Phil Klay - Redeployment

“Yeah,” he said.

I almost wentto the Chaps, but I went to Staff Sergeant instead.

“It’s not that I killed a guy,” I told him. “It’s that his family was there.”

Staff Sergeant nodded.

“There was this nine-year-old girl,” I said. “Just like my sister.”

Staff Sergeant said, “Yeah, it’s a son of a bitch.” Then he stopped. “Wait, which sister?”

Both my sisters had been at my deployment. One’s seventeen and the other’s twenty-two.

“I mean…” I paused and looked around. “She reminded me of when my sister was little.”

He had this look, like, “I don’t know what to say to that,” so I pressed.

“I’m really bugging.”

“You know,” he said, “I went and saw the wizard after my first deployment. Helped.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll go after my first deployment.”

He laughed.

“Look,” he said, “it ain’t like your sister. It’s not the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“This kid’s Iraqi, right?”

“Sure.”

“Then this might not even be the most fucked-up thing she’s seen.”

“Okay.”

“How long we been here?”

“Two and a half months.”

“Right. And how much fucked-up shit have we seen? And she’s been here for years.”

I supposed that was true. But you don’t just shrug off your brother getting shot in front of you.

“Look, this isn’t even the wildest Fallujah’s been. Al-Qaeda used to leave bodies in the street, cut off people’s fingers for smoking. They ran torture houses in every district, all kinds of crazy shit, and you don’t think the kids see? When I was a kid I knew about all the shit that was going on in my neighborhood. When I was ten this one guy raped a girl and the girl’s brother was in a gang and they spread him out over the hood of a car and cut his balls off. That’s what my brother said, anyway. It was all we talked about that summer. And Fallujah’s way crazier than Newark.”

“I guess so, Staff Sergeant.”

“Shit. There’s explosions in this city every fucking day. There’s firefights in this city every fucking day. That’s her home. That’s in the streets where she plays. This girl is probably fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine. She’s not your sister. She’s just not. She’s seen it before.”

“Still,” I said. “It’s her brother. And every little bit hurts.”

He shrugged. “Until you’re numb.”

In the can the next night,after about thirty minutes of me staring at the ceiling while Timhead played Pokémon, I tried to bring it up again. I wanted to talk about what Staff Sergeant had said, but Timhead stopped me.

“Look,” he said, “I’m over it.”

“Yeah?”

He put both his hands in the air, like he was surrendering.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m over it.”

A week latera sniper shot Harvey in the neck. It was crazy, because he wasn’t even hurt bad. The bullet barely grazed him. A quarter inch to the right, he’d be dead.

Nobody got positive ID. We kept driving, primed and ready to kill, but no targets.

As we moved down the road, my hands jittery with adrenaline, I wanted to scream, “Fuck!” as loud as I could, and keep screaming it through the whole convoy until I got to let off a round in someone. I started gripping the sides of the .50. When my hands were white, I would let go. I did that for a half hour, and then the rage left me and I felt exhausted.

The road kept turning under our wheels, and my eyes kept scanning automatically for anything out of place, signs of digging or suspicious piles of trash. It doesn’t stop. Tomorrow we would do this again. Maybe get blown up, or get injured, or die, or kill somebody. We couldn’t know.

At the chow hall later that day, Harvey pulled the bandage back and showed everyone his wound.

He said, “Purple fucking Heart, bitches! You know how much pussy I’m gonna get back home?”

My mind was whirling, and I made it stop.

“This is gonna be a badass scar,” he said. “Girls’ll ask and I’ll be like, ‘Whatever, I just got shot one time in Iraq, it’s cool.’”

When we got back to the canthat night, Timhead didn’t even pull out his Nintendo DS.

“Harvey’s so full of shit,” he said. “Mr. Tough Guy.”

I ignored him and started pulling off my cammies.

“I thought he was dead,” said Timhead. “Shit. He probably thought he was dead.”

“Timhead,” I said, “we got a convoy in five hours.”

He scowled down at his bed. “Yeah. So?”

“So let it go,” I said.

“He’s full of shit,” he said.

I got under the covers and closed my eyes. Timhead was right, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good to think about it. “Fine,” I said. I heard him moving around the room, and then he turned off the light.

“Hey,” he said, quiet, “do you think—”

That did it. I sat up straight. “What do you want him to say?” I said. “He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants.”

I could hear Timhead breathing in the dark. “Yeah,” he said. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

For a long timeI was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell them lies.

“There was this hajji corpse,” I’d say, “lying in the sun. It’d been there for days. It was swollen with gases. The eyes were sockets. And we had to clean it off the streets.”

Then I’d look at my audience and size them up, see if they wanted me to keep going. You’d be surprised how many do.

“That’s what I did,” I’d say. “I collected remains. U.S. forces, mostly, but sometimes Iraqis, even insurgents.”

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story. This lieutenant colonel who’s visiting the Government Center rolls up, sees two Marines maneuvering around a body bag, and decides he’ll go show what a regular guy he is and help.

As I tell the story, the lieutenant colonel’s a large, arrogant bear of a man with fresh-pressed cammies and a short, tight mustache.

“He’s got huge hands,” I’d say. “And he comes up to us and says, ‘Here, Marine, let me help you with that.’ And without waiting for us to respond or warn him off, he reaches down and grabs the body bag.”

Then I’d describe how he launches up, as though he’s doing a clean and jerk. “He was strong, I’ll give him that,” I’d say. “But the bag rips on the edge of the truck’s back gate, and the skin of the hajji tears with it, a big jagged tear through the stomach. Rotting blood and fluid and organs slide out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag. Human soup hits him right in the face, running down his mustache.”

If I’m telling the story sad, I can stop there. If I’m telling it funny, though, there’s one more crucial bit, which Corporal G had done when he’d told the story to me for the first time, back in 2004, before either of us had collected remains or knew what we were talking about. I don’t know where G heard the story.

“The colonel screamed like a bitch,” G had said. And then he’d made a weird, high-pitched keening noise, deep in his throat, like a wheezing dog. This was to show us precisely how bitches scream when covered in rotting human fluids. If you get the noise right, you get a laugh.