Shaw came to in the war room. He was surrounded by Slausen, Mike, and Ohio, and so many other guys he couldn’t see the walls for all the camo in front of him. They gathered around him close to break the news and he fell into their arms. Later, Slausen had his hands on Shaw’s face and was rubbing his cheeks. Shaw didn’t know if Slausen was checking for broken bones or whether he had found something he was trying to put back in place. He couldn’t feel Slausen’s fingers until he took them off his skin, and only then because his face began to tingle. He never felt any of the sedatives or fluids Slausen had injected from the IVs into his veins. They kept him heavily medicated.
“Open your mouth,” Slausen said.
Shaw did and Slausen put an opium lolli in his cheek, patted it gently with his hand. Shaw didn’t remember anything after that, surfing the morphine swells as he was. He couldn’t tell whether the hours on a clock were running forward or back until the CO and Slausen stood in front of him hours, maybe days later.
“Massey wants you to escort him home,” Slausen said. “It’s in his will.”
Slausen’s eyes were tiny black slits hiding in his red puffy eyelids. Shaw was sitting in a chair in the war room. He didn’t say anything. It felt like milk was flooding his eyes, blinding him. Slausen and the CO were fading into Mike and Ohio sitting next to them, and they all just formed a big jumbled mass of beards and fatigues. Depression and pity. Anger. Slausen leaned toward him. Shaw felt a beard on his face, warm breath on his ear. He smelled Copenhagen and sweat. Slausen whispered soft. Slow.
“He wants you to take him home.”
• • •
Slausen passed him a handful of pills before Shaw got on the bird with the caskets.
“Take all of them,” Slausen said. “You’ll piss hot, but everything will melt away. No pain. So no tests for two or three weeks.”
Shaw nodded and popped them, ground them to powder, and swallowed. His mouth felt chalky and dry.
“Listen to me,” Slausen said. “Get someone else’s piss or tell them you need to see the shrink.” He put his hands on Shaw’s shoulders and brought his face close. Their noses nearly touched. “Do not piss for them. They’ll kick you out.”
Shaw ran his tongue around his mouth and swallowed some grains that’d lodged between his teeth. Slausen looked behind him, at the flags draped over the metal caskets holding what was left of their friends. He sniffed and shook his head.
“Don’t kill yourself, all right? They already got four of us.”
Slausen hugged him and then bit at his fingernails.
“Make sure you’re sitting or lying down within a half hour. They hit hard.”
Shaw nodded, didn’t say a thing. He could already feel a tingling in the back of his head and spreading from his elbows. He kept licking his teeth.
Slausen looked him in the eyes.
“We’ll see you in a week or two, okay? Come back.”
They both nodded and Slausen turned away. The ramp started to close. From his seat, Shaw watched him walk away toward Mike and Ohio and the rest of the guys lining the airfield in the fading sunlight. Then Slausen stopped and turned toward the bird, his hand held up in a wave. Shaw watched his fingers close into a fist, then the ramp cut him off and the bird darkened.
Shaw never asked Slausen what he’d taken, but they worked. Everything fuzzed and melted away and he started feeling heavy and weightless at the same time. The person guarding the door of the cabin changed from a man to a woman and then disappeared entirely and he couldn’t be sure there was anyone at all. He saw bodies and sad little girls and smiling friends who had been alive but were now lying dead in caskets at his feet. He didn’t know if he clocked out at the half-hour mark like Slausen said he would, but the nearly daylong flight felt like only a few minutes. What he did remember of those few minutes seemed thick, cloudy, and invented like a dream.
Normally body parts of the fallen would be washed and prepared for burial after they were analyzed and the coroner’s final reports made. Then the remains would be put in caskets and flown home to their families. Since the bomb turned the four of them to mist, Shaw wondered if he was sitting in front of four empty caskets. He thought maybe there was only the one chunk of Massey’s chest and a couple jars of whatever they could find of Hagan, Cooke, and Dalonna lying on the metal beds underneath their flag blankets. He almost got the nerve to look.
