So I drive The Niece to most of her extra-curricular stuff (I am perfectly aware this is because my somewhat-pimped out Lincoln is way cooler than her mom's minivan plus I play way better music) and today she was singing along to my System of a Down CD, Jet Pilot, I believe. I was sooo proud. I thought I'd lost her to Kelly Clarkson and The Pussycat Dolls. I am so taking that kid to Ozzfest.
But anyway this is about Magic Stick so here you go. Another chapter and it took me less than a month to churn it out!
"The M67 fragmentation hand grenade has a 3 to 5 second fuse that ignites explosives packed inside a round body. Shrapnel is provided by the grenade casing. It produces a casualty radius of 49.2 feet, with a fatality radius of 16.4 feet. To arm the device, pull the pin; to ignite the fuse, release the spoon."
As he recalled them; Pvt. Williams hoped with every ounce of his being that his ability to recite grenade facts meant he wasn't going to die. His life was supposed to flash before his eyes and it didn't; not that there was much he was hoping to revisit before going to great big toilet in the sky. He saw Sadik pull the pin and raise his arm only to fall almost immediately as fifteen bullets from the Lieutenant's sidearm pierced his body preemptively, before he had a chance to throw.
He was the closest possible casualty after Lt. Benally and the last to join the dissonant chorus of cries to take cover before something he'd later only describe as the vacuum cleaner from hell, pulled him from every side. His head, when Lt. Benally plowed him, pushing him into the nearest open cell, felt as if it would implode.
She took the brunt of the raining chunks of wall and ceiling, squirming every time the falling debris made her helmet feel like the episode of Tom and Jerry where the cat got his head stuck in a bucket and the mouse beat on it with a stick. It was a while until Williams began stirring under her. She saw his hand reaching for her neck then feeling around for a pulse and got off him. William raised his head and rolled on his side, crying out something blasphemous when the bulk of his weight rested on his right side. Of all the ways to earn a Purple Heart, Pvt. Maurice Williams from Compton, CA would get his by getting stuck in the ass with rebar.
"Are you okay ma'am?" He yelled, overcompensating for his inability to hear his own voice through the ringing in his ears. Lt. Benally struggled to catch enough breath to form an answer that went unheard.
"Smashing."
Kai tried to sit up and didn't make it past failed attempt. She fell back down, wiped her bloody nose with the sleeve of her blouse and pushed the release tab in her helmet's chin strap as SSgt. Silas began a verbal headcount somewhere to her left. Dumphy and Nassiri followed up with clockwise rounds of the rubble. It was the latter who helped Pvt. Williams to his feet and hovered above her with his good hand outstretched. He had to steady himself to pull the Lieutenant upright when she didn't meet his effort halfway. She clutched her right side.
"Are you okay ma'am?" Nassiri asked echoing Williams' earlier concern.
"Find Colonel Ghazi," Kai ordered foregoing effusive thank yous or attempts to find out how anyone else had fared. "Rashid is in his office. Keep him gagged and bagged and away from that goddamned reporter."
"Captain Baron's here and we got the Colonel ma'am," Dumphy volunteered, at least slightly annoyed that the first thing out of the Lieutenant's mouth had been more orders. "Sgt. Glick called in the cavalry. Town's ours now."
–X–
Bina was crawling with soldiers when Lt. Benally et alia emerged from the newly remodeled underground level with their bounty in tow, game over, eighteen to assorted nicks and scrapes. Pvt. Williams was already favoring his left leg when he zeroed in on the red cross painted on the side of a Humvee and the medic working by yellow floodlights, stitching up a blindfolded, restrained detainee.
They moved through what had to be at least a hundred blindfolded men seated in neat rows in the middle of the street with their hands behind their backs and their identification cards if they had any, in front of them. Two privates were flanking a third soldier at a random spot between rows as he numbered foreheads with a black felt tip marker and jotted down the numbers in a clipboard next to each name.
Johanna Gilchrist, news correspondent non-extraordinaire was busy picking on the Sergeant in charge of the tagging efforts; spitting questions faster than the human brain could possibly comprehend let alone respond. She had tried her luck with Captain Baron earlier only to find him entangled in an awkward radio exchange trying to explain why an entire company had been mobilized to backup soldiers on an assignment that called for removed observation of a town from a little under two miles away.
