Fire and Forget Read online

  Our thanks to our tireless agent, E. J. McCarthy, and to our editor at Da Capo, Robert Pigeon, will be never-ending, and even so we’ll never do justice to the great boon and opportunity they’ve given us. Thanks to them both for believing in the work. Thanks also to Lori Hobkirk at the Book Factory, who saw this book through production.

  We all have our personal thanks as well—to those who brought us home, to those who helped us along—and our personal remembrances—to those who didn’t come back—or to those who did, but found themselves so weighed down by what happened that they couldn’t make the transition. In a sense, this entire volume is dedicated to every soldier and Marine who found coming back to the Mall of America stranger, even, than their first time under fire. We thank our fellow veterans, the ones we leaned on, the ones who carried us.

  Finally, a word about the title. We tossed around several ideas, including Did You Kill Anybody? and I Waged a War on Terror and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, but stuck with Fire and Forget because it seemed to touch so aptly on the double-edged problem we face in figuring out what to do with our experience. On the one hand, we want to remind you, dear reader, of what happened. Some new danger is already arcing the horizon, but we tug at your sleeve to hold you fast, make you pause, and insist you recollect those men and women who fought, bled, and died in dangerous and far-away places. On the other hand, there’s nothing most of us would rather do than leave these wars behind. No matter what we do next, the soft tension of the trigger pull is something we’ll carry with us forever. We’ve assembled Fire and Forget to tell you, because we had to—remember.

  THE EDITORS:

  Roy Scranton

  Matt Gallagher

  Jacob Siegel

  Phil Klay

  Perry O’Brien

  1

  SMILE, THERE ARE IEDS EVERYWHERE

  Jacob Siegel

  I GOT OFF THE SUBWAY AT THE PORT AUTHORITY and waited outside for the buses to arrive. The after-work rush still echoed in the half-empty streets but the city almost looked peaceful in the faded light of this in-between hour. You could stand still without feigning purpose.

  When I saw Cole, he just laughed. We had a long embrace, squeezing and clapping each other hard on the back. I was still thinking about the last time I’d seen him when it hit me that he was here, in front of me now.

  “What time’s Jimmy getting in?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a while,” I said.

  After the Army released us, we rushed to find those we hoped had been waiting. All of us but Cole. He cut the other way, turning back in the airport with a plan he carried through the long hours in Iraq, and went rogue, all over the world.

  We had talked since he got back. He was applying to law schools and I asked how the applications were going.

  “I might end up here,” he said. “I’ll live with you and Annie. You got a couch, right, and plenty of time to loaf around? We could grow beards and walk around in our DCUs. Go to parties and stand next to girls and talk about the horror of it all.”

  “I sold my DCUs to a protester, or maybe it was an art student,” I said. “Anyway, I got more than I paid for them, and then I saw them on the news when those kids burned that effigy.”

  This was the rhythm we knew from overseas. With just the right amount of disinterested aggression you could talk about almost anything.

  I remembered that he used to talk about finding a government job when we got back. “Law school sounds exciting. That helping-the-troops racket couldn’t compete huh?” I was looking for a rise, but his eyes were hard and steady.

  “You know,” his head turned toward the line of taxis at the curb, “I just want something new.” He smiled and looked back at me. “After I got back from Tokyo, I actually thought about reenlisting to catch another deployment. Things were fine at first, leaving right after we came home was good, I pretty much got everyone happy to see me without too many long looks and worried questions about how things were over there. But after I’d been home a couple weeks, I just felt the whole world slowing to a crawl. I had a couple of long nights where I thought, what the hell, you know? Like if I do it one more time then I’ll be able to work things out, and when I get back then I’ll be back for good. I figured that whatever I wanted to do would be here but the war could end and it still needed me.”

  “The war needed you?”

  “Or I needed it, but what’s the difference. It went away.”

  “The war’s still there.”

  “The feeling went away.”

  “So it’s all about your feelings.”

