We were hoping Sergeant Whitford would just die. No, it was worse than that. We were praying for him to just die.
The bullet that found him had come from ahead of us. It caught him in the throat, sending him plummeting to the cracked, dirty sidewalk, and the rest of us ducked for cover as more shots rang out. Skipping across the unpainted concrete walls of the surrounding buildings, the low-velocity rounds sounded like someone snapping their fingers. I scrambled behind the burned-out hulk of what had once been a station wagon. Pressing my back against the side of the wreck, I caught sight of the blood – a lot of it – splattered across the worn brick façade of the building behind Whitford.
“Man down!” someone yelled, but Corporal Brad Horton was already hustling to where Whitford had fallen, dodging and weaving as more bullets tore into the wall over our heads. I huddled next to the gutted car, certain that I’d avoid a direct shot only to catch one in the ass off the bounce.
“How bad is it?” I shouted, ducking as another bullet came too damned close. Aiming the muzzle of my M16 over the hood of the station wagon, I saw movement from one second floor window of a three-story building fifty yards or so up the street. To either side of me, the rest of the squad had taken up hasty cover behind cars, in doorways, beneath overhangs – whatever was available. They were firing toward the same window, along with whatever other targets presented themselves in or around the buildings lining either side of the narrow, dusty street.
Crouching next to me and hovering over Whitford’s limp form, Brad pressed his dirty, ungloved hand against the ghastly exit wound at the back of the sergeant’s neck. Whitford’s horrific gurgling was plainly audible over the sounds of rifle fire as he struggled for breath, already drowning in his own blood.
“We need evac,” Brad replied without looking up. Using his free hand to pull Whitford’s first aid kit from his cartridge belt and pry open the box’s plastic lid, he fumbled through its contents and retrieved a battle dressing. Blood ran from the bullet hole in Whitford’s throat and between Brad’s fingers with each beat of the wounded sergeant’s heart, but it was easy to see that the flow was ebbing from what it had been just a minute before.
I glanced about the narrow thoroughfare. Cables, clothes lines and other crap were strung between buildings, and vehicles – functional and otherwise – along with various other detritus littered the street and sidewalks. Getting a chopper in here for evac would be impossible, and our truck was parked on the outskirts of town, too big and lacking the maneuverability needed for navigating through the streets. It would take too long for us to haul Whitford back there, even if we weren’t taking fire. He was a goner.
Maybe.
There was more movement in another window. To my left, Tim Perkins loaded a grenade into the launcher mounted below the barrel of his M16 and fired. The 40-millimeter high explosive hit the building inches below the window, the resulting detonation tearing through brick and mortar as a massive hole appeared in the wall. A cloud of dust and rock shrapnel expanded from the point of impact, driven down the street toward us by the breeze wafting between the buildings.
Then, as quickly as it began, the brief skirmish was over. The only sounds we heard were shouts of alarm and panic from other buildings, and we all tried to watch every window at the same time, worried that more guns would appear. None did.
“Everybody sit tight!” shouted Corporal Dale Caruso, assistant squad leader and in charge now that Whitford was down, from where he crouched in an open doorway on the opposite side of the street. “Horton, what’s the story?”
I shifted my stance and saw that Brad was too busy to look away from the frantic treatment of his latest patient. Instead he simply shook his head. Beneath his hands, Whitford had stopped moving. His pupils were fixed and dilated, open and yet seeing nothing.
“He’s gone,” Brad said, wiping his bloody hands along the sides of his filthy desert cammie trousers.
I reached beneath the sweatband of my helmet to wipe my forehead, fighting back tears as I looked upon the unmoving form of Shane Whitford. The sergeant with brass balls and a take-no-shit attitude, he’d taught me more during my first week in-country than I’d learned during my entire first year in the Corps. As untiring as he’d been uncompromising in his standards, he’d saved my life half a dozen times in the four months since I’d rotated in from the States.
“Stay dead,” I pleaded, as much to God as to the sergeant’s unmoving body.
