Roy Scranton - War Porn

Later we saw our first Iraqis, a farm family thin as whippets, standing outside their hut watching us go by.

We stopped and dismounted. All along the line, men clambered down and stood or knelt on the road or shoulder, rifles aimed at the empty desert.

No radio traffic.

We stood in the sun while the wind whipped sand at us. Waves of silica slid and ebbed across the blacktop like the ghosts of snakes. Engines hummed. We watched the horizon.

The radio crackled and beeped twice. We looked to the truck in front and to the one behind. I wiped dust off my glasses. I drank water, then dug for an MRE. Chicken Cavatelli. Beef Teriyaki.

A few minutes later, the call came to roll out.

We crossed a bridge near a village, and on the far side, Iraqi kids ran at us waving knives.

“Watch those kids, Wilson,” Captain Yarrow said.

“Roger, sir,” I said.

Sergeant Chandler in the back leveled his rifle out the window.

“You buy!” they yelled. “Ameriki! You buy! Baynet!”

“Stay back!”

Men rose up behind the kids, grinning under mustaches and dragging coolers. “You buy, Ameriki,” they sang out. “You buy Pipsi.” They held up cans of red, white, and blue, wet with condensation, dripping ice. I could taste the sand in my throat.

The radio barked: “ALL ELEMENTS, DEEP STEEL THREE. BE ADVISED OF UNKNOWN CONTACTS BOTH SIDES. DO NOT STOP, DO NOT SAY AGAIN DO NOT BUY ANYTHING. SAY AGAIN, DO NOT STOP.”

“Can I shoot one, sir?” Sergeant Chandler asked.

“Balalalalalalala!” Lieutenant Krauss shouted. The kids laughed and pointed. One of them jumped and danced, his knife shining in the air.

Captain Yarrow turned to me: “If they get in front of us, honk. And if they don’t get out of the way, run him over. I mean it. Run him over.”

I imagined the Iraqi boy’s body dragged beneath the humvee’s tires, three tons of steel rolling over his chest, squirting intestines onto the road.

“You buy! Ameriki! Baynet! Pipsi!”

Captain Yarrow double-checked his pistol. “Roger, Specialist?”

“Roger, sir.”

When it happened, I thought, I’d speed up to make it quicker. I wouldn’t look in the rearview at the stain of blood on the road. I’d keep my eyes straight ahead and not even from the corner would I look at the boy I’d killed.

Of course I’d look.

No. I’d watch the taillights of the truck in front. I wouldn’t look.

Of course I’d look. I’d speed up—but would I even feel the body under the humvee’s tons?

face the target, place the weapon to your shoulder,

move the selector lever from safe to semi

Night fell. Against the bruised and blackening sky, flames shot up from distant towers. Armored ruins lined the road in squads, charred corpses scattered in among the blasted metal. A dead Iraqi grinned where fire had burned away his face, leaving yellowed teeth in a black ring, eye sockets smears of shadowed flesh.

The convoy slowed.

Coils of wire bloomed along the highway.

A sentry directed us in, her pale cheeks washed in humvee light and smudged with dirt and soot. Refinery fires shone gold and red in her empty eyes. She swung her arm again in front, again, directing traffic.

To our left burned a great fire into which three joes shoveled trash. Beyond that some kind of rusting, latticed, industrial turret, erratically lit, rose in the dark. To our right loomed the shadows of the big green, lines of hemmets and trucks, machines rumbling low. Guided by soldiers with chemlights, red lines floating in the black until our lights hit them and they flinched, we circled along avenues of wire, down mazes of green steel. We stopped.

Word passed: stand by.

We dumped our gear and dug out MREs.

After eating I slung my rifle, lit a smoke, and walked down the line searching for someone to talk to. I found a bunch of guys standing watching three National Guard females changing their brown t-shirts. They’d climbed on top of their fuel truck for privacy but still we could see.

One girl was black or Hispanic, so timid she sat and all we could see was her forehead. Another was skinny like a boy, with buzz-cut hair, no tits, and a face like cratered rock. The third, she was our favorite. She had a nice face and brown hair pulled back in a ponytail—even in DCUs you could tell she was a woman. When she pulled off her sweat-soaked brown t-shirt, we cheered.

“Fuck you assholes,” she shouted.

She had a gut, love handles, big tits. We adored her.

Someone shouted “Hey take off your bra” and she gave us the finger.

They pulled on their tops and the brown girl yelled down, “Show’s over, shitheads.”

Reading took this as an invitation to go backstage, but the rest of us scattered. We walked down the line, me, Villaguerrero, Healds, and Bullwinkle.

“I bend that white girl over the hood this humvee and fucking bam, right in the fucking ass.”

“I want the Chicana.”

“She black.”

“No she ain’t. She a hundred percent Puerto Rican. I can tell, I got spicvision.”

“Wouldn’t that be spicdar?”

“Beanervision.”

“Beaners are from Mexico, motherfucker. I’m Puerto Rican.”

“Beandar.”

“You don’t eat beans in Puerto Rico?”

“They fucking eat bananas.”

“Anyway you couldn’t even see her.”

“Bananas and mangoes and shit.”

“I could see her face and that’s all I need, cuz that’s what’s I’m gonna have wrapped around my cock. Oh yeah, baby, oh you like it? Fuckin’ eat it, bitch.”

“Shit, I’ll take two and make a Nasty Girl sandwich. Bread, bread, I’m the meat. Make my own mayonnaise.”

“Fuck that. I’m gonna fuck the black girl. Y’all can fuck the dog.”

“She a fucking dyke.”

“Fuck, man, this point I put a MRE box on her head and call it even. I gives a fuck.”

“Hooah.”

do not let your imagination and fear run wild

I forced my eyes to the tires ahead, to the road, at the sky, to my speedometer, changing focus every few seconds. The greatest danger glowed in the yellow and red rear-bumper reflectors of the leading truck—watching them wobble and dip, sustaining their slow rhythms, blobs of dim, pulsing light undulating in the dark—only a matter of time and you wake up ditched, smashed, your humvee flipping, rolling, whatever.

I bit my cheek. I bit my tongue. I jammed my knee into a sharp edge of metal under the dash until my head cleared. I cracked hot Mountain Dew and chugged.

The line wavered and swayed as drivers dozed and awoke. We’d been driving for eighteen hours.

We turned off the highway down a dirt road running between a ditch and a wall, passing tall grass, palms, and farms. Things felt close.

Lights swam as I fought to keep my eyes open. My neck bent under the weight of its dumb head, like a cripple who can’t hold his face up, like I needed a tube to talk with. We followed the convoy past a checkpoint and turned to the east fading ashen to white. In the distance, some kind of tower stabbed into the lightening sky. We turned again.

I saw great bands of painted Indians boil up out of the dark on steaming war ponies, ululating, attacking with tomahawks and Winchesters. I’d make my humvee jump like a frog: bounce over the burning wreck and over the ditch by the road, bounce across low scrub to the savages we’d land on and kill with a splat. Bounce, bounce, fuck.

“Wake up, Wilson.”

The truck in front pulled off. I put us in gear. Too tired to care whether I’d fucked up or what, so I’d fallen asleep, so what. Fuck shit fuck whatever, cockfuck shitfucker asscunt.

“Where the fuck are we?”

I followed the five-ton onto an airfield. We stopped between two Black Hawks.