Rock Paper Tiger

CHAPTER EIGHT

I KEEP THINKING, if that medic hadn’t been injured, I wouldn’t have gotten the transfer. No transfer, and everything would’ve been different. I wouldn’t be in this situation. Wouldn’t have the Suits and god knows who else on my ass. I would’ve gone home at the end of my deployment, gone to school like I’d planned to do when I joined the Guard, gotten a degree, gotten on with my life.

Or maybe not. Maybe I would’ve been killed instead of just getting blown up.

Who knows? It’s stupid to spend a lot of time thinking about what would have happened if things had been different. Things would have been different, that’s all, and you can’t change it anyway.

But sometimes I think there’s another life I could have had. Should have had. And maybe some other version of me is having it, like in some Sci-Fi Channel movie.

Which probably means it’s low-budget and lame.

The funny thing is, when I first got the transfer, I thought it might be good news, because the patrols were really starting to suck.

Like this one time, we were outside the wire on a cheesecake run, escorting a KBR truck that was transporting chow from our FOB to a small base about fifty clicks away, and we were almost there, the lead vehicle just rolling up to the gate.

“Creed’s a bunch of pussies,” the soldier next to me was saying to me. “You gotta check out System of a Down.”

That was when something exploded. It was so loud, it was like being on the inside of thunder. The left wheels of the Humvee lifted off the ground and fell back, bounced twice; metal spat against the hood and windshield like popcorn. Our gunner fired off one burst, two; somebody yelled into the radio; I smelled hot copper; and next to me, the soldier shouted, “Oh, fuck!”

Standard operating procedure is, you move out of the kill zone, set up a 360, a secure field of fire, and request a quick reaction force, because a lot of times a bomb is followed by small-arms fire, hajji trying to pick you off in the confusion.

I waited for the gunfire, but it never came. Everything settled down, like a spent cloudburst.

It was a suicide bomber, not an IED. He’d blown himself up too soon, with most of the damage hitting a blast wall. The KBR truck got dinged and broke an axle. The trucker had a thigh laceration that was bleeding a lot, so they radioed back for me to come and help.

I trotted up the street thinking, oh God, I am going to die, trying to keep low, ears ringing, the heat and the smoke searing my lungs.

“Fucking shithole,” the soldier jogging next to me said.

They’d put the base at the edge of a town, securing the perimeter by clearing out the buildings on the surrounding block and throwing up some blast walls and razor wire. The KBR truck sat crooked and smoking, partially blocking the entrance.

I put a pressure bandage on the trucker (who was doing okay for an overweight fifty-two-year-old with high blood pressure and a pack-a-day habit), and we got him on a gurney to take him to the aid station inside the base.

About a half dozen soldiers had gathered by the blast wall closest to the gate.

One of them, a buddy of mine, said: “Hey, Doc, check this out!” He pointed, grinning. “Way to go, asshole!”

What was left of the bomber was lumps of gore, splinters of bone, shredded clothes, a leg flung up against the blast wall, sneaker still on the foot.

“Where’s the other leg?” I asked.

“That’s not the good part,” my buddy said.

I looked where he pointed. There was a face lying a couple feet from the torso, peeled off from the skull like a mask.

“Too bad it’s not Halloween,” I said.

Even the trucker laughed at that.

Two weeks later, I got transferred to this new FOB because they were down a medic, who I later learned had gotten shrapnel in his head and throat from a mortar round. He didn’t die, though, and I heard he only drools a little, so consider him Private Lucky Motherfucker. Because this FOB just sucked. No mochaccinos there. The place was about the size of a football field, if that. Let’s call it Camp Falafel, which of course is not what it was called, because the U.S. Army prefers more serious names, like Camp Screaming Eagle, or Operation Enduring Kill the Stupid Rag-Heads. The base was built around an old Baathist government complex just outside of this provincial town that was a center of the insurgency, the insurgency that nobody wanted to admit existed back then.

In addition to what we called the Admin Core-offices, I thought at first-there were low, long barracks that used to house Iraqi soldiers. Republican Guards, I found out later. The existing buildings weren’t enough for us plus the prisoners that ended up getting detained there, so Camp Falafel had rows of tents as well.

Though I still rode along on supply runs now and again, I was mostly tasked to assist the physician’s assistant, Staff Sergeant Blanchard, at the aid station.

Blanchard was this tall, blocky guy with bad skin and birth-control glasses, those ugly-ass, Army-issue black-framed glasses that only look good on ironic alternative rock musicians, which he was not. The guy was a dick. He was always riding me, like I had no business hanging with the boys in a war zone. If I had been honest with him, I would have agreed. I didn’t want to be there.

But I wouldn’t admit that, because I wanted to do a good job. Instead, I just took all his insults, about how I couldn’t lift the gurneys because I was too fucking weak, how I was too fucking stupid to know what to do. Mostly he was pissed off that I wouldn’t sleep with him.

I hated being alone with Blanchard. I never knew exactly what he was going to pull, but I could always count on him to be a dick.

This was typical: One night when I was restocking the supply cupboard, he came up behind me and pressed himself against my back. I could feel his hard-on poking me. I really wasn’t in the mood.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Nothing. I’m not doing anything. Just getting some Betadine.”

He had me pushed against the shelves, and his hand reached over my shoulder, toward the shelf that was right about level with my chest. I knew where it was heading.

I sidestepped and squirmed past him.

“Don’t be such a bitch,” he called after me.

Mostly we dealt with everybody’s owwies and boo-boos: sprained ankles, heat stroke, skin infections, dysentery, gastroenteritis, that kind of thing. Plus, given the age of some of the Guard, we had to treat high blood pressure, cardiac infarction, even a stroke. Then there was the soldier nobody knew, some specialist, who one day just blew his brains out. Who knows why? Nobody knew the guy. He arrived one day and, two weeks later, decided to kill himself. Pretty fucking inconsiderate of him.

Then there were the Iraqi prisoners. The PUCs. That’s military-speak for “Persons Under Control.”

The PUCs would come in all kinds of different ways.