He vowed to quit, sitting in front of his friends. He finally admitted to himself that he couldn’t do it anymore, that all the ghosts had finally caught up with him. He’d seen the young boy from the pass wave, not point at them, too many times, and the little girl’s cries had turned into menacing laughter. The laughter was enlightened and harsh, like she was saying You might have killed my parents, but you’re the one who’s fucked. His grandma’s face had come through the woman’s chador after Hagan slit her throat in front of all those kids, and she had smiled at him. He thought if he quit maybe they’d all leave him alone, maybe he could get some peace. He thought maybe he’d be able to explain himself when they visited at night. He could tell the little girl her dad was an HVT, a known cell leader who massacred dozens of innocents, and that he was sorry about her mom and didn’t mean to kill her. He could tell the boy in the pass that he should have hidden from them, kept himself alive, and that others like him had reported positions and gotten guys blown away. He could tell his grandma that they never killed the woman, he had only dreamed it, and that the children would put it behind them and study hard and make good lives for themselves.
And then Shaw remembered Stag1’s smile, those white-as-shit teeth. He remembered the way he blew smoke at his knees and how it rose up into his face, and somewhere Shaw knew, even if Intel didn’t yet, that Stag1 had screwed them. Shaw remembered Hagan’s last words. They were Getting the blood moving. Shaw couldn’t place last words to Dalonna, Cooke, and Massey, and that pissed him off, so he thought of Massey with those kids in the CASH and Cooke cleaning his weapon as if it were a baby and Dalonna staring at the pictures of his family before leaving the war room to kill the fathers, brothers, and sons of others. He knew he could never escape the fate waiting for him at the end of some Hajji’s det-cord or rifle barrel. If it wasn’t one of theirs, it’d probably be one of his own.
Then he thought of Illinois. He knew he’d have to walk over the ice-chapped cornstalks of its southern border with Missouri and visit Massey’s family, lay the box of what was left of him into the ground and never see the agate necklace around Penelope’s neck. He thought of Chicago and how he’d have to visit Dalonna’s wife and hug his daughters, maybe make them a bracelet with one of their dad’s old bootlaces and how he’d have to see Dalonna’s son grow up and turn into his father because there’s no way he wouldn’t. He thought of the dry West Texas plains and wondered if there was some drunk, hard father out there among the tumbleweeds who used to beat his kids and might give a shit to see one of them buried in the oil fields. He thought of Hagan, their Hog, and how he wasn’t ever getting the wife he’d wanted to bring back to the land that killed him and show her how fucked up and beautiful it all was.
He thought about what Massey had asked him. About murder. He thought that even though that little girl probably just wanted her parents to braid her hair or read her stories before bedtime, her dad still needed to die. Her mom didn’t need to, but the daughter she carried like a backpack looked a hell of a lot like the straps of a suicide vest and the operators died when they hesitated. He’d tell the boy they had no idea if he would rat them out or not and weren’t willing to wait and find out. There were four of them and only the one of him and his weight was less than theirs. He’d tell his grandma that she was already dead and had left him alone long ago, that they left that woman and those kids alive to hate and love and become whoever they wanted to be after they left their town on fire.
If Massey were alive in that C-17, sitting next to him and not inside of a metal box, Shaw would finally be honest with himself and say yes. Yes, he did feel like a murderer sometimes, and before everything had happened he would’ve hoped that that realization alone would’ve made him stop. But sitting next to the caskets, he knew then that it wouldn’t. He’d like to tell that little girl in the poppy fields he was sorry about her mother but not her father. So where does that leave him? He’s killed far more than he murdered and there’s no way of knowing how many attacks they prevented, or how many they caused. The squadrons will keep going back long after the conventional units and all the news cameras have pulled out. They’ll outlast all the foreign aid. Not until long after the officeholders stop uttering the country’s name in anything but political-poison whispers and schoolchildren no longer recognize the significance of its syllables in their classrooms will the squadrons leave. And then they’ll just go to new places, different lands. Shaw knows there will always be Stag1s to chase until they killed them all, and they never will. Never could. So he can go on chasing them forever and they him until his ghosts have all left him. And they never will.
He’d rather charge among them than flee only to be overrun in the end.