God wasn’t listening, and neither was Whitford.
He lurched, muscle spasms racking his body before he jerked himself to a sitting position. Gazing about with eyes that remained as lifeless as he had been a moment ago, Whitford shrugged off Brad’s attempts to restrain him and pulled himself to his feet. With no apparent regard for the mortal injury he’d suffered and even as blood continued to stream from the wound in his throat, he said nothing as he cradled his M16 in his arms and moved off down the street.
Shane Whitford was dead, his soul hopefully departed and on its way to a better place. All that remained was the shell, which for reasons unknown and perhaps unholy marched on, driven to fight so long as there was an enemy or until someone else blew his fucking head off.
Son of a bitch.
***
Obviously they were corpses. The smell alone was enough to tell you that. Of course, nobody called them that, or “zombies,” or any other stupid shit you hear in those movies. We’re still talking about guys who used to be our buddies, after all. Somebody called them “Lifers” once, after we found out they’d be sticking around. It was more of a morbid descent into gallows humor than anything else, but it started spreading and finally stuck.
Nobody really knew for sure what caused the changes, but the general consensus was that it had to be tied to some kind of chemical weapon attack. Units across the country had reported being exposed to what was first thought to be mustard gas; decades old surplus from those weapons caches everybody said didn’t exist. You can be sure the brass back in Washington knew the truth, and maybe the generals and a few others on the ground here had the scoop, but the rest of us? Well, you know how that always goes.
The first time I saw a Lifer, I about shit my pants. They’re not anything you’re told about when you’re training up back home, and they’re damn sure not starring in any recruiting film. It’s not even like it was a wholly original idea, of course. The Pentagon had already done pretty much the same thing to those of us with the audacity to still be breathing.
You’ve probably heard or read about “Stop Loss,” a cute euphemism for the practice of involuntarily extending the enlistment contracts of service members during time of war. In other words, the government owns our asses so long as they see fit. Everybody who signs the line and swears the oath knows about the policy, or else they’re too stupid to have read the contract before they signed it. Still, it didn’t make it any less a shitty deal when the Pentagon implemented it. The talking heads on all the news shows kept saying it was a “short-term policy,” but I knew that Whitford had recently started his third tour over here, and his enlistment was supposed to be up two years ago.
Do the math.
The brass certainly seemed pretty damned proud of themselves when they devised this new wrinkle to “Stop Loss.” No flag-draped coffins or hero’s funeral for those poor bastards. Just like squeezing the last bit of juice out of a dying battery or the last bits of flavor from a bag of exhausted tea leaves, it was decided that since the Lifers were still capable of following rudimentary orders, there was no sense in sending them home.
And why the hell not, right? Officers or enlisted types, Lifers were stripped of rank, went where they were told to go and did what they were told to do. They never said a fucking thing; didn’t question orders, or bitch about the heat or the chow. There were no complaints about the maintenance backlog on the Humvees, or the lack of body armor or even just a decent pair of skivvies that might keep your nutsack from chafing. So far as the higher-ups were concerned, Lifers were the perfect little soldiers, at least until they got shredded by machinegun fire or stepped on an IED and got blown to shit. Whatever was left after that was cremated and sent home in a little box.
After that? Well, there never seemed to be a shortage of fresh bodies to take their place.
Christ.
***
With my fingers all but digging into the underside of the two-slat wooden bench lining the side of the truck’s cargo bed, I hung on for dear life as the vehicle lumbered down the dusty two-lane road encircling the town. PFC Nick Vendel – a kamikaze pilot in a past life if his driving was any indication – guided the deuce and a half toward the larger road that would take us back to base camp. Up front in the passenger seat, Corporal Horton aimed the barrel of his M16 out the window to his right, ever watchful for potential threats.
The rest of the squad was in the back with me, and all of us were paying strict attention to our surroundings. It had become second nature to scrutinize every building, vehicle, or person we passed. A guy with a rocket launcher might appear in any window. Any car was a potential weapon. Hell, any man, woman or child was a possible suicide bomber.
