War Porn (27 page)

“Other stuff?”

“Yeah. Command looked the other way as long as we kept it quiet.”

“What
. . . 
what did she do with the money?”

“She hid it, saving it for when she got out. She had her own cell, for privacy. We took care of her, you know, treated her pretty good, gave her extra MREs, cigarettes, shit from Any Soldier packages back home. Connie was alright. Some of the Army bitches complained about the guys, you know, pimping her, but nothing ever really happened. It never went official.”

“That's awful.”

“Oh, shit. You're totally right. I'll put it away, then.” Aaron reached for his thumb drive.

“No, wait,” Matt said. “It's awful, but I think I should see it. So I know what it's like. I should know what it's like.”

“Your call, Chief. You wanna click forward?”

“Yeah,” Matt said, then regretted it.

A young, mustached Iraqi man lay naked on the floor of a cell, his face ruptured and bleeding, his hands secured behind his back with zip-ties. A soldier stood with one boot on the back of his neck, grinning at the camera.

“That's Woolsley. We
. . . 
he was stressing the prisoner, you know, in preparation for an information session, and the guy got a little crazy, so we
. . . 
we kept running him into the bars until he fell over. Fucked him up pretty bad. He lost a bunch of teeth,” Aaron said, sliding his finger along the right side of his upper lip.

“Are these torture pictures?”

“I worked in detention.”

“Did you
. . . 
torture
. . . 
people?”

“Legally?”

“Were you actually involved in doing this?”

“I told you,” Aaron said. “I took pictures. Nobody's making you look. All you gotta do is pull out. Listen. You think about it while I get another beer. You want one?”

“Uh
. . . 
sure.”

Aaron got up and rummaged in the fridge while Matt stared at the man standing with his boot on the naked man's neck, the naked man's split lip and gashed face, his blood shiny on the concrete floor.

Aaron brought back two beers and handed one to Matt.

“What's that?” he asked.

“What?”

“In his butt. What is that?

“Oh, we made him stick a chemlight in his ass.”

“A what?”

“A chemlight. It's a little plastic, you know, a glowstick. They're about as big around as your thumb. You bend it and it breaks this glass capsule inside so it glows. It's a chemical thing. It doesn't really hurt, it's just invasive, and the hadjis don't know how the chemicals work so they freak the fuck out. But like I said, they're not that big, so as long as you don't tense up, it's not painful.”

“How would you know?”

“I've had bigger shits. I mean, you get your prostate checked,
right? It's not any bigger than that. It's just uncomfortable.”

“And humiliating.”

“Yeah, but so's a fucking prostate exam.”

“I don't think they're the same.”

“It was standard operating procedure. Not a big deal.”

“That's fucked up.”

“It gets better. Click forward.”

“Wait. I just
. . . 
So
. . . 
you
tortured
people?”

“Enhanced interrogation, technically. Whatever you want to call it, I told you, I fucking held the camera. How many times I gotta say that? Click forward.”

“I didn't know what to think. All I could do was imagine the worst.”

“Oh, Wendy,” Rachel said, rubbing her shoulder.

“It's just all so intense. After he called, after everything, after I thought he was dead, he's alive again and we keep talking on the phone and I can't stop thinking about him and I can't sleep and I start thinking about moving back to Tucson or him moving here and basically I'm in this crazy emotional spiral for like a week and that's part of why—I mean, I won't say I went to Grand Junction Thursday explicitly planning to fuck David T. Greene, but I needed something, some kind of counterweight, some blockage to put between Aaron and me. Something to keep me from falling.”

Mel grunted.

“But when he showed up, I knew. I knew. I knew instantly that we'd have a good time but that was it. Because I just can't. I've done this kind of thing and I can't anymore. There's something self-destructive in him, you know, that bad-boy thing, and the chaos energy's thrilling, but there are limits.” Wendy looked into the fire. She picked up a stick and poked at the coals. “I don't know. Sometimes I get the feeling he just doesn't care what happens anymore. He didn't used to be like that.”

“Like with Xena,” Mel said.

“That wasn't his fault,” Rachel told her.

The next picture showed a naked Iraqi man wearing panties on his face, handcuffed to a metal grating on the wall, passed out and dangling by his hands. A tall Hispanic soldier stood next to him.

“I can't remember this puck's name. It was like Z something. Zabar
. . . 
Zartan
. . . 
Zazar
. . . 
Anyway, that's a stress position. You keep them handcuffed like that for hours. You don't give them water, because if you do, they have to piss and then you have to unhook them and everything and it's a huge hassle. You don't feed them, either, because if you do that, then they have to shit. Click forward.”

“Can't you go to the media or something?”

“Sure. You see this guy?” he pointed to the soldier in the photo.

“Yeah.”

“That's Staff Sergeant Cortázar. He took us all aside after Abu G broke and—this conversation never officially happened, realize—and told us that because of one stupid shit, because of that blue falcon Joe Darby who turned in the photos, a whole bunch of good soldiers who did their jobs, who were doing
what they were told
, were now getting totally fucked by the system. It wasn't their commanders getting punished, it wasn't Dirty Sanchez or Rummy or Dubya, it was the men and women
doing their jobs
. And not only that, but this fuck Joe Darby was jeopardizing the whole intel-collection apparatus in Iraq, which put the lives of our fellow soldiers at risk. Those pictures fucked up the whole occupation. Fucking Joe Darby got American soldiers killed.”