  I was joking but it felt good to goad him. Cole was the last one I would have picked to go back into uniform, I thought he had figured out how make a clean break. Besides, he had things going for him when we left, the reliable kind, not the sort that could leave in the middle of the night. He had the kind where if you devoted yourself, it wasn’t insane to expect some kind of return.

  I couldn’t remember what I had going before we left. There must have been plenty, a whole life probably, but it wasn’t what I thought of when we were overseas. It shamed me to think now of what I had imagined over there. I didn’t have any real plans or ambitions for when we got back. I only had fantasies of other lives, like the fevered dreams of a sick man growing bolder and more intense the closer he gets to death.

  I dreamed of whole cities in heat. Ribald boulevards flushed with women. Greatness around every corner, New York at my feet, the buildings bowed, the whole city supine.

  We could see up 42nd Street. Movie theaters, marquees, and theme restaurants lined both sides. Crowds began to gather. Cole looked nothing like he had overseas, nothing like a soldier or veteran. It wasn’t hard to imagine him in a suit, laughing with coworkers.

  “Where does that energy go?” I wanted to know. “I thought when we got back I was going to step off the plane and pounce.”

  “Well, what did you want to do before we left?” Cole asked. It was the same question he’d asked from the front seat of our Humvee, only the tense had changed.

  My thoughts came out half-finished but Cole understood, if not what I was saying, at least that it had to be said. I was trying to say something about being back, that it was hard, that it almost made me nostalgic. I was talking about over there, how it felt when you got everything right. You could make the guns talk. Your words hardened into instruments controlling the machine, everything moving like you told it to. When you got it right there was a pure flow, thoughtless and unfeeling, unlike anything else. That was all it took, I said, “. . . and I could hear the world blow my horn.”

  Even the tedium felt fraught with anxious purpose, the restless hours waiting for time to pass, watching the hourglass spill sand and thinking, “Now I know, now I know, get me home, get me home.”

  “Over there things were clear,” I said, “and they were always on the line. How could anything compare to that?”

  People were close enough to hear; I lowered my voice and looked at Cole for a sign to stop, but he gave none.

  “And after the bomb goes off and you make it out okay, what about the silence after that when it’s still ringing in your ears like a bell from somewhere else? How are you going to hear your old self through that, whatever you thought you wanted? All that fear and heat, satisfaction and lust, that’s what your dreams are made of. Look around you, man, this is not what I was coming back to. This is just dirt and steel and other people.”

  “Jesus,” Cole waved his hand dismissively, and I laughed to make it easier and egg him on. “I bet you still got a working bullshit detector somewhere in there, but I’m sure that speech gets more convincing every time. Is that what you want to be good at? Making speeches about the war? Look what kind of company that puts you in. Try another line of work, man. Even if you’re a failure, which I’m not ruling out, it’s gotta beat this crooning about the war racket.”

  When I told him Jimmy’s bus was due any minute, he gave me a serious look. “Don’t menti
on any of that reenlisting and going back over stuff,” he said. “Last thing I want to do is put ideas in the kid’s head.”

  Jimmy worked as a security guard at some college in Michigan. He moved from Indiana to be closer to the Detroit music scene and closer to his wife’s family. He got her pregnant before we left, married her on his two weeks of leave, and came home a father.

  We saw him as soon as he stepped outside, scanning excitedly. He beamed when he saw us. “Hey fellas!”

  “Jimmy boy!”

  “C’mere.” Cole grabbed him around the waist, bent back, and lifted him into the air.

  Jimmy was taller than either of us, but he always seemed like the frailest of the bunch. Over there, he’d seen more than most, blood from both sides and some of his own, but he never lost his little-brother manner. You could see it in his stooped shoulders and shuffling walk and hear it in his voice, always hungry for attention, never sure what to do when he got it but ask for more. He seemed somehow still naïve. He’d act out his pain without masking it as rage or contempt. It felt needy, sometimes, even weak, but it was more honest than the subterfuge I went through with Annie. Being angry with her in just the right way never seemed to make her understand.

