Mickey never saw the one that got him.
He was on point, and when the shooting started it came from all sides. He was strung out, separated, pinched off, his squad somewhere below and behind him on the path, and the Taliban were close, so close he could smell them, a funky mix of sweat and shit even stronger than the powder tang off his rifle. He shot at them through the trees and they shot back and somehow he never got hit until the moment the whole mountainside erupted under his feet.
Mickey was on his back. He looked down at his legs and saw two red smears in their place. The arms and scalps and organs of things that had been Taliban only a second before lay all about him. A pink mist hung in the air. Rock and timber fell amongst and through it but the haze remained. It was a mist of blood, a mist of him and them. It took shape and he looked it in the eye. The wails of the dying echoed across the valley. Mickey felt frozen in panic and when he finally took a breath he inhaled the pink mist and it coated the back of his throat. He coughed and spit red phlegm, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and saw that he was drenched in the stuff. The pink mist loomed, and when he took another breath, Mickey sucked it all the way into his lungs.
Then pain and adrenaline suddenly flooded his body and he felt like he was going to jizz his pants.
“Sergeant Gabe, I’m hit!” he screamed into the mic on his left shoulder.
Silence from the radio and shouts and shots only feet away.
He tried to move backward using his arms and the remains of his legs. He ground the shards of his exposed shin bones into the earth and pushed, but the stilts provided no leverage or balance and he only managed an inch. He tried to twist himself around but he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t make his body work. Why? He put his hands to his stomach and found his bowels. A massive piece of frag had sliced open his belly, right below his vest. Mickey started pushing the blue and white tubes back into his gut with his snot dirt pink mist hands. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but he couldn’t help it. It was instinct.
He rolled over and began to crawl. He didn’t feel his intestines scrape along the gravel. Further down the path he saw his squad mates firing back, up the cliff face, into the valley. They were so far away. Chip was on the ground, lying on his side. Another soldier was working a jam on his machine gun. Sergeant Gabe was missing somehow, nowhere to be seen.
A rough hand rolled him over. Mickey lay on his back and stared up. Two Taliban, eyes rimmed with kohl, their AKs on his chest. Mickey reached for the rifle still slung against him but they pinned it with a foot. He struggled and called for Chip and Sergeant Gabe but he could barely hear his own voice above the gunfire.
Another man approached with a rough hemp rope. They slipped the noose over his head. The rope caught. They stretched his neck. He saw the machete.
A blink.
A break.
A fade.
The Taliban’s head explodes. Another reaches for his rifle and takes two in the chest. The third runs. Refreshed pink mist in his eyes and ears. Mickey rolls on his side and sees a dozen men with baseball caps and beards and wraparound sunglasses, running up the path, firing from cover up the hill. Now Mickey can hear the helicopter flap behind him and he tries to turn around and look but the sun overwhelms him and he can’t see the bird or the lines the men had used to fast-rope down.
Gusts of light-headed euphoria, and Mickey tries to prop himself up. One of the operators runs up to Mickey, squats in the gore, places his body between Mickey and the incoming Taliban fire, lighting up the ridgeline with his grenade launcher. Another comes on Mickey’s left, starts ratcheting tourniquets on his legs. The pink mist dissolves like fog at first light. Mickey’s pumping heart floods the path, pools and ponds and a stream over the lip of the cliff face.
“He’s going to bleed out,” the medic says.
“No, he’s not,” says a third operator just arriving. He checks the blood type stitched on Mickey’s vest, compares it to his own, written in black marker across the top of his boot. “Hook me up.”
The medic pulls out two catheters, two tubes, one bag, ties one man to the other. Buddy transfusion. The man takes a breath and balls his fist and flexes and Mickey’s brain glows from the hot transfer.
Bullet tracers light the sky and fast-movers thunder over the valley. Mickey’s anus lets go. The medic leans over, holds him close, grabs Mickey’s hand, looks him right in the eye.
“You’re going home,” he says.
Mickey’s first sight at the hospital is Chip and Sergeant Gabe. They are standing at the end of his bed, in uniform, Chip grinning. Mickey tries to reach for them but can’t seem to figure out how. His torso is buried under wraps and blankets, his leg stubs are mummies stuck in shrink-wrap plastic bags.