Of course, that only went part of the way toward explaining our increased vigilance. The truth was that we all were doing our best not to look at what once had been Sergeant Whitford. Sitting by himself near the rear of the truck, the blood from his wound had dried to a dark brown on his blouse, further marring the already dirty garment’s fancy, computer-generated desert camouflage pattern.
He wasn’t just staring off into space. More than once, I caught him looking around, his dead eyes lingering on each of us. I wondered what, if anything, might be going on within the lifeless brain bouncing around inside his skull. There obviously was some fire burning in there somewhere. Was he still trying to hold things together, like remembering our names or where he was? Shit, it was probably better if he couldn’t think. That way, he and everyone who’d suffered the same fate would be spared from dwelling on how they’d all been screwed over one last time by Uncle Sam. He hadn’t started to rot yet, of course. The decomp wouldn’t come until later. Hell, except for the pale, blank expression and the bullet hole in his throat, Whitford could still be one of the guys.
“They’ll throw him into the Corral the second we get back,” said Freddy Dix, shaking his head in disgust.
I couldn’t help feeling the same way as I thought about the fenced area back at home where Lifers attached to our unit “lived” until some officer found yet another crap job for them. Even though Lifers didn’t seem interested in eating anybody’s brain or some other stupid Hollywood shit like that, no one was taking any chances. You could almost forget they were over there, at least until the wind shifted and the stench came rolling through your tent. The only consolation was that the smell almost succeeded in masking the odor of whatever it was the cooks were serving up in the mess tent.
I felt the truck slowing and looked over the top of the cab to see that a line of cars and trucks – military as well as civilian – crowded the road in front of us. Maybe a hundred meters or so ahead, I could see black smoke belching from what had once been a white sedan. Its front end had impacted with a concrete barrier positioned across one lane of the narrow road, part of the defensive measures used to secure our various checkpoints around the area. From the looks of things, someone had tried to run the roadblock, or had at least given that impression, and troops had responded accordingly.
“After all this fucking time,” Freddy said, “you’d think the locals would figure this shit out.” He puffed on the cigarette dangling from his mouth, releasing a tired sigh. “Dumb asses.”
The muffled thump of an explosion sounded somewhere to our right and though we all flinched, none of us scrambled for the little cover offered by the truck’s cargo bed or the layer of sandbags piled atop it. Where the hell were we going to go? Sitting in an idle truck on an exposed road was not the best place to be, and experience had been a harsh bitch when imparting that particular nugget of wisdom.
Instead, we turned toward the sound of the explosion and got our latest look at one of the more distasteful uses to which Lifers were put. They’d proven most useful when it came to uncovering or even detonating mines or other IEDs – improvised explosive devices – planted in staggering quantities by insurgents throughout the region. This of course reduced the risk to living, breathing troops who were more than happy to defer the hazardous duty.
Such efforts were proving successful today, if that’s how you chose to look at it.
There were twenty or so of them this time, facing away from the narrow, pockmarked road. Organized in a line and keeping abreast of each other, they were shuffling across the sand toward a point presumably picked out by the NCO in charge of the sweep detail.
The line had halted, and we saw a small plume of smoke rising from a fresh hole in the sand and rock near the skirmisher line’s far end. A Lifer lay near the detonation point, its torso blown one way while its legs had been thrown in a different direction. Blood tainted the ground between the two chunks, and even from this distance I could see that the various body parts were still moving.
“Jesus,” said Corporal Tim Perkins, leader of our squad’s second fire team and now acting as assistant to Corporal Caruso. He glanced toward Whitford before adding, “They never stop finding ways to fuck them over.”
It’s one thing to see it happen to guys you don’t know, but it’s different when it happens to somebody you’ve spent damn near every waking minute with for months. Sergeant Whitford slept three racks over from mine. He’d whipped my ass at poker, and I’d taken his money throwing darts. We’d swapped dirty jokes and shared pictures of our girlfriends, and we’d even teamed up to steal beer and good chow from trucks heading to the base camps where all the REMFs were sucking up oxygen.
