Way of the Reaper by Nicholas Irving

Author:Nicholas Irving
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250088369
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

SIX

WITHOUT REMORSE

“IRV! LET GO of your junk, man. You’re out in public!”

The rest of the forty-man 1st Platoon who heard Ramirez’s successful attempt to punk me laughed. I felt my ears burning with embarrassment, but there was no way I was taking my hands from my groin. We were just outside of Kandahar in the late fall of 2008 before the surge that President Obama instituted. We may have been crossing a relatively small pond, waist-deep in water the color of feces, but in my mind, I was back home in Texas sitting on a couch a similar color to that water watching television.

I was home for a while between deployments. Jessica was at work and I had the day to myself to fill with whatever diversion I could find. That meant TV, and in this case a show on Animal Planet called Monsters Inside Me. This documentary about infectious diseases fascinated me. I wasn’t a hygiene freak then or now, but something about how these tiny little microorganisms wreak huge havoc on the human body kind of appealed to me. Talk about your “Without hesitation; without remorse” kind of creatures. These things were relentless and lived to kill and destroy.

The particular episode I was thinking of when I stood on the bank of that filthy bit of water was about a particularly nasty microscopic dude that could flow up your urethra when you peed while submerged in water. It would get up inside you and start to destroy your organs. If you didn’t get help, you’d die. I wasn’t about to piss in the water, but I wasn’t taking any chances, so I had my hand clamped pretty firmly on my groin. If I could help it, there wasn’t a single thing working its way up into me.

It wasn’t just the TV show that had me freaked out about sanitation and disease. We had to take pills, make sure we drank clean water, and do all kinds of other things to protect ourselves. A few years before this I was reminded of how dangerous Iraq and Afghanistan could be without even being shot at or having an explosive device detonated near you. This happened during the operation in Iraq I already told you about—the one with the large building where we came under attack. The one we referred to as the Hotel Party.

What I didn’t tell you is that on that operation, one of the mechanics who maintained a bunch of different vehicles was nearing the end of his deployment. He was thinking that maybe this would be the end of his Army days, too. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to re-up, but he knew that he didn’t want to have his career end without him getting a chance to see what life was like outside the wire. He volunteered to go on a ride-along on that operation. You know how crazy that whole thing got. What I didn’t tell you is that even before we got to that hotel party, we had to skirt around a cesspool.

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