Twitch

The desert is hell, wrapped in varying shades of beige, brown and tan. The heat waves curl off the asphalt, rising like smoke, rolling across the sand. It’s impossible to concentrate with sixteen pounds of body armor pressing down on you. The Kevlar soaks up every drop of sweat, growing heavier with each minute. I shift from one foot to the other, rolling my shoulders to distribute the weight, shifting the armor, knowing comfort is temporary. Tiny grains of sand blow across the road, blasting my skin, drying the sweat inching down my face. The heat is practically unbearable. There’s no escaping it, day or night, and it’s all the squad ever talks about.

Except when the subject inevitably shifts to going home.

Or snipers.

Or IEDs, roadside bombs, and the odds of not making it out alive.

Conversations drift into silence while each soldier swallows fear behind attitude and toughness.

I close my eyes, letting my thoughts wander for a minute. Maybe longer. Take a deep breath before opening them.

Iraq. Shit. I’m still in Iraq.

Every time I open my eyes I hope I’ll wake up at home, not stuck here. The Marines in my squad talk about going home, but home is something I keep buried deep, too far away to grab. When I was here for my first tour I wanted to get back to Georgia, but when I got there I couldn’t wait to be back here. I barely said a word to my wife until I said “yes” to a divorce, then re-upped for a second tour the next day. I don’t know what pulled me back, what made me think that was a good idea, but here I am in Iraq. Again.

I’ve got thirty-seven days left in this tour.

This time when I go home I’m not coming back.

We’re five long hours into a roadside checkpoint on Highway One in the Salahuddin Province north of Bagdad. Surrounded by people who want us gone, willing to pay any price to get us out of their country so they can claim victory, even though winning doesn’t matter. We’re not here to win. We don’t even know what winning looks like anymore. When they pulled Saddam from that hole we thought it was over. Thought we’d be home in a month, maybe two. Not years. Instead we’re still here, running out the clock, edgy and nervous, trying to get out of this desert hell. It’s chaos every day, and not just the Shiites and Sunnis, creeping our every move. It’s gauging distances through rifle sights. Estimating ranges. Setting up mortars. Digging up IEDs. Stuck in this sandbox where swirling dust storms fill our throats with sand, leaving us coughing like two-pack a day smokers, unable to swallow, barely able to take deep breaths. The dirt gets inside my goggles, and I’m stuck choosing between cleaning the lens or drinking to quench an unbelievable thirst that never disappears. The whole time breathing air heavy with fumes and smoke from burn pits while wearing a target.

It’s Groundhog Day every damn day. Nothing changes. Nothing ever will.

It's hard finding the horizon with the desert blending into buildings, bleeding into smog, blurring into dirt, blowing into dust. A line of cars stretches back three hundred yards, engines idling, horns honking. Voices swirl around us, chattering in dialects none of us understand. Doesn’t take long to hate the smell, despise the language, and measure everyone in anger and inconvenience.

“What’re they yelling about?” Private Donnie Wayne Spillner asks.

I look over at him. “How the hell would I know?”

He returns a stare, wide-eyed and innocent, shrugging. “You’re the Gunny.”

“So what?”

“Figured you know things like that, Sargeant Hawkins.”

The rank of Gunnery Sargeant comes with a range of responsibilities; language translator is not one of them. That’s why we have Elvis, our Iraqi interpreter.

I turn away. “Probably hot, tired, and pissed off like everyone else out here.”

“Sounds like gibberish,” he says with a lop-sided grin. “Like Sponge Bob cartoons I watched when I was a kid.”

“Just pay attention. Don’t get distracted.”

I watch the road. Manning checkpoints is repetitious. Always quiet and mundane, until it’s not. Some days boredom consumes long chunks of time, other days the intensity is ratcheted so high you can’t catch your breath. Tough to know which way this day will go. Things can change in the blink of an eye. The Iraqi security team fifty yards down the road gave in to the boredom after a few hours, waving through approaching cars, not even bothering with precautionary checks for weapons and bombs. Demonstrating what we call tiny heart syndrome. Every car is a threat when you wear a bullseye but they forgot that.

