“Sucking Chest Wound”
Baxter and Smitty and Sgt. Will were sitting in the Bradley’s shade, using one of the folding cots as a couch. It had only been three days since I had seen them, but seemed a lot longer.
“I got me a captain,” said Baxter. He showed me the camouflaged epaulet with some yellow insignia embroidered from the uniform of the Iraqi officer he shot through the lungs.
“The morning y’all left, the Brigade TOC got hit . . . Four killed,” said Sgt. Will. “Then they said dismounts were coming. We formed a perimeter.”
Baxter shot a fast-moving pickup truck, with the captain inside. The captain got out and ran, but they found him lying nearby, still alive.
“Sucking chest wound,” Baxter said, pronouncing the words slowly and deliberately, for effect.
I rummaged around inside the Bradley, collecting my gear. I climbed up on top for the rest of my gear, the familiar old routine of placing a boot on a steel-cable rung, a hand on the bustle rack, lifting the other boot up onto the rear edge of the Bradley’s armored skirt plate, hefting myself up.
There were three stubby M203 grenade rounds lined up on the edge of the armor plate. I planted a boot next to them to climb up. Baxter told me to watch I didn’t knock over any of those grenades.
“One of them fuckers fall off, boom, we’re all dead,” said Baxter. He was probably messing with me. But I don’t know anything about what it takes to set off a 40 mm grenade, so I kept my foot a good three inches away or so on the remaining space on that armor plate as I climbed down. I sensed that Baxter was bored and unhappy.
… On the boulevard, some engineers were now at work getting rid of bodies before the general showed up. They had rubber gloves on and their olive drab cravats were tied over their faces bandit-style against the smell. Two of them were lifting a dead mujahideen by the arms and legs. He looked familiar, but I was seeing him from a different angle this time. The top of his head was gone, and for a moment I had a clear view into his empty cranium, ringed by curly black hair, the interior blackened by congealed blood. His puffy greenish face looked like the primitive decoration on the front of a horrible bowl. The engineers were getting ready to heft him up and over, into the bucket of a large front-end loader that had a lot of hands and feet sticking out of it. We stared.
“It sucks to be you,” our stares told the engineers.
“Yeah. We know. Fuck you,” their stares said back, over the top of their OD cravats. I don’t think I’d ever seen eyes quite like that. Maybe the hate in the eyes of the women who had thrown their bodies over their children at Hindiyah, when we were blowing the hell out of their farm and trying to make nice with them.
Topics: everything
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:01 am on Friday, April 10, 2009
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