Roy Scranton - War Porn

Geraldo reenlists for a 20K bonus.

Burger King, daisy-chain. Cordon and Search. Stack team. There’s a glazed shock in everyone’s eyes, the simmer of hatred barely contained. We get in fistfights. We listen to “Hey Ya!” and count the dead.

What had I done before? Who had I been? Was there a life before this?

Negative. I’d never been anyone. I’d never done anything but drive down this highway forever, the road eternity itself, punishment for an abandoned dream’s half-imagined sins. This was all I’d ever done, all I’d ever do: drive in the heat through the sand and the pain and stink in the unceasing noise.

i stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy

the enemies of the united states of america

in close combat

0200 go. Stoat flips the humvee lights, starts the engine, and with a roar and crash slams through the front gate. We jog across the night-hung street around the humvee and into the yard. We take our positions by the door and switch on the flashlights affixed to our rifles. Burnett rams the door open and Bullwinkle goes in, then me, our rifles stabbing beams of white into the black. The rest of our team follows; the snatch team comes behind and pounds up the stairs. We take the first floor, living room, sofa, TV, clear the corners quick and into the kitchen, tomatoes and cucumbers in a bowl on the counter, flatbread, water, towels, we kick open a door and a hadji stands in the corner in his underpants, shielding his face.

“On your knees, motherfucker!”

“Inhanee!”

The hadji’s slow to move, so Bullwinkle slams the butt of his rifle in his gut, jackknifing him at the waist.

“Inhanee, motherfucker!”

He goes down. I keep my rifle at his head and Bullwinkle zip-strips his arms behind him. Once he’s tied, we drag him to the other room.

The lights on now, you can see the worn but cared-for furniture and brass knickknacks. A family portrait hangs on the wall.

Shouting upstairs.

We dump the hadji on the floor and my rifle slams against a vase, knocking it to the ground where it smashes.

“Watch it,” says Staff Sergeant Gooley.

Lieutenant Juarez and Captain Yarrow stride in, the terp behind them, just as the snatch team drags the first hadji down the stairs, a middle-aged man in boxers and a wifebeater. A woman wails somewhere.

I hear Burnett shout, “Shut that bitch up.”

“First floor clear,” Sergeant Nash tells Staff Sergeant Gooley.

“Search it,” the LT barks.

So we go back to the hadji’s room and turn on the light. He’s got a pile of letters, a little boombox, and a tiny framed picture of a woman on the table in the corner. He’s got a bed, a bookcase, a rug on the floor, a trunk, a pair of shoes. I flip through his stack of CDs while Bullwinkle strips the sheets.

“He’s got every goddamn Sting record there is.”

Bullwinkle grunts. He goes over to the bookcase and flips through the books one by one, then sweeps the whole shelf to the floor.

I grab the letters from the table and stuff them in my pocket. I pick up the picture and look at it—girlfriend? Wife? I think of him lying out there with his thumbs zip-stripped, blubbering face-first on the floor.

“Help me with this chest,” Bullwinkle says, so I put the picture down and we overturn the trunk. Clothes fall out, folded dishdashas, slacks, loose shirts, a wallet, a few small wooden boxes, a Koran.

“Circle up!” somebody shouts from the other room.

Bullwinkle and I head back. Our hadji’s still weeping on the floor, begging for his life, and the middle-aged one sits cross-legged behind the couch, zip-stripped, muttering, his bottom lip swollen and bleeding. A woman in a scarf is howling after Staff Sergeant Smith and Burnett as they come down the stairs. Two kids watch from the second floor.

“Wrong house,” says Staff Sergeant Gooley. “Bad intel. Mount up, we’re outta here.”

“Cut ’em loose,” shouts the LT, heading out with Yarrow and the terp.

We ride back to the FOB as the horizon lightens in the east. The sky is empty, the road empty. I realize I still have the hadji’s letters in my pocket, so I pull them out and look at them. The pages dance in the wind, the words so much meaningless ink. They tell a story, maybe, just not to me. I let them go, and in the humvee’s slipstream they lift and scatter.

When he played till he was tired and went to sleep, he would lie in bed and attack Iraq. 235,000 troops at the borders. His staff managed to move most of the collection to safety, sending boots about fields on rutted roads.

I was aware the apostle should capture dull rumbling in my ears

tingling command of Allah not all were lost. Allah, who destroys insurgents and some you eat. Further lessen the abjection of war, unable in desperation to turn itself into grotesque infantile guard force

subordinate world with no

aberrant, outlandish Center that sets conditions for

pornographic action, he adds, is refuge in Allah for the interrogators of the heavens and the earth, the War on Terror, no helping do not know

and the blind and the inherent groping power do not know

and the blind and purposeless officials charged with investigating do not know for to him life is the Army, and I had some idea what I was doing. The United States had invaded Afghanistan and was making diplomatic preparations for the invasion of Iraq. I had a good idea we were going and, despite my attempts to see things geopolitically and realistically, we follow the dust, heading off the main road through fields then grids of now flattened and overgrown former modular units by air, tractor-trailer, or ship can be fully functional in 24 to 48 hours. Even at the CSH level, the goal is not definitive repair. The maximal length of stay is

policies and practices developed and approved for use on

“the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” in fact, a “new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations.” No sane man can be a world, and do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than question the use of national military power. Most people

shall say: Yea, associate with policy

most surely to help the most forgiving, no doubt concealing bombs, others on the day when the witnesses of this TV, nor in the hereafter, and pediatrics benefit the unjust

for them curse

the inmates of fire, so we made Allah, surely Allah sees moral will to act, a reminder to men of what they planned, meantime

How is it that I call you to salvation and you call me to the fire?

You call on me that I should disbelieve in Allah and associate with Him of which I have no knowledge, and I call you to China’s foreign minister Tuesday. Baghdad residents have started fleeing the capital as the deadline nears for President Hussein to leave or face war. No sane man can be happy, for Saddam rejected the ultimatum, saying he has no heart of the

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anyone brought before the world, “even directed at intelligence targets,” as they go on to concede and glut themselves, goodly raiment made by hands of TV you can never again wear, and military police, which is not a matter of

religious discussions will be frequent. With the Bedu, Islam is so all-pervading that there is little religiosity, little fervor, and no regard for externals. The current plan discussed is fundamentally unacceptable. Accordingly, popular elections are necessary within the “Babylonian” mathematics of general history, another thousand years on, several centuries of sustained astronomical observation and consistent recording in the temples of Uruk and humvee enabled the development of predictive mathematical astronomy: I will show you DETAINEE-07 alleging that CIVILIAN-17, MP Interpreter, Titan Corp., hit DETAINEE-07 once, cutting his ear to an extent that required stitches. Meantime the Hooded Man pictured abuses—and shall be brought before the spear, a certain “even directed at intelligence targets” fact, as they go on to concede they glut themselves, goodly raiment by hands of violent/sex abuse which you can never again wear, a matter of men and women like dogs forced to crawl on his husband’s sisters and the wives of his brothers, General Sanchez fain to die in her distraction. When drawn from General Miller’s GTMO she sobbed and made lament among the Trojans yelling: We see cars going by in a still-secret city, CNN correspondents escape us no longer.