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PRIVATE SECOND CLASS, ANONYMOUS FEMALE
- University of Virginia Press
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31 PRIVATE SECOND CLASS, ANONYMOUS FEMALE COINCIDENCE I don’t remember the day, month, time, or even his name. It was about halfway through my deployment to Iraq. I had just been switched to night shift in the DFAC (dining facility ) when I got the call. I was needed because of President Bush’s surge. I had heard stories from other girls. Some passed out, others vomited, but most cried and just refused to do the job. I had said no to being placed among their ranks once already. It wasn’t mandatory or anything. Just a new skill and a new experience. I didn’t understand the big deal. I felt excited and a little nervous the first time. They said the smell would be horrible. But overall I thought I was ready and I was. Being ready isn’t what I needed to worry about. It’s how to deal with the events afterward. He is white, maybe twenty, medium height, gray eyes the color of a rainy sky. His BDUs (Battle Dress Uniform) look like they’ve been rolled in dirt. And the body odor. Well, it’s bad. But who wouldn’t be dirty and wrinkled after such a long flight in a C-130, and Baghdad isn’t even his last stop. A few days earlier he had come through the line in the DFAC. I was serving lasagna. It was a Friday night. I looked up through the cloud of food steam and kidded around with him a little bit, just for fun. He said he was leaving that night for a FOB. Then he smiled, said thanks when I spooned a pile of dinner onto his plate, and kept moving. Now, the second time I see him, he lies on this table, a big chunk of his left leg missing and a flimsy piece of bloody meat holding his calf and thigh together. The explosion burned all the hair and skin off his skull, which is the whitest white I have ever seen. The room has a metallic smell so strong I can taste it. I keep looking into his left eye. The right was burned along with the right side of his face. It feels like he is looking at me, too, the moment he realized he was not going to make it frozen in a flat, gray stare. Regret at life ending so soon. Somebody in the room said his Humvee was rocketed. He is heavy. I shift his body by putting one arm under his waist and the other 32 COINCIDENCE over his stomach and under the hip on his right side. I remove his keys and Gerber. That’s it. I drop it all in a small cardboard box with the soldier’s name already written in Marks-a-Lot across the top. We bag, tag, and put him in a casket. Then the flag is carefully draped over the rounded top. We carry him to the freezer. I wash up, change from scrubs into my uniform, and drive back to the DFAC. It is dark out, the kind of black that makes me want to curl up with a sheet over my head and a flashlight. I am thinking of all the things that should happen: loss of appetite, nightmares, anxiety , the usual female stuff. As soon as I hit the DFAC, I eat because I had missed dinner. I have pollock, which is dry, steamed rice, and bread hot from the oven, which I spread thick with butter. I eat like I have never seen food before. My friends and I laugh, joke around, and watch movies until time to serve the next meal. I am so proud of myself. I haven’t cried, passed out, or vomited like the other girls. I have made it through the night! For the rest of the deployment I stop harassing the soldiers who come through the DFAC. In fact, I don’t really see them anymore. They don’t exist. I go to the morgue when called in, and when I shut the door behind me, I forget everything. When we closed the casket, it was supposed to have been the last time I would see him. I had never watched the news before my deployment, and when I got back to the States I avoided CNN like a doe running for her life when she spots a predator. After I had been home a few months, I met...