Redeployment

The narrator says that “[f]or a long time I was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell them lies” (53). He often tells a grotesque story about an arrogant officer grabbing a body bag away from two Marines who worked in Mortuary Affairs to prove that he wasn’t squeamish. In the story, the bag rips open, and the corpse’s organs splash all over the officer’s face, making him scream. But the narrator says that no one talks about human remains comically, and even if the story had been true, no one would have joked about it.

The narrator struggles during his time in the Marines: “I didn’t fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The smell of it gets into your skin” (55). He wonders if he would have handled his time in the war better if Rachel had not left him. She is a pacifist and had not been able to stay with him when he enlisted. He joined the Marines because he was “tired of doing the weaker thing” (56). He never believed she would actually leave him. She stayed with him through boot camp but said they were done when he deployed.

He is not interested in telling war stories: “What happened in Iraq was just what happened, nothing more. I don’t think it made me any better than anyone else. It was months and months of awful” (59). When he comes back, a man called Corporal G takes him to Las Vegas. Corporal G is an expert in picking up women in clubs, and by the end of the first night, he has arranged for a 38-year-old brunette woman to leave with the narrator. They go to the woman’s house with Corporal G and another woman, and they sleep together.

When he gets home, he calls Rachel and asks if they can have a visit. He drives to her parents’ house to see her. She seems more beautiful than he remembers, and he is aware of how lean and thin he has gotten during his deployment. He puts his hand on her thigh as they talk and then asks her if she wants to lay down. He lays behind her on the bed for five minutes while she tells him about her cat, and he thinks that “[t]here was no one but me and her in that room, and I knew she didn’t want me” (68). He feels that he has to leave, or he will beg her to touch him. He wants to tell her a story about Iraq but can’t.

As he drives home, he thinks about the woman in Vegas whom he refers to as “thirty-eight.” She had been so drunk that he worries that he may not have had her consent. He goes out that night and drinks with old friends from high school. He meets a man whose cousin died in Iraq and tells him the story that he wanted to tell Rachel, “a story about the worst burn case we ever had. Worst not in charring or loss of body parts, just worst” (69). He and Corporal G had processed the remains of a Marine who had burned to death. His hands had been clenched around two objects, and they worked hard to open the hands and get them out. But inside of each hand was a gray piece of gravel. The narrator can’t remember why he wanted to tell this story to the man or to Rachel. But he still has one of the rocks in his pocket.

The story ends with the narrator saying that Rachel gets married while he is on his third deployment and has her first kid while he is on his fourth tour in Iraq.