Or maybe they don’t care anymore.

Yesterday some kid – fourteen or fifteen – got through a checkpoint on the outskirts of Tikrit, explosives strapped to his chest. He weaved through the cars, just another face in the crowd. When he got close to the barriers the Marines hesitated, uncertain or uneasy about engaging with a kid. Fanatics come in all ages but it’s different when you’re pointing a gun at somebody just a couple of years younger than the grunt squatting next to you. You can’t wrestle with moral dilemmas. If you want to get home you learn to say, “fuck the consequences”. Hesitation is costly.

Hesitation took out three Marines and a dozen Iraqi bystanders, along with the kid.

Now soldiers are going home in caskets because they hesitated.

No way I’m taking that chance. Not with thirty-seven days left.

Backpack bombs often get detonated by insurgents punching in codes on a cell phone. If I see a guy picking up a flip top, my finger won’t twitch when I pull the trigger.

Donnie Wayne spits a glob of phlegm in the dirt, kicking at it with his boot. Watches some of the drivers getting out of their cars. “Goddamn. This is one fucked up country.”

This coming from a trigger-happy cherry from Missouri less than two weeks removed from Camp Lejeune. He hasn’t been here long enough to earn an opinion. Just another small town kid in my squad – desperate to belong to something when he signed up, thinking it was all flag-waving patriotism wrapped in glory. He doesn’t get it. Doesn’t understand the cost and what it’ll take from him when things go south.

And things will go south.

“Worse than anything I ever seen,” he says, pushing his helmet up from his face with a gloved hand.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” he says proudly. “Couple of months now.”

“You ever been anywhere outside that redneck county you grew up in,” I ask, “that gives you that kind of insight?”

Donnie Wayne looks at me.

“Been to Arkansas once,” he says. “Didn’t like it neither.”

I wipe the sweat from my face again. I look at the drivers, rolling through the checkpoint, their faces a mix of suspicion and hate. Smiling like they’re our friends, plotting to kill us behind our backs. Two tours have taught me that hatred and vengeance are behind every look.

“Got taught in Basic you can’t trust none of them,” Donnie Wayne says.

“Would you trust some random stranger walking down that main street of your town, pointing a gun at you all the time? A guy you didn’t ask to show up and protect you? A guy who won’t leave?”

“We’re doing a job. Helping them,” Donnie Wayne says. “They supposed to know that.”

“You going to talk to me about stabilizing the country now?”

Donnie Wayne frowns. “Don’t know what that means.”

The kid is a recruiting officer’s wet dream.

“We’re uninvited guests at this party. Nobody asked us to stay this long and now they want us to leave.”

“We’re supposed to be fixing what Saddam broke.”

“Everybody here is either afraid of us or hates us,” I say. “Ain’t no middle ground. Nobody wants our help. They want us dead. You need to treat everything as a threat. Might save your ass some day and get you through your tour.”

Donnie Wayne shakes his head, whistling. “Some serious shit we got to deal with, huh?”

I shrug. “Just how it is.”

It’s been quiet so far, cars rolling through, drivers giving us the look, listening to Donnie Wayne go on about the world he left behind in Flat River, Missouri. Same story every small town kid tells. He’s no different than I was at that age – just a kid looking for something bigger than the place he’s from. After thirty minutes I’ve learned everything there is to know about him, every job he ever held, his friends, and his girl Mandy, the high school valedictorian who left for college last fall. I don’t have the heart to tell him that Mandy isn’t returning to Flat River. One day he’ll call and Mandy will tell him through a flood of tears how she needs to move on. Needs freedom or space or room to grow or something he can’t give her anymore. Whatever they had in the backseat of his parents’ Ford will be gone, even if he makes it home to Flat River.

The novelty of being the small-town girlfriend of a soldier wears off faster than a summer rain.

