What I Walked Away With

            by Ian Flanagan

 

I knew I had to get up, but you know when you’re in so much pain you can’t even remember how to stand; no, you probably don’t. Well, that’s what it’s like, I felt like I was splitting limb from limb. My eyes rolled, my head throbbed, and my ears rang, and the rest of me hurt so bad I couldn’t even feel it. I still can’t feel some of it.

Over four thousand Americans have died in this war already, and less than a quarter of them in the glory of battle. Most guys go out the same as Joey Barone of Queens, or Tobi Guilara of Flintstone, Indiana, or Rodna Devensworth of Oakland. I mean nobody dreamed of bein’ shot down in their prime, going out guns ablaze, but after you watch your best friend take a Sunday drive over a homemade landmine you realize there’s no glory in death. So, maybe, even though their ain’t no glory, there might be something to say in that letter home. Something like, “Your son died defending democracy, peace, honor. He was shot down even when every shred of him wanted to fight on.” There’s at least some show of dignity there, but a letter that reads, “Rodna was a woman that drew upon herself for strength, and was blown up eating a chocolate and bar, riding shotgun on a medical convoy,” doesn’t quite have a war hero ring to it.

It’s hard to think that parking your ass on a truck for a two hour ride is more likely to get you killed than charging into a hail of bullets to capture a fuckin’ sand dune. But that’s how it goes. The tanks, the planes, the mechies capture the country, but us grunts, well, we get the fun part. We get to sit with our thumbs up our butts at the corner of Mohammed’s Video Rental and the Golden Goat Grocery. You can’t have an M1A1 tank patrol the streets, markets, laundries, sewers, goat farms, chicken farms, rat farms; we get to occupy the country.

It’s as boring as Grandma’s collection of commemorative plates, and as dangerous as her five alarm chili. Guys get blown up or shot every fuckin’ day, yet somehow when you look out onto Ali Kara street, and it’s quiet as shit, it’s damn boring. People say war is hell, that’s only half true. One day it’s hell and the next it’s a PTA meeting.

You’d think after three years of free elections and a functioning government we could leave, or maybe, you’d think that at least we could put our minds at rest for a day or two. It’s just when you think things are gonna’ be alright, or just when you let your mind drift for a second. That’s what Joey did, stepped out from his post for a minute, just to get some air after a three day sand storm, and pow, caught a slug right in the gut; we never did find the sniper.

Occupying the country can be dangerous in many ways, the most important being that you want to care for the people, you want to do anything to help. Like Tobi, leadin’ a supply convoy, saw a hurt kid on the side of the road and, wouldn’t you know, stopped the whole damn thing to go help. He grabbed his medkit, jumped from the hmvy and ran to the kids side. Soon as he tore open the kid’s shirt Tobi’s head blew apart. Kid was fuckin’ booby-trapped. You can’t even help when you want to; war fucks with your head.

The gravel from the ditch gnawed at my palms as a slowly pushed myself up. I was moving in silence, silence save for the ringing in my head. I lifted a hand, and tenderly wiped the blood from my eyes; I knew I was fucked up something fierce. My head swam and wiping the blood was an effort in and of itself. The ground was thumping; I could feel the vibrations through my teeth. There were explosions still going off.

            Tentatively I raised my head, enough to see onto the road. It was strewn with the remnants of what used to be our convoy. Three hummers and a couple of trucks were now ripped apart and burning. Tires let off a thick, black smoke, that smelled - wait no, it didn’t, not that time. It was then I went cross-eyed and saw my nose staring right back at my left eye; it was bent completely sideways.

            Bodies, or at least parts of them, were scattered across the highway. We had upwards of a hundred and fifty men riding with us that day from Baghdad to an outlying suburb Sari-Qi. It was like in the comic books, the limbs trailed blood lines from them, sometimes stretching fifteen feet.

            A mortar, or a RPG, I don’t know, landed ten feet away, I was showered with dirt and rocks. It blew dust into the air, a haze now surrounded the highway. Lights of exploding bombs came and went, illuminating the thick air. My head, still doing the fifty meter freestyle, when I pulled myself onto the road. Probably not the smartest idea, but who’s in control when shit like this goes down? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

            The road was rougher than the ditch I had ventured from; crawling along just got me cut up. My forearms were showing crimson through long gashes and droplets were pooling where my shirt had worn thin. Then, a scream, I could hear, and along with that scream came the dull thuds as the shells impacted the ground. Gun chatter answered the mortars.

            “Tom! Tom!”

            My name, oh god, people were still alive.

            “Tom, what the fuck are you doing!? Get the fuck over here!” A different voice, but it was my name for sure.

            “Where the shit are you guys?” I couldn’t see through the blood, the dust, the haze. There was the gray of the road and the red of everything else.

            “Get the fuck up and run!”

            I kicked my leg under me and pushed, but as I did the burns across my back tore open what little healing they had done in the last ten minutes, and I fell back down. I screamed, I heard it from outside myself. I screamed.

            “Fuck man, shit I can’t come get you, shit’s bouncing all over!”

