The Constant Gardener

Our sister platoon was on the east side of the city, helping the Army put in COPs there. And to the north, the Marines were doing their thing, taking areas, holding and clearing them of insurgents.

We went back for a few days to work with the Marines when they took down a hospital north of the city on the river.

The insurgents were using the hospital as a gathering point. As the Marines came in, a teenager, I’d guess about fifteen, sixteen, appeared on the street and squared up with an AK-47 to fire at them.

I dropped him.

A minute or two later, an Iraqi woman came running up, saw him on the ground, and tore off her clothes. She was obviously his mother.

I’d see the families of the insurgents display their grief, tear off clothes, even rub the blood on themselves. If you loved them, I thought, you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?

It’s cruel, maybe, but it’s hard to sympathize with grief when it’s over someone who just tried to kill you.

Maybe they’d have felt the same way about us.

People back home, people who haven’t been in war, or at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted. They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.

Maybe it seems cruel or inappropriate. Maybe it would be, under different circumstances. But in the context of where we were, it made a lot of sense. We saw terrible things, and lived through terrible things.

Part of it was letting off pressure or steam, I’m sure. A way to cope. If you can’t make sense of things, you start to look for some other way to deal with them. You laugh because you have to have some emotion, you have to express yourself somehow.

Every op could mix life and death in surreal ways.

On that same operation to take the hospital, we secured a house to scout the area before the Marines moved in. We’d been in the hide for a while when a guy came out with a wheelbarrow to plant an IED in the backyard where we were. One of our new guys shot him. But he didn’t die; he fell and rolled around on the ground, still alive.

It happened that the man who shot him was a corpsman.

“You shot him, you save him,” we told him. And so he ran down and tried to resuscitate him.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi died. And in the process, his bowels let loose. The corpsman and another new guy had to carry the body out with us when we left.

Well, they eventually reached a fence at the Marine compound, they didn’t know what to do. Finally they just threw him up and over, then clambered after him. It was like Weekend at Bernie’s.

In the space of less than an hour, we’d shot a guy who wanted to blow us up, tried to save his life, and desecrated his body.

The battlefield is a bizarre place.

Soon after the hospital was secured, we went back to the river where the Marine boats had dropped us off. As we got down the bank, an enemy machine gun started tearing up the night. We hit the dirt, lying there for several long minutes, pinned down by a single Iraqi gunner.

Thank God he sucked at shooting.

It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy.

Taya:

I never played the video Chris had recorded of himself reading the book for our son. Part of it was the fact that I didn’t want to see Chris getting all choked up. I was emotional enough as it was; seeing him choked up reading to our son would have torn me up more than I already was.

And part of it was just a feeling on my part—anger toward Chris, maybe—you left, you’re gone, go.

It was harsh, but maybe it was a survival instinct.

I was the same way when it came to his death letters.

While he was deployed, he wrote letters to be delivered to the kids and me if he died. After the first deployment, I asked to read whatever he had written, and he said he didn’t have it anymore. After that he never offered them up and I never asked to see them.

Maybe it was just because I was mad at him, but I thought to myself, We are not glorifying this after you’re dead. If you feel loving and adoring, you better let me know while you’re alive.

Maybe it wasn’t fair, but a lot of life then wasn’t fair and that’s the way I felt.

Show me now. Make it real. Don’t just say some sappy shit when you’re gone. Otherwise, it’s a load of crap.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 800