His lip curled and relaxed. “Do I even know who you are? Seems like maybe we start there.”
“You know me, Kel. Even if you don’t know who I am.” She held his gaze to make sure he understood. “There’s four of us. This started back when I worked on the wetlands.”
“What’s up with the wetlands?”
“Just another harbinger on a long list. The point is, the four of us are kind of, I don’t know what you’d call it—the hub of the spokes. The core of the thing.”
“Yeah, Shane, well, what’s the fucking thing?”
“We would want you to be our fifth.”
“You know…” He chewed on his tongue and spent so long thinking, she wondered if he’d say anything. Finally, he went on. “I spent a lot of time in IVAW dealing with folks who wanted to tell me about my life and what I’d done. They tended to sound a lot like you, no offense. So while you’re dancing around whatever you’re dancing around, let me ask you something first: What did you do during the war?”
He said this with great hostility. Ferocity. She had never heard either of those things in him before.
“I went to college,” she said calmly. “Bounced around a bit after that.”
“You ever feel guilty?”
“About what?”
“That guys like me and more’n a few gals like you went and wasted the best years of our lives in that sorry misadventure while y’all blew each other in dorm rooms and your parents got a supply-side tax cut?”
“I don’t know. How guilty do you feel that you came home, and there’s some Iraqi kid who got incinerated by American-brand white phosphorous?”
She couldn’t read his face, but something dark passed across it. He carried a great misery inside, and he couldn’t do a remotely satisfactory job of hiding it.
Shane picked up the saltshaker, cupped it in her palm. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He rolled his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “Small world that you and I ever met.”
“So small, it makes you understand the difference that can be made if you go about it the right way.”
“Color me skeptical. Alls I ever think is how the guys who died in Baghdad or Kandahar had all the sweet-berry luck. Didn’t have to come home and sit with a stinking pile of shit in themselves. They got the hero’s parade.”
She sighed. “Don’t talk like that.”
He waited for a second, like he was trying to decide. “Like what? That dying can be lucky?”
“No, man. You can wish you were dead all you want. But don’t pretend there’s anything heroic about it. All the bumper stickers and parades and ‘thank a veteran for your freedom’ bullshit—all the pedestalizing. All the movies. All that isn’t for you guys who went. It’s for the next time. How else do you get children in Oklahoma City or Fallujah to kill people they’ve never met? Convince them they’ll be heroes.”
Murdock ran his finger around the wet rim of the coffee mug and stared glumly at the snow. He looked far away, like he was no longer listening.
“Look, Kel.” She slid the saltshaker from one hand to the other. It scraped across the table. She kept right on staring at Murdock. “We can go through this shit to the moon and back. In fact, at some point I’m sure we will. But for now, I just want to know”—she slid the saltshaker back to the original hand—“if you’ve got one more war in you?”
ANAMNESIS He liked to think it’d been Toy’s triumph that finally got them good, but that was specious and relied on a certain Hollywood symmetry. Anbar had dozens of skilled bomb builders and trained more every day. Toy himself may have been a composite of every operator that ever outsmarted them, a concrete antagonist to hunt. Still, his gut would always tell him Toy left the suspicious package in the intersection where the choke points were obvious and the convoy had to set up fifty yards back. After they’d rolled the TALON down to the package and discovered that it was only some men’s shirts—false alarm, not unusual—Ta’amu cracked, “Man, I just got a baller idea for a GAP ad,” as the EFP hidden under a garbage pile went off and pretty much liquefied the captain in front of his eyes. SSG Jim Matthews was killed as well, and SPC Cort Kronlan lost an arm. Someone had triggered it through a wire hidden in the ground, so the Warlock couldn’t save them, and it was some five hundred pounds of armor, tactical vest, ammo, rifle, and man vanishing except the feet still in the boots. Ears droning, concrete chunks raining, molten steel popping holes in the armored Humvee, Murdock didn’t stop to think of all the bits of Ta’amu he had in his eyes and mouth. The gunfire began.