Never saw or heard about anything like this in the news, did you? Of course not. Seems like the so-called “liberal media” always found something else more interesting to report on whenever the chance to cover the topic came along. I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with the fat-assed white men in charge of the companies who own the bulk of American newspapers and news channels, none of whom would do anything which might piss off their pal in the White House. Oh, sure, they report on the odd “scandal,” but everybody knows those are just smokescreens to keep everyone off the scent of the really smelly shit lying around in festering piles all over the place.
Free press, my ass.
No one else said anything as one of the regular troops overseeing the sweep walked up to the fallen Lifer. He aimed his M16 at the miserable bastard’s head, and the echo from the single shot rolled across the sand toward us. Its sharp report signaled an end to the poor son of a bitch’s suffering, finally granting his tortured soul permission to seek the rest it had been denied upon death.
Behind us, I heard Whitford emit a low grunt. Did he understand what had just happened? Despite the oppressive desert heat, the thought sent a momentary chill coursing down my spine.
“I swear to Christ,” Dix said, nodding in the direction of the sweep detail, “I’m doing myself if that ever happens to me. No way I’m hanging around long enough for that shit.”
It was a promise each of us had made, even Whitford. If we’d had the balls to actually do it ourselves, we would’ve blown his head off back in town. Orders had come down early on, prohibiting any such “mercy killings” even though they happened all the time. We’d only needed another minute or so to take care of it, but by then we’d hooked up with our lieutenant and there was no way that prick was going to let us put Whitford out of his misery.
Hopefully, Shane would forgive us.
“Shut up and pay attention,” growled Corporal Caruso, rising from his seat near the cab and lifting his M16 so that its barrel rested atop the wooden slats on the truck’s left side. He didn’t have to say anything more, as the rest of us were already shifting into a defensive posture. My anxiety wasn’t eased as I looked across the road and the expanse of empty sand separating us from the outermost buildings of the shitty little town we’d just left. Too many open windows and doors faced our way, and there was a disturbing lack of foot traffic. The whole thing smacked of something getting ready to go down.
Of course, most of the town’s residents had fled long ago, leaving behind everything in their haste to escape the escalating violence in this region. A few stragglers remained – people who refused to leave their homes or who were in need of assistance to get out – requiring troops to be dispatched in order to facilitate those evacuations. That was what we were doing when we’d gotten ambushed by insurgents who’d moved into the abandoned town.
I think I was the first to notice it, catching movement in my peripheral vision. I turned to see a head and shoulders on the roof of a two-story building maybe fifty yards away. The fuckhole wasn’t even trying to conceal his position, lifting a long narrow tube onto his shoulder and settling into position.
“Incoming!” I yelled, seeing the thin wisp of white smoke as the shooter fired the rocket propelled grenade. The next seconds were chaos as we scrambled over the sides of the truck. My boots hit gravel and I rolled with the momentum, throwing my body down the shallow slope leading from the road into the sand an instant before the RPG found its mark.
At this range the explosion was deafening and superheated air washed over me as I rolled farther down the embankment. With my eyes closed and my arms up to protect my head, I heard the sounds of debris from the truck peppering the nearby ground, along with shouts of terror and pain from those caught by flying shrapnel. All around us, people were scurrying for cover, abandoning their vehicles and seeking refuge in the pitiful concealment offered by the ditch.
Shifting my body around, I looked up to see that the truck’s cab was consumed by fire. Two shadowy figures, Nick Vendel and Brad Horton, sat unmoving inside. Killed in the explosion? With luck, yeah.
“Spread out!” Caruso shouted from somewhere to my right just before the sounds of gunfire erupted in front of us. “Stay down!” His left arm hung useless at his side, blood staining his sleeve. He’d been hit by shrapnel, the pain evident in his face, but he remained focused on keeping the squad safe.
Just like Shane would have done.
