One September Morning (19 page)

Iraq
Emjay

“I
hate this shit…night patrol.” Antoine Hilliard turns the Humvee onto the main highway, a dangerous stretch of road.

“You hate everything here,” Emjay says, never taking his eyes off the road ahead. Although Hilliard is driving, you need every set of eyes watching out for bombs tucked into oil drums or suitcases or cars abandoned by the roadside. Out here, day or night, every object is suspicious, every man a suspect.

In the patches of light from tall street lamps you can see rubble where IEDs, improvised explosive devices, have blown up the concrete divider. Emjay subconsciously begins to count the scars from bombs that have torn up the median, then stops himself. He can’t afford to lose focus.

The Humvee moves away from a housing development on the outskirts of Fallujah, plunging into a stretch of unlit highway. Emjay straps on his NOD, which allows him to see details in the darkness, though it’s all through a greenish haze.

“Guys—” From the back of the Humvee, Spinelli taps on Emjay’s seat to get his attention. “We have to go back to the FOB. My NOD’s not working.”

“Fucking Spinelli,” Hilliard grumbles.

Spinelli has been so quiet, Emjay almost forgot he was back there. Usually, night patrols are carried out by a team of four, but everything got shifted around when John went down. Emjay now has to partner with the kid, and with Noah stateside on leave, Chenowith is pushing Hilliard, “blurred vision or not,” to get his ass out on patrols and take Noah’s place as field medic. “Your guys need you out there,” Chenowith told Hilliard, pulling the buddy card on him. The platoon is all messed up now, guys jockeying to form teams, with John dead and Noah home on leave. But it’s all in a day’s work at Camp Despair.

“We’re not going back,” Hilliard says.

“But my NOD’s broken. I can’t see anything.”

“Let me take a look,” Emjay offers, twisting around to take the device from the kid, who reminded him of a teen who’d just blown a homework assignment. Christ, the army was really sinking low, recruiting snot-nosed boys and sending them here, to the fifth level of hell.

“If we go back now, Chenowith will send us out, make us start patrolling at the first checkpoint again,” Hilliard complains. “I am not driving back to camp.”

“Sorry, man,” Spinelli says. “It’s not my fault.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong, because you should have checked the fucking equipment before we left the fucking FOB.” As he talks, Hilliard’s head tilts from side to side on his large square body, and Emjay is reminded how much he looks like one of those giant tortoises. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Of all the guys in the platoon, Hilliard is the one who spends the most time lifting weights, and the most time in front of the mirror. Lassiter sometimes calls him “Hans und Franz,” which really pisses Hilliard off, but when you live in close quarters with eight guys, everybody gets some ribbing.

Spinelli’s NOD is definitely not working, but Emjay quickly homes in on the problem. “It’s been disabled. There’s a piece missing,” Emjay says. “I had the same problem with mine. I don’t know how it got screwed up.”
It looks like someone messed with it, just like mine,
Emjay thinks, but he doesn’t say that aloud.

“Can you fix it?” Spinelli asks.

“Back at the base, sure. I don’t know about right now.” Emjay turns the night-vision device over in his hands. “You gotta stay on top of this stuff, Spinelli.”

“I checked it last week.”

“Christ, Spinelli. A week in the desert is a fucking eternity.” Hilliard slows the Humvee and begins to pull over.

“What you got?” Twenty yards ahead, a compact car stands with its hood open. Emjay can see one man leaning over the hood.

“Somebody breaking curfew.” Hilliard puts the Humvee in park and straps on his own NOD.

“Hold up,” Emjay tells him as he shoves the NOD back toward Spinelli and reaches for his M-16.

In the seconds that Emjay makes those adjustments, Hilliard opens his door, climbs out. “Stay where you are!” he shouts to the man leaning over the disabled car.

The rest happens in slow motion…the viscous pace of a nightmare.

Hilliard steps forward, yelling. “Stay where you are!”

But the man behind the disabled car straightens and bolts, lunging toward them.

Through the windshield of the Humvee, in the green light of his NOD, Emjay can make out the vest—the thick contraption strapped over the man’s torso.

A suicide vest.

The man hurtles himself toward them, head bent, on his toes like a track runner.

Hilliard digs in his heels, about to back off, when there is a flash of white.

