a chance at revision, we want a time-out, a do-over.
In the past, on that day in May, we listen to casevac and quick reaction force calls traveling radio to radio. The calls relay and relay until they become broken and unreadable and we receive mixed accounts of the incident. Our platoon huddles around open Humvee doors, where the radio watch is located at Forward Operating Base Gold. Some accounts report an entire platoon was wiped out. Others report there were no injuries.
The final count is one KIA. Cheeks.
In the future we think, We are the winners of this war, not whoever the fuck we were fighting. We ask one another who we fought. The answers resound: Muslims, Terrorists, al Qaeda, Ragheads, Taliban, Islam, Mujahideen, bin Laden, Hajjis, Farmers, Ourselves. It doesn’t matter, we won. If piling their dead like cordwood or sending them to bottomless-pit detention facilities to be forgotten is winning, we won. We came home, they didn’t. We have the power. We write the history. We try not to ask what we fought for.
We write, Benito “Cheeks” Ramirez was manning the turret when his Humvee rolled over a pressure plate attached to a surface-laid one-five-five round and he died.
We draw a line through he died, replace it with he lived—strike his death from the ledger, move him into the black.
Nothing happens.
In the past, our salts tip racks and swear and throw their rifles and cry into one another’s shoulders. We lament and mourn and say things like, He made it back twice before. And, He gave me a cigarette once. And, Remember when? And, Fucking pointless. And, What for? And, Fuck this. And, Twice before, twice before.
In the future, we go in search of Cheeks. Maybe he has appeared in a closet or shed, unaware of the time passed or where he is. He is not there or anywhere. We watch the news, waiting for reports of a long-dead Marine returning home to Texas telling a tale of being rewritten into history.
In the past, the day after his death, at FOB Black, the junked Humvee sits near the burn pit. Light shines through tens of holes in the double-armored vehicle and, though it’s been hosed out, there are still stains and coagulation.
In the future, we try to tell the story to our friends and our families. We go to college and try to tell the story. We try to tell the story to our wives. We attend grad school and try to tell the story. The conclusion is always, He made it home twice. No matter how hard we try to rewrite or retell or erase or revise or edit or scrub the bloodstains, Benito “Cheeks” Ramirez’s story ends the same.
Hashim Ibrahim Awad
We move to Habbaniya, an old Iraqi Air Force base. Trashed Iraqi jets spray-painted with American military insignia litter the corners of roads inside the barbed wire compound. The jets are broken and twisted, but the electronics work. The Lance Corporal Underground—the enlisted version of a retirement community gossip ring—tells us that before our arrival, a lieutenant bought himself a one-way ticket when he posed for a picture in an aircraft and pulled the ejection lever, which sent him meters through the air on a doomed flight complete with a complimentary crash landing. He broke bones but lived.
In my rack at night I wonder if the lieutenant thought he might die. I wonder as I fall asleep sweating, mosquitoes in my ears, what dying might feel like.
After some weeks of living at the base we’re placed on lockdown. No patrols, combat operations suspended.
Breaking news from the Chatty Cathys in the Lance Corporal Underground: A group of seven Marines and a Navy corpsman murdered an Iraqi man. Hashim Ibrahim Awad. The guy served under Saddam during the Iran–Iraq War, a real old guard motherfucker, the Underground reports. They kidnapped him, took him to a main road, forced him to dig a hole with a stolen shovel, and then wasted him at close range.
Awad was murdered in April. It is May when the Navy corpsman’s conscience eats away his fear and he comes forward and the news hits the Underground.
May in Iraq of 2006 is one hundred degrees and never cloudy. May means we’ve been here five months with another three to go. May is thirty-one days. We have no air-conditioning. We have nothing to do but make ourselves scarce for fear of working parties—painting rocks and raking dirt.
In May of 2006 I watch every piece of pornography ever filmed. After I’ve watched every piece of pornography ever filmed I run. I run around Habbaniya. It is shaded by date palms and so only ninety degrees. But there is a mile and a half section of flight line that cooks all day, no trees, nothing higher than coyote scat.
