The Paris Review

I’m in the turret with the gunner. Phosphorescent flashes keep popping from miles up ahead, and they’re followed by what I want to call a flutter; it’s like your eye goes aquiver for a moment. And there’s a smell in the air, nothing like the usual reek of burning and high-ex. I don’t like it. When it comes to combat I don’t much like anything I haven’t seen or smelled before.

That’s what I’m thinking when we come under fire. Mortar and small arms.

“Rag-heads, ’bout five hundred yards, quarter left,” goes my driver Cummings, a snippy hard-case Bristolian with shit tattoos all over his neck.

“Shove into that dip, quarter right.”

There’s a dune we try to snuggle in behind. Our vehicle stops dead in the sand and the engines power down. I drag my knuckles across the side of Cummings’s head.

“Do not, repeat do not let me hear you refer to the enemy as rag-heads towel-heads sand-niggers or any other fucking thing other than the fucking enemy, right Cummings? Right?”

“Color Sar’nt!”

They should know that by now. I won’t have it. Not in the middle of combat. Down the pub, in the mess, or in the whorehouse they can call ’em what the fuck they like. But not here. Won’t have it.

“Why not?” I ask him. “Why fucking not?”

Another mortar falls and there are a couple of pings as bullets strike our AV. The boys in the back think I’m mad. We’re under fire and I’m giving them parade-ground drill. But I know the mortars are well short and the bullets are spent when they hit the sides of the Warrior. “Come on! Let’s hear it!”

“Underestimation of enemy, Color Sar’nt,” says Brewster, at the top of the class.

He’s going to say more but I cut him off. “Under-fucking-estimation of enemy! I don’t know what we’ve got here but sitting just behind them is the Iraqi Republican Guard. More fucking highly educated than you are, Cummings. Crack fucking soldiers, you cunt. Loyal to Saddam. They are not towel-heads rag-heads or sand-niggers, they are the fucking enemy and you will respect their capacity to blow your fucking balls off, right Cummings?”

“Color Sar’nt!” goes Cummings, red in the cheeks. Another round of bullets ping the Warrior.

“These fucking people invented reading and writing while we were still living in mud huts and dancing round Stone-fucking-henge with a blue face, you got that Cummings?”

“Color Sar’nt!”

Well, that’s enough of that. All the lads in the back are looking at me, so I swing down and give ’em a nice big smile, like I’m just lemonade. “Good lads. Now then, what we got?”

Turns out there is a little emplacement dug into the sand, still active behind our front lines. This is just what we’re here for. Clean up. Mrs. Overalls. Get the marigold gloves on, out with the bleach and polish, make the world shine. Our infrared should be able to tell us how many bodies they have dug in, but it’s on the fucking blink, which is normal. All this gear works fine until you need it to run with sand in it; though I suspect these phosphorescent flashes might have something to do with the malfunction. Doesn’t matter. Our AV is well equipped to take the enemy out.

The terrain suits us. There’s a slight rise on our eastern flank so I can get a couple of lads out there to attack the position while we give covering fire with the cannon. Brewster and Dorky volunteer, as do one or two others. I give them the nod, and then for some reason—I don’t know why—I decide I’ll go and hold their hands. It’s not that they need me.

I order the driver to power up and move on fifty yards to fire a couple of white phos grenades to make a smokescreen so’s we can drop out and flit over to get behind the rise, hopefully unnoticed. When we reach the rise we can see a burned-out Iraqi tank on the sand maybe just another hundred yards away. We scope it out. There are bodies lying around it. No life. It’s all clear. It’s a bit of useful cover and we go up behind it to set up our gear to help the Warrior make its fire on the Iraqi bunker.

“Fucking hell,” says Dorky.

He’s looking at a torso nearby. Or at least I think it’s a torso. It still has its arms and legs, but it’s a weird shape. Shrunk. Nasty.

“Never mind what’s around you,” I bark at him. “Get operational!”

But Brewster and Dorky are paralyzed by this thing. It’s an effort for them to look away.

“Come on, lads,” I say, a deep low growl.

Training kicks in, they go to it, fumbling a bit, fidgety, hyper, but they set up. And I look at this thing out of the corner of my eye because I don’t want the lads to see I’m freaked by it, too. It’s a corpse—of a kind—of an Iraqi soldier spilled out of the tank. Part of his head’s gone but most of the rest of him is there. I can’t see hands and feet. None of that bothers me. I’ve seen enough bits of bodies in my time, and after a while it’s no different from what’s in your burger. But this thing: it’s a body, but it’s shrunk to maybe a third of the size it should be. It crossed my mind that it might be a kid, but it’s bearded and anyway it’s not like it’s a kid, it’s like the whole thing has twisted like a plastic bag when you set fire to it. And it’s left a spooky shadow behind, a man-shaped shadow on the sand.

The boys are set up and ready, but I’ve got to shift this bloody mess. I step over to the thing and I try to side-foot it under the tank, out of eyesight, but my foot passes straight through part of it. Nothing turns my stomach. My guts are cast iron, but for the first time in years and years my bowels soften. Some of the thing sticks to my foot. I scrape sand and debris and push as much of it as I can under the tank.

I turn back. Dorky and Brewster are watching me now. “All set up, lads?”

“Color Sar’nt!”

Brewster radios the Warrior and we watch the slow elevation of the cannon before it locks. There’s a pause before the Warrior launches its bombardment of the Iraqi emplacement. Dorky watches the results through binoculars and reports what’s happening. I have to make a mental effort not to think about this goo stuck to my boot.

“Give ’em a strafing.”

“Chain gun!” Brewster tells his radio.

There’s not much more. After the cannon and chain gun has softened them up they come out and all we have to do is point our weapons. These are not Republican Guard. These are conscripts; they’ve had enough and they’re stumbling out with their hands on their heads. They seem to think we’re the Yanks. Their idea of being a prisoner is to try to talk to us in Iraqi.

Later, after the prisoners are passed back down the line, the mopping pattern is repeated a few times. The only thing that’s changed is the dust. The tanks and the armored vehicles are kicking up so much sand that it’s getting hard to see farther up ahead. We’re proceeding pretty much by radio coordinates and infrared activity. We stop a couple of times to check out a destroyed tank or other vehicle and we keep spotting these shrunk plastic bodies with their shadow-casts, and all the time I’m thinking: what weapon is it that shrinks a human being but doesn’t destroy a tank?