Redeployment Packing Checklist

Pack your Army Combat Uniforms first. Military roll. Cram the black Under Armour sports bras, the tan undershirts, and the lucky convoy socks around the bottom inside edges of your green Army-issued duffel bag. Tuck the laminated photo into the bag but don’t look at it. You don’t want to look at it. It’s the picture that you held after your first recovery mission in the sandbox: three soldiers burned alive after their Humvee rolled over a pressure-plate ied. Your brother’s smirk and your father’s wide grin, the picture taken when you were on r&r, all three of you standing in front of the house, each one of you pretending that nothing had changed since you left for Iraq. It helped you fall asleep that night. You can’t help yourself—you unpack the photo to look at it once more. The corner edges are falling apart. The girl in the photo used to be you, but that’s not the face you see in the mirror anymore.

Pack your camo-covered Army Bible. The pages have to be rubber-banded shut; otherwise it opens to Psalm 23. Pack the Rite in the Rain combat notebook, another sort of bible: the name and rank of every soldier you ever placed into a black body bag written on its pages. Poems. Letters to your father that you never mailed. Pack the maroon prayer rug you stole while raiding a house in Sadr City. Unpack the prayer rug. Kneel on it while you pack the empty m4 magazines, the pistol holster, ammo pouches, and desert combat boots. Pick up your aviator gloves, the feel of manning the 50 caliber machine gun on convoy. Pick up the shell casing from your first confirmed kill. One of six 7.62 caliber bullets that you fired into a fifteen-year-old boy’s chest. He was shooting an ak-47 at you. You shouldn’t have the shell casing. You shouldn’t have the gloves. Women aren’t supposed to see combat. Pack it all into the duffel.

Pack the hours spent in a cement bunker waiting for mortar rounds to stop whistling into base. Pack the hate and the anger. Pack the fear. Pack the shame and disenchantment for a job done too well. Pack the back-to-back months spent going out on convoy without a day off. Pack your twenty-first birthday, the day you spent in firefight outside fob Courage. Pack your combat lifesaver bag, your hajji killing license, and the rest of your dignity. Pack them all next to the Army Core Values and the bullshit promise your government made to protect innocent civilians. Pack your worn copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Pack the tattered American flag you picked up off the ground outside Abu Ghraib. Pack the fucks and the goddamns tightly next to the it should’ve been me. Pack the green duffel until there isn’t room for anything else. Fold over the top flaps. Shut it up tight. Lock it. Heave it onto your back. Carry it all home.