            I had to stand, crawl, squirm, slither, something. I had to get across this road. I had people on the other side. They knew me, they wanted me, they needed me. I knelt, then, cocking my right leg first, stood. My feet kicked rocks and shell fragments and what looked like a thumb as I took a few blundering steps, but after that the pain caught up with me. Pain that is so tangible you can taste it. My leg collapsed and I fell straight down, the pavement coming up to connect with my shoulder. Gravel imbedded itself in the open burns, and all went black.

            I gradually regained consciousness over the next six days; fading in and out for seconds, then minutes, then hours at a time. During those windows I could catch snippets of my surroundings, but until I was fully awake I didn’t have the time to piece them all together. There was white, and lots of it, lights, walls, sheets, computers, and people. People dressed all in white. Then there was the noise; noise that was not just uncomforting, but was down right fuckin’ terrifying. I think it was the screams, they came and went, but were always louder than I had thought a person could be. But it might not have been, could have been the goddamned bleep, bleep, bleep of the machine next to me. Who knows then the fucking thing could just laid out one very long note, and all would have been over.

            By the seventh day I was able to keep my eyes open and my thoughts straight. I was in a hospital, if you can even call it that. It was a fuckin’ warehouse, but to the staff’s credit, it functioned just as well as the circumstances would permit. Light poured in through the giant skylights and bounced off the heart-monitors. At night the same effect was reached, but with artificial lights that were hung from the high ceiling. The place was never dark, never really dark, but for many like myself, it could be dark for days at a time. Whitewashed walls had been brought in and tacked up against the sheet metal of the building. They floors were gray, but swept clean, and kept sterilized. Cots were lined up for a hundred feet in each direction, with four cots and six walkways going across. Any hour of the day the place was bustling; murmuring with the sound of soft voices, exploding with cries of pain. Doctors, nurses, medics, running; and it never slowed down.

            After being strung up in a full goddamned bodycast for two weeks lying there I figured I could go home, but the answer was the same as every other day, I was too unstable to be moved. This statement was always followed by a long list of pretty fucking horrifying things that could happen if they did attempt to move me.

            The one thing that was nice about the place was that they had a great big TV. It was rigged up so it was about 15 feet off the ground and could be seen from all around. My bed was front and center. It was constantly tuned to one of about four different twenty four hour news stations. It was TV from home and every guy or gal in there was fucking glued to it. They’d only turn away to check out a local scream, or if a pool of blood was getting awfully close.

            I’m sure the CO’s thought it would be nice for the boys to watch a little tube from back home. But we weren’t glued to it because it was a little piece of home. We didn’t watch it because there was something particularly interesting on. We didn’t even stare at it for hours on end because there was nothing better to do.

At first I watched just because it was there, but after a few days of being fully aware of my surroundings it became something more. I watched the commercials, the news stories, the editorials, everything I saw apart from me. Totally separate. There were terribly grave news stories; one sick son of a bitch that killed his little baby girl or another about a car accident that killed fifteen people. Then there were stories that couldn’t even be qualified as news; a cat that could tap dance, pigeons that had been roosting in a church in great numbers lately.

It wasn’t that there was an anti-war sentiment to what I was seeing. Hell I’m not exactly fond of it myself. I’m here because it’s my job. People are entitled to their own damn opinions, for the war or against, doesn’t matter as long as you recognize that it’s fuckin’ happening.

I was watching a cat food commercial the other day, a nurse had just finished re-wrapping my chest and right arm, when they brought in a guy who wasn’t even whole. Poor bastard was missing both of his legs. He was screaming too, and fighting, grabbing the doctors and nurses around him, thrashing and crying. I wanted to help, with all my soul I wanted to help, but I couldn’t even wiggle my toes or move my neck more than a few degrees.

He died later that night, while a reporter warned of a brush fire, apparently started by a man burning his garbage.

You see this is a dirty war; this is a war where the people back home lost interest. They were fully behind and supported moving into Iraq, but it’s gone beyond the time frame they had in mind, and since it’s not running to their schedule they might as well just block it out.

Watching twenty hours a day and, save for a few things, the closest they came to reporting on the war was an updated death count scrolling along the bottom of the screen right along with the stock prices. There was, of course, the uproar about “mistreatment of prisoners” in American prisoner of war camps. I was watching the Senate debate some fucking bureaucratic angle on the subject when I met Jimmy Bee.

Well, Jimmy never actually said anything, so I guess I can’t say I met him. He was brought in on a stretcher and had quite a few IV’s stuck in him. The doctor and two medics who brought him in, and a few more of the hostpital’s medical staff got to talkin’ out of ear shot. Then a nurse, with a dry, sunken face and downcast eyes, sombered over and with a smile of familiarity looked up at me and said “Tom, this is Jimmy Bee, can you keep him company for a little bit.”

I was so relieved to be able to help, I didn’t think what was goin’ on, maybe I didn’t want to know. I just started talking, and for the next few hours did nothing but. I told him my life, plain and simple; about my brother, and my home, highschool, girls, movies, what I’m goin’ do when I get back home. I don’t really know when Jimmy stopped listening, I wanna’ believe it was right up until he passed on, cept’ I don’t know when that happened either.

The whole time I talked the TV was covering a Yacht Club’s lawsuit with the state of New York.

Maybe I’m not the most patriotic person out there, but I’ll be damned if I ever forget what went on here. It was two faced war, with evil and good, and ever should the American people deny the honor of memory that so desperately deserve it.