Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

On our second night the Mexicans blew another hole in the wall. Amid the swirling smoke and dust lit up by our floodlights a man walked out of the darkness and stood in the new breach. He was covered in dust and his face was shadowed by a hat, a cloth hat with a wide soft brim, like a gardener’s hat. We couldn’t see his face but we felt him looking at us. No one moved. We waited. Then he moved his hand very slightly and people began to stream out of the darkness behind him and walk past him through the new hole.

They were silent. In all that wind and dust, with all the orders being shouted and guys yelling, you could hear that they were silent. Our orders were to shoot anyone breaching the wall. The floodlights exposed them: women, children, old people, sons, daughters — expressionless, focused only on getting through and disappearing into the darkness on our side. When we saw it was civilians I ordered my company to fire warning shots, but the people didn’t even slow down. I was getting orders on my headset to stop the motherfuckers and I was yelling back that it was kids and women and old people. Stop them, I don’t care how, but stop them. No one crosses. I called out a warning in English and again in Spanish but they didn’t even look up. I shouted an order to my men to use non-lethal force. Our first shots were to legs and feet, and a whimper went through the crowd, but people just lifted the wounded under their arms and carried them forward. Someone must have told them not to run, not to panic, not to scream, that their only hope was to just keep walking forward. Other units were firing at other breaches along the wall and we heard a C6 and an FN Mag open fire. I prayed for the crowd to turn back. I shut my eyes and pleaded with the universe to turn them back, but of course it didn’t. They needed a drink of water. They needed food. They poured through, heading for darkness while the man with the hat stood looking at us.

The major on the other end of my headset demanded to know what was wrong. Stop them, or I’ll stop you.

I wish I could tell you I said, Go ahead, stop me.

I flipped the switch. I wish I could say it was my training that kicked in, but it wasn’t. I felt rage. Rage that I was in that position, and rage that my men were. There was anguish and pain and horror, but on top of that, there was rage, and it coalesced into one thought — make this stop, shut this down. End it. We took out the man with the hat first. All night they kept coming, as if they thought we might run out of bullets. They had to climb over bodies to keep coming. When I say bodies, you think dead bodies, but many of our shots were not fatal. Our earlier kindness in shooting to injure we soon regretted. During a pause in the exodus, as we stood with our guns pointing toward the heap of bodies, we heard moaning and crying and muffled wailing and groaning. Children crying Mama, Mama, Papa, and women, mothers calling Eduardo, Anna, Maria, Carlos. Men calling for their wives, their children, sisters and brothers, friends. No one crying for themselves.

It was like a massive birthing gone wrong. Bodies covered with sweat and blood and tears, hair glued to heads like a newborn’s, flesh blue and white, glistening and streaked with darker blood.

I asked for permission to terminate the wounded. The major was gentle with me now: We don’t know how bad this thing is going to get. I know it’s hard, Quincy, but you need to save bullets for the ones coming over.

I thought of going to take a piss and then just keeping on walking, but unless I took my men with me, I wasn’t leaving.

My soul — and the souls of many of my men — leached out that night. I could feel it coming out of me; there was a sensation to it, like blood leaking from the heart, electricity from the brain. Damage that you know is permanent as it is being inflicted.

The morning after, it rained. My lieutenant put his 9mm in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I remember him bending over the muzzle of his lowered weapon and opening his mouth and I thought, Odd time for a sexual joke.

All those people wanted was a simple drink of water, and here it came, for free. I think we would have killed God, or whoever it was that set the world up this way, right then. The rainwater ran off the bodies, washing their blood away. I looked down at my friend, in chunks from the neck up. Anyone walking through the hole that morning I let pass. There weren’t many. An American commander drove up, saw what was going on, and said something like, If you let them in, Americans are going to die. They would shoot us if the situation were reversed, in a heartbeat. Are you fucking soldiers or aren’t you? I almost shot him just to shut him up.

We stayed there for another three months.

Some men started to take the women aside first. The kids would go nuts, screaming for their mothers.

For the acts I committed at that time I was given the nickname Mercy.

I could not continue speaking for a while.

Then I said, I will never kill again.

Tears started in my eyes. I stopped them.

Horror is not surprising, I said. Not at all. It’s surprisingly familiar. An old friend on the street who you recognize even at a distance. It’s not unimaginable at all. People who say it is are lying.

I stopped speaking. The sides of the rabbit hole were hurtling by at speed as I sank into the earth. Ruby wasn’t reaching out a hand. I could not speak in that instant, yet had Ruby said something it would have been a lifeline. Eventually, desperation made me babble on.

I have subsisted, not dying and not living, until I met you. And you have taken me somewhere as close to free as I am ever going to be. Are you wondering if I’m sane? What makes me sane is that I see you and I want you; nothing else in this world makes sense. I see you and blood goes to my penis, cause and effect. That’s a kind of sanity.

I became a soldier, I laughed bitterly, to end killing.

I fell silent.

Two sisters walk hand-in-hand down the road, their backs turned to me, whispering secrets in each other’s ears: Murder and Suicide.

Murder: the coward’s form of suicide.

Suicide: the coward’s form of murder.

I came to this afternoon in my armchair, two empties by my feet, and the worms making their entrance from the outside corner of my eyes, using my lids as their stage curtain. Mardi Gras hadn’t let up one bit. Twelve worms in party hats, whirling noisemakers and tossing confetti, danced the Macarena toward the bridge of my nose and assembled on my cheekbone to do the hip grind part right in front of my eyeballs. I was mesmerized, to say the least. I wanted to join their party and leave myself behind forever.

The spokesworm climbed up to the bridge of my nose and lifted his arms for silence. The others moved back to listen. I was cross-eyed watching him.

David he wrote words of sin

Goliath came and clocked him

David tried to write some more

Goliath feigned a little snore

Then up and got ’im in a headlock

Mussing up poor David’s dreadlocks

Let my memories go, D cried

Golly’s laughter was rather snide

Hey there Moses of the mind

It’s your meat I’m going to grind

Golly said, you’ll never win, see?

Which made Allen Quincy

Even more wincy!

At this last line all the worms broke out dancing and singing again, waving their arms in the air and blowing whistles. Those closest to my left eyelid began to exit the stage by ducking under and the others followed. C’mon, Quincy, what you got to lose? asked the spokesworm.