“More intense than defusing an IED?”
EXPLOSIVE THEORY Understand how a pinch of extremely unstable or reactive compound can produce an expansion of material, heat, light, and pressure through a supersonic chemical reaction. Understand how the wave speed flowing through a brick of C4 will get a velocity of frag they called Mach Fuck Me. Know your frag: nails, bolts, ball bearings, steel shavings, human shit, pieces of dead dog. Know the ordnance better than the people who built the ordnance. Understand how to shear a firing pin, melt a land mine pressure pad, shoot buckshot, water, or steel bits into the mechanisms of a device to safe it. The US came to fight one war but got another, and EOD had to learn on the fly in this brave new hyper-creative world. They saw spray-foam-encased EFPs, sandbags filled with radio-triggered mortar shells, pressure-plate-activated devices, dual-tone multifrequency decoder board setups, 122-millimeter projectiles lashed like Christmas lights to pressure-switch contacts, improvised Claymores with two scoops of nuts and bolts for frag, VBIEDs with a suicide switch coiled around the transmission lever, the wiring running to a car battery in the back seat, sitting on a pile of propane tanks and plastic explosive all strapped tight with evil black electrical tape. Fill a pressure cooker with some diesel fuel and fertilizer, bury it in the road, touch two wires to a dinky double-A battery. Boomtown.
AND THEY FOUGHT BACK With the Suit, bang sticks, det cord, blast caps, time fuzes, shock tubes, EXIT charges, the British BootBanger, Bottlers, Maxi candles, Semtex, PE4, C4, and TNT. They safed IEDs with robots, from the four-hundred-pound monster the F6A, to the light, maneuverable PackBots, to his buddy SPC Kieran Slade’s preference, the TALON. They handed the robots Gatorade bottles filled with water and explosives and sent them to get blown to shit and end their miserable robot lives. And the key: the Warlocks—the electronic jammers that saved so many lives, they should’ve won the Medal of Fucking Honor. He still saw the random digits of the glowing green LED displays cycling through threat frequencies in his dreams.
“In a lotta ways. Say you’re out there, and a bomb’s gone off, right? You got ten minutes to collect all the evidence you can ’cause after that, the snipers and other insurgents descend. So you’re telling the Iraqi police to stand down, you’re telling a Marine or army captain about ten pay grades above you to back the fuck off, you’re telling family members of the victims, ‘Sorry, ma’am, you ain’t getting your son’s disemboweled corpse,’ or ‘No, sir, your daughter’s hands and feet belong to the US Army.’ Because you need that shit. That’s evidence. That’s going to help you find these motherfuckers and ventilate them. Then you start getting shot at, mortars are falling on your head, you’re trying to swab everyone at the scene for DNA samples.” His left eye spasmed, and he blinked furiously to clear it. “All that’ll get your butthole puckered every time.”
KELLY WILEY Bitched to her manager that she kept getting stiffed on tips, and Marcia snapped, “ ’Cause you don’t pay attention to your tables, you let everyone see the bottom of the mug, and the cooks redo your orders twice a day when you bunk ’em.” Now Kelly watched Table #19 like the pot about to boil. Table #19 was not the normal Tuesday-morning pairing. She’d guessed a quick first date for coffee, but they’d been talking for nearly an hour like they had nowhere to be. Old friends maybe. But the chat looked too intense. The woman with the darkish skin and messy black hair studied the fat guy, really peering into him. She tried to beam her wish into the lady’s brain: Order the skillet so I can stop worrying about you! Quit sitting there stewing on one freaking cup of coffee! Maybe she should give trade school another try. She was not cut out for waitressing.
THE ONLY OTHER PERSON TO NOTICE Was Richard Lee Haas, whom everyone called Ricky Lee. He’d finished his Bob’s potpie and was waiting for his waitress to notice he was done. She was just standing there staring off into space, and he hated being one of those unpleasant people who stuck his hand in the air and made a little check-signing gesture. Something very rushed, rude, and modern about that. His eyes passed over the young couple. The pretty woman focused on this young buck like she was practically interviewing him. Poor choice of time and place for a date, but they looked like they could be happy enough. “Everyone deserves a little.” That was what Ricky Lee’s late wife had always said.
“But you made it out without a scratch,” she said, not without admiration. “Three tours and you’re sitting here like, like…”
“Like Jesus walked through gunfire.”
Shane smiled.
“I got scars. Shrapnel still under the skin. And I’m TBIed as fuck. I never sleep more’n four or five hours at a time since I been back.”
“TBI is Something-Brain-Something?”
“Traumatic brain injury. Standing next to bomb blasts for a few years turns out to not be so hot for your think box.”
“So like football players with concussions.”
“Sorta. Concussion is when you come to a sudden stop and your brain kinda”— he thumped a fist into his open palm— “smushes up against the inside of the skull. What happened to us was a little different. Had to do with the blasts that got your brain all tore the fuck up.”
READ UP ON SCIENCE Explosive waves that come off the bang either speed up or slow down depending on the density of the medium they travel through. So the time they rolled up on a car bomb only to have another one go off a few dozen yards away, those compression waves traveled slowly through the air, but then sped up as soon as they reached their skulls. Density was key. Density creates shredding, ripping-type forces. The misconception was that explosions killed people with their fire and whatnot—no, no, no. It was always blast lung. The blast cut these little air pockets in the lungs, and motherfuckers drowned on their own blood. Those same compression waves worked a number on your brain. Occupational blast exposure was what the MDs called it. Before they’d stopped speaking, his buddies from EOD all talked about lost memories, lost sleep, and losing the ability to make a decision at random moments. Murdock hadn’t thought much of any of the memories he’d tagged before leaving for basic. Now that his whole life more or less began when he got to EOD school, he had to tell himself that.
MEMORIES MOST AVAILABLE Aluminum bunk trailers and the plywood offices, the phone on the ops desk that rang with their missions, garbage piles on the streets, dead dogs left to rot, endless situation reports, popping open the dust cover on the optical sight of his M4, cigarettes smoked at a lung-cancering pace, bomb scene investigation that earned him a familiarity with the human anatomy, sorting through intestines, burned chunks of automobile, fingers, ball bearings, feces, brake fluid, bloody fragments of bone, black coffee that tasted of desert grit, camel spiders, and endless, routinized interactions with gear: body armor, M4 rifle with three-point sling (pistol grip high, right hand ready), pistol in cross-draw holster on the front left side, ammo, night-vision, GPS, flashlight, crimpers, helmet, gloves, earplugs, sunglasses, Leatherman, knife, heart.
“I’m sorry, Kel. That sounds awful.”
“It gives me the sleep problems like I said, but there’s some damage memory-wise too.”
“Yeah?” She was circling him, but Shane also did love hearing about war. Though she’d begun her adulthood organizing against the country’s major military misadventures, a part of her ached for combat. She envied the sense of purpose, the action, the definitive stamp of reality, finality, and meaning war seemed to imprint on its participants.