Roy Scranton - War Porn

When I got off the plane, there was my ex-girlfriend and another girl, an old friend, and we hugged and kissed and grinned. In the parking garage by the car, they lifted their skirts and showed off their matching Superman panties. My heart was full of love.

All the long ride home while the girls talked to me and each other, I scanned overpasses for snipers and watched the shoulder for IEDs. I kept reaching back for my rifle, startled that I’d lost it, and eyeballed cars passing on 205, feeling spooked, thinking I need a drink, I need a smoke, how the fuck long do I have to do this alone?

Now, after weeks of being apart, she’d be there waiting for me.

Geraldo showed up in C7.

“’Sup, Wheat Thin.”

“Good to be home, Cheeto.”

“You missed a dope barbecue.”

“Anybody get killed?”

“Naw. Burnett some caught shrapnel from an IED. Like a thumbtack. Purple Heart’s tomorrow. You have yourself some fun?”

“I didn’t know what to do with nobody shooting at me. I got laid, though. Any word on redeployment?”

“Saying April.”

“April, huh?”

“What they say.”

“That’s like ninety days.”

“Ninety days be ninety days.”

On the way back to the CP, I watched the West Side DFAC go by and the road to Gate 5. The route I had run in the mornings and the fenced-off mosque. We passed Battalion Maintenance, the mini-PX, and the hemmet lot, finally pulling into our compound. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or shit myself.

I got out and downloaded my gear. On my way to draw my weapon, I ran into Nash and Sergeant Chandler.

“What are you doing here, Sergeant? I thought you were getting out.”

“Yeah, so did I,” he said.

“What d’you mean?”

“Three days before my orders, I get fucking stop-lossed.”

“Say what?”

“Stop-loss. No-Movement Orders come down for all units in support of OIF. Nobody ETSes out of Iraq anymore.”

“What the fuck’s that mean? You don’t get out?”

“Not till we get back.”

“That is some fucked-up shit. But it’s only ninety days, right?”

“So they say. But enough about my troubles. How was leave?”

“Fucking-A, man. I ate everything. I drank everything. I got fucked. I saw the new Lord of the Rings movie, which was awesome. And this—you gotta check this out.” I dug through my backpack. “You and me, Sergeant, we’re Person of the Year.” I handed them the Time magazine with the 1AD guys on the cover.

“No shit.”

“Yeah. There’s a big article in there about how fucked up it’s been for 4-27.”

“I guess we’re too boring.”

“It’s weird man, coming back. At the Dallas airport, there was this line of flag wavers, and anytime anyone found out I was in Iraq, they got all serious and shit, started thanking me and telling me what a great thing it was I was doing. I didn’t know what to say. Like, hell yeah, fuck hadji! I mean, what the fuck?”

“Bet you got a lot of ass.”

“Sure, well… I was fooling around with my ex, but… if I’d wanted, there was definitely opportunity. I mean, what chick doesn’t wanna fuck a war hero?”

I left them with the magazine and went to draw my rifle. As I crossed the motor pool, I seemed to be walking through a dream. I felt too relaxed. Everyone else was depressed and hateful, just like I remembered, but the difference was me: I was okay. I could see our frustrated rage, our barely checked aggression, our loneliness, our desperation, and for the first time ever, I could see it without belonging to it. If I can just hang on to this, I thought, I’ll get through. Everything’ll be fine.

Later I talked to Bullwinkle and he said yeah, that lasts about three days.

when defending, or when temporarily halted

while making an attack, you must seek cover from fire

and concealment from observation

We hauled our gear into the new barracks at FOB Raptor: lines of squat, cinder-block rooms inside a dim, echoing, sheet-metal hangar. We were assigned four to. My roommates were Sergeant Chandler, Stoat, and Reading.

The best part was the latrine. Instead of porta-johns, we had an actual building. Gleaming mirrors. Linoleum floor. Toilet paper. Twenty stalls, separated by white plywood, with doors and flushing toilets. White porcelain sinks. Fourteen showers with curtains, drains, and high-power nozzles. Hot and cold running water.

We ranged the FOB with a quickness, reporting back to each other like kids scouting a theme park. There was a small PX, a hadji souvenir shop, a hadji coffee shop, laundry service with three-day turnaround, a hadji barber, internet café, hadji bootleg-DVD shop, hadji smoothie stand, gym with elliptical trainers, weight machines, and treadmills, and some outdoor volleyball and basketball courts.

Ninety days.

Too easy.

Our patrols weren’t difficult. Baghdad had calmed down over the winter. There was less shooting, fewer IED attacks, fewer random ambushes. We rolled through the same garbage-strewn, sewage-washed streets over and over.

Men stood before turquoise-tiled mosque doors, impeccably dressed, watching us go by. Little kids in pink pants waved. Old women in niqabs waved. Shopkeepers waved.

We had terps with us every day now. There was Anuman, an older guy with a short beard, once an economist; Big Joe, who wore mirrored sunglasses and a black leather jacket, who loved American TV and thought American women were “the hottest bitches in the world”; Qasim, a nervous, stick-thin math professor with a Scottish accent; and Ramana, who we called Bertha, a great surly mound of a woman who used to do something with computers. There were others we only met once or twice: Frick and Frack the dental students, Akbar the pimp, Ms. al-Radi the psychiatrist.

Life took on a dependable rhythm. We went to the internet café. We emailed friends and family. Reading and Cheese played Warcraft III. Other guys posted photos on Hot or Not and bragged about their ratings. I googled places to go on vacation, broke up with my ex, and ordered thick nineteenth-century novels from Amazon.

We blew our tax-free combat pay on CDs, digital cameras, portable DVD players, creatine powder, protein shakes, Maxim, and cases of Red Bull. On patrol we’d drive to the hadji market in the Green Zone, which had the best bootlegs in Baghdad. Little kids ran up shouting “Ficky-ficky DVD,” their hands full of porn.

A private in Attack Battery got killed by an IED. At the ceremony, we stood in formation while the chaplain read from the Bible and some soldiers got up and talked about what a great guy the dead kid was. Lieutenant Colonel Braddock stood and told us how important it was that we were doing the job we were doing and how important it was to bring democracy to Iraq, and most important, how we were defending American freedom from the terrorists who hated our way of life.

The bomb had gone off under the kid’s humvee. The charge had been buried in a pothole and covered with plaster of Paris, probably detonated by cell phone. One of the guys in Attack told me they left more of him stuck charred inside the truck than they put in the body bag.

“We’re fighting them in the streets of Baghdad,” the Colonel said, “so we won’t have to fight them in the streets of Jacksonville, Florida, or the streets of Galveston, Texas, or the streets of PFC Gabriel’s hometown of Culver City.”

Taps played on a boombox. Halfway through, the CD started skipping. Then somebody bumped it with his foot and it stopped.

do not move: la ta-ta-HAR-rak

do not resist: la ta-QAOWM

We set up Traffic Control Points, usually at night, where we pulled over random hadjis and searched their cars. The LT’s favorite spot was Checkpoint 15, an overpass spanning the main expressway along our route. On the north side it fed into a neighborhood, but on the south, the concrete dropped off twenty meters past the entrance ramp, making the overpass a one-way street and a low-traffic exit.