Redeployment

When the narrator is about to leave for Iraq, his father gets drunk and tells him about his time in Vietnam—about the weather, about how often their rifles would malfunction, and about the mobile brothels and prostitutes that would follow the soldiers around. He gives his son a small metal cross that he carried through Vietnam. Weeks later the narrator is in Iraq.

In Iraq, he becomes friends with a Marine who has been nicknamed Old Man because he joined at a relatively late age. Old Man often says he wishes he knew where an Iraqi whorehouse was. He just wants to find a woman who will let him cry on her for a little while. Everyone in First Platoon gets herpes, and the other units are convinced First Platoon knows where a whorehouse is, but they won’t say a word about it. One day a superior calls all of the men with herpes together and demands to know what’s going on. One of them says they have been “sharing a pocket pussy” (122). Shortly after, a lengthy mortar attacks begins. When it ends, the narrator has an erection. He masturbates on the roof while the others look away. He doesn’t fantasize about a woman. He thinks that nearby “maybe somebody I knew was dying” (123). Old Man tells him that when he gets home, all of the girls who never gave him a chance will be different now that he’s a war hero.

When they return to Lejeune, Old Man takes him to a strip club where he says some of the girls have sex with their clients. The narrator goes into a trailer with a woman and pays her forty dollars for sex, which “felt great right until the moment that I came and the world crashed back into focus” (127). He isn’t sure whether he enjoys it or not. He goes back to the stage and watches the dancers. He counts his money. “If it let myself get into it again, it’d be almost as good as not being there,” he thinks as the story ends (128).