NICKNAMES Cropped up faster than IEDs: He was all at once “Kel,” “Kelter,” “Skelter,” “Docker,” “Dick,” “D,” “Murder,” and “Manfuck.”
The waitress came by again, and Shane sent her away with a polite scuttle of her hand and a “Not quite ready.” The cute little Bambi waitress pursed her lips like this made her anxious but didn’t argue. Shane’s sleeve slid down her arm, and she instinctively tugged it back down over the tattoo.
When she left, Shane turned back to Murdock. “Do you keep up with anybody from IVAW?”
“Nah. Didn’t see the point. War’s over. Might as well be the Spanish-American imbroglio as far as anybody remembers or gives a fuck.” He pronounced the word with a hard g.
“Sometimes I think it was better when American kids were dying and getting maimed. It put invisible infrastructures in front of people. On their television screens. Now that you’ve got a liberal—whatever that dubious word means—a liberal building a surveillance state and assassinating extrajudicially via robot, no one seems all that bothered.”
TATTOOS Murdock clocked Shane’s lone tattoo (BUILD THE PATH—some drippy lib meaning he could no longer recall), and it set his mind off like daisy-chained 130-millimeter artillery rounds. First to the EOD Crab with its blue-bomb heart, now looking a little droopy as its home on his pec sagged. Then to Captain Ta’amu, who had an enormous design coating an arm as meaty as a chuck eye roast. “This here, Manfuck, is the Marquesan Cross. That’s Polynesian warrior shit—not suitable for southern-fried baby-men like yourself.” This fit because Ta’amu had the energy of a guy who’d prefer to charge the enemy with a stone axe. Once when they came under fire on a bridge, their security started pounding a riverbank, and some kid’s SAW jammed, so he was pinned down behind a railing, frustrated and terrified as he tried to fix his weapon. This infantry escort was new, and it might’ve been the kid’s first firefight. He looked about fourteen years old. From EOD’s position behind an armored Humvee, you could see the kid’s resolve cracking. Panic swelling. Tears beginning to well in his blue farm-boy eyes. When Ta’amu finally saw this, he tightened his boot laces, leaped up, and went jogging over through the bullets to plop down beside the boy. He took the SAW from him, unjammed the jam in about thirty seconds, and handed the mighty weapon off, yelling, “Remember, son. The tears of strangers are only water.” Then he jogged back through the bullets pinging off the Humvee, took one hit in the Kevlar, which barely threw him off his stride, and when he got back to safety remarked, “What suspense! Didn’t need to pay for the whole seat ’cause all I needed was the edge.”
“Yeah, well, time marches on. Getting caught up in causes don’t interest me. Not anymore. Especially when you see the scope of what this is.” He took the Heinz ketchup bottle from the condiment holder. “That’s the thing: Most people don’t understand this. The ingredients, what it goes on, where the energy comes from to create it, the ways the world’s gotta be directed and coaxed and violated and controlled to get this one little fucked bottle. And once you see how ketchup relates to imperial maintenance it’s tough to not get an overwhelmed quality to your thinking. Like one of them Magic Eye thingamajobs—hard the first time, but once you get it, you’ll never unsee it.”
“Did you have to kill anyone for the ketchup?”
Once she let loose the question, she wondered if she’d blown it. It felt rehearsed coming out of her mouth, like she’d used the whole conversation to get there. Which she more or less had.
WHITEHALL While at Penn State working on his degree, he took a class on military history. Turned out the professor was a real fucking communist named Whitehall, who went on in class about American imperialism and militarism, which so enraged him that Murdock went to Whitehall’s office hours and basically said, “Fuck you, I put my life on the line for this fucking country, so keep your faggoty fucking liberal mouth shut about it” (or something to that effect). And Whitehall, without flinching, immediately asked, “How many people dja kill?” When he responded none, he’d killed none, Whitehall went on. “You’re lucky. What you’ve got here is nothing. It’s not good, I’ll grant you that, but what you guys are losing every two months, we lost in a day. That made us jumpy. I shot a woman through the head because I thought she had a rifle, but it was just an axe. She’d been chopping some wood. But when all your best friends are getting killed, one young woman in a sea of gore doesn’t really weigh on you at the time. Then I got back and couldn’t figure out why I was so messed up in the head, so angry all the time, and—oh, wouldn’t you know?” He threw up his hands and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “I’d spent two years killing people. Do yourself a favor and get over the posturing, get over your masculine bullshit, and go find some psychotherapist and have a good cry.” He’d asked what war Whitehall was talking about. “ ’Nam, my son! Jesus Christ, I know we haven’t gotten there in class yet, but I’d have thought some of you kids’d heard of it.”
ON THAT TOPIC He’d fired his weapon a handful of times, but only when shit got real sticky and even EOD was expected to return fire. He’d never hit anyone as far as he knew. Yet to say he’d killed no one? Not exactly nail-meets-head. For instance, there’d been the Iraqi woman approaching their infantry escort, and he’d been asked to assess if she was wearing a suicide vest. Who the fuck could tell? The burkas made them all look strapped to boom. So when she ignored the terp’s instructions and kept walking, American brass spilled. No bomb, though, it turned out. She’d just been pregnant.
“Zero. I was purely a technician. I saved lives. Best way to see the war. Blow shit up all the time, but you ain’t gotta kill no one. Thought that’d be perfect.”
“We don’t have to talk about this.” It wasn’t so much an offer to change the subject as it was a request to go on.
“I’ll tell you, Shane: I got a pretty good idea of when I’m being probed. After every tour we had to take a psych stop to make sure we wouldn’t go murdering our families when we got home. Part of me wondered if you were getting in touch to get in touch, but this is all about whatever you’re working on, I gather.”
Her smile flared before she tucked her lips back over her teeth, just enough to leave the flirtation hanging, but with a reminder that she wasn’t interested. Touching his hand would be too much, so she went ahead and could feel in his palm how much he ached for it.
“Right. This is about a project I’ve started. As long as you’re okay with that.” Murdock waited, and she took the hand away. She weighed her options and decided to stay with EOD. She’d done her research, but again, there was the thrill of hearing about it from a man who carried the wreckage. “So you saw a lot of bombs?”
He snorted. “You could say that. If you count two or three a day, then yeah. A lot. Now, mind you, some of them had already gone off. We’d get the call or we’d see smoke rising from the FOB, and twenty minutes later we’re in the thick of it. Half the job was investigations. Trying to collect all the evidence so we could find these guys. Some intense shit.”