fre',M.
S\\ort
2~1~.
~feS(,
~~ii l<.1"'1~ cal~cfiDvt ,t
s+x:~s - R~ct~p!oyW'!MiJ
Ne~J 'forJc: ~{?1(-t•~
5?,-t(.
BODIES
-- Ph;( k~ -2Dl1
For a long time I was angry. I didn't want to talk about Iraq, so I
wouldn't tell anybody I'd been. And if people knew, if they
pressed, I'd tell them lies.
"There was this hajji corpse," I'd say, "lying in the sun. It'd
een there for days. It was swollen with gases. The eyes were
sockets. And we had to clean it off the streets."
Then I'd look at my audience and size them up, see if they
wanted me to keep going. You'd be surprised how many do.
"That's what I did," I'd say. "I collected remains. U.S. forces,
mostly, but sometimes Iraqis, even insurgents."
There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like
it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get
to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to
the -distance as you gaze upon the ho
ors of war they can't
quite s~e. Either way, it's the same story. This lieutenant colonel
who's visiting the Government Center rolls up, sees two Ma-
ines maneuvering around a body bag, and decides he'll go
show what a regular guy he is and help.
As I tell the story, the lieutenant colonel's a large, a
ogant
ear of a man with fresh-pressed cammies and a short, tight
mustache.
54 R E D E P L O Y M E N T
"He's got huge hands," I'd say. ''And he comes up to us and
says, 'Here, Marine, let me help you with that.' And without
waiting for us to respond or warn him off, he reaches down and
grabs the body bag."
Then I'd describe how he launches up, as though he's doing
a clean and jerk. "He was strong, I'll give him that," I'd say. "But
the bag rips on the edge of the truck's back gate, and the skin
of the hajji tears with it, a big jagged tear through the stomach.
Rotting blood and fluid and organs slide out like groceries
through the bottom of a wet paper bag. Human soup hits him
ight in the face, running down his mustache."
If I'm telling the story sad, I can stop there. If I'm telling it
funny, though, there's one more crucial bit, which Corporal G
had done when he'd told the story to me for the first time, back
in 2004, before either ofus had collected remains or knew what
we were talking about. I don't know where G heard the story.
"The colonel screamed like a bitch," G had said. And then
he'd made a weird, high-pitched keening noise, deep in his
throat, like a wheezing dog. This was to show us precisely how
itches scream when covered in rotting human fluids. If you get
the noise right, you get a laugh.
What I liked about the story was that even if it had hap-
pened, more or less, it was still total bullshit. After our deploy-
ment there wasn't anybody, not even Corporal G, who talked
about the remains that way.
Some of the Mortuary Affairs Marines thought the spirits of
the dead hung about the bodies. It'd creep them out. You could
feel it, they'd say, especially when you look at the faces. But it
got to be more than that. Midway through the deployment,
guys started swearing they could feel spirits everywhere. Not
BOD IE S 55
just around the bodies, and not just Marine dead. Sunni dead,
Shi 'a dead, Kurd dead, Christian dead. All the dead of all Iraq,
even all the dead ofiraqi history, the Akkadian Empire and the
Mongols and the American invasion.
I never felt any ghosts. Leave a body in the sun, the outer
layer of skin detaches from the lower, and you feel it slide
around in your hands. Leave a body in water, everything swells,
and the skin feels waxy and thick but recognizably human.
That's all. Except for me and Corporal G, though, everybody in
Mortuary Affairs talked about ghosts. We never said any
different.
In those days I used to think, Maybe I'd handle it better if
Rachel' d stayed with me. I didn't fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and ··
nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that
handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The
smell of it gets into your skin. Putting down food is hard after
processing, so by the end of the deployment we were gaunt
from poor nutrition, sleep deprived from bad dreams, and
shambling through base like"a bunch of zombies, the sight of us
eminding Marines of everything they know but never discuss.
And Rachel was gone. I'd seen it coming. She was a pacifist
in high school, so once I signed my enlistment papers the thing
we had going went on life support.
She would have been perfect. She was melancholy. She was
thin. She always thought about death, but she didn't get off on
it like the goth kids. And I loved her because she was thought-
ful and kind. Even now, I won't pretend she was especially good-
looking, but she listened, and there's a beauty in that you don't
often find.
Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody,
56 R E D E P L O Y M E N T
there's a real community you don't get in other places. If you're
like me, though, and you don't fit in, it's a prison. So our rela-
tionship was half boyfriend/girlfriend, half cell mates. For my
sixteenth birthday, she blindfolded me and drove me twenty
miles out of town, to a high point off the interstate where you
could watch the roads stretch out forever across the plains to-
ward all the places we'd rather be. She told me her gift was this,
the promise to come back here with me someday and keep go-
ing. We were so close for two years, and then I signed up.
