Fire and Forget (9 page)

Instead, you're stuck in an American Eagle Outfitters. Your wife gives you some clothes to try on and you walk into the tiny dressing room. You close the door, and you don't want to open it again.

Outside, there're people walking around by the windows like it's no big deal. People who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died. People who've spent their whole lives at white.

They'll never get even close to orange. You can't, until the first time you're in a firefight, or the first time an IED goes off that you missed, and you realize that everybody's life, everybody's life, depends on you not fucking up. And you depend on them.

Some guys go straight to red. They stay like that for a while and then they crash, go down past white, down to whatever is lower than “I don't fucking care if I die.” Most everybody else stays orange, all the time.

Here's what orange is. You don't see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the
environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It's hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.

So that's orange. And then you go shopping in Wilmington, unarmed, and you think you can get back down to white? It'll be a long fucking time before you get down to white.

By the end of it I was amped up. Cheryl didn't let me drive home. I would have gone a hundred miles per hour. And when we got back we saw Vicar had thrown up again, right by the door. I looked for him and he was there on the couch, trying to stand on shaky legs. And I said, “Goddamn it, Cheryl. It's fucking time.”

She said, “You think I don't know?”

I looked at Vicar.

She said, “I'll take him to the vet tomorrow.”

I said, “No.”

She shook her head. She said, “I'll take care of it.”

I said, “You mean you'll pay some asshole a hundred bucks to kill my dog.”

She didn't say anything.

I said, “That's not how you do it. It's on me.”

She was looking at me in this way I couldn't deal with. Soft. I looked out the window at nothing.

She said, “You want me to go with you?”

I said, “No. No.”

“Okay,” she said. “But it'd be better.”

She walked over to Vicar, leaned down and hugged him. Her hair fell over her face and I couldn't see if she was crying. Then she stood up, walked to the bedroom and gently closed the door.

I sat down on the couch and scratched Vicar behind the ears and I came up with a plan. Not a good plan, but a plan. Sometimes that's enough.

There's a dirt road near where I live and a stream off the road where the light filters in around sunset. It's pretty. I used to go running there sometimes. I figured it'd be a good spot for it.

It's not a far drive. We got there right at sunset. I parked just off the road, got out, pulled my rifle out of the trunk, slung it over my shoulders, and moved to the passenger side. I opened the door and lifted Vicar up in my arms and carried him down to the stream. He was heavy and warm, and he licked my face as I carried him, slow lazy licks from a dog that's been happy all his life. When I put him down and stepped back, he looked up at me. He wagged his tail. And I froze.

Only one other time I hesitated like that. Midway through Fallujah an insurgent snuck through our perimeter. When we raised the alarm he disappeared. We freaked, scanning everywhere, until Curtis looked down in this water cistern that'd been used as a cesspit, basically a big round container filled a quarter way with liquid shit.

The insurgent was floating in it, hiding beneath the liquid and only coming up for air. It was like a fish rising up to grab a fly sitting on the top of the water. His mouth would break the surface, open for a breath and then snap shut, and he'd submerge. I couldn't imagine it. Just smelling it was bad enough. About four or five Marines aimed straight down, fired into the shit. Except me.

Staring at Vicar it was the same thing. This feeling, like, something in me is going to break if I do this. And I thought of Cheryl bringing Vicar to the vet, of some stranger putting his hands on my dog, and I thought, I have to do this.

I didn't have a shotgun, I had an AR-15. Same, basically, as an M16, what I'd been trained on, and I'd been trained to do it
right. Sight alignment, trigger control, breath control. Focus on the iron sights, not the target. The target should be blurry.

I focused on Vicar, then on the sights. Vicar disappeared into a grey blur. I switched off the safety.

There had to be three shots. It's not just pull the trigger and you're done. Got to do it right. Hammer pair to the body. A final well-aimed shot to the head.

The first two have to be fired quick, that's important. Your body is mostly water, so a bullet striking through is like a stone thrown in a pond. It creates ripples. Throw in a second stone soon after the first, and in between where they hit the water gets choppy. That happens in your body, especially when it's two 5.56 rounds traveling at supersonic speeds. Those ripples can tear organs apart.

If I were to shoot you on either side of your heart, one shot . . . and then another, you'd have two punctured lungs, two sucking chest wounds. Now you're good and fucked. But you'll still be alive long enough to feel your lungs fill up with blood.

If I shoot you there with the shots coming fast, it's no problem. The ripples tear up your heart and lungs, and you don't do the death rattle, you just die. There's shock, but no pain.

I pulled the trigger, felt the recoil, and focused on the sights, not on Vicar, three times. Two bullets tore through his chest, one through his skull, and the bullets came fast, too fast to feel. That's how it should be done, each shot coming quick after the last so you can't even try to recover, which is when it hurts.

I stayed there staring at the sights for a while. Vicar was a blur of grey and black. The light was dimming. I couldn't remember what I was going to do with the body.

T
HE LANDSCAPE GLOWS COLD AND BLANK
in the cracked lens of the moon. An ascent. A decline. The motion repeated dune after dune. With each step, Henderson's boots sink mid-calf deep. It's as if the desert itself is pulling them down to an absolute low, he thinks, to be buried in sand when the wind picks up. He pauses at the crest to catch his breath and take in the sweep, the dusty sea rolling to the horizon.

