Phil Klay - Redeployment

“The only thing I want to do is kill Iraqis,” he said. “That’s it. Everything else is just, numb it until you can do something. Killing hajjis is the only thing that feels like doing something. Not just wasting time.”

“Insurgents, you mean,” I said.

“They’re all insurgents,” he said. He could see I didn’t like that and got very agitated. “You,” he said, hateful, “you want to see something?”

He pulled out a camera and started flipping through photos. When he got to the one he wanted, he turned it around so I could see.

I braced myself for something terrible, but the frame only showed a small Iraqi child bending over a box. “That kid’s planting an IED,” he said. “Caught in the fucking act. We blew it in place right after the kid left, because even Staff Sergeant Haupert didn’t want to round up a kid.”

“That boy can’t be older than five or six,” I said. “He couldn’t know what he was doing.”

“And that makes a difference to me?” he said. “I never know what I’m doing. Why we’re going out. What the point of it is. This photo, this was early on when I took this. Now, I’d have shot that fucking kid. I’m mad I didn’t. If I caught that kid today, I’d fucking hang him from the telephone wires outside his parents’ house and have target practice till there’s nothing left.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Besides, some of the other guys…” He paused. “There’s lots of reasons somebody’s al-Qaeda. He’s driving too slow. He’s driving too fast. I don’t like the look of the motherfucker.”

After the meeting, I resolved that I’d do something. It wouldn’t be like with Rodriguez. I would push.

First I spoke with his platoon commander, Staff Sergeant Haupert. He informed me that Combat Stress had diagnosed the lance corporal with combat and operational stress reaction, which was common and not a condition recognized as an ailment or a reason to remove a Marine from a combat zone. Furthermore, he said, while the lance corporal talked tough, he performed his duties fine and I shouldn’t worry.

When I spoke to Boden and the first sergeant, I got the same. When I talked to Colonel Fehr, he asked me if I was a trained psychologist. When I talked to Combat Stress, they told me that if they sent home every Marine with COSR, there’d be nobody left to fight the war. “It’s a normal reaction to abnormal events,” they said. “Ramadi is full of abnormal events.”

Finally I talked to the chaplain at Regiment, a Presbyterian minister with a good head on his shoulders. He told me that if I really wanted to piss people off, I should put my concerns in an e-mail and send it to the responsible parties so there was a clear record in case anything went wrong.

“They’ll be more likely to play the CYA game if it’s in an e-mail.”

I sent an e-mail to the colonel, to Boden, to Haupert, and even to the docs at Combat Stress. Nobody responded.

In retrospect, it made sense. The lance corporal’s breakdown—his lack of empathy, his anger, his hopelessness—was a natural reaction. He was an extreme case, but I could see it around me in plenty of Marines. I thought of Rodriguez. “They’re all the same to me. They’re all the enemy.”

In seminary and after, I’d read plenty of St. Thomas Aquinas. “The sensitive appetite, though it obeys the reason, yet in a given case can resist by desiring what the reason forbids.” Of course this would happen. Of course it was banal, and of course combat vets like Eklund and Boden wouldn’t really care. The reaction is understandable, human, and so not a problem. If men inevitably act this way under stress, is it even a sin?

I found no answer that night in evening prayer, so I flipped through the books I’d brought with me to Iraq to cast about for some help. “¿Cómo perseveras, ¡oh vida!, no viendo donde vives, y haciendo por que mueras las flechas que recibes de lo que del Amado en ti concibes?”

There’s always the saints to show us a way. St. John of the Cross, imprisoned in a tiny cell scarcely larger than his body, publicly lashed every week, and writing the Spiritual Canticle . But nobody expects sainthood, and it’s offensive to demand it.

A journal entryfrom that time:

I had at least thought there would be nobility in war. I know it exists. There are so many stories, and some of them have to be true. But I see mostly normal men, trying to do good, beaten down by horror, by their inability to quell their own rages, by their masculine posturing and their so-called hardness, their desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstance.

And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell.

The moon is unspeakably beautiful tonight. Ramadi is not. Strange that people live in such a place.

Rodriguez spoke to meagain about three weeks later. By this time, Charlie Company’s AO had shrunk to less than half its original size. It was still dangerous, but they had far fewer incident reports than before. Rodriguez seemed calmer, though also strangely out of it. I thought of the little bag of Ambien.

“I don’t believe in this war no more,” Rodriguez told me. “People trying to kill you, everybody angry, everybody crazy all around you, smacking the shit out of people.” He paused, eyes downcast. “I don’t know what gets somebody killed, and what keeps them alive. Sometimes you can fuck up and it’s all right. Sometimes you do the right thing and people get hurt.”

“You’re thinking you can control what happens,” I said. “You can’t. You can only control your own actions.”

“No,” he said. “You can’t even do that all the time.” He paused and looked down. “I been trying to do what I think Fuji might have wanted.”

“That’s good,” I said, trying to encourage him.

“This city’s an evil thing,” he said. He shrugged. “I do evil things. There’s evil things all around me.”

“Like what?” I said. “What evil things?”

“Acosta’s gone,” he said. “Acosta ain’t Acosta no more. He’s wild.” He shook his head. “How can you say this place ain’t evil? Have you been out there?” He gave me a cruel smile. “No. You haven’t.”

“I’ve been outside the wire,” I said. “My vehicle was IED’d, once. But I’m not infantry.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “If you were, you’d know.”

I chose my words carefully. “This is a life you chose. Nobody forces you into the military, and certainly nobody forces you into the Marine infantry. What did you think you would find here?”

Rodriguez didn’t seem to have heard me. “When Acosta says, I’m gonna do this one thing… And Acosta’s got respect. Ditoro don’t. Ditoro can’t say shit because he’s a pussy and everybody knows. But me, I got respect. I can slow Acosta down.” He laughed.

“I used to think you could help me,” he said. His face turned vicious. “But you’re a priest, what can you do? You gotta keep your hands clean.”

I tensed up. It was as though he had struck me.

“No one’s hands are clean except Christ’s,” I said. “And I don’t know what any of us can do except pray He gives us the strength to do what we must.”

He smiled at that. I wasn’t sure I believed the words I was saying to him or if there were any words I’d believe in. What do words matter in Ramadi?

“I don’t think about God no more,” he said. “I think about Fuji.”

“It’s like grace,” I said. “God’s grace, letting you hold on to Fujita.”