Redeployment

A man named Rodriguez approaches the narrator, who is a priest and a chaplain. Rodriguez has blood on his face. The priest thinks about when he used to box. He sees something in Rodriguez’s expression that reminds him of how he felt in the ring, “[t]he space between when rage ends and violence begins” (129). He is four months into his deployment, and a Marine named Fujita has just become the twelfth member of their unit to be killed in action (KIA). Rodriguez smiles, and the narrator wonders if he might be on drugs, and he doesn’t want to be alone with him. Rodriguez says they’ll talk later and leaves.

The chaplain reads from Second Timothy at Fujita’s funeral. Rodriguez also speaks and makes a point of mentioning how Fujita liked the Iraqis. The Marines gather around the casket, and the chaplain observes that “[g]eared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children” (132). Rodriguez finds the chaplain afterward in the chapel and says he respects priests and that four months ago, his unit was getting hit every day by suicide bombers. The unit has been in more firefights than any other, which has earned them admiration. Each engagement gets them a new hashmark on the Most Contact board. Rodriguez talks about trying to secure a school when a grenade landed in the middle of a group of children.

Rodriguez seems to hint that the men in his unit would goad one another into making visible displays, like dancing on rooftops. This would encourage snipers to fire on them. Then they could retaliate and boost their ranking on the Most Contact board. They called it Contact Bait. Fujita may have been Contact Bait when he was shot, but Rodriguez does not say it.

The next day, the chaplain is praying when he realizes he has to tell someone what he has potentially learned. He goes to Major Eklund. Eklund says there is not enough to investigate. Fujita was part of Charlie Company, which is led by Captain Boden, who encourages his men to kill as many insurgents as possible and ask questions later. Boden does not care about the methods. “‘In a war like this, there’s no easy answer,’” Eklund tells the chaplain (145). He says it is too late for Charlie to be anything but a Kill Company.

Four weeks later, there have been two more casualties. A lance corporal comes to talk to the chaplain and says that everything they are doing is pointless. He says the only thing he wants to do is kill Iraqis. The corporal shows the narrator a photo of a 5-year old child planting an IED. He says he’s angry that he didn’t shoot him. In his journal, the chaplain says that he is worried that the Marines’ “desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstances” (151) is at the root of many of their problems.

Rodriguez speaks to the chaplain three weeks later. He says he no longer believes in the war: “This city’s an evil thing. I do evil things. There’s evil things all around me” (152). Rodriguez doesn’t think about God anymore, only Fujita. He says he never sleeps.

The chaplain remembers a time when he tried to comfort a father whose 14-year-old son had just died of cancer. The man had screamed at him when he told him his boy was now in Paradise: “I dared suggest some good had come of it? It was unbearable. It was vile” (154). He does not believe he can comfort Rodriguez either. He does not know how to minister to men who are constantly being assaulted.

He writes to a mentor named Father Connelly, who writes back three weeks later. Father Connelly says that what the narrator and Rodriguez are suffering is not a crisis of faith but a typical reaction to a high-pressure situation and that the chaplain’s only job is to find a way to communicate, “one soul to another” (156).

He gives a sermon in which he tells the story of an Iraqi father whose daughter had been burned by oil from the stove. He brings her to the Marines of Charlie Company, and they save her. But he says the father is not grateful to them for being in Iraq. Rather, he comes to them because they have the best doctors. He tells the congregation that they come from a tradition of suffering, and they need to make their suffering meaningful or it will turn to cruelty.

As he flies back from his deployment, the chaplain lists the names of the injured and dead he can remember. Sixteen are dead, and over one hundred are injured. He begins to plan the memorial services for all sixteen. Two months later, a man named Jason Peters dies of his injuries from an IED, bringing the total to seventeen. His family takes him off life support at the end. Over the following years, the chaplain thinks of the deaths of other Marines he hears about and the crimes they commit. Several of the Marines commit suicide.

Two years after returning home, a man named Alexander Newberry appears at an event called Winter Soldier. He had served in Charlie Company and is now part of a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War. He shows a series of photos he took of people he killed and who were killed on Boden’s orders. Later the chaplain talks with an officer named Haupert, who had been there and who now hates Newberry because “[y]ou don’t talk about some of the shit that happened” (164). He does not see the point in talking about things that no one can understand.

Rodriguez’s old squad leader, Ditoro, commits suicide. Rodriguez finds the chaplain in the base chapel. He looks small and sad. He hands the chaplain a printout of Ditoro’s suicide note, which he mailed to Rodriguez before killing himself. “‘They say Ramadi’s quiet now,’” says Rodriguez (166). The chaplain reads the note. It says that Ditoro believes Fujita’s death was his fault and that he hopes his family knows that he is now making himself face judgment.

Rodriguez says he still blames himself a bit. And he blames the chaplain for not doing more. The chaplain tells Rodriguez that God promised that they would not have to suffer alone. Rodriguez spits in the grass.