“Total fairy tale. So ridiculous, I couldn’t watch it again.”
Shane had gained weight in the past seven years, but Murdock had put on more, maybe thirty, forty pounds, mostly in the gut. He wore a white Affliction Chuck Liddell tee with the roaring winged skull across the front and had the same cut as when they met, shaved on the sides and a cap of blond on top, now with a bit of gray frost. His ears, always big, looked bigger, the slack of his lips slacker, which made his drawl deeper. Tormented blue punching bags hung under his eyes. Maybe every soldier came home older, but that older was nothing compared to the older of seven years on.
“There’s this one EOD guy running around by himself,” he said. “Running off the FOB alone to question an Iraqi, getting into a sniper fight, grabbing a Humvee to drive out to nowhere to detonate ordnance in a one-man convoy. Fucking absurd. When we rolled out the wire, we never went anywhere without at least twenty-five guys.”
BECAUSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO EXPLAIN Even twenty-five would be rolling light. By his second deployment they were escorted by a whole platoon with Humvees, Strykers, MRAPs, and sometimes tanks for the neighborhoods where even the toddlers shot at them. During the dark days when no-shit-fuck-you civil war broke out, they’d have escorts of one-hundred-plus soldiers with an Iraqi army unit to match.
She’d been organizing a rally with Iraq Veterans Against the War in D.C. This was ’07, Bush II still president. Prior to the march, at a lunch of turkey wraps delivered by the garbage bag, she’d been introduced to this bomb-tech peace activist, part autodidact, part swinging-dick male trope. Though she’d mostly been dating women at the time, she told him, “I doubt you could have activated my fourth-wave feminist impulses more completely.” They did the thing where after they slept together they became Facebook friends, and over the years he’d drop her a line now and then. The messages were tinged with puppy dog yearning (Heya gal, hope you’re well. Was thinking of you the other day. Wondering where the wind blew you. –Murdock). Years later, when she reached out to him via postcard with a new number, he’d called the same day.
“The whole lot of movies about OIF are such a pile of dog shit. It’s like they’re making a movie about waitressing, and waitresses go and watch it and see all these sexy characters meeting dashing, dangerous men, and every encounter is some bullshit verbal joust—Fuck no. You serve old fucking fat people shit food for ten hours, some tip you, some stiff you, you wake up and do it again. Iraq was mundane. Boring as beans until you got a call and all of a sudden it wasn’t. No one’s seeing a movie like that, though.”
“You know why there will never be a great movie or great art about the Iraq War?” she asked.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it hewed too didactically to its own absurdity.” She looked off at the cold parking lot. “Like, most war is stupid in the existential sense, but this one was bad-joke stupid. You can’t get a piece of art to grapple with what’s already brain-dead, you know? I mean, the fucking child-boy president landed on an aircraft carrier with a sock stuffed in the crotch of his flight suit and stood in front of a banner that said— Well, you know what it said. How can you make subtle, contemplative art about that? The whole thing was an unknowing satire of itself from word one.”
“Well, Eastwood’s got a sniper flick coming out. I’m sure that’ll be the subtle contemplation you’re looking for, Ebert.”
FOR HIS PART Murdock felt embarrassment and small-hold bitterness for how he must look to her. She was still Good Curvy, as Troy Ta’amu used to say. Her hair was longer now, a shaggy black mess with a mullet shape to it. She’d taken the stud out of her nostril, and he could see the small hole it had left. Her hooded eyes should have made her look naturally bored, but they drilled into him. Like what he said mattered. He remembered gripping the white of her love handles, and the tributaries of purple stretch marks crawling beneath pale brown skin. She still radiated fearlessness and a self-aware acid Zen. He ate up the way she spoke, the way she thought. Every honed, spear-sharp sentence came tumbling out of her mouth like it had just occurred to her. She’d never treated him with faux reverence. She was the first woman who slept with him after he got back, and at first it made him so achingly distraught, thinking this was what he’d missed: When he went to play with the bang, all the kids like her went to college and just fucked and fucked until they were bored with it. While he jerked off in KBR porta-pots and played endless video games with Slade, Hermoza, and Beech, his peers stateside lived in another dimension. He’d thought this was what his life could be like now that he was back. He’d been so sure she was a kind of mystic signal or road sign that life still remained, glorious and unexpected, on the other side of the war.
She laughed and remembered standing with him outside a bar, shadows splayed on the pavement of a dead D.C. street. He’d pulled two cigarettes from the pack with his teeth, handed her one, and said, “Wanna ditch these losers and go throw rocks at the moon?” He was wounded in that perfect, unfixable way that compelled her as a young woman, at least for a night.
“Not sure I ever asked…” She ratcheted the conversation closer to her mark, as carefully as if she were handling one of Kellan Murdock’s IEDs. “How did you end up doing bomb disposal?”
He flipped a hand in the air and farted with his lips. “Us guys from the Alabama part of Pennsylvania either go military or go to jail. Once I got deployed and started really meeting people—I mean, meeting guys from every fucking corner of the world where the American experiment got its hooks in—Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands—places I’d never heard of, it was funny how many of the stories were the same. Guy got in trouble with the law or was on the verge of getting shot over some bullshit or just owing too much money to turn down the signing bonus. Regular army’s mostly ex–drug dealers from what I could tell.”
“But why did you join?”
“I was rah-rah America. Wanted to go hunt al-Qaeda, put my boot in the ass, all that. Thought I’d be infantry, but I was always kind of a cerebral hick. An enlisted guy suggested I try for EOD school, and shit—guess you could just say I had an aptitude. Politics didn’t even occur to me.”
EOD SCHOOL Some recruits were already engineers. Murdock was more like a savant, who’d gotten a lot of mechanical training by accident working in his mom’s boyfriend’s auto shop since he was ten. Some guys can just tell how the lock balls and gears of a setback-armed, mechanically timed, graze-impact-fired mortar fuze are gonna work.
Her eyebrows made a skeptical bounce. “But what you’re describing, Kel—that’s a political attitude.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know that. Plus, it all went away quick for me. By the time I started my third tour I couldn’t have given a fuck less what hajji wanted to do with their sand. So even after I stopped caring personally, I still didn’t really question the mission.” He sipped his coffee. “Why, after all, would so many brilliant, hardworking, talented motherfuckers be pouring this much passion and energy and courage into a thing if it wasn’t absolutely the correct undertaking? Get me?”
TA’AMU He’d spent an entire deployment grilling his captain, Ta’amu, about American Samoa, because what the fuck was that, right? Like a place Frodo’s gotta go in Lord of the Rings? Ta’amu was a hulking engineer turned EOD commander with a body like a fatty stone pillar and a smashed-pan face topped off by a dark and handsome unibrow. Ta’amu was the guy who put him in the Suit, who sent specialists, technical eggheads like Murdock, on the lonesome walk. He was a bizarre dude. Hysterically funny on occasion. Everyone in the army was funny to some degree—maybe not in a laugh-out-loud kinda way; sometimes in a strange, grim, you-know-this-constant-talk-of-sodomy-and-incest-has-a-home-base-in-his-gray-matter kinda way, but Ta’amu could be both. “Dog tags and blood type go in the laces of the boot,” he told Murdock early on. When he inquired why this was, Ta’amu replied, “Get with the program, Murder! What’s left when the bang goes off? Hands and feet! What do you think they’ll find of you after you go from a complex consciousness to a rapidly unwinding miscellany of gore and Pentagon-issued gear?” Then he started laughing like a lunatic.