“If you mean is his body is all right, then yes, I guess he’s all right in that way.”
“That’s good.” I didn’t know if he wanted to pursue this line of conversation, so I waited and glanced up at the
college game.
Then he got started. “He saw stuff over there that no eighteen-year-old ought to have to see. He’s just a kid,
and he’s not the same guy now that he was before he left. You wouldn’t believe half the shit that’s really going
on over there that the media won’t show us over here. It’s really fucked up over there. The place is a mess.”
I managed to get in a quick “I think I can believe it” just to let him know that I was paying close attention and was
genuinely interested in what he had to tell me.
Annie the bartender called to him, “Johnny, which shirt do you want for your nephew? We’ve got four different
kinds.”
Johnny nodded to Annie that he’d heard her, but he continued
talking about his nephew and Iraq to me. Annie turned her
attention to a white-haired, white-bearded Ernest Hemingway of
a man seated at the opposite end of the bar. Behind Papa, as I
began to think of him, were dozens of framed pictures of giant
fish caught, hauled off of boats, and hoisted up and onto the
very same dock I was looking at through the grimy window.
Their conversation was related to fishing.
Captain Johnny continued. “Yeah, he came back so bitter, and
he feels used. He did one tour and he made it out of there. He
was into some very heavy fighting in his first tour. He was lucky
to get out, after what he told me we went through. A lot of his
friends didn’t survive or were badly injured. So he came back,
and the army stationed him somewhere down in Georgia at a
base down there, training other kids, since he had been in so
Imuch combat. His battle experience was needed to try to teach the new guys just going over how to keep
themselves alive and not get shot up.”
I was glad to get this real-world report by way of a man who appeared to care for his nephew deeply.
“After a few months working as a trainer,” Johnny said, “the army offers him a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus to
return to Iraq. He accepts that offer and he goes back. This time it’s even worse than before. Two of his buddies get
blown up by roadside bombs; another takes a hit in the head by a sniper while they’re driving together in a Humvee.
Everybody’s carrying weapons; you don’t know who to trust. Let me tell you, the media isn’t showing us anything
about how bad it actually is in Iraq. They hold back the truth and the big events from us, no pictures, no reports—
nothing. And the biggest insult was that the army paid my nephew only twelve hundred of the twenty thousand
dollars they’d promised him to go back to Iraq. He’s very bitter about that. A lot of things are bothering him now and
eating away at him. He was never like this before he went over there.”