Checkpoint inspections are grueling. The road from Tikrit to Baghdad is a pipeline from bomb-making factories in the northern provinces to the urban war zones in the capital. For every bomb we find, another one still gets through. Elvis checks IDs, asking questions, getting responses that sound like gibberish to the grunt alongside him. Donnie Wayne and I stand behind a concrete barrier with our rifles, watching everything move, fingers steady on the triggers of our rifles. One Marine checks beneath the chassis, looking for bombs or low-grade explosives while another digs inside seats, prying open door panels, looking for anything that feels out of place.

Anything that’s meant to kill us.

A team of Army Explosive Ordinance Removal techs stand a few feet away, robots ready to diffuse any bombs we find.

Thoroughness creates delays. Delays spark anxiety, and anxiety boils into anger. The heat only fuels the resentment. It’s like some twisted high school chemistry class equation, each move building on the last, each step a chemical reaction with the potential to turn into a mistake.

You don’t recover from mistakes.

I try reaching Elvis, to tell him to explain to the growing crowd that we’re working as fast as we can, asking for patience, but our handsets are nothing but static and broken sentences.

The sun burns heavy and the checkpoint feels like a slow-moving storm, soldiers lined up behind concrete, rifles twitching. A boy, no older than twelve, scuffs his feet through the dirt as he approaches. Loops past the cars, coming straight towards the gate. His eyes are wide, nervous but steady. My mouth goes dry. Feel my heart race. Draw a deep breath.

My squad, already weary from endless hours watching the horizon blur in the heat, snaps to attention.

Fingers hovering over triggers like a second skin, instinct latching onto the possibility of threat.

One voice cuts through the murmur of the others. “Stay down!” McCoy barks, his M16 aimed at the boy. Everyone follows, rifles raised in unison, silent and deadly. The boy freezes, hands raised as if trying to surrender. The air feels thick, caught in the tension of that single moment.

“Bring him closer,” I say through my headset.

McCoy’s voice is sharp. “Move closer, slow.”

The boy shuffles forward, eyes never leaving the ground, too scared to look up. His breath looks shallow, chest tight. When he is finally close enough, we see what we didn’t before: the bread, the plastic bag, the harmlessness. He isn’t carrying a weapon. Just bread.

An offering of friendship. Peace.

A long pause.

The corporal lets out a short, humorless laugh. "Just a kid," he says into the headset. The tension snaps, but the silence remains heavy, too heavy.

An hour passes, maybe more.

Takes most of those sixty minutes for my breathing to return to normal.

Drivers and passengers gather on the side of the road, a small crowd of angry faces. Smiles fading, replaced by something darker. None of us speak but we don’t need to. We’ve done this too many times for too many hours over too many days that turn into too many weeks. Days like this I’d rather be in a Humvee, tearing through the desert, hunting the people trying to kill me like I did during my first tour. No rules. Dictating the narrative. Utilizing the warrior traits that make us Marines, controlling the action instead of waiting for someone to make the first move.

It doesn’t take long for the crowd to grow, both in size and anger.

Hostility doesn’t need an interpreter.

What starts with chatter and obscene gestures always finds a way to grow. It’s that one voice, animated and angry, that provides the spark in the dry desert air. That’s when I notice the guy. I didn’t see him get out of a car – he just appeared out of the dust, his voice rising, loud and clear. Gets the crowd’s attention. Raises a fist, his actions encouraging others to do the same. I can’t put my finger on it, but spend enough time in the sandbox, you can sense when the mood shifts.

“That son of a bitch looks like he’s trying to start something,” Donnie Wayne says with the authority and experience of someone who has been in country for months instead of days.

I glare at him.

Donnie Wayne raises his M16. “You see him?”

I see him.

I don’t know what set him off. Maybe he’s just like me, tired of being stuck someplace he never asked to be, in the middle of a situation spiraling out of control. Tired of being trapped. Tired of fighting. Losing patience. Tired of the war. Can’t be older than twenty-five. Dark hair, skin scorched by the sun, pockmarked cheeks and bad teeth. Probably hasn’t showered in days but he’s too far away to know if he smells as bad as I do under this body armor. Probably just another guy who wants to go home.

Maybe he’s just like the kid who offered us bread.

Maybe I’m just overreacting.

When he takes a few steps forward something shifts. The hairs on the back of my neck bristle and stand again. The “maybe’s” change.

