Phil Klay - Redeployment

So there’s no indication here of what happened, though I know ten kliks south of us is a cratered area riddled with shrapnel and ruined buildings, burned-out vehicles and twisted corpses. The bodies. Sergeant Deetz had seen them on his first deployment, during the initial invasion. None of the rest of us have.

I turn sharply away from the gun line. It’s too pristine. And maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. Somewhere, there’s a corpse lying out, bleaching in the sun. Before it was a corpse, it was a man who lived and breathed and maybe murdered and maybe tortured, the kind of man I’d always wanted to kill. Whatever the case, a man definitely dead.

So I walk back to our battery area, never turning around. It’s a short walk, and when I get back I find a couple of the guys playing Texas hold ’em by a smoke pit. There’s Sergeant Deetz, Bolander, Voorstadt, and Sanchez. Deetz has fewer chips than the others and is leaning his bulk over the table, scowling at the pot.

“Oo-rah, motivator,” he says when he sees me.

“Oo-rah, Sergeant.” I watch them play. Sanchez flips the turn card and everybody checks.

“Sergeant?” I say.

“What?”

I’m not sure where to start. “Don’t you think, maybe, we should have a patrol out, to see if there were any survivors?”

“What?” Sergeant Deetz is focused on the game. As soon as Sanchez flips the river, he throws his cards in.

“I mean, the mission we had. Shouldn’t we go out, like, in a patrol, to see if there are any survivors?”

Sergeant Deetz looks up at me. “You are an idiot, aren’t you?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“There weren’t any survivors,” says Voorstadt, tossing his cards in as well.

“You see al-Qaeda rolling around in tanks?” says Sergeant Deetz.

“No, Sergeant.”

“You see al-Qaeda building crazy bunkers and trenches?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“You think al-Qaeda’s got some magic, ICM-doesn’t-kill-my-ass ninja powers?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“No, you’re goddamn right, no.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

The betting is now between Sanchez and Bolander. Sanchez, looking at the pot, says to no one in particular, “I think the 2nd and 136th does patrols out there.”

“But, Sergeant,” I say, “what about the bodies? Doesn’t somebody have to clean up the bodies?”

“Jesus, Lance Corporal. Do I look like a PRP Marine to you?”

“No, Sergeant.”

“What do I look like?”

“Like an artilleryman, Sergeant.”

“You’re goddamn right, killer. I’m an artilleryman. We provide the bodies. We don’t clean ’em up. You hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

He looks up at me. “And what are you, Lance Corporal?”

“An artilleryman, Sergeant.”

“And what do you do?”

“Provide the bodies, Sergeant.”

“You’re goddamn right, killer. You’re goddamn right.”

Sergeant Deetz turns back to the game. I use the opportunity to slip away. It was stupid to ask Deetz, but what he said has me thinking. PRP: personnel retrieval and processing, aka Mortuary Affairs. I’d forgotten about them. They must have collected the bodies from this morning.

The thought of PRP works and worms through my brain. The bodies could be sitting here, on base. But I don’t know where PRP is. I’d never wanted to know, and I don’t want to ask anyone the way, either. Why would anyone go there? But I leave the battery area and walk around the perimeter of the Battle Square, over to the CLB buildings, dodging officers and staff NCOs. It takes a good half hour, sneaking around, reading the signs outside of buildings, until I find it, a long, low, rectangular building surrounded by palm trees. It’s offset from the rest of the CLB complex, but otherwise just like every other building. That feels wrong—if they cleaned up from today, severed limbs should be spilling out the door.

I stand outside, looking at the entrance. It’s a simple wooden door. One I shouldn’t be in front of, one I shouldn’t open, one I shouldn’t step through. I’m in a combat arms unit, and I don’t belong here. It’s bad voodoo. But I came all this way, I found it, and I’m not a coward. So I open the door.

Inside is cool air, a long hallway full of closed doors, and a Marine at a desk facing away from me. He has headphones on. They’re plugged into a computer that’s playing some sort of TV show. On the screen, a woman in a poofy dress is hailing a cab. She looks pretty at first, but then the screen cuts to a close-up and it’s clear she’s not.

The Marine at the desk turns around and takes off his headphones, looking up at me, confused. I look for chevrons on his collar and see he’s a gunnery sergeant, but he seems far older than most gunnys. A trim white mustache sits on his lip and he has a white fuzz of hair over the ears, but the rest of his head is shiny and bald. As he squints up to look at me, the skin around his eyes scrunches into wrinkles. He’s fat, too. Even through the uniform, I can tell. They say PRP is all reservists, no active duty undertakers in the Marine Corps, and he looks like a reservist for sure.

“Can I help you, Lance Corporal?” he says. There’s a soft, southern drawl in his voice.

I stand there looking at him, my mouth open, and the seconds tick by.

Then the old gunny’s face softens and he leans forward and says, “Did you lose someone, son?”

It takes me a second to figure it out. “No,” I say. “No. No no no. No.”

He looks at me, confused, and arches an eyebrow.

“I’m an artilleryman,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

We look at each other.

“We had a mission today. Target was ten kliks south of here?” I look at him, hoping he’ll get it. I feel constricted by the narrow hallway, with the desk squeezed in and the fat old gunny looking at me quizzically.

“Okay?” he says.

“It was my first mission like that… .”

“Okay?” he says again. He leans forward and squints up at me, like if he gets a better look, he’ll know what the hell I’m talking about.

“I mean, I’m from Nebraska. From Ord, Nebraska. We don’t do anything in Ord.” I’m fully aware I sound like an idiot.

“You all right, Lance Corporal?” The old gunny looks at me intently, waiting. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass by now. Any gunny in an arty unit would have chewed my ass as soon as I walked through the door, waltzing into someplace I didn’t belong. But this gunny, maybe because he’s a reservist, maybe because he’s old, maybe because he’s fat, just looks up and waits for me to get out what I need to say.

“I just never killed anybody before.”

“Neither have I,” he says.

“But I did. I think. I mean, we just shot the rounds off.”

“Okay,” he says. “So why’d you come here?”

I look at him helplessly. “I thought, maybe, you’d been out there. And seen what we’d done.”

The old gunny leans back in his chair and purses his lips tight. “No,” he says.

He takes a breath and lets it out slow.

“We handle U.S. casualties. Iraqis take care of their own. Only time I see enemy dead is when they pass in a U.S. med facility. Like Fallujah Surgical.” He waves his hand in the general direction of the base hospital. “Besides, TQ’s got a PRP section. They’d probably have handled anything in that AO.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

“We didn’t have anything like that today.”

“Okay,” I say.

“You’ll be all right,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, Gunny.”

I stand there, looking at him for a second. Then I look down at all the closed doors in the hallway, doors with nothing behind them. On the computer screen behind the gunny, a group of women drink pink martinis.