  * * *

  I was somewhere else when she came in from work and saw me looking through old photos on my laptop, Jimmy’s tracks playing quiet through its tiny speakers. It wasn’t the first time, and it didn’t take long after she kissed me hello. We collected our silence, poised to resume the scene we’d been playing out for months.

  “It doesn’t help,” was all she said at first, as one hand clenched the other and they went bright with white and red spots where the blood stopped and started. “Yesterday you barely spoke to me, and when you did your teeth were clenched. It wasn’t fair.”

  She waited, but I didn’t say anything. She went on. “You reminding yourself of better times? Or what it was like to be there? What’s it gonna be like when Jimmy and Cole get here? You gonna tell them everything you won’t tell me and pretend one year is all there is to you? Then you’ll come home, this, here, your home, and be mad at me for not knowing what they know.”

  She held in a breath and her eyes flickered. For a moment I thought she was going to laugh and I wanted to laugh with her, but her mouth never moved and I realized that she was somewhere else, caught in the middle register between a memory of happiness and the feeling of its loss.

  When she spoke again, it was gone. “What about Petersburg and the Neva River? We were gonna be Vadim and Ludmilla. You could go there with Cole, but would he know why? What do they know about that? What do they know about you?”

  Her voice was still soft and she dipped her head to catch my eye, but I stared down at her feet and pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth.

  “You don’t even try to talk to me about it,” she said.

  How many times had I tried. While I was there, I imagined telling her everything, and now that I was back we couldn’t pass a word between us that sounded the same on both sides. “It only makes it worse,” I said.

  She moved toward me, shaking her still-clenched hands. “No, you don’t talk to me, you lecture. You spend an hour telling me how many frequencies your different radios can hold and which one’s better in your car and which one’s better on foot. And if I ask one wrong question, if I stray the tiniest bit outside these rules I don’t even know, that you won’t tell me, then you shut down again and punish me for not understanding.”

  “We didn’t have cars.”

  “Hummers, whatever.”

  I spoke deliberately, forcefully enunciating like I was talking to a child. “High-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle. H.M.M.W.V. Humvee.”

  “Hummer, Humvee, whatever. Is that what I don’t understand, that it’s not a Hummer? Is that what you’re holding against me?” She reeled back and imitated my voice, “H.M.M.W.V. Humvee.”

  * * *

  Then we were out on the street, the three of us. I took them through Times Square and waited until Jimmy noticed.

  “Woah, wait a minute, man. This is Times Square.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “this is Times Square. Come on, I’ll show you the world’s most famous recruiting station. Unless you like corporate-sponsored seizure lights, there’s not much else to see around here.”

  “Too cool,” Jimmy said, mocking me.

  “Way too cool,” added Cole. “Maybe we should just hang out at the bus station.”

  “I’m not too cool, I just don’t need any daiquiris or T-shirts. Come on, it’ll be fun. We can go mess with the recruiters and see if any of them have combat patches, the non-deployable bastards.”

  Cole shook his head and snorted. “We’re here for one day and that’s how you want to spend it? They’re over there working and you want to give them a hard time.” He turned from me to Jimmy. “All of a sudden he’s a subversive. This guy who probably threw himself at the first recruiter he found: Hey Sarn’t, please won’t you make a man out of me?”

  We stood in front of the small recruiting building as Broadway traffic surged around us and people found their way to livelier attractions. Cole and I watched a father assemble his family for a photograph, their heads crowned by “U.S. Armed Forces” etched in glass on the façade, while Jimmy craned to look up at the buildings, making little comments to himself about what he should buy for his daughter. A recruiter stepped outside to smoke, ignoring all of us. I couldn’t see his right shoulder to check for a combat patch. We grabbed Jimmy and headed southwest, out of the lights, looking for a drink.

  We found a bar on 39th Street. The room smelled of peanuts, sweat, and spilled beer. Aside from the old man serving drinks, there were only two other people in the place. They stayed by the TV.