Donnie Wayne tenses too.

“Stay cool,” I say, curling my finger around the trigger. “Let it play out.”

“Don’t like standing here, waiting for somebody to take a shot at us,” he says, voice tense.

Neither do I. But we hold our position.

I bring up my binoculars, zeroing in on the guy and that’s when I see it. Something tucked under his jacket, close to his body. Something’s not right.

My mind flashes to the kid at the Tikrit checkpoint and three dead Marines.

I take a breath and hold it.

It could be nothing. But he’s holding it too close, too deep in his jacket – it doesn’t look like it’s goat meat or cheese for us to share.

McCoy, the big blond Springsteen-loving corporal from New Jersey is close by, digging around the backseat of a sedan. The second he hears it – raised voices, angry shouts – he straightens. Locks eyes on the commotion.

His voice comes through my headset, tight, uncertain this time.

“Gunny?”

”On him,” I respond.

“Got your six,” he says.

Everybody is itchy to do something, even if none of us know what that something is.

I don’t understand enough of what he’s yelling to make sense of it, but that’s why we have Elvis, only he’s not paying attention. He’s too busy playing Let’s Make A Deal with one of the drivers, trying to swap a six pack of beer and a box of condoms. Typical Elvis. Always hustling, even when our world is on the edge of exploding.

That strange bundle the guy carries could be food from one of the small markets lining the road to town. Maybe quizi – lamb, toasted nuts, raisins over rice. I see Iraqis eating that shit at the checkpoints. Or maybe handmade bracelets or necklaces they try selling us, like we need crappy souvenirs to remind us of all the time we’ve spent in country. And then there’s the usual hustle – cans of Coke, Pepsi or Mountain Dew, tuna, beans, and packaged Meals, Ready to Eat. It could also be DVDs; old horror movies from the 80’s and 90’s are popular with guys on our Combat Outpost. Heavy metal or rap CDs. Maybe even the Quran.

Or maybe none of those things. Maybe grenades. Or a bomb.

It’s impossible to tell from this distance. All I can do is guess at his intentions and measure the risk.

But I don’t see a man anymore. Don’t picture a guy with a family. I see a target. That’s all he is.

I bring up my M16, pulling the charging handle to the rear. Release the bolt so it doesn’t jam, slowly leveling it in one smooth motion, drawing a bead on him.

In that moment I shut out everything around me. Even the chaos, the static, the voices in my headset get dialed down.

The target becomes my only focus.

I hear Donnie Wayne asking what to do. Hear McCoy’s voice in my headset but I don’t answer.

There are strict fire disciplines that we adhere to in situations with civilians when they look like threats. We’re trained to fire warning shots, disperse crowds, keep things under control. But that never works. You fire a three round burst and it sends them running towards the checkpoint instead of scattering, making things worse.

But today the rules are dialed back.

It's kill or be killed.

The crowd is getting restless. A couple of guys, laughing a minute ago, are suddenly stone-faced, clutching cricket bats like shields. Arms crossed, their eyes locked on us, daring us to make the first move.

The anger grows, thickens, and the sound becomes a pressure in my chest. The Marine search team pulls back, inching away from the cars. Elvis takes a few steps forward to assess the situation, but he’s just a local Sunni we hired. He doesn’t know how to read the crowd—doesn’t understand how fast things can spin out of control. As the tension thickens, he backs away, retreating toward the Humvee.

I’m still on the target, trying to figure out what the hell he’s really holding. It’s a game of calculation now. The crowd is hostile, and it’s only a matter of time before this goes off.

If I wait too long, it’ll be too late.

“What’s he yelling about?”

“Sounds like bache bimar,” McCoy says.

“Means sick child.”

“I think it means ‘go home’,” somebody else says.

Whatever Elvis tries to say gets lost in static.

“All of you shut the fuck up,” I say, narrowing my focus.

There is a loud, sharp pop as a bottle shatters against the Humvee, glass shards spraying the soldier positioned nearby.

Things take on a life of their own. When that happens we can’t do anything but react.

