Phil Klay - Redeployment

“You know what we were doing,” he asked, “when Fuji got shot?”

“No.”

“Nobody does,” he said. He looked around suspiciously, as if someone might break in on us. “Nobody thought I should talk to you,” he said. “What’s a fucking Chaps gonna say? What’s anybody gonna say? You know nobody respects chaplains, right?”

“Their mistake.”

“I respect priests,” he said. “Most priests. Not the little-boy fuckers. You ain’t a little-boy fucker, right?”

Rodriguez was testing me. “Why? Are you?” I said. I folded my arms and made a point of sizing him up, giving him a look to let him know I wasn’t impressed. Normally I’d be more aggressive, maybe even pull rank, but I couldn’t after a memorial service.

Rodriguez held up a hand. “I respect priests,” he said again. “Not the faggots and the boy fuckers, but, you know, priests.”

Rodriguez looked around and took a breath.

“You know we get hit like every fucking day,” he said.

“I know you’ve got a violent part of the city.”

“Every day. Shit, they used to come at us in the Government Center three times a week. Suicide assaults. Crazy. It’d end with air strikes on Battleship Gray or Swiss Cheese. Allah’s fucking Waiting Rooms. Killing motherfuckers. And you go out on the street, you go on a raid. You stop for a minute too long, you’re getting lit the fuck up.”

His face contorted into one of those quick snarls of rage I’d seen before. “You remember Wayne?” he said. “Wayne Bailey? You remember him?”

“Yes,” I said quietly. I made a point of remembering the full names of all the dead. And Bailey was one of the fallen I’d actually interacted with before he died. That made it easier.

“We were checking on a fucking school. And they made us stay. We’re on the radio telling them we gotta go and they’re like, No, stay there. We’re like, We stay here too long, something’s got to happen. But the Iraqis are late and we got to follow orders. And there’s a group of kids and the first RPG lands smack in the group of kids.”

I could remember seeing the ComCam photos. I’d seen sick and dying children before, but that had shaken me. It’s strange how a child’s hand is so easily identifiable as a child’s hand, even without a frame of reference for size or a recognizable body for it to be attached to.

“Then Wayne gets hit. Doc was pounding his chest and I was holding his nose, doing rescue breathing.”

Wayne, everybody said, was a popular man in the platoon.

“My last deployment,” Rodriguez said, “IEDs, IEDs, IEDs. Here there’s still IEDs, but them suicide assaults are coming every week. We’re getting shot at every week. More firefights than any unit I ever heard of. And Captain Boden, he puts up a board listing all the different squads. The Most Contact Board.”

Rodriguez lifted a tightly clenched fist to his face and looked down, baring his teeth. “The Most Contact Board,” he said again. “You get a hash mark every firefight. IEDs don’t count. Even if somebody dies. Just firefights. And it’s like, whoever has the most contact, they get respect. ’Cause they been through the most shit. You can’t argue with that.”

“I suppose not.” Suffering, I thought, has always had its own mystique.

“Four months in, them suicide assaults stop coming. Hajjis got smart. We were chewing them up. And now it’s just IEDs. And Second Squad”—he slapped his chest—“my squad, we were the leaders. Not just in the platoon, in the whole fucking company. Which means battalion, too. Probably the whole fucking Corps. We were top. Most fucking contact. Nobody could touch our shit.”

“And then…,” he said, and stopped for a second, as though to gather courage. “Attacks fall off. Our squad’s stats fall off, too. Staff Sergeant gave us shit for it.” Rodriguez scowled and then, imitating Haupert’s gruff, confident voice, said, “You pussies used to find the enemy.” He spat at the ground. “Whatever. Fuck that. Fuck firefights. Firefights are fucking scary. I don’t get off on that shit.”

I nodded, trying to hold his eyes, but he looked away.

“What were you doing,” I said, “when Fujita got hit?”

Rodriguez looked around at the stacked-up care packages all around him. Our closet was crammed with rows of wooden shelves filled with M&M’s, Snickers bars, individually wrapped brownies, Entenmann’s cakes, and other goodies. Rodriguez dug his hand into a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pulled one out, inspecting it in his hand. “You know this is Sergeant Ditoro’s first deployment?” he said.

“No,” I said. I figured he was talking about his squad leader, though I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to stop his flow of words by asking.

“Embassy duty.” Rodriguez shook his head and tossed the candy back into the bag. Then he quickly wiped at his face. It took me a second to realize he was wiping away tears. In relation to what, I wasn’t sure. “You know, if I hadn’t been busted down after that DUI, I’d probably be leading this squad.”

“What happened,” I asked again, “when Fujita got hit?”

“About a month back,” he said, “Corporal Acosta was buzzing off Ambien. That shit gives you a body high, and it’s like being a little drunk. Maybe he’d taken something else, too.”

“He get Ambien from the Combat Stress team?”

Rodriguez laughed. “What you think?” He pulled a plastic sandwich bag full of little pink pills out of his cargo pockets and held it at eye level. “How you think any of us sleep?”

I nodded my head.

“We set up an OP,” he said, “and we just trash it. I mean, insurgents like to destroy any place we use as an OP anyway, so might as well go crazy. And Ditoro, he doesn’t have respect. Acosta, though, he’s good to go.”

“Even on drugs?”

Rodriguez kept going. “Last deployment, I saw what he did. Suicide bomb, and Acosta was helping wounded and the motherfucker was on fire. He didn’t even realize. He was actually burning and he was running around helping wounded kids and shit. Man could have gotten a medical discharge, one hundred percent disability, but after burn unit he stayed in to do another deployment. Man’s got fucking respect.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“So Ditoro ain’t saying shit to Acosta. And Acosta is buzzing. We’re not even looking and he strips to his underwear and Kevlar and goes out on the roof like that, dick hanging out, and he starts doing jumping jacks, screaming every Arabic curse word he knows.”

It wasn’t the craziest thing I’d heard of Marines doing.

Rodriguez smiled, his eyes dead. “They started shooting at us within five minutes.”

“Who’s they?” I said.

“What?”

“Who’s shooting at you?”

He shrugged. “Insurgents, I guess. I don’t know. Honestly, Chaps, I don’t care. They’re all the same to me. They’re all enemy.” He shrugged again. “We lit them fuckers up. And we get back and it was, you know, another hash mark. On the Most Contact Board. We went out and found the enemy, instead of waiting for him to IED us. And our stats went up.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you did it again.”

“Sergeant Ditoro would make the junior Marines play rock-paper-scissors, see who goes.”

It was starting to make sense. “Fujita was a junior Marine.”

“When he got here,” he said, “Ditoro used to make him sing, ‘I am the new guy and I am fucking gay.’” Rodriguez laughed. “It was funny as shit. Fuji took it well. He played the game. It’s why we liked him. But he didn’t like us setting up contact bait. He said it was fucked up. That if it was his neighborhood, he’d take a shot at some asshole on the roof. But we did it anyway.”