  The first few rounds were easy. Cole talked about the beauty of Tibetan women, the bad manners of New Zealanders, and his plan to volunteer for some vets group while he got his law degree. With a little prodding, Jimmy gave us a few bars of a song he was working on.

  He sang, “Headlights hold one space of breath, the last one till the next, / we clear the road, we hold the road but all it holds is death / or rest, maybe rest / and I got MySpace and my guitar and my own games to play, / I’ll walk to chow and wash my truck, cross off another day. / If I was waiting for the next one then I might start to scare, but I just wash my socks, have a smoke, and wait to grow my hair. / It’s cool, be cool, and smile, there’s IEDs everywhere. / There’s mine, there’s yours, so smile, there are IEDs everywhere.”

  Jimmy spent his year in the turret, up on the gun. He manned the 240B from the lead vehicle—the most exposed man in the platoon. Once, as we mounted up to head outside the wire, he tossed me his camera and asked for a picture. Jumping on the roof of his Humvee he cranked his turret till the glass shield faced me. He’d written in the dust: “Smile, there are IEDs everywhere.”

  The high pitch of his voice strained to the point of breaking, then sunk low and finished easy. When he was done we told him how great it was and how we couldn’t wait till he cut a CD. Bashfully, he soaked up our praise. Cole asked if he had an agent or what, but he said he was mainly just playing at bars now, worried about his wife making more money than him and what kind of father he’d be and whether he could afford to keep playing or if he had to get a real job.

  But he brightened up when he talked about the college kids where he worked security, how they came to see him play and always came around when he was done to tell him how moving his songs were and how it was like when he sang about it they finally understood the war.

  I imagined what else the college kids asked him. What did he think of the president? Was it right for us to be over there? Had he lost any friends—or been forced to do any horrible, unimaginable, unforgivable things that he didn’t have to talk about if he didn’t want to?

  Jimmy might have answered their questions, but he wasn’t a barroom boast or some vainglorious artist trading on his story. He just needed people to hear him an
d was willing to talk frankly, if sometimes mawkishly, about his troubles. We tried not to hold it against him.

  * * *

  It was well past midnight and a dozen rounds in when I started telling them about my writing.

  “What are you writing about?” Jimmy asked.

  “You gonna tell our story?” asked Cole, dryly, so I wasn’t sure if he was serious.

  “Never!” I shouted, slamming the bar. My hand came up ringing and the bartender looked over. “I’d rather write blasphemies and technical manuals.”

  Another round of short browns showed up and I swallowed mine while they waited.

  “I’d rather write on a chalkboard with a steak knife.” I stabbed my hand at the air between us. “I’d rather write lullabies for pedophiles. I will not pimp myself out. I will never, by everything that’s holy, never feed a hungry mob the red meat off my brother’s bones.”

  I caught myself when the words came out, felt them clearing my throat, and looked up at Jimmy and Cole. Their expressions hadn’t changed, but I was drunk now and things were hard to register. Suddenly ashamed, I changed tack. “The hell with the war, anyway, you think anybody’s actually interested in that bullshit? It’s old news. It was all ash before the bombs dropped.”

  I had not finished so much as a story since I’d gotten home. Usually when someone asked what I was working on, I gave them the line about my epic detective novel set inside a pulp detective novel. I called it Lucifer’s Nightgown.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. I got up every day after Annie went to work and tried to make sense of what happened over there, how it all fit together, why it counted for so much if I wasn’t even sure how to add it up. I sat at my computer staring at the same words—the plain words, the gruesome words, the sentimental words, words that belonged only here, had no claim to that, no purchase on the ground over there. I couldn’t write the things that haunted me for fear of dishonesty and cheap manipulation, which I blamed on not being haunted enough. How much blood did I need to justify spilling it on the page? I felt this incredible urge, heat on every inch of skin. I needed something cold to press to my face. There was something I had to say, something I had to tell them, but Jimmy was frowning at me with narrow eyes.