A rock comes out of nowhere, flying over my shoulder. Bottles and rocks begin smashing against the Humvee, raining down on us, shattering on the barriers. The crowd surges forward. The target turns and for just a heartbeat, there’s a flash – just a glint of metal catching the sun, tucked inside his clothes. Insurgents fashion IEDs from simple things like soda cans, metal containers and tool boxes, sometimes even strapping explosives on donkeys. Nothing surprises me. Cans packed with ball bearings, nails, screws, and bolts turn into lethal fragments. All it takes is somebody punching that code into a cell phone to detonate a bomb.

The target reaches inside his clothing and everything becomes clear.

“Hands! Don’t fucking move!”

From out of nowhere, a crack splits the air and something else sails over my head- a bright white light with a tail on it, burning past me. Could be a bottle rocket, could be something worse. Hard to say. Then something ricochets off the barrier, sending concrete shrapnel flying.

I flip off my safety.

Don’t hesitate like the Marines in Tikrit.

You can’t be afraid to do what needs to be done. No warning shot.

Fuck the consequences.

The guy’s less than twenty feet away, his face twisted like it’s caught in a storm. I can feel the rush, blood pounding, head spinning. I see the wild look in his eyes, and my whole body wakes up—every nerve shot through with electricity. This time it feels real. Time goes blurry for a second, then I squeeze the trigger, three quick shots, the sound ringing out with a roar. The bullets catch him high, his throat exploding in a red mist, blood spraying in all directions. His head jerks backwards, body twisting violently to the side before straightening. He staggers, already dead but still moving because his body hasn’t caught up to death yet.

Another burst drops the target’s body to the ground.

The seconds hang.

Fear is contagious, the same as hesitation. Maybe it’s the weight of the world pressing down. Frustration, anger, panic—all that raw energy, building up, looking for a release.

Maybe the fucking heat.

Whatever it is, it happens quick.

I don’t know what drives everyone in my squad to squeeze their triggers, but when the noise softens and the cloud of smoke clears, bodies are crumpled in the dirt. Car horns blare savagely. Iraqis slump against cars, their faces a mix of grief and disbelief. Sobs cut through the air, sharp and desperate. The living scream, voices cracking, pleading. Panic spreads as drivers back up and peel away from the checkpoint, tires screeching, and I can feel fear in every cry, thick and real, clawing at my chest.

I take a deep breath and hold it.

I’m still alive.

The target is dead, face first in the dirt. Cans of baby formula and food, riddled with holes, torn and scattered, roll across the ground from beneath his body. Understand too late it’s probably just a guy trying to get home to feed his baby. The sand soaks up the bloody mess, mixing with the spilled contents. The locals once told us that flowers grow stronger in the sand where blood has been spilled, but if that’s true, I’ll never know what kind of flowers will grow where the bodies now lays crumpled.

I won’t be around to watch anything come up from the ground.

I’ve got thirty-seven more days until I go home.

PRESS RELEASE

The Pentagon released the names of the two American service members killed last week after their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device (IED) in Iraq.

The American soldiers who died belonged to the 2nd Marine Division and the 8th Marine Regiment out of Fort Lejune, North Carolina. The attack occurred in Iraq’s Salahuddin Province, located north of Bagdad. The soldiers were identified as Gunnery Sgt. Jack Hawkins, 29, from Blue Ridge, Georgia; and Pfc. Donny W. Spillner, 19, from Flat River, Missouri. A local Iraqi interpreter assigned to their unit was also killed.

Gunnery Sgt. Hawkins, who joined the Marines in 2010 was assigned to his current unit in 2013. This was his second tour, and according to officials from the Department of Defense, was just five days away from the end of his deployment. Pfc. Spillner had been in Iraq less than two months before the incident.

BIO: Michael Downing is a writer originally from New Jersey, now living in Georgia. His latest book, Saints of the Asphalt, is available online and at select bookstores. Over the past twenty years, he’s written plays, published several other books, and had short stories featured in a range of literary magazines and anthologies—some of which have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He remains unmistakably Jersey: full of attitude, edge, and Springsteen songs (but absolutely not Bon Jovi).