The platoon stretches out in staggered wedge formations. The fire teams move like the silent wings of birds in slow motion, one “v” following another with single-minded intention. Alpha team is out front with Sgt. Reyes on point. Henderson watches how easily Reyes gives in to the dune's steep pitch: he leans back with his weapon muzzle-up at the moon, then slides down the dune on his back in a fluid, unbroken sweep. The rest of Reyes's team—Royce, Caldwell, and Ong—follow him, Royce yelling, “Tits up, fuckers.”

 Sgt. Gould huffs up behind Henderson, the rest of Bravo team in trail. “Any word from the LT?” Gould asks. He flicks old chew to the ground and brushes his hand on his fatigues.

Henderson shakes his head while Royce helps Caldwell to his feet in the shadows below.

“I'm sure something'll come down soon . . . Fucking shitbags up at brigade, man. They just sit on their asses punching the clown all day.” Gould spits and sucks water from his CamelBak.

“You jealous? You want to get promoted up to a desk?”

Gould wipes the last flecks of chew from his lips with the back of his hand, smiling. “Well, I'd sure have a helluva lot more time to do what I love best.”

Henderson waits for it.

“Punching that god-damned clown.”

* * *

After 0200, a slight headwind picks up, lifting the finest grains from the dune crests, catching sand in little twists and pockets of air, swirling into widening cones and dropping into hollows. It reminds Henderson of the beach near Half Moon Bay, the flats where the tide pulls back white foam. Anna, asleep in a mummy bag with her hair tangled by salt. Breathing. The breakers' white-caps rolling in from out of the darkness while the wind lifted the spray from the peaks of the falling waves. The cool mist on his face when he closed his eyes beside her. For a moment, Henderson can almost taste it. He's back home again. He's with her. Anna. He says her name under his breath to make her real. “Anna. Anna.”

He looks up the slope to his right, about 150 meters away, to where Lt. Novotny and his radioman, Griggs, struggle against the dune, leaning into the wind and sand that pours down on them as they near the top. Henderson slides his goggles down from his Kevlar and pulls them tight to his face. A voice crackles over the radio on his chest, but the transmission's too faint to make out.

* * *

“Everybody always says it's like a bad dream,” Royce says. “But it ain't like that at all. I mean, if this was a dream, there'd be all kinds a weird shit out here, you know? Like your fucking mom would be out there or something. Fucking sand just goes on forever and forever.”

Ong says, “Yeah. Like, if this was my dream, over every dune you'd see some crazy shit, you know? Like a giant fishbowl with seaweed and big orange Nemos with goofy eyes like they're gonna blow up or something.”

“There's definitely weed in your fishbowl, Ong, but it ain't seaweed,” Royce says. “How the fuck you ever pass a piss test?”

* * *

Henderson and Reyes hear the wind-muffled laughter of the squad rising up from below. He wonders how long their humor will last.

“What do you think?” Reyes asks.

“I think we're fucking lost,” Henderson says, staring off at the clusters of soldiers strung out along the dunes. “I'm thinking vehicle coms are down, and maybe they're waiting for us in the wrong spot. Plus, I'm thinking we should sit tight and wait for this sandstorm to blow over, link up with the vehicles, then get the hell out of Dodge.”

Reyes motions to Lt. Novotny and Griggs off on a far dune. “And him?”

Henderson shakes his head, exhaling deep and slow. “I don't know. I think our Lord Farquaad's gonna keep pushing forward.” Henderson wipes his lips with his shirtsleeve. “Double-check the weapons and make sure your guys haven't oiled them down too much. I don't know how in hell to keep them from getting all gunked up, but do what you can.”

“Do what I can?” Reyes tilts his head and tries to shake the sand grains out of his earlobe. “Right. Do what I can. Sure.”

* * *

05:00 . . . 11:40 . . . 19:07 . . .

The turning of day nearly indistinguishable from night.

Oh-dark-thirty. Oh-dark-hell.

Bringer of the wave that takes them under.

* * *

The platoon moves forward in fits and starts as the wind drives hard against them, soldiers falling back or tumbling down dunes to roll into pits where the sand seems determined to bury them. Henderson can see Sgt. Gould yelling, but his voice barely registers above the wind's cry and the crack of sand against his goggles. He thinks maybe Gould is cursing the sky itself, as close as any of them might come in their argument with God, or maybe he's calling out to the men disappearing around him, yelling to be heard over the din of the world in its gritty erasure. Henderson would yell, too, but what difference would it make? It would fill his mouth with sand to even try. And Caldwell? Ong? Royce? Each is driven to his own silence, whole and complete. Henderson imagines Sgt. Reyes still on point somewhere in the storm, moving forward, and hears the
pop pop
of small arms fire from a squad in the distance. Now Sgt. Gould, the last man Henderson can see—though he's only a form in the wind and sand blowing over now, more shadow and movement than man or a soldier named Gould with a family, someone from Rhode Island, no, nothing more, a blur—is running off sideways along the shear of the wind into the sound of gunfire. Something breaks inside. In some essential place of order far deeper than the architecture of the brain, the body discovers its rope-held panic and cuts it loose. Henderson's legs stumble forward until the dune gives way, and he tumbles in the swirling dust the way a man might fall to the very bottom of his life, the carbine torn
from his firing hand, coughing as he falls and spins and twists before slamming against another body slumped on the low ground. Half-buried in the sand beside him, the body is curled up on itself. When Henderson pushes him over, he discovers it's the radioman, Griggs. A red chem-light in his left hand signals a world that only recognizes a man when it breaks him down to his most elemental form, though Griggs would never have thought of it that way. Griggs would most likely have said something like “Oh, fuck” or “I goddamned thought so.” No matter. He speaks the grammar of sand now, Henderson thinks, and the wind will break him down to dust.