People back home, people who haven’t been in war, or at least
not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops
in Iraq acted. They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often
joked about death, about things we saw.
Maybe it seems cruel or inappropriate. Maybe it would be,
under different circumstances. But in the context of where we were,
it made a lot of sense.
We saw terrible things, and lived through
terrible things.
Part of it was letting off pressure or steam, I’m sure. A way to
cope. If you can’t make sense of things, you start to look for some
other way to deal with them. You laugh because you have to have
some emotion, you have to express yourself somehow.
E
very op could mix life and death in surreal ways.
On that same operation to take the hospital, we secured a house
to scout the area before the Marines moved in. We’d been in the
hide for a while when a guy came out with a wheelbarrow to plant
an IED in the backyard where we were. One of our new guys shot
him. But he didn’t die; he fell and rolled around on the ground, still
alive.
It happened that the man who shot him was a corpsman.
“You shot him, you save him,” we told him. And so he ran down
and tried to resuscitate him.
Unfortunately, the Iraqi died. And in the process, his bowels let
loose. The corpsman and another new guy had to carry the body
out with us when we left.
Well, they eventually reached a fence at the Marine compound,
they didn’t know what to do. Finally they just threw him up and
over, then clambered after him. It was like
Weekend at Bernie’s.
In the space of less than an hour, we’d shot a guy who wanted
to blow us up, tried to save his life, and desecrated his body.
The battlefield is a bizarre place.
S
oon
after the hospital was secured, we went back to the river
where the Marine boats had dropped us off. As we got down the
bank, an enemy machine gun started tearing up the night. We hit the
dirt, lying there for several long minutes, pinned down by a single
Iraqi gunner.
Thank God he sucked at shooting.
It
was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and
tragedy.
Taya:
I never played the video Chris had recorded of
himself reading the book for our son. Part of it was the
fact that I didn’t want to see Chris getting all choked up.
I was emotional enough as it was; seeing him choked up
reading to our son would have torn me up more than I
already was.
And part of it was just a feeling on my part—anger