I sprint the mile and a half until my breath is ragged, until it feels like my bowels might give way. I pass the junked, decaying jets and wonder what that lieutenant felt traveling toward the vertex of his parabolic flight—panic to elation, and then as the floating in his belly turned to lead dragging him back toward the hardpan, fear.
I wonder whether Hashim Ibrahim Awad ever killed a man in the years between 1980 and 1988. I wonder if he begged for his life, if he cried, if he soiled his thawb or whether he said to himself in his head as firing pins collided with bullet primers, Inshallah, and closed his eyes.
Maybe all these things.
I pump my legs and think of those men and hate the rat fuck corpsman for snitching and getting us all stuck on this shit hole of a base, and as my vision tunnels to pinpricks the bile and water I retch out of my smiling mouth toward the cracked sand-marbled macadam evaporates in the blow-dryer wind and I think maybe I know what dying feels like.
Self-Diagnosis: How Did That Happen?
How to Feel Ashamed for Things You Never Did
When the boy returns from his first deployment in August 2006, his family is waiting at Camp San Mateo. The company rolls in on charter buses from March Air Force Base in the evening. They exit the buses to a parade deck full of screaming families. Some of his salts who got out before or during the deployment are outside the armory throwing beers over the fence as Marines turn in rifles and heavy weapon systems.
The camp guard gives up.
He finds his family wandering the basketball court at the center of the barracks calling his name. Grandparents, aunt, fiancée—he wants so badly to be happy when he sees them.
The family has rooms at a hotel in San Clemente, California, just outside Pendleton. The boy has leave for ninety-six hours. Four days. The thought of four days with them quickens his heart and sweat slicks his palms. In the car he places his hand to the smooth, cool flesh of his fiancée’s thigh, and the muscle beneath her skin tightens for a lightning strike of a second. From the front seat, the grandfather talks about the drive from Mount Shasta to Camp Pendleton. The grandfather talks about driving The Grapevine and the great distances of California and how no one else makes his mochas the way he likes them aside from the chippie at the coffee hut back home. The boy listens, stares at the city lights, and marvels at the lack of tangled wires, at the people walking around after ten at night, at the smiles, at the clean roads.
In the hotel room he drinks beer and liquor and smokes cigarettes. He is quiet at first—the flight from Iraq to Kuwait to California a shock to his system, his synapses are out of whack. He’s had a drink or two in the last eight months, only a swig of contraband whiskey here or there. This is something else altogether.
Because of the drink he’s tossing down his gullet, later on he won’t remember how he began talking about the deployment.
The boy has not lied to them, yet. He tells them stories about Keene hitting himself and trying to talk after their Humvee was blown sky-high by a culvert bomb, about Charlie falling down a dune while taking sniper fire during lieutenant-mandated forced tr
ash pickup, about detaining a twelve-year-old boy during a raid, about being ambushed in the back of a Humvee and laughing.
In the silent spaces between stories, the boy’s family filters from the room, excusing themselves to sleep until it’s only the boy, the aunt, and the fiancée. The silences hang between them. He sips his bottled beer and moves his eyes all over the room, skipping over the women’s faces, which to him look drenched in a sheen of expectation.
What the boy hasn’t realized in that moment, what he’ll come to understand later, is that the aunt and fiancée are not expecting anything. Instead they’re pleading, begging, and screaming for him to shut up, to not crack another beer, to sleep. If he could erase the drunk from his brain he’d notice the facial torsions, widened eyes, crimped mouths. But instead, the warped faces look to him confused and questioning, wondering where the real story is. Like the women are waiting for an answer as to why he has come home this way, nervous and quiet and dispassionate.