INSTINCT One thing you could say about the US military is that when they trained you to do something, you fucking well remembered it. Even with pieces of Ta’amu coating him and a hail of bullets thwapping from a nearby building and the Muslim call to prayer suddenly ringing out from a nearby Statue of Liberty–colored minaret and someone screaming, “Tell ’em we got a TIC! Put the fifty on those niggers!” and SSG Mason Saunders going cyclic with the SAW right by his ear, spitting through nine hundred rounds in about a minute—melting the barrel in the process—Murdock still did what his trauma training told him to. He leaped on top of Kronlan, this shrieking nineteen-year-old child of Texas, ripped the med pack from his vest, ground his knee into the bicep above Kronlan’s severed arm to stop the blood flow (between the heart and the wound, America told you), got the tourniquet ready, spitting out pieces of his brother that tasted more like diesel than blood, not thinking Captain’s dead, Captain’s juice, letting the pressure go long enough to slip the tourniquet around the Limb Formerly Known as Cort Kronlan’s Arm, spitting, spitting, spitting, but Kronlan wouldn’t stop thrashing and screaming long enough to get his life saved (Kronlan, for the sweet cunt of fuck), so he cracked him in the face with his elbow, broke his nose, but stunned the Texan long enough to get the tourniquet tightened—until the limb stopped the spurts that timed eerily with the pulse Murdock could feel humming through Kronlan’s whole body—and then packed the wound cavity with this handy little Kerlix super sponge stuff they gave you. With sticky fingers, packing it into a stump the color of grilled brook trout he and his mother once caught, long ago, in Wiconisco Creek.
AND LATER When Kronlan was saved and people were already telling Murdock about the Bronze Star Medal coming his way, Slade found him picking at a bit of bloody material still stuck in his teeth, and SPC Slade looked at him and, channeling Ta’amu himself, Murder said, “Tastes like chicken,” and laughed. Slade thought this was inappropriate, but Murdock was drenched in so much of Ta’amu’s and Kronlan’s blood he didn’t much give a fuck. You put that shit somewhere deep and beat a stray cat to death with a hammer five years on to try to work those feelings out.
NOW THAT WE’RE DOWN THIS ROAD Two springs ago he’d driven down to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, for the annual May ceremony to induct the recently juiced on the EOD Memorial Wall. He sat among the family and friends of that year’s fallen EOD in the sweltering, swampy heat and marveled at how many people in the audience were missing limbs. All manner of hooks, tennis-shoed prosthetics, grippers, and angled titanium protruded in place of bone and flesh. One woman had half her face burned away and wore a large hat tilted to cast a shadow over the ruined portion. The wall, a pale gray slab of concrete resembling a highway divider, had four cenotaphs, one for each branch of the military, with EOD dead dating back to World War II. A bedsheet of an American flag riding above. The keynote speaker was the air force chief of staff. “This is EOD,” he’d said, and Murdock felt his throat close, his eyes well. “The brains of an engineer, the hands of a surgeon, the heart of a martyr.” They played “Amazing Grace,” and he went to the wall and ran his fingers across the slim bronze tablet affixed to the army’s cenotaph, the one that said CPT TROY J. TA’AMU 2/07. Then he tossed his Bronze Star Medal at the ground because that was the cliché most appropriate to the moment. In war, cliché was as inescapable as the dread of your own death. They’d gone over there having already learned all the clichés from the movies, and they took them up with ease: the brotherhood and adrenaline that made you cuss and laugh and feel as if this was the only place you belonged, and then you saw fucked-up shit and did fucked-up shit and it changed you, the way the movies told you it would. How frustrating to watch your life, your misery, your madness depicted absolutely accurately by cliché. Because it felt so real and original when it was you with these wives, husbands, parents, brothers, sisters, and children milling in the heat. And what was he left with? What could he do when his head was a mess of forgotten voices and errant whispers of memories with no value and no sustained narrative, just purposeless minutiae and fragments he’d take with him to the void?