It was a decision she didn't understand much more than
I did. I wasn't athletic. I wasn't aggressive. I wasn't even that
patriotic.
"Maybe if you'd joined the Air Force," she'd said. But I was
tired of doing the weaker thing. And I knew that her talk about
the future was just that, talk. She'd never leave. I didn't want to
stay with her, work in a veterinarian's office, and be wistful. My
ticket out of Callaway was what passed in our town for first class.
The Marine Corps.
I told her, "What's done is done." It made me feel like a
tough guy from a movie.
Even still, we stayed together through boot camp. She wrote
me letters while I was there, even sent me naked photos of her-
self. A few weeks earlier another guy' d gotten a package like
that and the Dis had put the photos up in the bathroom stalls.
The guy's girlfriend had worn a cheerleading uniform and
stripped it off picture by picture. I remember thinking how
glad I was that Rachel wasn't the kind of girl to send me some-
thing like that.
Mail call in boot camp works like this. One of the Dis stands
at the front of the squad bay with all the platoon's mail while
BOD l ES 57
the platoon stands at attention in front of their racks. The DI
calls out names one by one, and recruits rUJ.'l up and take their
mail. If it's a package or an envelope that feels suspicious, the
DI makes him open it right there. So when I opened Rachel's
letter it was in front of the whole platbon and with Sergeant
Kuba, my kill hat, glaring at me.
This wasn't the first time I'd had to open a letter with him
watching. My parents had sent me photos of their vacation to
Lakeside. That was no big deal, and I hadn't been wo
ied. I
didn't think my parents would send me naked photos. Rachel's
name on the envelope, though, te
ified me. I opened it slowly,
trying to come up with a plan if the photos turned out to be
contraband.
The envelope had three glossy four-by-six prints that Rachel
had developed herself in our high school's darkroom. When I
pulled them out and saw her thin, pale, and very naked body, I
didn't even look up for Sergeant Kuba's reaction. I stuffed the
prints into my mouth, closed my eyes, and hoped for the best.
It's impossible to swallow three photographs at once, espe-
cially if you've only got two seconds before your kill hat has one
hand on your face and th~ other on your throat while he
screams and sprays spit at you.
The- senior drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Kerwin, came
unning' and
oke us up. When Sergeant Kuba released my
neck, I spat the pictures on the floor. Staff Sergeant Kerwin
looked at me and said, "You must be fucking crazy, and I must
e on the Marine Corps shit list if they give me a worthless fuck
like you to turn into a Marine." Then he leaned in close and
said, "Maybe I'll just kill you instea:d."
He told me to pick up the photos. It was hard because I was
58 R E D E P L O Y M E N T
shaking and because all the other Dls were screaming at me. I
tried to hold them so my hands covered Rachel's body. Only
her face stared out, and her face in the photo seemed scared.
She often looked like that in photos, because she didn't like
how she looked when she smiled. There's no way she'd ever
taken shots like that before.
"Rip them up," he said. It was a kindness.
I tore them, slowly, into smaller and smaller pieces, ,twisting
and tearing them, making sure no one could put them back
together. When they were in shreds, he turned and walked
away, leaving me to the other Dis.
I had to eat the torn pieces while Sergeant Kuba delivered a
lecture to all of us on how a true Marine wouldn't just share na-
ked photos of his girlfriend with his platoon, but would let
them run a train on her as well. Then he told them they were
all fucked up if they'd tolerate an individual like me in their
platoon, somebody who thought he was special, and he took
them out back and thrashed them for a good twenty minutes
while I stood at the position of attention and watched. Every
night that week, he made me stand at the mi
or and scream,
''I'm not crazy, you aret" at my reflection for a half hour, and he
hated me from then on and thrashed me pretty much contin-
uously while I was there.
The next time I saw Rachel was after I graduated from boot
camp. I showed up at her parents' place in my uniform. Dress
lues are supposed to get you laid, but she started crying. She
told me she didn't think she could stay with me if I went on a
deployment, and I asked her to give me at least until I went to
Iraq. She said yes. Ten months later, I was heading out. They'd
BOD IE S 59
given me the opportunity to deploy if I deployed with Mortuary
Affairs, and I took it.
Rachel came to see me off. She gave me a sad little blow job
the night before and told me we were done. In the military, the
thing women are supposed to do if they love you is stay with you
at least through deployment. Maybe divorce you a few months
after you get back, but not before. Which meant, to my simple
little mind, that she didn't love me. That she'd never loved me
and that everything I'd felt so strongly about in high school was
just me being childish. Which was okay, because I was going
somewhere that would definitely make me a man.
Except what happened in Iraq.