A percussive jolt that obliterates all sound but a loud ringing in the head, a tremor in the bones.

And suddenly it’s raining, black, sticky dirt and dust and gravel.

And blood.

Emjay is trying to get out of the Humvee and get to Hilliard, but at the same time he realizes he’s not moving. He’s frozen in the wake of the explosion, frozen and stunned.

“Oh, God,” Spinelli whimpers behind him. “Oh, God. You okay?”

“I think so.” Emjay’s body is shaking all over, but at least he can feel. He can move, goddammit. He throws himself into the door to push it open and nearly falls out. The dust is thick and gritty, hard to see, but he needs to get to Hilliard.

“Hilliard!” He rounds the front of the Humvee and pauses. Hilliard’s body lies face down, his square torso and head covered in blood…the rest of him gone.

“Oh, God!” Spinelli sobs behind him. “My head. I’m bleeding!”

Emjay stumbles out of the helicopter and starts to walk across the roof of the army hospital in Baghdad, but two medics grab him under the arms and lead him to a wheelchair.

“I can do it,” Emjay shouts back at the medic pushing him, but his voice is lost in the thrum of engine and whirring blades.

The wheelchair is pushed up to the elevator, and the medic walks into his line of vision and presses the button. The medic is a small mountain of a woman in scrubs—navy blue scrubs. Her hair is dark, cut short, her eyes are soulful and languid as honey, and her chocolate skin reminds him of home. How long has it been since he’s seen a woman who isn’t hidden in a black abaya, one he can actually look at without stirring up disgrace and scorn?

“It’s okay, now,” she tells him. “Your C.O. wanted us to check you out, and he’s right. You’re not looking so good.”

He lifts a hand to his head, not sure if the blood on his hand is his own. Still, he rests his cheek against his blood-spattered hand and sobs, so relieved to be in someone else’s hands, at least for the time being.

“It’s okay to cry, honey.” Her hand touches his shoulder, and at that moment he’s sure she’s not a flesh-and-blood woman but an angel. “We’re going to take good care of you,” she says, and to his surprise, now that the moment of danger has passed he begins to tremble and sob.

The men and women of the ER are exceedingly kind to him, wiping the blood and black char off with damp cloths, telling him when and where they will probe. A tall, rangy doctor with a cue-ball head and quick hands removes a piece of shrapnel from Emjay’s neck.

“We’re lucky this is just on the surface,” he says, peering through a magnifying glass strapped to his head that makes him resemble a Cyclops. “Looks like you got lucky this time.”

“No, sir.” Emjay wants to tell the doctor that if he possessed real luck he’d be stateside right now with a beer and tickets to the Redskins game, but conversation is not something he can access anymore in this stunned, stone world. He braces as the nurse swabs his neck with iodine wash, but all he can feel now is the cold.

While Emjay should be able to return to duty in a day or two, Spinelli’s wound is a bit more complicated. An MRI reveals that a piece of shrapnel penetrated his left eye, hence the blood and blurred vision. The ER physician feels confident that Spinelli’s sight can be restored, but the procedure is too specialized for the facility here. They’ll close up the laceration here, then send Spinelli back to the U.S. for further surgery at Walter Reed Hospital.

“You got the golden ticket,” Emjay tells Spinelli, who is seated on the bed across from him.

“Yeah. And all this time I was aiming for my foot.” Spinelli leans back against the pillow and lets out a sob. “Oh, God. I’m still seeing him.”

“Me, too.” But for Emjay, the image of Hilliard’s shredded torso is imposed over the memory of John splayed on the floor, bleeding out in seconds. And his heart is beating fast and furious, like a fire racing through dry brush, out of control. He can’t slow it down, can’t find calm anymore, and the pulsing in his ears is nearly deafening.

“I appreciate what you did for me out there,” Spinelli tells him. “I’m so sorry I fucked up. I didn’t know the night device was broken…I didn’t.” His cheeks are wet, whether from tears or eye wash, Emjay is not sure.

“Your broken NOD probably saved my life,” Emjay says. The Humvee shielded them from most of the blast, and because of Spinelli he stayed in the vehicle a few extra seconds.

“Hilliard was so pissed at me,” Spinelli sniffs. “Hilliard. I can’t believe it.”

