“Other stuff?”
“Yeah. Command looked the other way as long as we kept it quiet.”
“What… what did she do with the money?”
“She hid it, saving it for when she got out. She had her own cell, for privacy. We took care of her, you know, treated her pretty good, gave her extra MREs, cigarettes, shit from Any Soldier packages back home. Connie was alright. Some of the Army bitches complained about the guys, you know, pimping her, but nothing ever really happened. It never went official.”
“That’s awful.”
“Oh, shit. You’re totally right. I’ll put it away, then.” Aaron reached for his thumb drive.
“No, wait,” Matt said. “It’s awful, but I think I should see it. So I know what it’s like. I should know what it’s like.”
“Your call, Chief. You wanna click forward?”
“Yeah,” Matt said, then regretted it.
A young, mustached Iraqi man lay naked on the floor of a cell, his face ruptured and bleeding, his hands secured behind his back with zip-ties. A soldier stood with one boot on the back of his neck, grinning at the camera.
“That’s Woolsley. We… he was stressing the prisoner, you know, in preparation for an information session, and the guy got a little crazy, so we… we kept running him into the bars until he fell over. Fucked him up pretty bad. He lost a bunch of teeth,” Aaron said, sliding his finger along the right side of his upper lip.
“Are these torture pictures?”
“I worked in detention.”
“Did you… torture… people?”
“Legally?”
“Were you actually involved in doing this?”
“I told you,” Aaron said. “I took pictures. Nobody’s making you look. All you gotta do is pull out. Listen. You think about it while I get another beer. You want one?”
“Uh… sure.”
Aaron got up and rummaged in the fridge while Matt stared at the man standing with his boot on the naked man’s neck, the naked man’s split lip and gashed face, his blood shiny on the concrete floor.
Aaron brought back two beers and handed one to Matt.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What?”
“In his butt. What is that?
“Oh, we made him stick a chemlight in his ass.”
“A what?”
“A chemlight. It’s a little plastic, you know, a glowstick. They’re about as big around as your thumb. You bend it and it breaks this glass capsule inside so it glows. It’s a chemical thing. It doesn’t really hurt, it’s just invasive, and the hadjis don’t know how the chemicals work so they freak the fuck out. But like I said, they’re not that big, so as long as you don’t tense up, it’s not painful.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve had bigger shits. I mean, you get your prostate checked, right? It’s not any bigger than that. It’s just uncomfortable.”
“And humiliating.”
“Yeah, but so’s a fucking prostate exam.”
“I don’t think they’re the same.”
“It was standard operating procedure. Not a big deal.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“It gets better. Click forward.”
“Wait. I just… So… you tortured people?”
“Enhanced interrogation, technically. Whatever you want to call it, I told you, I fucking held the camera. How many times I gotta say that? Click forward.”
“I didn’t know what to think. All I could do was imagine the worst.”
“Oh, Wendy,” Rachel said, rubbing her shoulder.
“It’s just all so intense. After he called, after everything, after I thought he was dead, he’s alive again and we keep talking on the phone and I can’t stop thinking about him and I can’t sleep and I start thinking about moving back to Tucson or him moving here and basically I’m in this crazy emotional spiral for like a week and that’s part of why—I mean, I won’t say I went to Grand Junction Thursday explicitly planning to fuck David T. Greene, but I needed something, some kind of counterweight, some blockage to put between Aaron and me. Something to keep me from falling.”
Mel grunted.
“But when he showed up, I knew. I knew. I knew instantly that we’d have a good time but that was it. Because I just can’t. I’ve done this kind of thing and I can’t anymore. There’s something self-destructive in him, you know, that bad-boy thing, and the chaos energy’s thrilling, but there are limits.” Wendy looked into the fire. She picked up a stick and poked at the coals. “I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling he just doesn’t care what happens anymore. He didn’t used to be like that.”
“Like with Xena,” Mel said.
“That wasn’t his fault,” Rachel told her.
The next picture showed a naked Iraqi man wearing panties on his face, handcuffed to a metal grating on the wall, passed out and dangling by his hands. A tall Hispanic soldier stood next to him.
“I can’t remember this puck’s name. It was like Z something. Zabar… Zartan… Zazar… Anyway, that’s a stress position. You keep them handcuffed like that for hours. You don’t give them water, because if you do, they have to piss and then you have to unhook them and everything and it’s a huge hassle. You don’t feed them, either, because if you do that, then they have to shit. Click forward.”
“Can’t you go to the media or something?”
“Sure. You see this guy?” he pointed to the soldier in the photo.
“Yeah.”
“That’s Staff Sergeant Cortázar. He took us all aside after Abu G broke and—this conversation never officially happened, realize—and told us that because of one stupid shit, because of that blue falcon Joe Darby who turned in the photos, a whole bunch of good soldiers who did their jobs, who were doing what they were told, were now getting totally fucked by the system. It wasn’t their commanders getting punished, it wasn’t Dirty Sanchez or Rummy or Dubya, it was the men and women doing their jobs. And not only that, but this fuck Joe Darby was jeopardizing the whole intel-collection apparatus in Iraq, which put the lives of our fellow soldiers at risk. Those pictures fucked up the whole occupation. Fucking Joe Darby got American soldiers killed.”
“But…”
“We didn’t decide to do this shit. We didn’t ask for the torture detail. Staff Sergeant Cortázar told us to do this shit because Lieutenant Viers told him to do this shit, and Captain Weems, the company commander, told him to do this shit and so on up the fucking chain of command. Plus, our guidance with the OGA fucks was full cooperation. They say jump, we don’t ask how high, we don’t ask shit. We jump. Now these orders were put never in writing, realize. Everything was verbal. The OGA guys go straight back to Langley or whatever cesspool they ooze out of, and we’re their tools. We did what we were told to, just like those kids in Abu G. So Sergeant Cortázar is all like, here’s the deal. Think about this fact: if we decide to talk to somebody, show somebody pictures, we better damn well think about who exactly is going to be getting it in the ass. Bush? Rumsfeld? The general? The CO? Or your battle buddy?”
Aaron took a drink of beer. “The fact of the matter is, fucked up as it may be, most of these fucking hadjis didn’t know shit. I’d say the majority of them were locked up by mistake, or at best they were grunts who didn’t know their ass from al-Qaeda. It’s a little depressing when you think about it. But if I had a problem with what was going on—which I did, of course, I’m a red-blooded American, right?—then the time for me to address that was before I fucking did it, before it got done, or at the very least while it was happening. Not afterwards. Not later. Not now. Something else Sergeant Cortázar said that stuck with me is that once you make a decision, once you do something, you can’t take it back. And he’s right. You don’t get to say ‘Oh, wait, what I did was wrong, so now I want to get someone else in trouble so I can feel better.’ If it was wrong, it was wrong. But I did it. Nothing can change that. Click forward.”