Phil Klay - Redeployment

“Tell him to swing,” I said.

The kid swung as though he were using the bat to beat someone to death, lifting it overhead and bringing it brutally down. I wanted to send that shot to G.G., but instead I showed the kid how to swing correctly and went back to taking photos. The timing was difficult, but after about twenty swings I got it perfect, the bat blurry, the batter’s face pure concentration, and a look of worry from the catcher, as if the batter had just connected with a pitch. I turned the camera’s display around and showed the picture to the Professor and the kids.

“Look at that,” I said.

The Professor nodded. “There you are,” he said. “Success.”

My dad only told meabout Vietnam when I was going over to Iraq. He sat me down in the den and he took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a few cans of Bud and started drinking. He’d take long pulls of the whiskey and small sips of the beer, and in between sips he’d tell me things. The sweatbox humidity in the summers, the jungle rot in the monsoons, the uselessness of the M16 in any season. And then, when he was really drunk, he told me about the whores.

I guess at first the command organized monthly trips to town, but it didn’t last because everybody’d get too crazy. Once the trips stopped, the brothels moved in next to base and Marines would either bust through the wire at night or invite girls in as “local national guests” during the day. Those girls, he said, you’d treat more like girlfriends, which made it better.

By his second tour, he said, the whole thing was a pretty smooth machine and there was a wide range of services, even different brothels for white and black Marines. If a girl who worked in a white brothel ever got found out servicing a black man, she’d wind up dead or at least beat till she couldn’t work anymore. He didn’t agree with that, but it happened, and he said it amazed him, to think you could just do that to somebody.

Then he told me about one place where they had dancers and a stage where the girls would do this trick to make a little extra money. Customers would put a stack of quarters on the bar. Then the girls would squat down over the stack, drop their vag on top of it, and pick up as many quarters as they could. That was the thing at that bar.

Dad was pretty well gone at this point, but he didn’t stop knocking them back, pulling on the whiskey and taking those small sips of beer. He looked so old, deep wrinkles running down his face and little gray spots on his hands.

“I had this friend,” he said, and one time this friend goes to that bar and drinks, all night, not talking to anybody. And he takes out a stack of quarters and puts it on the bar, and then he hunches over with his arms around it so no one can see, and he takes out his lighter and holds the flame on those quarters till they’re branding iron hot. Then he calls over a girl. “Just any girl,” said my dad, “my friend, he didn’t care which.” My dad took another pull of the whiskey. “It smelled like sizzling steak,” he said.

I was like, Jesus. All right. Well, thanks, Dad. That was helpful.

We didn’t keep drinking much beyond that. Dad was too drunk to even sit right. Before I brought him to his bed, he mumbled to me about being careful and gave me a tiny metal cross, the sort you’d wear on a necklace. He said it carried him through Vietnam. A few weeks later I was overseas.

We weren’t in Iraqlong before I told Old Man my dad’s story. In the team, Old Man was the one you’d go to with things like that. West, our team leader, would have thought badly of me. With West, you were either a hundred percent or you were a piece of shit. Old Man was different. He’d joined the Corps late in life, so he had age and, we thought, wisdom. When I told him, all Old Man did was laugh and say, “Yep. In Vietnam they had whores. I guess that’s one thing they had over us.”

I thought about that the first time I jerked off in a sandstorm. Being nineteen and seven months without getting laid makes you all kinds of crazy. I thought about it again when West died, and Old Man said he wished to God he knew where the Iraqi whorehouses were, ’cause he’d get himself a big fat whore who’d let him cry into her tits.

But we didn’t know where the whores were, and that convinced me we didn’t know anything about Haditha. In training we’d learned to observe our environment, get the rhythms of city life. A man who walks this way every day is suddenly avoiding a particular street, an unusually tall woman you’ve never seen before strolls through the market in a hijab and people get out of her way. A bunch of kids that used to play soccer in a dirt patch near the road don’t play there anymore. I spent so much time looking at women through scopes. Sometimes I’d switch from eye to eye, closing one and then the other. Look at women through my bare eye. Look at women through the sights. Human, animal, human, animal. Me and my dad used to hunt.

But I never scratched the surface. I never had a chance to look at a woman and think, There is a whore.

First Platoon, though, in Kilo Company, we were sure they’d found a place. They got herpes all at once, and we thought, That’s it. They’re going on patrols and visiting a brothel when they’re supposed to be meeting sheikhs and drinking tea.

Who would have done that, in those days, violent as things were? Only a crazy person. But half of them were at the BAS with their dicks oozing. They had to be fucking somebody. And the one thing everybody wanted to know was, Where is it? Where is it? I’ll wear a condom, I’ll be fine. But none of them said a word. They’d get mad, tell us to fuck off. I cornered one of the guys, this shifty-looking PFC. I told him, Everybody knows what you’re doing, we just want to know where. He told me if I didn’t quit asking, he’d face fuck me with his KA-BAR. I left him alone after that. I wasn’t really serious anyway.

We shouldn’t have bothered. The next day, the CO had all the herp cases called to the BAS and the doc said, “All right, guys, where’s the whores? You ain’t leaving till we figure out this goddamn dick epidemic.”

They all looked at the ground and their faces turned red, and after a while one of them finally admitted, “Doc. Ain’t no whores. We been sharing a pocket pussy.”

“Jesus,” said the doc. “Clean the fucking thing out, boys.” And he got that platoon issued a pallet of hand sanitizer as a joke. For the rest of us, we had something to laugh about the next couple days.

Then the mortar attack came where the mortars wouldn’t fucking stop, mortar after mortar after mortar, and we just cowered there, wondering, Aren’t we getting place of origin on these fucks? Isn’t somebody targeting them? West was still alive, then, and he started praying, freaking everyone out because you’d hear, “O Lord in heaven—” Boom. “Forgive us, God, us sinners—” Boom. “Sinners—” Boom. “West! Shut the fuck up!” Boom.

No injuries, and afterward I had an erection that could bust concrete. So hard, it hurt. And I went up to the roof, and Flores was up there with Old Man, and they looked the other way while I jerked off on the roof, looking out at Haditha, wondering, Is there a sniper out there, scoping in to shoot me, dick in hand?

At first I put some tits in my brain and the idea of me fucking someone, anyone, but toward the end my mind was blank, just me scratching an itch, and I heard small-arms fire off in another section of the city and I kept jerking, faster and faster, almost coming with the thought floating in, as it always did when I heard gunfire, that maybe somebody I knew was dying.