“Sergeant Gabe,” Mickey manages to say. “Where did you go?”
“I was right there, don’t worry,” Sergeant Gabe says.
“Chip, I thought you got killed.”
“No, I’m all right,” Chip says. “We had to be here to welcome you home. No way we would miss it.”
Mickey feels relief but anxiety starts to creep in.
“But what now?” Mickey asks. He doesn’t need to point below his waist to explain what he means.
“Now you get into rehab,” Sergeant Gabe says. “You have work to do.”
Every day at the gym, Mickey works his stumps, lifting and kicking and straining. He does leg raises with weights hanging from his femurs, crunches and twists that pull the stitches in his abdomen wall taut as guitar strings. As soon as he receives his metal legs, he starts running every day, first one mile, then two, then more, many more. When his stumps are too sore, he bikes. When his belly is too sore, he works chest and arms and gets big, bigger than he’s ever been. When he takes off his shirt you can see that the scar stretches completely across his belly, turns up at the ends like a smiley face, his nipples as eyes. Mickey works until his legs look like the tips of two muscled torpedoes jutting from his hips.
Mickey is in the weight room, crushing his bench, kicking his stumps, when the telegram arrives. The telegram says: “We need you back.” His eyes fill. Mickey turns to his wife.
“I’m so happy for you, Mickey,” she says. “You’ve worked so hard. You need to go. I’ll be here waiting for you.”
Mickey arrives at the mustering station walking on his new steel pins. Chip is there, and Sergeant Gabe, and the whole squad.
“Syria,” Sergeant Gabe says. “They’re sending us all back over.”
“But how? It’s been so long since I got hurt, you guys should have been reassigned by now,” Mickey asks.
“There’s a new policy,” Sergeant Gabe says. “No more moves. They’re keeping the units together. They’re never going to break up our squad ever again.”
They land at Tartus. The front door of the landing craft drops and Mickey and his squad mates hit the beach. Mortars fall in sheets and enemy strongpoints lay down overlapping machine gun fire but Mickey and Chip and Sergeant Gabe press up the sandy slope and take cover behind a concrete wall. The enemy soldiers are all dressed in uniforms, black man-jams that silhouette sharply against the grey and dusty homes. Mickey and Chip find their marks, move their squad in one block, then two, into the center of the city. The black uniformed men fall in piles and fill the gutters with blood. Children appear in doorways and immediately run to the Americans, take cover behind them, safely out of the way. One boy grabs onto Mickey’s leg in fear, but Mickey musses his hair and the boy smiles with his wide dark eyes.
House to house they move and the Syrian Army liquefies before them. A rout becomes a slaughter becomes an extermination. Mickey and Chip reach the center of town to see enemy tanks fleeing. Tartus is free. A woman in a headscarf walks up to Mickey and touches his cheek and puts a flower behind his ear and says thank you. The boy smiles. Their commander, Captain Wodinski, drives up in his Humvee, steps from the armored truck, and addresses his men.
“Keg’s on me when we take Damascus! Two kegs for Babylon!”
Chip and Mickey are resting in the shade of the palm trees as Sergeant Gabe walks among the squad and tosses out field rations.
“Chip, what’d you get?” Mickey asks.
“Beef stew and a can of Cope. How about you?”
“Chili Mac and Lucky Strikes.”
“Nice.”
The vacuum-packed meal pouches are already warm in the desert heat, and Mickey and Chip and the squad dig in. Chip puts in his dip and Mickey smokes and they talk of all the girls they left behind and the enemy that lay before them.
“Chip, can I tell you something? I was always afraid I had made the wrong decision, re-enlisting,” Mickey says. “Can you believe that? I thought the war was evil. That maybe what we did was evil.”
“Evil?” Chip says, shaking his head. And then Sergeant Gabe is there, standing over them.
“Nothing is evil when it’s done for love,” he says.
Outside of Tartus the inland hills rise in waves of scrub. Up the dusty paths Mickey and Chip and Sergeant Gabe march, their squad the vanguard of fleets of soldiers and Marines at their backs, until a regrouped enemy battalion counterattacks from above. They dive for cover and artillery shells donate around them. American fighter jets tear the sky and drop bunker-busters on the positions ahead. Chip screams to make himself heard.
