It was dangerous there. Scorching winds whip across the desert, and marines with machine guns peer from under their helmets in the military convoys that bump along the roads in clouds of dust – squinting into the yellow haze, and every second expecting from somewhere a rocket fired by the mobile Soviet RPG-7 launcher which in Russian slang goes by the unpronounceable name granatomiot. This rocket could come at any time from any direction and pierce the armour of their Humvees. It will burst clean through the emblem representing the globe and anchor over which the fearsome American eagle spreads its wings, and the hot jet stream, hot as the inside of a star, will burn through the metal and reach the ammunition. Then ‘bang!’ and the heavy Humvee will flip over and rip open in the explosion like a can of sardines.
In such a scenario, we were told, the best chance of survival is to be the one manning the machine gun. The chance is scant, but there had been cases were the gunner was blown away from the car by the blast wave to land in the dunes and suffer only a spinal compression fracture.
When I thought about it, looking at the white hospital ceiling and the round lamps with their opaque plafonds, it made me angry. It was such a shame that it made me want to cry. Those guys from my platoon, those rather stupid, uneducated, loutish rednecks and Latinos, black and white, had gone to protect their homeland and were ready to give their lives for it.
Maybe they didn’t even think about it, never thought about it… yet they did it, and deeds will always mean more than words. Words meant nothing. People were judged by what they did, and it turned out that I, Joshua Kold, the one who had signed his contract consciously and joined the military with a point to prove… I wanted to prove first to myself that all are equal in the fight for freedom and democracy, and that in a free country there is no ‘gun meat’, there is no payment in blood for citizenship, there is no caste on national and social grounds… Well…
The result was clear. While my platoon is fighting in the Iraqi deserts against the saddamites… me, the big intellectual, white collar Joshua, I’m lying on a white bedsheet and looking at a white ceiling.
I had proved nothing to anybody. Life had taken me by the scruff of the neck and killed my idea in the form of Master Sergeant Westerhausen. He’d aimed at the head, got my legs – but what’s the difference, the result was achieved.
The first days I was obsessed with the injustice and my own bad luck, constantly, and even at night I couldn’t drive the thoughts from my head. In the special ward for patients with heavy leg injuries where I was lying, there were three more beds, but all empty because no one was interested in breaking their limbs but me.
And so I lay, gritting my teeth with rage and powerlessness, hesitating to press the call key for the nurse because in the afternoon it was a young girl, a mixed race girl with very beautiful lips and eyes like a cat’s.
And so I suffered on, with ringing ears, gripes in my stomach and only when it became absolutely unbearable and spots were whirling in front of eyes did I press the damned button. She came with an astounding dancing gait and undulating hips, and at once said with a deep chest voice, ‘Hi!’, dexterously handed me the urine bag, then delicately turned away to the window to chat on the phone to some Nick. It was meaningless chat, small talk between lovers whiling away the day until the evening when they would merge later in one being groaning with passion and pleasure.
To me, that Nick was for some reason the sergeant from our base – a strong, stately black demigod who’d been through a couple of wars, was confident in himself and what he did.
The nurse – her name was Kelly – was proud for certain that she had such a boyfriend, a white-toothed athlete never at a loss for words, capable of beating off two or three Puerto-Rican addicts/robbers on the street, and as good as a stallion in bed.
I narrowed my eyes, urinated into the urine bag, and listened as Kelly sang into her phone: ‘Da-arling, my honey…’, she cooed, and my face reddened, and my ears reddened, and even my dick seemed to become red, because of the burning shame, rage and offense – for myself, for the world, for the damned Iraqis and Russians, for the redneck Ken and the other guys from my platoon which already was not mine, for that unknown Nick and the beautiful Kelly whose intelligence was probably not much higher than of a monkey’s in a zoo. In a word, for the whole world!
I envied them all! I envied them because it turned out that I, educated and possessing huge knowledge of computers and hacking, in my mature years lie like a helpless doll with broken legs in a hospital while life passes by. And all of them, insignificant small fry whose existence doesn’t make any more sense than the existence of amoebas or cockroaches makes sense, live and feel pleasure, and even bring benefit.
It’s they who fight for democracy, freedom and justice, fuckit, and do what I had dreamed of since that moment I left the damned Garage!
When Kelly carried the urine bag away, I usually fell asleep, but those thoughts remained with me even in my dreams. They were transformed into fancy images, into some whirling dance of cleavers and ridiculous but extraordinary charming beings cheerfully hopping along a wide road through green fields to mountains over which the sun shines. In those dreams I looked like a reptile, a creeping reptile, or even some pathetic worm or caterpillar crawling in the dirt-filled ditch beside the road.
Pa came to see me a few times. He brought a wall TV, a computer and a hi from sister. I asked him whether Mom knew I was in hospital. Pa, in his usual way, answered quickly and directly:
‘There’s no need for her to know. She has no relation to our family.’
But Mom, of course, found a way to meet me, and regularly came with delicious food, but always cautiously, as if I wasn’t in hospital, but in prison and she was doing something illegal.
I set up several news channels on the TV and watched them day and night. And online it was forums and chats where our soldiers in Iraq communicated among themselves. They usually posted photos against a background of the desert or urban landscapes, or looked for acquaintances or told stories, not often funny but terrible in their realness.
Sometimes there are garage rabble – pacifists and anarchists, or just trolls, psychopaths and perverts who derive pleasure from slinging mud at something precious to others.
Those who swore straight off were banned at once, but there were others planting propaganda and talking of the injustice done by ours marines and GIs. Some said that Iraq was a peaceful and even prosperous country, and Saddam Hussein was its legitimate head. Those little fools made me laugh, and I always got deeply involved in discussions and posted the materials about the chemical attacks of saddamites on civilians, and data on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the methods of killing dissidents in the jails of Iraqi counterintelligence.
Some people agreed – there are still some smart people in the world. Someone were dead opposed, saying, I believe in his innocence, and that my arguments are unconvincing. I was very much amused by those who said ‘I believe’ as though it was a question of religion.
But there were also those who didn’t just argue, but tried to prove me wrong. They posted statistical calculations, translations from Arab or even Russian media, but we – me and those real Americans who hang out on forums – understood that all this is blatant propaganda in the spirit of the Cold War, which wasn’t over for these people.
My legs gradually ceased to hurt and began to itch terribly under the plaster. Doctor Gilbert, a fat, grey-haired man with a colonial moustache, told me that this was very good because it meant that the process of healing had started.