So he tells a lie. He tells them about a made-up village and a fantasy house within the village and imagined insurgents within the fantasy house and fictional grenades and bullets used to kill those invented insurgents defending the fantasy house. He tries thinking of realistic films, secondhand stories from his salts, books he’s read, anything to tell convincing details of bullet holes and blood spatter and viscera. This feels, to him, like an explanation of individual experience, this black-and-white infallible story of good versus evil. A story where he doesn’t feel as though he has to explain his actions. A story where he gets to feel, for once, like a hero.
In the morning, the boy’s head aches and alcohol sweat coats his skin like wax. There’s a tough, meaty, sick feeling in the ethereal place beyond his stomach, between soul and body, floating around inside—a shattered figurative pelvic bone where he birthed his lie into the world.
The next day in the car on the way to breakfast no one makes eye contact with him. Or maybe it’s he that cannot make eye contact with them. Or maybe he’s imagining all that. He wonders what he said verbatim. He wonders if he fabricated anything other than his perfect story. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. The boy thinks maybe he should ask what he talked about. He wonders if his family would recount the story he told. Will they remember? he thinks. Maybe they’ll forget about it, he thinks. They probably don’t remember, he thinks. I should tell the truth and apologize, he thinks. I’ll just say, Sorry for last night, he thinks. The boy thinks, They’ll understand; they are my family; of course they will understand.
He opens his mouth to speak.
The grandfather pulls out of the hotel parking lot in the path of a passenger bus and the boy has a very real, not fictitious anxiety attack. The car shrinks, his ears buzz, his skin prickles. Suspicious roadside trash puckers his asshole, his fingernails sheathe into his palms at the sight of a woman in a hijab. The boy thinks the aunt must notice his reactions because she eyeballs him and tries to make a joke about the grandfather’s driving. The boy cannot manage a laugh.
At the restaurant, the family eats, and begins again to talk—family news and gossip, jobs, the fiancée talks about college. Now the boy thinks maybe they never stopped talking in the first place. He stuffs his mouth with huevos rancheros and lets sticky ocean brine into his nostrils for his first full breath in eight months.
The lie becomes a scratch on the roof of the boy’s mouth he can’t stop tonguing—passively nagging and pulling, closing and reopening, always there. Later, he’ll fashion the lie into a story to tell friends, acquaintances, other Marines. After a time, he’s ashamed not to tell the story, and that thick sick feeling, in the place beyond his guts in the ether from where the story emerged, becomes a dull throb, a bit of pressure next to his spine or behind his eyes or inside his rib cage, but doesn’t disappear, because the boy hasn’t found a way for the story to end.
Light Green or Dark Green
We are told the Marines don’t see race. We hear this in basic training, in movies, during sensitivity training. We are not black or white or brown. We are not even light green or dark green. We are green. We bleed red, white, and blue.
In the fleet we call one another wetback and honky and twinkie and spade and fence jumper and porch monkey and cracker and gook and round eye. We speak in Spanglish and with Charlie Chan Asian accents and Cedric Brown sings slave spirituals as we collect brass shell casings from the desert after firing ranges. Up down turn around pick a bale of cotton, he sings.
And we are told we don’t see race.
We laugh and join in with Cedric. Up down turn around pick a bale of hay, we sing. Cedric’s body is broad but he has soft almond-shaped eyes and his skin is the color of Concord grapes. He smiles when we sing. He smiles when we run in full gear practicing our movements to contact. He smiles when we are forced to stand in blinding Humvee headlights at night shoulder to shoulder and sing “The Marines’ Hymn” before our seniors let us hit the rack.
In the weeks after we return from our first deployment in Iraq, we are drinking at the barracks; happy to be home and happy to be alive and happy that most of our salts treat us now like peers. They give us beers and let us tell our war stories as they once told us theirs.
Do you remember that fucking blast? How about that fucking hajji who shit himself in our truck when we detained him? How about getting bawled out for detaining that kid? Who cares? Fucking muj in training. What about that suicide bomber’s face? Like a fucking mask amiright? Remember how Cheeks gave us cigarettes after OP Mansion got fucked? He bummed me a couple at the ECP once.
