The War After Armageddon (30 page)

“I was cleaning my boots, sergeant. The out house has turds all over it.”

“Just clean your weapon and go to sleep.”

Weapon in hand, Garcia led the way under the dangling lightbulb in the hallway and out through the drapery that served as a front door. He wondered where the electricity was coming from. It was hard to believe that anything still worked in the entire country.

Just outside, in the fading heat, Garcia turned on Cropsey. Keeping his voice low. And making a note that it was time to turn out all the inside lights, to go blackout.

The evening had gone the color of his mother’s favorite sweater, a soft purple. What did you call it? Lavender? The blotches on her face had been the same color just before she died.

“What’s your major malfunction, Cropsey? What is it, man? You don’t like the Marines? You don’t like sergeants? You don’t like Hispanics, maybe? Or maybe you just don’t like me.”

“I love you, Sergeant Garcia. It’s just that I’m afflicted with moral dilemmas and quandaries. I think I’m being traumatized by war.”

Garcia wanted to hit him. But he didn’t. Instead, he changed his tone of voice.

“Come on, Cropsey. What’s eating you? You afraid of something? If you weren’t such an asshole, you could be a great Marine.”

Cropsey just stared at him. Pale eyes in a fading face as the dark came down. As insolent as the Arab girl.

“We’ll settle this another time,” Garcia told him. “Meanwhile, I don’t want to hear one more word about that girl. That’s an order.”

Cropsey shrugged.

“You clean your weapon?” Garcia asked him. He wanted things to be normal. As normal as they could be in war. And he felt that Cropsey was getting the better of him.

“My weapon’s always clean, Sergeant.”

“Then go in and get some sleep.”

Cropsey pivoted and pushed aside the drapery.

Just in time for both of them to see the girl. She was standing at the doorway of their room. With a grenade in her hand.

For an instant, her eyes met Garcia’s. Then she tossed the grenade into the room and ran.

Cropsey began to swing up his weapon, but Garcia pulled him to the ground. Just before the explosion.

The blast blew out the light and thickened the air with dust and smoke.

“That little cunt,” Cropsey screamed. Then they were both on their feet. Weapons up. Heading for the room into which the girl had fled. Kicking masonry scraps out of the way.

“In first,” Cropsey yelled.

“Got your back.”

“Grenade!”
Crospey screamed. He dived forward.

Garcia hurled himself back out through the doorway.

As he hit the ground, the concussion slammed him. And he realized what had just happened, as if watching an instant replay.

Cropsey had thrown himself on top of the grenade.

Garcia stormed back into the house. There were moans now. A male voice. Not Cropsey. And shouting upstairs. Boots thumping.

“Everybody stay put,” Garcia shouted.

He rushed toward the room in which the girl and her family had been promised a refuge. Disregarding everything but the need to spill his rage.

He emptied one magazine blindly into the darkness. Then he pulled another magazine from his vest and shot it dry.

He reloaded. But he didn’t pull the trigger immediately. He listened.

When he heard a stuttering groan, he spent the third mag in the direction of the sound.

With the room silenced, Garcia dropped to the ground, cradling his weapon amid the dust and smoke.

When the firing stopped, Corporal Tony Gallotti waited for a voice, a command. But all he heard was a faint moan from below: a Marine.

“Sergeant Garcia?”

No reply.

“Sergeant Garcia?”

Gallotti flipped down the night-vision device on his helmet. Peering through the dust and debris.

A voice from down below called, “Sergeant Garcia?”

That was Corporal Banks. Yelling in from the doorway.

“It’s Gallotti. I’m coming down from the second deck. Tyrrell, take my back. Yon, you’re overwatch.
Corpsman! Marines down!
”

As Gallotti felt his way down the stairs, adjusting to the spook-light in his reticle, he spotted Sergeant Garcia. Slumped against the wall. Not moving.

“Sergeant G? Yo, Sergeant Garcia?”