Emjay closes his eyes, but the image of Hilliard’s truncated torso is there, haunting him, the sickening sight throbbing like his pulse.

Oh, God, that’s not how Emjay wants to remember this man.

He braces his eyes open and tries to imagine the faces of the people who will miss Antoine Hilliard, his kids and his wife, who sent care packages every week loaded up with nuts and candy and copies of
Body Builder
magazine. There was a mother; Emjay remembers hearing Hilliard talk about her, that she still lived back in Arkansas. And Hilliard used to talk about his friends, a core group in Little Rock, where he’d spent his childhood and attended high school.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Spinelli says.

“I know.”

As Spinelli succumbs to another sob, Emjay stares up at the speckled ceiling tile and realizes that, for all their differences, he and Spinelli suddenly have way too much in common.

“It’s okay to cry, man,” Emjay says over the clamor of his heartbeat, a drum that bangs on and on, out of control. A tear runs down his own cheek, a selfish tear not so much for the lives lost as the ruination of his own life. Never again will he be able to close his eyes without seeing them…the dead. But today was the kid’s first visit to hell and, with that eye injury, it will probably be his last.

Maybe there’s hope for Spinelli. If he leaves here and never comes back, maybe he can forget.

“It’s okay,” he tells Spinelli, spinning a lie. “You’re gonna be all right now.”

Arlington National Cemetery
Madison

W
ho knew a funeral could be like a day at Disney World? The air resonates with the music of a full marching band, soaring strains of trumpets, instruments mingling with the low thrum of bass brass and rumbling drums. Dozens of soldiers in dress blues parade below a towering brown stone archway, the gold stripe down the sides of their trousers bending and straightening in perfect unison. It is a sea of blue punctuated by shiny gold buttons, flat gold-trimmed caps, and silver-bayoneted rifles tipped toward heaven. Sun glints off the bayonets and the cone of the tuba as a gentle autumn breeze teases the flags born by the color guard.

And at the rear of the parade rolls a cart with silver, broad-spoked wheels. The cart is lined with shiny, fringed satin and drawn by two white steeds that make her think of white knights and fairytales. You wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this cart pull up in front of Cinderella’s castle.

Of course, they’re calling the parade a funeral procession, and the costumes are army dress uniforms. And the cart is not a princess’s carriage but a caisson bearing her brother’s ashes.

Oh, God.

That limo ride up the twisty hills of the cemetery was not a ride on Big Thunder Railroad.

The whole funeral is unfurling like a well-planned wedding, and it’s no wonder, after the way her mother massaged every detail.

Mom actually called it the funeral of the century—she’s that into the whole status thing.

Today Mom is working closely with the cemetery’s funeral director, signaling with a nod or a whisper when it’s time to move to the next phase.

Dad is playing the colonel, buttoned into his dress uniform and standing at attention, ready to salute any general who might pass by.

Abby is surrounded by Suz and her college friends, Fanteen and Hitch, who flew in from England, and that reporter guy who was actually embedded in Iraq the same time as John. Suz is great and the college friends are kind of interesting. The British woman, Fanteen, looks sort of goth, with jet black hair and a nose ring. Hard to believe she’s got two kids. Fanteen’s husband is this skinny, very mellow dude and the reporter guy, Flint, seems okay, but surprisingly quiet. She expected him to be bold and pushy, asking lots of questions, but mostly he watches everything. They’re a nice group but they’re Abby’s friends, and none of her friends were able to make the trip all the way out here just to watch her brother get his ashes stowed near some famous presidents.

Noah and Madison seem to be the only outcasts: Noah by choice and Maddy by bad luck. Noah is still in no-talking mode, wild-eyed and weird, so people steer clear of him, and Madison, well, there just aren’t any other sixteen-year-olds in sight. She’s too old to be indulged like a kid and too young for total inclusion in the adult world.

It would be great if she and Noah could hang together, but Noah-Balboa is not himself. Not at all. Besides looking awful, sort of haunted and bony and pale, he’s acting like he’s drunk or stoned on drugs. Drugs were never his thing, and she’s been with him all morning and he hasn’t touched a drop of liquor, so his whacked-out appearance is that much more of a mystery.

And a concern.

When all of this sinks in, when the awful, cold truth really hits her after the fanfare dies down, she and Noah could maybe help each other.

Maybe…if the real Noah shows up.