Redeployment

The narrator is with a unit that fires artillery on a group of insurgents one morning. He and the men are excited that after two months in Iraq, they performed a mission that resulted in kills. Over lunch they argue about how many insurgents they must have killed and whose guns were likely to have killed the most. A man named Jewett says, “‘I don’t feel like I killed anybody. I think I’d know if I killed somebody’” (273). He repeats this several times until the narrator leaves.

Jewett finds him and says that now he has something to tell his mom about. The narrator married a woman named Jessie a week before deploying. He doesn’t feel like he is married. Jewett leaves, and the narrator goes to an artillery rack and puts his hands on the shells. He describes the process of the team loading and firing artillery shells at the insurgents. He saw the explosions as they hit, six miles away. “God, this is why I’m glad I’m an artilleryman,” he had thought (278). The guns are now clean, and it doesn’t feel to him like they could have been used in the morning’s mission. He feels that the guns are too clean, yet

[s]omewhere, there’s a corpse lying out, bleaching in the sun. Before it was a corpse, it was a man who lived and breathed and maybe murdered and maybe tortured, the kind of man I’d always wanted to kill. Whatever the case, a man definitely dead (280).

The narrator finds several of the men playing cards and asks the sergeant if they should send men out to look for survivors. He is told no, that that is the job of Mortuary Affairs. He leaves and goes to the Mortuary Affairs office. He asks an old gunnery sergeant if they had been out to clean up the bodies. He is told that the Iraqis take care of their own dead. Before he leaves, the gunnery sergeant asks him to put his wedding ring on his dog tags instead of his fingers. He says that the rings are the hardest thing for them to retrieve after a death.

Outside, he stops near the Fallujah surgical building. Two mornings prior, he had seen four corpsmen carrying a stretcher draped with an American flag. He knows now that the body, whoever it was, was headed for the gunnery sergeant, who would have had trouble removing the wedding ring, if the corpse had been wearing one. He imagines the body being prepared for transport and traveling from Kuwait to Germany to Dover Air Force Base back home and knows that “[e]verywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end” (288).