Redeployment

A military vehicle is hit by a grenade, and the narrator—named Ozzie—climbs out of the wreckage. He sees two men from his unit, Corporal Garza and Timhead. Someone opens fire on them from a nearby building, and they shoot back. When the shooting stops, a woman is screaming from the building. When they reach the building, they see that Timhead has shot and killed a 13-year-old boy. The boy’s mother is the screaming woman.

Timhead tells Garza that it wasn’t him, so Garza assumes that Ozzie shot the boy. Timhead comes to Ozzie and says that he’s worried that everyone back at the base is going to ask him what it was like to be the first of them to kill someone. Since Garza already thinks that Ozzie shot the kid, he asks if they can stick to that story. Ozzie agrees, and when they get back, everyone in the unit shakes his hand and congratulates him on doing his job. The next day, he gets asked to tell the story many times. Each time, he adds details and realizes that his version of the story is starting to feel as if it really happened.

A week later, a man named MacClelland is killed when a convoy is attacked. At his funeral, Ozzie finds himself shaking while “Taps” plays on the speakers. A member of his unit tells him that “at least you got one” (37).

During most of their off-duty time, Ozzie and Timhead sit in the barracks and play video games. They don’t talk much, and “[s]ometimes I’d look at him, focused on the Nintendo, and I’d want to scream, ‘What’s going on with you?’ He didn’t seem different, but he had to be. He’d killed somebody” (38). They are both sleeping badly as well. Every time Ozzie needs to sleep, he goes down and plays a video game instead. After he nearly falls asleep during a convoy mission, he smashes his video game console when he gets back.

Ozzie and Timhead talk. Timhead says that his little brother is in juvenile detention for setting fires. He is 16, not much older than the kid he shot. Timhead says that he keeps seeing the kid’s face and then then the mother. Ozzie has been seeing the same things, but he says that is what they signed up for. They are just doing their jobs.

Ozzie talks with his Staff Sergeant. He tells him everything that Timhead said about the kid, “but like it was me” (41). Staff Sergeant tells him that what they do in the war never gets easier, but the fact that he can even talk about it is a good sign. He recommends that Ozzie talk to either the psychiatrist or the chaplain, but Ozzie declines. He thinks about the saying that combat is 99% boredom and 1% terror. It’s different in Iraq. He is scared all the time and feels like he could die at any moment: “You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking” (43).

Chaplain Vega comes to talk to Ozzie a few days later. Vega asks him to talk, but Ozzie doesn’t have much to say. Then Vega says that he knows how he got his nickname, Ozzie, and asks what his real name is. He got the nickname Ozzie after being dared to bite a dead lizard’s head off, like the singer Ozzie Osbourne had done with a bat. His real name is Paul. He repeats that he doesn’t have much to say and that he isn’t even sure what’s bothering him, but he doesn’t think it’s the kid. He says, “‘Every time I hear an explosion, I’m like, that could be one of my friends. And when I’m on a convoy, every time I see a pile of trash or rocks or dirt, I’m like, that could be me. I don’t want to go out anymore. But it’s all there is’” (46). Vega tells him that he should pray more and then leaves.

During a night convoy, Ozzie is in the lead vehicle when they see two Iraqis digging, which could mean they are preparing to bury an explosive device. They receive orders to fire on them. Ozzie fires his gun into the night and knows that he might have hit them, but it is too dark to tell. That night he tells Timhead that he’s “bugging out a little” (48) because he thinks he might have killed someone. Timhead said that the killing doesn’t bother him—it’s that the kid’s family was there. He says a little girl had been watching from a window.

Ozzie goes back to the Staff Sergeant and says, “‘It’s not that I killed a guy, it’s that his family was there’” (49). He says that there was a little girl at the window. The Staff Sergeant says, “‘There’s firefights in this city every fucking day. That’s her home. That’s in the streets where she plays. This girl is probably fucked up in ways we can’t even imagine’” (50). Ozzie realizes that the shooting is probably not even the worst thing the girl has seen. He tries to talk to Timhead about it again that night, but Timhead stops him and says he is “over it” (51).

A man named Harvey gets shot in the neck during a convoy, but the bullet only grazes him. He brags about the scar he will have, which annoys Timhead, who starts calling him “Mr. Tough Guy” (52). He keeps talking about it in their bunk until Ozzie says, “‘He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants’” (52). Timhead says that it doesn’t matter, that nothing does, and Ozzie agrees.