Then he saw the body. What was left of it. Through the smoke, he couldn’t identify the Marine.

He thought he saw Garcia’s chest heave.

“Corpsman!”

Moaning haunted the background. It sounded like it might be Larsen.

Gallotti crossed the hall to where Garcia sat. Breathing all right.
No blood-shine. Then the corporal saw that Garcia’s hand rested on a helmet containing a severed head.

Gallotti flipped up the night-sight and tore the flashlight off his armored vest. With the red light in his face, Garcia looked up. He was crying, but there was no par tic u lar expression on his face. Tears streaked the dust caked on his cheeks.

Garcia dropped his head again.

“Sergeant Garcia? You okay? Hey?”

The sergeant didn’t respond.

More boots. A lot more boots. More voices. Murphy, the corpsman, spoke from the corporal’s rear.

“Who’s down.”

“I think it’s Larsen. In there. Just check it out, Murph.”

The corporal squatted by Garcia. He passed his flashlight in front of the sergeant’s face. “You okay, Sergeant Garcia? You hit, man?”

Garcia looked up. So abruptly that the corporal recoiled.

“That’s Cropsey’s head,” he told Gallotti. “We have to put him back together.”

Garcia hoisted himself to his feet, sliding up the wall, thrusting his body armor against the force of gravity. He walked outside.

“Sergeant G? You all right?”

Garcia didn’t speak again until they were in the courtyard. With Marines gathering from beyond the compound. Captain Cunningham materialized. The company commander had washed his face and shaved.

The captain rushed up to Garcia and Gallotti.

“What happened?”

Gallotti was about to speak for the sergeant, to cover for him, but Garcia’s shoulders relaxed, and he answered for himself.

“We didn’t check the women, sir. I mean, we kept our hands off them, didn’t frisk them or anything. I was worried about things getting out of hand.” Garcia’s voice was flat, as if he were reporting on missing tent pegs. “She looked like a kid, sir. Not a little kid. But a kid. She tossed a grenade into the room where Larsen and Polanski were bunking. It was quick, sir. Me and Cropsey went after her. I’d been giving him some counseling outside the doorway. Cropsey
went in first. And she flipped out another grenade. He jumped on it.” Garcia looked past the captain and into the night. “I think I killed them all, sir. There were three of them, and I think I killed them all.”

The captain turned to the gathering Marines. “First Sergeant?”

“He’s checking the OPs, sir.”

“Gunny Matthews?”

“Sir?”

“I want every Arab in this ville strip-searched.”

“The women, sir?”

“Girls, women. Give them what privacy you can, and no nonsense. But everyone gets searched. Down to their underwear. Two Marines present at all times. Pass the word.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You all right, Sergeant Garcia?”

“Cropsey threw himself on the grenade, sir.”

“You told me that.”

“I don’t know why he did it, sir.”

“He was a good Marine.”

But Garcia was stubborn. “I just don’t know why he did it.”
“Make a hole!”
The corpsman and another Marine lugged out a stretcher.

It was Larsen. His face had been erased. His eyes were gone. The cavity where his mouth had been bubbled pink over scarlet meat.

“I knew the girl was trouble, sir,” Garcia said. “I just didn’t know what kind of trouble. How could she do some crazy shit like that? I mean, she was a kid.
Why
would she do that?”

“She’s dead now?” the captain asked. As if he hadn’t heard all that had been said to him.

“I fucking hope so,” Garcia told him.

1091ST COMBAT SUPPORT HOSPITAL, ZIKHRON YA’AKOV

The patient evacuation holding area had gone quiet. Now and then, the sound of a man confused by pain and drugs rose and fell
away, but the new calm seemed almost eerie to Major Nasr. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he lay intermittently aware of the battery of clamps, splints, ban dages, and tubes controlling his body, only to find himself back in Nazareth again, being beaten for reasons he couldn’t remember or imagining that he’d pissed himself bloody again.