“But . . .”

“We didn't
decide
to do this shit. We didn't
ask
for the torture detail. Staff Sergeant Cortázar told us to do this shit because Lieutenant Viers told
him
to do this shit, and Captain Weems, the company commander, told
him
to do this shit and so on up the fucking chain of command. Plus, our guidance with the OGA fucks was full cooperation. They say jump, we don't ask how high, we don't ask shit. We jump. Now these orders were put never in writing, realize. Everything was verbal. The OGA guys go straight back to Langley or whatever cesspool they ooze out of, and we're their tools. We did what we were told to, just like those kids in Abu G. So Sergeant Cortázar is all like, here's the deal. Think about this fact: if we decide to talk to somebody, show somebody pictures, we better damn well think about who exactly is going to be getting it in the ass. Bush? Rumsfeld? The general? The CO? Or your battle buddy?”

Aaron took a drink of beer. “The fact of the matter is, fucked up as it may be, most of these fucking hadjis didn't know shit. I'd say the majority of them were locked up by mistake, or at best they were grunts who didn't know their ass from al-Qaeda. It's a little depressing when you think about it. But if I had a problem with what was going
on—which I did, of course, I'm a red-blooded American, right?—then the time for me to address that was before I fucking did it, before it got done, or at the very least while it was happening. Not afterwards. Not later. Not now. Something else Sergeant Cortázar said that stuck with me is that once you make a decision, once you do something, you can't take it back. And he's right. You don't get to say ‘Oh, wait, what I did was wrong, so now I want to get someone else in trouble so I can feel better.' If it was wrong, it was wrong. But I did it. Nothing can change that. Click forward.”

Dahlia lay back in the grass, staring into a sky so black it was purple, watching Perseus and Cassiopeia chase each other across the galaxy. “Hey—you guys want to fire another bowl? Maybe do some shots?”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Let's party like it's 1999.”

“I don't know,” Rachel said.

“Girl, you got to live a little,” Dahlia said. “It's a gorgeous night, we've got plenty of stuff to keep us going, and when was the last time you partied till dawn? C'mon. Sunrise. I want to feel like I did something epic for once.”

“Let's do it, man,” Mel said.

“Yeah,” said Wendy. “C'mon.”

“You think the boys'll want to?” Rachel asked.

“Fuck the boys,” said Wendy.

“I suspect they will,” Dahlia said, “but regardless, Wendy's right. Fuck 'em. We can have us a girl's night while they, whatever, jerk each other off and talk about computers.”

“They're in there now,” said Rachel.

“Where?”

“They're on the computer. They've been in there awhile.”

“I bet Matt's showing him that dumb program.”

“It's not dumb,” Wendy said.

“That's sweet, Wendy, but it kinda is. It's just blobs of color you can't tell apart, and it doesn't even really work. Plus, he can't seem to finish. I mean, I don't want to talk about him behind his back . . .”

“Even though that's what you're doing.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe you're right. I'm just tired of hearing about it.”

“I'm guessing Aaron will be too in about five minutes.”

“So let's get lit then before they come out and start talking about complex visual representations of turbulent systems.
Please
.”

There was a line of men in prison garb kneeling, black bags over their heads, their hands zip-tied behind them. Someone whose face was out of the shot was standing over them prodding one in the back with a baton.

“So, you get a bunch of new guys in and you have to establish control. You can't fuck around. We'd line them all up and get them down and scream at them for about twenty minutes, poking them with batons and kicking them, then we'd leave them there for a few hours with a couple dudes and if they moved, the two guards would scream at them and knock them down. Click forward.”

One prisoner was standing in front of the line of kneeling prisoners. The kneeling ones' hoods had been removed and they all looked up at the man standing over them. A male American soldier stood behind the standing prisoner, a female soldier next to him. The soldiers wore blue surgical gloves. The male soldier had a pair of scissors.

“This is sort of a mass technique we developed with the OGAs for when a bunch of fresh pucks came in. So after fucking with them for a while, we take one out of the line, the biggest fucker in the group, and stand him up in front. Then we take off their hoods, right, but not his, so they can watch. Then your point man here, with the scissors, Grimes in this case, he cuts open the prisoner's outfit and strips him and whichever female we have, that's Littleton, she points at his cock and laughs. Click forward.”

The standing man was naked now except for the hood, and the female soldier was pointing at his genitals and laughing.

“It's all a big show we put on. We—Grimes—pokes this guy in the ribs, pokes him in the butt, while Littleton laughs and points at his cock, then we give him one good whack in the belly and he goes down. Bam. Makes a huge impression. Next.”

The naked and hooded man was on the ground and Grimes's boot was slamming into his stomach.

“That's a good one. Action shots are hard. The boot's a little blurry but you can see the impact. I like that picture. That's a good one.”

“That's fucked up. This is fucked up.”

“Yeah. You mentioned that. Next.”

Matt clicked forward to a close-up head-and-shoulders of a mangled, bloody face. A middle-aged man with a thick gray mustache.

“That dude died. I mean, he was dead when I took the picture.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Fuck no. We just stressed him to the point where his body failed. He was kinda old, anyway, and the older ones can't take much. I wished we'd had dogs. Dogs would have made life so much easier. We complained about that all the time, but our battalion K-9 had been tasked out to some other bullshit. It's totally easy to stress dudes with dogs, and you don't even have to touch 'em. Dogs scare the shit out of people. Next.”