Then afterward one of them sliced her face.

Sliced halfway up her face on both sides. Corners of her mouth he'd sawed-at with a Swiss Army knife.

So she was grinning. Like a crazy clown.

And her eyes open, staring.

THEY WERE ASKING What had he done to her. Had he hurt her, and where had he left her.

They were saying If you were provoked. If you confess now, and lead us to her. Where you left her, Corporal.

DIDN'T WANT A LAWYER. A lawyer meant guilt.

A lawyer meant shame, and a lawyer meant guilt.

His mouth tasted of vomit, he'd tried to rinse the sour taste away. And where he'd bitten his tongue, or maybe it was a mouth ulcer. In Iraq he'd had them-mouth ulcers. Staring in the mirror seeing the tiny white dots thinking it was cancer.

A terrible death by cancer, eaten alive. From the mouth outward.

It was a worse death because slower, than the other.

He'd heard-felt-the explosion. Heard screams, and then curses.

In their combat outpost, a deserted school. Battered and the windows like gouged-out eyes and behind it a bomb inside a drainage pipe that'd exploded blowing off the hands of Private Hardy and killing Private Quinn outright.

He'd run to them. Blindly running, thinking he could help.

What he saw was- When it came to be his turn to die later and in another place. Shouldn't have been so totally surprised but fact is, he was.

For always you think, can't help but think God would not let that happen to me. Jesus would not. I am a good person, I will be spared.

He'd been a good person, Corporal Kincaid. All his life tried.

Boy Scout for Jesus the Sergeant called him sneering with one-half his face like a side of beef grinning.

This was in Salah ad Din province. Dusty, sandy, nasty.

Daily patrols were fifteen, sixteen hours-the record was eighteen hours. Your brain turned off, legs and feet continued like a windup zombie-toy. Boots so damn heavy like lifting weights or leg shackles and the socks not thick enough to prevent the skin scraping off his heels or a sharp toenail cutting into an adjacent toe feeling like a shard of glass driven into the toe. Infantrymen are particularly warned to be careful of infections which can happen easily in a combat zone and which can be life-threatening. The object was to protect the army base-(but why the hell was the base in such a dusty sandy nasty place requiring protection)-from fragmentation grenades, sniper fire, insurgent assault.

Move! No matter how exhausted if you stand still for more than four seconds-you're a candidate for a Ziploc bag, kid.

Fucking snipers never slept.

Or maybe it had been somewhere else-the names were strange and dreamlike riddles you can't be sure you've heard right, you feel a pressure inside your head not wanting to fuck up and be laughed-at.

In emails home he'd tried to be accurate. As a student he'd tried to be accurate. It was the least you could do, he'd thought, to prevent things from being more fucked-up than they were, yet still he couldn't have sworn it had been Salah ah-Din and not Diyala or As Sadah. And there was Kirkuk.

They'd shoveled him up in pieces there-Kirkuk.

Guys joked about donor organs. Like for instance, cock, testicles.

There was a rumor, wealthy Saudis bought kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, eyes, bone marrow on the black market. Their own kind-"Arabs"-"Muslims"-were cheap to be harvested.

In the U.S. that was illegal. In the U.S. you could not sell or purchase any body part or organ, this was against U.S. standards of morality.

The fight against terror is a fight against the enemies of U.S. morality-Christian faith. Somewhere in this God-forsaken place were the imams of the Al Qaeda terrorists who'd blown up the World Trade Center. Out of a pure hateful wish to destroy the Christian American democracy like the pagans of antiquity had hoped to do, centuries before. Ancient imperial Rome in the time of the gladiators-you would be required to die for your faith. It had been explained to them by their chaplain-this is a crusade to save Christianity. General Powell had declared there can be no choice, the U.S. has been forced to react militarily. The U.S. will never compromise with evil. No choice but to send in troops before the weapons of mass destruction are loosed by the crazed dictator Saddam-nuclear bombs, gas and germ warfare.

Only a very foolish and cowardly country would "wait and see" what developed. In the chapel the minister told them, Our ancestors are those brave enough to take the pre-emptive strike.

The insurgents were terrorist-enemies. The other Iraqis-"civilians"-were friends of the U.S., dependent upon the U.S. military to protect them.

Some were Kurds, not Iraqis. Kirkuk was the site of a vast oil field.

Some of this the guys knew, or had known at one time.

Soon, you began to forget. Following orders you forget what was the day before.

Names of places were easy to forget. Drifted in sand. And sand in eyes, nostrils, mouth. Sand inhaled in lungs so each breath you took, you drew the desert deeper into you.

Later in the hospital he'd tasted the sand-grit in his mouth. In his lungs. Coughing-choking trying to clear his lungs and what came up was a thick syrupy mucus tinged with blood.

In his brains, something squirming and teeming like-maggots?

A titanium implant, to secure the broken skull.

In his mangled left eye and the soft-matter (brains) behind the eye a minuscule intraocular lens (guaranteed to withstand melting at temperatures below 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) was implanted.

Vision is in the brain. The "eye" is the lens of the brain.

From one of the (dead, blasted) insurgents they'd taken trophies: eyes, thumbs, ears. Entire faces sliced off though rarely in one piece.

Wrapped in gauze and secured then in hand-sized Ziploc bags.

You figure why not. Fucking earned it.

Not Kincaid the Boy Scout. But others.

Private Muksie was the Jokester of the platoon.

"Coyote" Muksie who was Sergeant Shaver's right-hand man.

Insurgents. Insurgent snipers. These were an army of shadows, no way to fight shadows except to obliterate them in waves like flame.

