“My memory—especially before Iraq—is so fucking shot, it’s almost like I was never that person. Can barely remember my hometown, my mom. Can’t remember anything about high school—almost at all. Like, at some point, I know I learned algebra, but I couldn’t tell you who was in my class or what teacher I had or what girl I liked. Some guys I know can’t remember anything about their kids being born. Some don’t remember meeting their wives. But even that’s not the whole thing.”
“What’s the whole thing?”
“Hard to describe. Ain’t quite anxiety, ain’t quite depression. Not quite wanting to punch people out. It’s just this clawing feeling like something’s about to happen. Gets worse in crowds. Like I hate being at a football game or the airport. Anywhere there’s too many people. Also, whenever I don’t got my M9 nearby.”
“That sounds pretty fucked.”
He offered her a tepid bob of his head side to side. “You learn to get by. Iraq taught me you can get used to just about anything. I mean, shit, don’t ask me to take a memory quiz or nothing, but I can still work. Been a product development engineer for a few years. Braking and transmission systems. But compared to EOD the stakes are so low—you know, if you fuck up no one’s getting killed. Basically feels like I can sleepwalk through it. Don’t tell my boss.”
“Ever go home? Do you have family around?”
“Mom got smoked by cancer of the thyroid a few years ago—I swear it’s that shit they’re putting in the ground to get at the gas. No Pops to speak of. Gone before I was even abortion material.”
“Any love life?” she pushed on.
“Between exes right now. Was hooking up with a girl I met online for a while, but she didn’t work out.” His hard stare told her to get to the point.
“Who do you spend your time with?”
“A few buddies at work, a few from Iraq who I still see now and then.”
“No best friend?”
“Nah, I keep to myself. So are you like writing a screenplay about me, Alvarez? Christ.”
Alvarez. She hadn’t gone by that surname in five years. She did not correct him as to what was on her driver’s license now, though. She pushed forward, sensing his itching curiosity. Allen Ford Jr., her mentor and comrade, had once clued her in that people mostly just wanted to be listened to. They wanted to tell their story, and if you could get to their story, you could get to their conscience.
“That first time we met, back in D.C., you told me you missed it. The war. Do you still?”
Murdock considered the advertisement for the Wildfire Chicken Salad on the laminated card propped up out of the condiment basket.
“Not as much no more. Sometimes. There’s the brotherhood, the camaraderie of it, combat love, that’s one thing. And there’s the adrenaline—best high you’ll ever get. No such thing as blood pressure meds for a heart attack, right? But there’s also a calm to it that you can’t really get back here.”
UNTRUE He never saw the EOD guys anymore. Once he got involved with IVAW, Murdock’s views left him with the loneliness of both the prophet and the traitor. They didn’t get how he could shit on the cause that some of them had given it all for, and he didn’t want to argue with the people he cared for most in the world. Loving your brother in arms was a more profound experience than loving God. Better if they speak of it all in another life. Kieran Slade had called him up when he found out the guy they’d nicknamed Murder was going to IVAW protests. “So you’re with these fucking brain-damaged Marines telling everyone we’re war criminals? All so a bunch of fat, happy, self-righteous pussies who’ve never been afraid of shit in their lives can sit back and judge us? Fuck that, man, and fuck you. T would fucking lay you out, man. He’d fucking cripple you if he saw this. You’re a coward, Docker.”
“How was the war calm?”
“When I got back, I was dating this girl at Penn State—she’d sort of latched on to me even though I kept telling her I wasn’t much in the mood to get married, and that’s clearly what she was after. I remember this one time we were driving through a McDonald’s, okay? And we’re picking up food to take to her family’s house for dinner, and she’s got this huge list of everyone’s orders. But the speaker box or whatever that is don’t work so well. It keeps cutting out, so the lady on the other end keeps missing stuff and she needs to keep repeating herself, and then they’re confused about what she’s already ordered and what she hasn’t, and I’ll tell you—right in that moment, I would have given anything to be back in Baghdad. Any fucking thing in the world if it meant I could go back and get shot at.”
His water glass was nothing but ice at the bottom, so he tossed back a few cubes and crunched them loudly with his molars. He began nodding as his story morphed.
“There was this guy over there. This bomb maker we called Toy because his devices always used the radio frequency from kids’ toys. Remote-control cars and Buzz Lightyear dolls and such. He came up with some real ingenious shit. Like he’d find a way around our Warlocks—our electronic jammers. He’d plant decoys. He’d wire a bomb with a different trigger three times out of five and then the other two would be callbacks. He was a meticulous cat. And we never caught him. Thought we did a few times. Once, near a bomb site, we took DNA swabs from everyone at the scene, and this shopkeeper matched. So a unit rolls up on the shopkeeper. Bingo-bango-bongo. No more shopkeeper. But a month later, there’s a new bomb, and you could just tell it was his. The Warlock Red jammed it—we were in that protective bubble. But the style was his, the way the wire braided from the battery to the blasting cap. Had a little receiver from a remote-control helicopter for the detonator. He’d put his signature on the IED, you know? Cuz he wanted us to know he was still out there. Now, don’t get me wrong, we all wanted to find that motherfucker and put a few through him, but at the same time I had this respect for him because I had to be better, smarter, quicker.”
HE RETURNED To Whitehall’s office hours because he liked having someone who could talk honestly about the thing. Whitehall didn’t give two fucks what you were supposed to say to fellow vets. “Don’t dwell on what’s been done,” he said. “When I got back I threw every medal and patch and memento and symbol of the American empire into a lake.” He handed Murdock books, a lot of Chomsky, Hobsbawm, Bacevich, and Chalmers Johnson. He read them at the dining room table of his one-bedroom apartment while loading and unloading his M9. It was dismaying how quickly his illusions eroded, a bad paint job that once attacked with mere sandpaper just flakes to the floor on its way to dust. He hadn’t understood how ready he was, and the puzzle pieces of his reading and his experience began to snap together. He carried it around in the back of his throat. However fury, sorrow, and undefended humiliation tastes. It made him want to go back to Iraq, finally hunt down Toy, and say, “I’ve had some time to think about it, and I sorta see your point, dawg.”
The waitress tried to come over again, thinking they might be ready, but Shane gave her a too-impatient Halt gesture. “We’re still going to need another minute.” Bambi smiled impatiently and turned heel. “What about IVAW? Do you have a foot in activism anymore?”
“Nah. I did a year more after we met, but the surge started to settle things down, and troops were on their way out. Got tired of lefty activist types explaining the war to me.” He ticked one cheek in a partial grin.
“Turns out you might’ve been premature given the whole situation over there now.”
“Not too hard to predict, I guess.” Murdock took the fork from the silverware and began twirling a tine against his thumb. “And I’ll tell you something else—the beheadings, the torture, this shit ain’t going nowhere. Barbarity is a powerful thing. Almost a faith in and of itself. We opened a can of worms there that’s gonna writhe for twenty, thirty, fifty years.”