Phil Klay - Redeployment

What I liked about the story was that even if it had happened, more or less, it was still total bullshit. After our deployment there wasn’t anybody, not even Corporal G, who talked about the remains that way.

Some of the Mortuary Affairs Marines thought the spirits of the dead hung about the bodies. It’d creep them out. You could feel it, they’d say, especially when you look at the faces. But it got to be more than that. Midway through the deployment, guys started swearing they could feel spirits everywhere. Not just around the bodies, and not just Marine dead. Sunni dead, Shi’a dead, Kurd dead, Christian dead. All the dead of all Iraq, even all the dead of Iraqi history, the Akkadian Empire and the Mongols and the American invasion.

I never felt any ghosts. Leave a body in the sun, the outer layer of skin detaches from the lower, and you feel it slide around in your hands. Leave a body in water, everything swells, and the skin feels waxy and thick but recognizably human. That’s all. Except for me and Corporal G, though, everybody in Mortuary Affairs talked about ghosts. We never said any different.

In those days I used to think, Maybe I’d handle it better if Rachel’d stayed with me. I didn’t fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The smell of it gets into your skin. Putting down food is hard after processing, so by the end of the deployment we were gaunt from poor nutrition, sleep deprived from bad dreams, and shambling through base like a bunch of zombies, the sight of us reminding Marines of everything they know but never discuss.

And Rachel was gone. I’d seen it coming. She was a pacifist in high school, so once I signed my enlistment papers the thing we had going went on life support.

She would have been perfect. She was melancholy. She was thin. She always thought about death, but she didn’t get off on it like the goth kids. And I loved her because she was thoughtful and kind. Even now, I won’t pretend she was especially good-looking, but she listened, and there’s a beauty in that you don’t often find.

Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody, there’s a real community you don’t get in other places. If you’re like me, though, and you don’t fit in, it’s a prison. So our relationship was half boyfriend/girlfriend, half cell mates. For my sixteenth birthday, she blindfolded me and drove me twenty miles out of town, to a high point off the interstate where you could watch the roads stretch out forever across the plains toward all the places we’d rather be. She told me her gift was this, the promise to come back here with me someday and keep going. We were so close for two years, and then I signed up.

It was a decision she didn’t understand much more than I did. I wasn’t athletic. I wasn’t aggressive. I wasn’t even that patriotic.

“Maybe if you’d joined the Air Force,” she’d said. But I was tired of doing the weaker thing. And I knew that her talk about the future was just that, talk. She’d never leave. I didn’t want to stay with her, work in a veterinarian’s office, and be wistful. My ticket out of Callaway was what passed in our town for first class. The Marine Corps.

I told her, “What’s done is done.” It made me feel like a tough guy from a movie.

Even still, we stayed together through boot camp. She wrote me letters while I was there, even sent me naked photos of herself. A few weeks earlier another guy’d gotten a package like that and the DIs had put the photos up in the bathroom stalls. The guy’s girlfriend had worn a cheerleading uniform and stripped it off picture by picture. I remember thinking how glad I was that Rachel wasn’t the kind of girl to send me something like that.

Mail call in boot camp works like this. One of the DIs stands at the front of the squad bay with all the platoon’s mail while the platoon stands at attention in front of their racks. The DI calls out names one by one, and recruits run up and take their mail. If it’s a package or an envelope that feels suspicious, the DI makes him open it right there. So when I opened Rachel’s letter it was in front of the whole platoon and with Sergeant Kuba, my kill hat, glaring at me.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to open a letter with him watching. My parents had sent me photos of their vacation to Lakeside. That was no big deal, and I hadn’t been worried. I didn’t think my parents would send me naked photos. Rachel’s name on the envelope, though, terrified me. I opened it slowly, trying to come up with a plan if the photos turned out to be contraband.

The envelope had three glossy four-by-six prints that Rachel had developed herself in our high school’s darkroom. When I pulled them out and saw her thin, pale, and very naked body, I didn’t even look up for Sergeant Kuba’s reaction. I stuffed the prints into my mouth, closed my eyes, and hoped for the best.

It’s impossible to swallow three photographs at once, especially if you’ve only got two seconds before your kill hat has one hand on your face and the other on your throat while he screams and sprays spit at you.

The senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Kerwin, came running and broke us up. When Sergeant Kuba released my neck, I spat the pictures on the floor. Staff Sergeant Kerwin looked at me and said, “You must be fucking crazy, and I must be on the Marine Corps shit list if they give me a worthless fuck like you to turn into a Marine.” Then he leaned in close and said, “Maybe I’ll just kill you instead.”

He told me to pick up the photos. It was hard because I was shaking and because all the other DIs were screaming at me. I tried to hold them so my hands covered Rachel’s body. Only her face stared out, and her face in the photo seemed scared. She often looked like that in photos, because she didn’t like how she looked when she smiled. There’s no way she’d ever taken shots like that before.

“Rip them up,” he said. It was a kindness.

I tore them, slowly, into smaller and smaller pieces, twisting and tearing them, making sure no one could put them back together. When they were in shreds, he turned and walked away, leaving me to the other DIs.

I had to eat the torn pieces while Sergeant Kuba delivered a lecture to all of us on how a true Marine wouldn’t just share naked photos of his girlfriend with his platoon, but would let them run a train on her as well. Then he told them they were all fucked up if they’d tolerate an individual like me in their platoon, somebody who thought he was special, and he took them out back and thrashed them for a good twenty minutes while I stood at the position of attention and watched. Every night that week, he made me stand at the mirror and scream, “I’m not crazy, you are!” at my reflection for a half hour, and he hated me from then on and thrashed me pretty much continuously while I was there.

The next time I saw Rachel was after I graduated from boot camp. I showed up at her parents’ place in my uniform. Dress blues are supposed to get you laid, but she started crying. She told me she didn’t think she could stay with me if I went on a deployment, and I asked her to give me at least until I went to Iraq. She said yes. Ten months later, I was heading out. They’d given me the opportunity to deploy if I deployed with Mortuary Affairs, and I took it.

Rachel came to see me off. She gave me a sad little blow job the night before and told me we were done. In the military, the thing women are supposed to do if they love you is stay with you at least through deployment. Maybe divorce you a few months after you get back, but not before. Which meant, to my simple little mind, that she didn’t love me. That she’d never loved me and that everything I’d felt so strongly about in high school was just me being childish. Which was okay, because I was going somewhere that would definitely make me a man.