Redeployment

The narrator details an incident in which he helps take down a house of hostile insurgents. He describes the orders each man is given and the responsibilities each man has—knocking down doors and securing each room while watching and protecting the man next to him. They kill several enemies who fire on them and secure the house. Corporal Sweet is shot in the thigh and receives treatment for the blood loss and to prevent him from going into shock.

Downstairs, two men who were being held and tortured are still alive. One of their captors fires at the soldiers, and Dyer shoots him in the face, which takes off his jaw but does not kill him. A man named Moore grabs the man Dyer shot and is prepared to beat him, but the narrator stops him. The two imprisoned men are “tied to a chair in front of a video camera on a tripod. They’re beat to hell and there’s a nice pool of blood on the floor” (19). The al-Qaeda fighters have laced their ankles to the chairs with barbed wire, and it’s difficult to get them free of the chairs. The narrator can tell that something is wrong with their feet, so he gives orders to bring them to their treatment center.

The soldiers search the rest of the house while a medic continues treating Sweet. A helicopter arrives, and they load Sweet into it along with the two tortured men. After, they strip off their bloody clothes, and Doc examines them to make sure there are no injuries. Doc tells them that the two men were beaten with hoses on the bottoms of their feet, “and they took a power drill to their ankles, right at the joint, so they’re pretty much fucked for life. Not life-threatening, though” (22). They were going to videotape it all but realized that they were out of film right before they started.

The narrator asks Moore if he was really going to “stomp that hajji downstairs” (23). Moore says the man would have deserved it, and the narrator says that’s not the point and that if “[y]our Marines see you fucked up over this, then they start thinking about how fucked up it all is. And we don’t have time to deal with that. We’ve got another patrol tomorrow” (23).

As they drive away, someone says that at least they saved the two men’s lives. But the narrator does not believe they wanted to be saved: “I didn’t see any tears of joy when we burst in, M4s at the ready. They were dead men. Then we doped them up, CASEVAC’d them out, and they had to live again” (24).

At the hospital, he learns that Sweet is out of surgery and will recover. Then he goes to look at the two men they saved and finds that “[t]hose two, even cleaned up, their bodies don’t look like bodies should. Seeing them stops me for a second. I don’t call the squad over because they don’t need to see this” (25).

He takes his men to the commissary, and they start to eat. But Dyer just sits there, staring. He says he’s not hungry. After they eat, the narrator orders Dyer to get some cobbler, and he does. The story ends with Dyer “looking at his ice cream melting into the cobbler. No good. I put a spoon in his hand. You’ve got to do the basic things” (27).