Had he pissed himself again? He wasn’t sure. He wanted to know but couldn’t tell for certain. Then he decided, again, that he didn’t care.

He counted the crucified men. Thirty-six. He counted them again. Thirty-seven. Again. Only thirty-six.

Why wouldn’t the number come right?

Where was he? The doctor was there. No, that had been earlier. He was sure it had happened, though. In a lucid moment, he’d asked a doctor how bad his injuries were. The doctor, a lieutenant colonel, told him, “We don’t know. You need tests that we can’t do here. But you’re going to live.”

To live.

What would they tell his parents? He wished he could speak to his father first, before they got to him. His father, who had always seemed so strong but wasn’t.

The pain was so strange. He knew it was there. The way you knew another person was in the room, even though you couldn’t see him. Plenty of painkillers racing through his bloodstream. But the pain was still there. Dressed up in a bizarre costume.

Guess who I am?

Pain, in an Arab robe. In a crisp uniform patterned on the British military of a previous century. Only Arabs wore those Sam Browne belts nowadays.

He was an Arab.

Was he? What did
that
mean? Wasn’t being a Christian more important? Being an American?

It was all in the blood. It would be there after the painkillers thinned out. You knew things with your blood. Things that others couldn’t understand.

An officer in battle dress had tried to ask him questions, overriding
the nurse and then the doctor. It was urgent. What was urgent? “I have to ask you a few questions . . . I’m sorry . . . The Corps G-2 needs to know . . .”

Who had a need to know? What could be known, anyway? A hundred transfusions wouldn’t change what he knew in his blood.

I know that I am still alive. In a field hospital. I know . . . that I’m going to live.

Nasr wondered if he’d be able to have sex. The boots of Arab policemen gravitated toward testicles. Testicles and kidneys.

He’d always heard that badly wounded men wanted their mothers. But he found his thoughts returning to his father. Who had seemed so shockingly frail, so bewildered. “But my son . . . He is in the specialty forces . . .”

Dad, it’s going to be okay. You hear me?

Had he accomplished his mission? In Nazareth? Who had he better served? His own kind, or the enemy? But who were “his own kind?”

Not them, not them.
American
. I’m an American. Dad, we’re Americans. They can’t change that.

A charley horse in his left leg made him cry out. The leg was immobilized, and he couldn’t cock it up to ease the spasm. It seemed worse than the pain he’d felt during his beating. Or after.

Then it subsided. “These things, too, shall pass away.”

If he could revisit any old girlfriend, who would it be?

That didn’t work. For him, it was always the one he was going to meet. The perfect one. Who was waiting.

The nurse who had come into his field of vision while he was lucid had looked like a pit bull. While he was in ROTC in college, he’d had to read
A Farewell to Arms
for a survey of 20th-century American literature. It struck him now as the most dishonest book he’d ever read.

Dad, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry. They’re not going to take you and Mom to any camps.

He faded again, swirling in and out of dreams of torture. He was in the snack bar at the bowling alley on Ft. Bragg. He told them they had to stop because there were children watching. Then he
was back in the Bradley that had evacuated him from Nazareth. But that was impossible. That had to be a dream, because he was already in the field hospital. He was sure of it.

I did my duty, he wanted to scream. I did all I could do.

It wasn’t a bowling alley after all. And
he
was doing the torturing. With kitchen knives.

Nasr woke. To the fitful quiet of the evacuation ward. It took him a moment to get a grip on reality. Then, all at once, everything seemed clear.

He was going to
live
.

Dad, I’m going to live. Everything will be okay.

A man in scrubs loomed over him. The man wore a surgical mask. He held up a syringe.

“Who are you?” Nasr asked, alerting.

“A friend,” the man said. He stabbed the needle into Nasr’s forearm.

A fierce burn spread up Nasr’s arm and over his body. In just under two minutes, he was dead.