Phil Klay - Redeployment

Chaplain Vega’s a tall Mexican guy with a mustache that looks like it’s about to jump off his face and fuck the first rodent it finds. Kind of mustache only a chaps could get away with in the military. Since he’s a Catholic chaplain and a Navy lieutenant, I wasn’t sure whether to call him “sir,” “Chaps,” or “Father.”

After he tried to get me to open up for a bit, he said, “You’re being unresponsive.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Just trying to have a conversation.”

“About what? That kid I shot? Did Staff Sergeant ask you to talk to me about it?”

He looked at the ground. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I didn’t want to. I thought about telling him that. But I owed it to Timhead. “That kid was sixteen, Father. Maybe.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know you did your job.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s fucked with this country.” I realized, a second too late, I’d used profanity with a priest.

“What’s fucked?” he said.

I kicked at a rock in the dirt. “I don’t even think that kid was crazy,” I said. “Not by hajji standards. They’re probably calling him a martyr.”

“Lance Corporal, what’s your first name?” he said.

“Sir?”

“What’s your first name?”

“You don’t know?” I said. I wasn’t sure why, but I was angry about that. “You didn’t, I don’t know, look me up before you came over here?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Sure I did,” he said. “I even know your nickname, Ozzie. And I know how you got it.”

That stopped me. “Ozzie” came from a bet Harvey made after Mac’s lizard died in a fight with Jobrani’s scorpion. Fifty bucks that I wouldn’t bite its head off. Stupid. Harvey still hadn’t paid me.

“Paul,” I said.

“Like the apostle.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, Paul. How are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. How was Timhead doing? That was what he was really about, even though he didn’t know it. “I usually don’t feel like talking to anyone about it.”

“Yeah,” said the Chaps, “that’s pretty normal.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re a Catholic, right?”

That’s what’s listed on my dog tags. I wondered what Timhead was. Apathetic Protestant? I couldn’t tell him that. “Yeah, Father,” I said. “I’m Catholic.”

“You don’t have to talk to me about it, but you can talk to God.”

“Sure,” I said, polite. “Okay, Father.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Prayer does a lot.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It sounded like a joke.

“Look, Father,” I said. “I’m not that much for praying.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“Father, I don’t even know if it’s that kid that’s messing with me.”

“What else is there?”

I looked out at the row of cans, the little trailers they give us to sleep in. What else was there? I knew how I was feeling. I wasn’t sure about Timhead. I decided to speak for myself. “Every time I hear an explosion, I’m like, That could be one of my friends. And when I’m on a convoy, every time I see a pile of trash or rocks or dirt, I’m like, That could be me. I don’t want to go out anymore. But it’s all there is. And I’m supposed to pray?”

“Yes.” He sounded so confident.

“MacClelland wore a rosary wrapped into his flak, Father. He prayed more than you.”

“Okay. What does that have to do with it?”

He stared at me. I started laughing.

“Why not?” I said. “Sure, Father, I’ll pray. You’re right. What else is there? Keep my fingers crossed? Get a rabbit’s foot, like Garza? I don’t even believe in that stuff, but I’m going crazy.”

“How so?”

I stopped smiling. “Like, I was on a convoy, stretched my arms out wide, and a minute later a bomb went off. Not in the convoy. Somewhere in the city. But I don’t stretch out like that anymore. And I patted the fifty, once, like a dog. And nothing happened that day. So now I do it every day. So, yeah, why not?”

“That’s not what prayer is for.”

“What?”

“It will not protect you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “Oh,” I said.

“It’s about your relationship with God.”

I looked at the dirt. “Oh,” I said again.

“It will not protect you. It will help your soul. It’s for while you’re alive.” He paused. “It’s for while you’re dead, too, I guess.”

We took different routesall the time. Don’t be predictable. It’s up to the convoy commander, and they’re all lieutenants, but most of them are pretty good. There’s one who can’t give an Op Order for shit but tends not to fuck up too bad on the road. And there’s one female lieutenant who’s tiny and real cute but tough as balls and knows her shit cold, so it evens out. Still, there’s only so many routes, and you got to use one.

It was at night and I was in the lead vehicle when I spotted two hajjis, looked like they were digging in the road. I said, “Hajjis digging,” to Garza. They saw us and started running.

This was just getting into Fallujah. There were buildings on the left side of the road, but they must have been spooked stupid because they ran the other way, across a field.

Garza was on the radio, getting confirmation. I should have just shot them. But I waited for an order.

“They’re running,” Garza was saying, “yes…” He twisted and looked up at me. “Light ’em up.”

I fired. They were on the edge of the field by then, and it was dark. The flash of the .50 going off killed my night vision. I couldn’t see anything, and we kept driving. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were body parts at the edge of the field. The .50 punches holes in humans you could put your fist through. Maybe they got away.

There’s a jokeMarines tell each other.

A liberal pussy journalist is trying to get the touchy-feely side of war and he asks a Marine sniper, “What is it like to kill a man? What do you feel when you pull the trigger?”

The Marine looks at him and says one word: “Recoil.”

That’s not quite what I felt, shooting. I felt a kind of wild thrill. Do I shoot? They’re getting away.

The trigger was there, aching to be pushed. There aren’t a lot of times in your life that come down to, Do I press this button?

It’s like when you’re with a girl and you realize neither of you has a condom. So no sex. Except you start fooling around and she gets on top of you and starts stressing you out. And you take each other’s clothes off and you say, We’re just gonna fool around. But you’re hard and she’s moving and she starts rubbing against you and your hips start bucking and you can feel your mind slipping, like, This is dangerous, you can’t do this.

So that happened. It wasn’t bad, though. Not like the kid. Maybe because it was so dark, and so far away, and because they were only shadows.

That night, I got Timhead to open up a bit. I started talking to him about how maybe I killed somebody.

“I’m bugging a little,” I said. “Is this what it’s like?”

He was quiet for a bit, and I let him think.

“For me,” he said, “it’s not that I killed a guy.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s like, his family was there. Right there.”

“I know, man.”

“Brothers and sisters in the window.”

I didn’t remember them. I’d seen all sorts of people around, eyes out of windows. But I hadn’t focused in.

“They saw me,” he said. “There was a little girl, like nine years old. I got a kid sister.”

I definitely didn’t remember that. I thought maybe Timhead had imagined it. I said, “It’s a fucked-up country, man.”