Dry Heat
By J.p. Lawrence
Small green trolls infest the shooting range at West Point. They pop up from the tall grass. They grimace at me, so I shoot them. My nose kisses the rear of my rifle’s charging handle. I see the green target in the middle of my iron sights. I fire. And it’s gone.
My weapon is the M4A4. I carried one for 12 months while deployed. Two months in Fort Lewis, Wash. Ten months in southern Iraq, in Basra. Fort Lewis is where I met Maj. John Harvey. Harvey was an intelligence officer. His job was to talk to the CIA. He loved fly-fishing and life on the river. Before deploying, he met Spc. Marianne Summers, a cook with the unit. Summers was a blonde with a nose like Meryl Streep and an air that suggested she knew the minds of desperate, hungry boys.
My buddies would whisper to me that Harvey and Summers would skip training and sneak off into the woods like young lovers. But Summers was 23 years old and Harvey was 48. Sexual relationships are prohibited during deployments. And everyone sniffed trouble.
In Iraq, I always carried my rifle, but my real weapon was my D200 digital camera. I was a military photojournalist. I would fly from base to base, writing stories about the people there. The heat was relentless, but dry. The story was that there was no story: the war was over.
Young boys with dreams of blowing up villains and winning medals sniped each other in video games played on big screens. The staff officers and one of the generals spent their Thursday nights playing Risk in air-conditioned conference rooms.
One morning my bosses told me to take my camera to a special mission. A suicide. I stood outside the doorway of a plyboard hooch, half-completed. The military policemen and the criminal investigators were already there. Harvey was inside.
The investigator ushered me in. There was a halo of blood around the body. The inner ring was dark red. It coagulated and formed a raised plateau. The outer ring was brown and thin – the blood had dried up and left nothing but a stain. His eyes were open and his jaw was agape, giving him a slack-jawed and ghoulish overbite.
Harvey held a M9 pistol in his right hand. There was a hole in his right temple where there was nothing but blackness. There was a hole in his other temple and a hole in the wall. There was a bullet in the next room. “Good thing it wasn’t a hollow point round,” the military policeman says. “That would’ve made a mess.”
The military policeman tells a story about a man who tried to kill himself with a shotgun and missed. A few centimeters would have been death. But he missed and had to live the rest of his years with no face. Brain damage. Pain every day.
Spc. Tom Hannah is the military policeman’s name. He wants to know if this is my first dead body, if I’ll crack. But I am just doing a job. I ask the investigator to close the door so I have even lighting. I feel nothing. I feel nothing in the presence of the dead. I aim. I press a button. The shutter clicks. And there’s a flash.
A target pops up on a fire range. I swing my weapon toward the target. I fire. A crack of lightning. A flash. The target goes down, as if in a dream. Another target. I look. I fire.
Gone.
I think of playing football in the backyard, or learning how to throw a spiral for the first time – there’s that moment when you realize you’re good at this, when you understand just how much you control. You see someone open, running down the field, and then the next thing you know, the ball is in their hands.
It’s as if the self subsides. The self becomes a spectator. The self becomes an instrument. Another target. Gone. Another. And another. And another. Gone.
*Names are pseudonyms.
*Published in Stone Canoe 7, a print anthology.