Taking a chance, I popped my head up long enough to get a look across the road and saw that the original shooter had been joined by a whole shitload of his friends. Light glinted off the barrel of another RPG launcher.
“Down!” I yelled, and we ducked again as the second rocket was launched, this one slamming into the car in front of our burning truck.
“We need air support!” Perkins was shouting into his radio. “Now!” The air was pierced by the sounds of M16s as the rest of the squad got themselves into hasty defensive positions and started returning fire. Chunks of dirt and rock were tossed into the air as enemy bullets tore into the ground around us.
Coughing hard enough to dislocate my fucking lungs thanks to the dust and smoke now filling the air, I low-crawled up to the edge of the embankment, pushing my tired body across the sand and feeling rock and whatever the hell else littered the ground digging into my legs and arms. Bringing my M16 up so that its stock pressed into my shoulder, I tried to use what was left of the truck for cover as I picked a spot from which to return fire.
“Get some fire on that fucking rooftop!” Perkins yelled, and I turned to see Freddy Dix crouching low as he came toward me, cradling his M249 in his arms. The machinegun was trailing a belt of ammo, sunlight reflecting off the brass links and shell casings as Freddy drew closer.
Then there was another explosion, smaller this time but still large enough to make Freddy disappear in a mist of blood and bone.
There was no time – not to process the fact that Freddy had stepped on a mine or some other fucking IED the Lifer sweeper detail had missed, or even to scream in horror at what I’d just witnessed. Pieces of Freddy plastered my face and body at the same instant white hot fire erupted across my right side, enveloping everything from my knee to my ribcage. Every nerve ending seemed to cry out in unison, overloaded by agony as I twitched in the sand.
“Man down!”
I was only dimly aware of the call for help, or of rounds impacting the ground around me, pushing closer to me as my exposed position gave the enemy shooters a clear target. Frantic calls for help rang in my ears, along with someone crying out my name. It all seemed so distant as I curled into a ball in a desperate, futile attempt to force away the pain.
A shadow fell across me and someone grabbed my left leg before I felt myself pulled across the sand, away from the embankment and back down into the ditch. Through the haze of pain clouding my vision I looked up to see Shane Whitford. Dried blood crusting both his uniform and the ragged hole in his throat, he regarded me with those lifeless eyes as he dragged me to safety.
“Nice going, Whit!” somebody yelled over the gunfire and other chaos unfolding around me, though I couldn’t tell who it was. Every sound now was faint and muddled. I was already slipping into shock, that itself telling me I’d been hit pretty bad. Pulling my right hand away from my side, I held it up and saw dark blood dripping from my fingers.
Now out of the line of fire, I saw Whitford, his M16 in his left hand as he loomed over me. Maybe it was just my shock-dulled brain making shit up, but I was sure I saw satisfaction in the sergeant’s dead expression, perhaps content that he still was able to see to the safety of the men in his charge even though death already had claimed him.
His expression never changed as the bullet tore through his face, ripping away it and most of his head in a haze of blood and tissue. I screamed again as Whitford – what was left of him – stood above me for one lingering moment before his body collapsed to the sand at my feet.
This time, he remained still. Shane Whitford had beaten the curse. Finally, he’d go home, and soon would be left to rest in relative peace.
“Thank God,” I whispered, barely hearing even my own words as other members of my squad rushed to my aid. Unable to keep my head from lolling to one side, I looked down to see my own blood staining the dirt beneath me. Despite that, the pain from my wounds seemed to be lessening somehow, nothing more than a dull throb of which I was only fleetingly aware.
I felt a faint touch on my face as my head was pulled back, and I saw Dale Caruso leaning over me. His mouth was moving and spitting out words I could not hear, his hand around mine feeling faint, indistinct. There was no mistaking the determination and concern in his eyes.
He was hoping I’d just die. No, he was praying I’d just die.
Too bad I’d signed the same contract he and Shane Whitford. Uncle Sam still owned my ass, whatever was left of it.
Son of a bitch.