There were counterinsurgency measures since before Corporal Kincaid had arrived. Yet, the memory of an earlier strategy issued by the brigade commander Colonel T___ remained fresh and was preferred: KILL THEM ALL AND LET GOD SORT THEM OUT.

He'd lost his meds. These were antibiotics to keep the death-bacteria from eating him alive.

Begin in the blood, then soft-tissue. Then, the brain.

He was prone to seeing things not-there and hearing things not-there since the explosion inside his head.

Problem is, you can't distinguish.

Telling them he didn't know. The girl-he'd forgotten her name.

Never knew her name. Any of their names. Civilians.

The interrogation continued through the night. He'd been one of the younger men assigned to the detail. It was thrilling to enter the little houses of the Iraqi civilians in which insurgents were suspected of hiding. Ducking your head to step through one of the dwarf-doorways next thing you know you might be shot-your head might explode. That could happen.

Later, he'd been sick with shame. At the time, there was no high like it.

Sure he'd smoked dope. He'd never tried cocaine, heroin. He'd never (yet) tried crystal meth. But he knew, there could be no high like this because it was a natural high.

"Kill board"-Sergeant Shaver was the overseer.

Muksie was the expeditor.

They hadn't asked him. Hadn't invited him. Knowing he'd snitch on them. Fucking Boy Scout Kincaid should've shot him.

Fragmentation grenade. Should've fragged him.

It wasn't a secret. "Coyote" told lots of people.

Anything that is done by one in the company, is done by all.

An army is ants. Essentially.

He'd been sick for two, three days. He'd felt his brain soften and drift bobbing like an embryo in formaldehyde, in a glass jug.

Went to the chaplain. His throat was so dry from the sand, almost he couldn't speak.

Are you sure, son. Take your time, son.

What passes between us is confidential.

They'd asked: who did the shooting.

He was trying to remember: she'd run from him.

Couldn't understand why-she'd run from him. He'd called after her but she'd run from him.

Hadn't wanted to hurt her. She'd said I am the only one who understands you. No one else can know what we know, they are beloved of God.

His guts were like concrete. The only way for him to shit was if it turned to liquid, fiery liquid, scathing as it poured out of him.

Otherwise, it was concrete.

So fucking ashamed, pain in his bowels. Rocking with pain. Breaking out into sweat. And trying to piss, after the catheter. You have to learn how, it isn't an instinct.

He was trying to tell them he hadn't seen. Hadn't been anywhere near.

Or maybe he'd been there and hadn't seen-exactly-what the guys were doing, or had done. Maybe by then it was over. Maybe it was hours over. Days over.

Or maybe he'd blundered into it. Staff Sergeant Shaver calling him: KIN-CAID! CORP'L FUCKING KIN-CAID! like the surprise was for him.

Bring your cell phone, Kin-caid! Photo op!

THEY'D THOUGHT SHE WAS OLDER-for sure. Hadn't known she was so young.

And the younger brother, eight or nine.

And the parents-so small they'd look like children back in the States.

And the old ones-grandparents . . .

After they'd dragged the girl out and were done with her Sergeant Shaver said disgusted No witnesses! Wipe 'em.

It hadn't been what they'd planned. None of it felt right. The girl was just a child not a teenaged girl like they'd been expecting, of which so many had been speaking A girl! Sexy babe! like it was MTV and rap music accompanying and if somebody was raped, or beaten bloody and dead, it wasn't like MTV where they came back laughing. It wasn't like any of that it was like-it was like a sad, stupid mistake . . . In the culvert they dragged her about one hundred feet from the end of the village road and tried to bury her beneath mud-chunks and rocks and slats of a broken fence. One more God-damned task to be done once the high was over. Essentially it was hard to take the Iraqi civilians seriously. Hard to see why they cared if they lived or died. If one of their kids died, or some old people. Anyone.

Muksie, Broca, Mahan, Ramirez. Not Kincaid.

How many feet separated him from Shaver and his "kill crew" he'd be asked to estimate later. At the time in confusion and alarm he'd had no idea for he'd had no idea what the men were doing exactly.

Then, he'd seen Muksie with the shears. He'd heard the guys laughing kind of scared and breathless like kids in his high school daring to climb out onto the school roof and run stooped across the roof during school hours. Wild!

He'd raised his voice to protest. But no sound came.

Sick to his stomach. Puking out his guts.

Photo op, dudes! Lookit!

HE'D BROUGHT IT BACK with him, that last time.

The new cell phone, a gift from his prospective in-laws.

The Mayfields are snooty people living up there on the hill. They will look down on you like a dog-trained little mongrel-puppy. Don't come whining to me when you find out.

Fact is he was crazy for them. Zeno, Arlette.

Any resentment he'd had, his mother's bitterness, something about how the mayor had treated her, or hadn't treated her-it might have been that Ethel had wanted more attention from the mayor, as a reasonably good-looking woman (single) with a little kid (boy, needing a dad) might expect from a man like Zeno Mayfield giving off heat just entering a room-Hel-lo! Ladies, good mornin'!

What he was, was a phony. God-damn phony politician.

She'd been a file clerk. Worked in the front office. High heels, lipstick. Never got promoted. Eleven years.

Took her revenge, brought home office supplies in her ShopRite bag.

Paper she had no use for, reams of paper. Ballpoint pens by the fistfuls. Even printer cartridges. (But she had to be careful: the cartridges were expensive. Didn't dare take more than a single one every week or two.) Even rolls of toilet paper from the storage closet, unopened. So they had all the God-damn toilet paper they'd ever need.