Phil Klay - Redeployment

The best I could get were little signs. One time in the chow hall we were sitting with Corporal Garza and Jobrani and Harvey when Sergeant Major walked up. She called me “killer,” and after she passed, Timhead said, “Yeah, killer. The big fucking hero.”

Jobrani said, “Yo? Jealous?”

Harvey said, “It’s okay, Timhead. You just ain’t quick enough on the draw. Ka-pow.” He made a pistol with his thumb and finger and mimed shooting us. “Man, I’d have been up there so fast, bam bam, shot his fuckin’ hajji mom, too.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah, son. Ain’t no more terrorist babies be poppin’ out of that cunt.”

Timhead was gripping the table. “Fuck you, Harvey.”

“Yo,” said Harvey, the smile dropping from his face. “I was just playing, man. I’m just playing.”

I wasn’t getting good sleep.Neither was Timhead.

Didn’t matter if we had a mission in four hours, we’d be in our beds, on the video games. I’d tell myself, I need it to come down. Some brainless time on the PSP.

Except it was every day, time I could be sleeping spent coming down. Being so tired all the time makes everything a haze.

One convoy we stopped for two hours for an IED that turned out to just be random junk, wires not going anywhere but looking suspicious as hell. I was chugging Rip Its, jacked up so much on caffeine that my hands were shaking, but my eyelids kept sliding down like they were hung with weights. It’s a crazy feeling when your heart rate is 150 miles per hour and your brain is sliding into sleep and you know when the convoy gets going that if you miss something, it will kill you. And your friends.

When I got back I smashed my PSP with a rock.

I told Timhead,“I never even liked people calling me ‘killer’ before this bullshit.”

“Okay,” he said, “so suck it up, vagina.”

I tried a different tack. “You know what? You owe me.”

“How’s that?”

I didn’t answer. I stared him down, and he looked away.

“You owe me,” I said again.

He laughed a weak little laugh. “Well, I ain’t gonna let you suck my dick.”

“What’s going on with you?” I said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. What?”

“You know.”

He looked down at his feet. “I signed up to kill hajjis.”

“No, you fucking didn’t,” I said. Timhead signed up because his older brother had been in the MPs and got blown up in 2005, burns over his whole body, and Timhead joined to take his place.

Timhead looked away from me. I waited for him to respond.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“You fucked in the head, man?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“My little brother’s in juvie.”

“I didn’t know that.”

There was a loud boom somewhere outside our can. Probably artillery going off.

“He’s sixteen,” said Timhead. “He set a couple fires.”

“Okay.”

“That’s some dumb shit. But he’s a kid, right?”

“Sixteen’s only three years younger than me.”

“Three years is a big difference.”

“Sure.”

“I was crazy when I was sixteen. Besides, my brother did it when he was fifteen.”

We didn’t say anything for a bit.

“How old you think that kid I shot was?”

“Old enough,” I said.

“For what?”

“Old enough to know it’s a bad fucking idea to shoot at U.S. Marines.”

Timhead shrugged.

“He was trying to kill you. Us. He was trying to kill everybody.”

“Here’s what I see. Everything dust. And the flashes from the AK, going wild in circles.”

I nod my head.

“And then I see the kid’s face. Then the mom.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the shit, right there. I see that too.”

Timhead shrugged. I didn’t know what to say. After a minute, he went back to his game.

Two days laterJobrani and me opened up on a house after a SAF attack in Fallujah. I don’t think I hit anything. I don’t think Jobrani did either. When the convoy was done, Harvey gave Jobrani a high five and said, “Yeah, Jobrani. Jihad for America.”

Timhead laughed and said, “I’m pretty sure you’re still sleeper cell, Jobrani.”

Afterward,I went and talked to Staff Sergeant. I told him everything Timhead said about the kid, but like it was me.

He said, “Look, it fucking sucks. Firefights are the scariest fucking thing you’ll ever fucking face, but you handled it, right?”

“Right, Staff Sergeant.”

“So, you’re a man. Don’t worry about that. Now all this other shit”—he shrugged—“it don’t get easier. Fact you can even talk about it is a good thing.”

“Thanks, Staff Sergeant.”

“You want to go see the wizard about it?”

“No.” There was no way I was going to let myself be seen going to Combat Stress over Timhead’s bullshit. “No, I’m fine. Really, Staff Sergeant.”

“Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to. Not a bad thing, but you don’t have to.” Then he gave me a grin. “But maybe you get religious, start hanging with the chaplain.”

“I’m not religious, Staff Sergeant.”

“I’m not saying really get religious. Just, Chaps is a smart guy. He’s good to go. And hey, you start hanging with him, everybody’s just, maybe you found Jesus or some bullshit.”

A week lateranother IED hit. I heard the explosion and turned back. Garza was listening to the lieutenant screaming something on the radio. I couldn’t see to where they were. Could have been a truck in the convoy, could have been a friend. Garza said Gun Truck Three, Harvey’s. I swiveled the .50-cal. around, looking for targets, but nothing.

Garza said, “They’re fine.”

That didn’t make me feel better. It just meant I didn’t have to feel worse.

Somebody saidcombat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror. They weren’t an MP in Iraq. On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.

I didn’t go to the chaplain.But a few days after Harvey got hit the chaplain came to me. That day, we’d waited three hours outside of Fallujah while EOD defused a bomb I’d spotted. The whole time I sat there thinking, Daisy chains, daisy chains, ambush, even though we were in the middle of fuck-all nowhere desert with nowhere to ambush us from and if the IED had been daisy-chained to another one, it would have gone off already. Still, I was stressed by the end. More than usual. When Corporal Garza reached up to grab my balls, which he sometimes does to fuck with me, I threatened to shoot him.

Then we got back and the Chaps just happened to drop by the can, and I thought, I’m gonna shoot Staff Sergeant, too. We went and talked by the smoke pit, which is a little area sectioned off with cammie netting. Somebody’d put a wooden bench there, but neither of us sat down.