To Cheeks, we cheer and chug our cans of beer.
Ken Emerson doesn’t want to hear our stories. With his rat face he reminds us of Templeton from Charlotte’s Web. His wavy jet-black hair is receding from his sloped forehead leading into a nose that owns most of his upper lip’s real estate. He has silver in his teeth. Back in May, before we first met him, he got cut up by a machete-wielding Canuck at a bar at home in Manitoba—made out with a punctured lung, a damaged kidney, and lacerated liver.
We are on the second deck of the barracks, hanging over the catwalk railing ashing our cigarettes and spewing beers through our noses to the gravel below, telling stories, taking it and dishing it, when Ken stumbles from his room and slurs words in our direction, but we can’t hear him for our laughter. Cedric is smiling, telling us about the IED that blew out his eardrum. Lawdy, lawdy, pick a bale of cotton.
Ken puts himself in our faces and says, Fuck you, you think you know about war? Think you been in the shit? He says, You motherfucks. You motherfucks don’t know a thing. He lifts up his shirt and shows us scars. He tells us all, Shut your fucking mouths. Then points a finger at Brown and says, And you, shut your nigger mouth.
Cedric, who always smiles, who invites us to sing slave spirituals with him and smiles, who makes Kunta Kinte jokes and smiles, who took his turn on the Gravitron and got off smiling, knocks the silver from Ken’s rat mouth, still smiling. It takes work to tear Cedric away, his knuckles bloodied, his face spattered. There’s a stare down between a few salts and us.
You heard what he said, one of us says. You heard him.
They pick up Ken and haul him off.
Another of us says, Mexican standoff.
Another says, Fuck you, güey, pinche joto gringo.
We laugh and hit shoulders and get stinking drunk.
The next day as our hangovers peak we remember what happened and spend the next few days anticipating a punishment that never comes.
Years later Cedric will die early of a heart attack in his sleep at home in Georgia. His obituary will tell about the people he leaves behind, his wife and young sons; the awards he won and the character he displayed in combat; after his eardrum was blown out he went back out on patrol the next day. It will not say a word about the night he knocked out Ken Emerson’s silver teeth or what shade of green he was.
Lawdy, lawdy, pick a bale of hay.
Meeting the Mortar God
In Oct
ober 2006 at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, on a weapons range with no name in the middle of the desert there is a mountain where the Mortar God lives. He commands, from his vantage, all smoothbore muzzle-loaded high-angle-of-fire weapons and drops imminent death with impunity where he deems it should land. The 81mm mortar crewmen are his favored children. We are they.
As followers of the Mortar God we are fanatical extremists. We live and die by the smell of burnt black powder charges mixed with singed rifle bore cleaning compound. We covet lensatic compasses, scream repetition in tongues as we lay our guns on line in the direction of fire.
The Mortar God’s mountain is covered in scrub and loose gravel. Wind scorpions chase our shadows and rattlesnakes shake their bones as we run past. Our bodies sweat beneath our camouflage utilities. Our calves ball and flex and push lactic acid through our quads and hamstrings, our crotches chafe, and our guts clench as the rubber soles of our boots slip on shale and sand and what we assume are the bones of those who came before us. We are elated and panicked and lusty and furious and prideful and strong and monstrous as we run the hill to face the Mortar God.
We have been told once we reach the top to pray and seek forgiveness for the transgressions we have committed to warrant our presence in the Mortar God’s domain. We did not check the sights before firing, or we aimed on the wrong stakes, or we didn’t punch the bore, or we stacked the ammo incorrectly. We were again meritoriously promoted, this time to corporal, and so we are punished when our squad fucks up. It doesn’t matter—we will visit the pain upon them tenfold.
We are to pray with our diaphragms. Push the air from our lungs hard enough for all below to hear, so that they may understand our faults, and in their understanding be purified of their own transgressions. We earned this. We want this. We are terrified. We reach the top, testicles in our throats, flesh crawling with clammy coolness, shaking on unsteady legs.
