“You speak their language?”
“No, no, I don’t. But I still could talk to ’em. They could understand.”
“What were they like?”
“They were like people anywhere. Some of them good, some not.”
“Did any of them seem angry?”
“Angry?” His eyes changed on that word, but she wasn’t sure how.
“Angry at us. For tearing up the country and killing them.”
—
She thinks she’s the moral one, and she talks this way to a soldier back from hell?
Mr. Perkins, sitting behind, could hear the conversation, and it filled him with anger. Yes, the man was obviously not playing with a full deck. No, the war had not been conducted wisely, and, no, there were no WMD. But anyone, anyone who knew what war was should be respected by those who didn’t. Perkins knew. It was long ago, but still he knew: The faces of the dead were before him. They were far away, but he had known them. He had put his hands on their corpses, taken their personal effects: Schmidt, Heinrich, PFC, 354th Fortress Artillery…Zivilberuf: Oberlehrer. He remembered that one because of those papers he’d kept. God knows where they were now, probably in a shoe box in the basement, mixed up with letters, random photos of forgotten people, bills and tax statements that never got thrown out. Schmidt, Heinrich. His first up-close kill. He’d thought the guy looked like a schoolteacher, and, by Christ, he had been. That’s why he’d kept the papers — for luck.
Yes, he knew, and obviously this black man knew — and how could she know, this “editor” with her dainty, reedy voice? More anger came up in him, making him want to get up and chastise this fool woman for all to hear. But he was heavy with age and its complexity, and anyway, he knew she just didn’t know better. As an educated professional, she ought to know better, but obviously she didn’t. She talked and talked, just like his daughter used to do about Vietnam, when she was a seventeen-year-old child.
—
“Angry?” said the soldier. “No. Not like you.”
She said, “What do you mean? I’m not angry.”
The soldier wagged his finger slowly, as if admonishing a child. “The thing you need to know is, those people know war. They know war for a long time. So not angry, no. Not like you think about angry.”
“But they didn’t—”
The finger wagged again. “Correct. They don’t want this war. But they know….See. They make a life. The shepherd drives his animals with the convoy. The woman carries water while they shoot. Yes, some, they hate — that’s the knife in the neck. But some smile. Some send down their good food. Some appreciate the work we do with the kids, the schools….”
—
He could walk for hours, every now and then calling the dog and stopping to listen. He walked across the field and into the woods and finally into the deserted farm. When he walked, he didn’t think of Iraq always. He thought of Jack when he was a pup, of wrestling with him, of giving him baths, of biking with the dog running alongside, long, glistening tongue hanging out. He thought of how patient Jack was when Scott was a baby, how he would let the child pull on his ears and grab his loose skin with tiny baby fists.
But the feeling of Iraq was always underneath, dark and liquid, and pressing up against the skin of every other thing, sometimes bursting through: a woman’s screaming mouth so wide, it blotted her face; great piles of sheep heads, skinned, boiled, covered in flies; the Humvee so thick with flies, they got in your mouth; somebody he couldn’t remember eating a piece of cake with fresh offal on his boot; his own booted foot poking out the doorless Humvee and traveling over endless gray ground. In the shadows of the field and the woods and the deserted farm, these things took up as much space as his wife and his child, the memories of his dog. Sometimes they took up more space. When that happened, he took the safety off the gun.
Like, an angry, cripple, man, don’t push me! Ghost’s voice and the old music ran parallel but never touched, even though Ghost tried to blend his voice with the old words. Sad to put them together, but somehow it made sense. Bill took off his headset and turned back toward the guy across from him, feeling bad for ignoring him. But he was busy talking to the older blonde behind him. And she seemed very interested to hear him.
—
“And the time I went out on the convoy? See, they got respect, at least those I rode with. ’Cause they didn’t fire on people unless they know for a fact they shot at us. Not everybody over there was like that. Some of ’em ride along shooting out the window like at the buffalo.”
“But how could you tell who was shooting?” asked Jennifer. “I hear you can’t tell.”
“We could observe. We could observe from a distance for however long it took, five, sometimes maybe even ten minutes. If it was a child, or somebody like that, we would hold fire. If it was an enemy…”
—
If it was an enemy, thought Bill Groffman, he would be splattered into pieces by ten people firing at once. If it was an enemy, he would be dropped with a single shot. If it was an enemy, she would be cut in half, her face gazing at the sky in shock, her arms spread in amazement as to where her legs might’ve gone. If it was an enemy, his or her body would be run over by trucks until they were dried skin with dried guts squashed out, scummed-over eyes staring up at the convoy driving by. Oooh, that’s gotta hurt!
—
“Still,” said Jennifer. “I don’t see how they could not be mad about us being there.”
—
Oooh, that’s gotta hurt! Six months ago, he would not have been able to hold back. He would’ve gotten into it with this woman, shut her up, scared the shit out of her. The war was stupid, okay. It was probably for oil. But it was also something else. Something you could not say easily with words. There was enemy shooting at you and then there was the thing you could say with words. There was dead squashed enemy and there was the thing you could say with words. There was joking at squashed bodies and nothing else to be said.
—
“Here,” said Jim. “Let me ask you something now.”
“Okay,” said Jennifer.
“Do you ever feel guilty?”
“What?”
“Do. You. Ever. Feel. Guilty.” He smiled.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“I didn’t ask about everybody. I asked ’bout you.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I feel guilty.”
“Good. Because guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt can instruct you; you can learn from guilt. Know what I mean?”
“I think so.” She felt something, but she didn’t know if it was manipulated or real.
He smiled. “So here’s what I want to say. Guilt, you can live with. But you can’t live with regret. Can’t learn from it, can’t live with it. So don’t ever feel regret.”
—
The thing was, Perkins could not really understand this man, either. He didn’t know if it was because he had forgotten, or because war was different now, or because the man was black, or because…Well, the man was not right, that was obvious. But you heard things about a lot of them that didn’t seem right. You supported them, absolutely; you wanted to be proud; what happened after Vietnam should never be allowed to happen again — but then you read someplace that they didn’t care about killing civilians, that it was like video games to them. Stuff about raping young girls, killing their families, doing sex-type things with prisoners, taking pictures of it — and then you’d read somebody sneering that “the Greatest Generation” couldn’t even fire their guns, while these new guys, they liked to kill.