“We’re pinned down,” he says.
“We have to keep moving,” Mickey says. “We have a whole Army behind us. Let’s go.”
“Stop! Don’t take that path!” Sergeant Gabe yells and grabs Mickey’s arm. His ear is pressed to the radio. “The drones can see the IEDs. That path is mined. This one is clear.” And he turns and climbs a new crease in the hillside and the squad follows him into the incoming fire.
Up they go, shooting, bounding, covering. Mickey looks out at the Mediterranean and can see the Navy’s battleships turned broadside, firing their sixteen-inch guns at the enemy positions above him. He keeps moving, always moving, up the hill, his metal legs untiring, until a mortar lands between him and Sergeant Gabe and his world turns upside down.
Mickey looks at the sky. He pats down his chest, his thighs, finds his prosthetic legs are nothing but twisted metal.
“Medic!” Chip calls.
“No, no, I just need new legs,” Mickey says.
“Medic!” Chip calls again, louder now, and Mickey sits up and sees a lump where Sergeant Gabe once was. Chip is working on him, surrounded by other soldiers. A litter appears, a form is loaded on, far too small to be Sergeant Gabe. They begin to carry him away but now Mickey’s view is blocked as an engineer arrives with a package. Two new titanium legs. Mickey is up in a moment.
The artillery comes in. The naval fire goes out. Chip is back, the rest of the squad behind him, and he and Mickey huddle for cover, pinned down by the Syrians, when they hear a new sound, a growing sound. From behind them, a Humvee is barreling up the dusty road, its machine guns clanking and pumping in an unceasing ruckus. The armored truck stops next to Chip and Mickey and they look up at the gunner in disbelief.
Strapped into the turret is a piece of Sergeant Gabe. He looks like a larva of stitches and bandages, and smells like a summer cookout.
“They say I can come back,” Sergeant Gabe says and smiles through tears. “They say I can still fight. They say I’m still useful.”
And with one hook he spins the wheel and winches the turret around and with the other he works the paddles on the M2, singing softly to himself of mama, Ma Duece, so sweet, she’s got everything he will ever need. Sergeant Gabe points his metal hose over the heads of his advancing comrades, the stream of bullets dousing the enemy hill and the men below freshened as if basking in the cooling mist thrown off by the spigot.
Sergeant Gabe suppresses them all. Mickey and Chip fight their way to the top of the first rise, toss a grenade in a machine gun nest, kill every man-jam that stumbles out dazed.
Mickey’s mother turns to him and says, “We’re so proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Mickey, look at what you’ve done for all of us,” his father says. The pile of corpses rises to his waist. “All is forgiven. You are welcome home any time.”
“Dad, I have things I need to do. My squad needs me,” Mickey says.
“Of course. That’s the kind of man you are. We understand. Your mother and I love you.”
“We’ve always been proud of you,” she says.
Another Syrian hill awaits, and another, and yet more. Mickey and Chip follow Sergeant Gabe in his Humvee as they slowly work their way inland, up the rise, clear the trench, advance again. The Syrians squirm in their holes like maggots in meat, and Mickey throws his grenades, shoots every rifle mag, is down to his pistol, down to the last click, when Chip arrives with reinforcements and clears the trench.
Mickey’s grandfather claps him on the shoulder and smiles.
“Good job, Mickey,” he says.
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
He hands Mickey a new bandolier of rifle magazines.
“Mickey, we can take this hill,” his grandfather says.
“You’re right, Grandpa.”
“I’ll stay here. You and Chip out-flank ’em.” And they do, his grandfather boiling off his Browning machine gun in an endless belt of covering fire.
“I want to tell you all about the war, Mickey,” his grandfather says. “What it was like in France and Germany. Everything you’ve always wanted to know. Come walk with me.”
“Where are we going?” asks Mickey.
“We’re marching to the Pacific,” he says, and puts his steel pot on his head.
“It’s what we should have done to start with, right after 9/11,” says Chip.
“It’s Manifest Destiny,” says Mickey.
“That’s right, we’re going to wipe ’em out, from the Med all the way to Korea, and then they’ll sign the peace treaty, and when we get home, there’s going to be a parade.”