"Sergeant Broadus it seems unlikely that all these men are enemy combatants. How were they apprehended? Why are the troops keeping them together? What efforts are being made to offset the risk of wrong imprisonment? Will Coalition forces undertake retaliative measures against police Colonel Hassan Ghazi for his refusal to turn over the former Minister of the Interior?
"Tell me Sergeant, what do you think about this raid? Do you think it will affect the timetable for Coalition forces to pull out of Iraq?"
Sergeant Broadus wasn't paying attention. He had picked a spot on the wall and continued to stare at it until Johanna's voice melted into an insect-like buzzing he could ignore much like his wife's constant reminders that the lawn needed to be mowed. Eventually, Johanna Gilchrist' one sided interview fizzled out, not because she was about to give up her questioning or stop her attempts to report, but because she recognized Al-Jazeera's Ahmad Chalabi bound and bagged in his press jacket followed by two men who seemed promising enough to brave their heavily armed entourage.
At least one of those, Johanna figured, had to be the former Minister of the Interior. Out-scooping the competition carried a big cash bonus with SCN Networks.
She slipped a fresh tape into the properly labeled slot in her camera and trained her lens on the stragglers. It had been a while since she had a chance to revive her mistreatment of the press angle for her ten viewers at home but Ahmad Chalabi's hunkering stance was too good to pass up. She closed in on the highest ranking body in the stack, Lt. Benally, without noticing their shared peeing handicap.
"Lieutenant what will happen to Husam Thamir Ibrahim al-Sadun now that he is back in US custody? Do you think this episode will affect his overall treatment while he is detained?" Johanna walked backwards with the camera on her shoulder, counting to six in her head to give her victims enough time to respond. Not a creature dared stir, not even Dumphy with his predilection for an ear to enthuse.
"Come on Lieutenant," she tried again. A medic covered the lens of Johanna's camera with his hand when she kept filming within the boundaries of the triage area. The private beside him was a wordless, gesture-free version of the same unwelcoming message with his hefty frame blocking her access to the medic working on Tariq and William's scrapes and promising to do the same for her target as soon as she took two more steps. Something inside Johanna clicked as even more soldiers escorted away the trio of high profile detainees. It smelled very distinctly of whiny determination.
"I have full access to all the areas and operations of this company Lieutenant. You have been ordered by your commanding officer to cooperate in all possible ways with all journalists covering in country events and this is not cooperation."
Lt. Kai Benally and Johanna Gilchrist found each other eye to eye with very little space between their faces. The decidedly female voice that spoke to Johanna in a deadpan, whisper chilled her blood.
"You live at 151 North Gower Street in London, don't you? You didn't tell the landlord about your cat before moving in, started you off on the wrong foot." Johanna nodded up and down and side to side, paling considerably in the yellowish light. "Perhaps you can reconcile your duty to report with your need to remain a Brit in good standing? Her Majesty's Revenue takes tax evasion very seriously when it's strapped for cash."
Johanna licked her lips with a tongue so dry it could have rivaled her cat's for texture. She swallowed in vain before nodding her understanding. She clicked off the 'record' button and tried to step away.
"I'd appreciate it if you would place the two tapes in your pockets inside the camera bag you'll be handing over to Pvt. Dumphy as a show of good faith," Kai said loudly for the benefit of the medics and the patients and especially Dumphy who escorted Johanna in her very brief walk of shame.
Kai wanted nothing more than a clean toilet where she might be able to pee in relative privacy but the simple wish got further away in the mammoth radio headed her way on the camouflaged back of someone who could probably think of better ways to spend his night than having his sleep interrupted to arrive long after his presence was needed. Captain Baron was visible in the distance as the radio's previous victim, tired, annoyed and angry and Sgt. Glick close behind him basking in the afterglow of career suicide at the tender age of 33.
She barely had time to identify herself when Col. Ryan's unmistakable voice boomed. Sixty-eight percent of what he relayed through a filter of distance and static would be unprintable in family papers worldwide. For the second round, he toned the content down.
"Are you in-fucking-sane Lieutenant?" The radio's handset hollered. She could only hear a faint whisper even though the Colonel was speaking loud enough to rouse the dead. "Are you independently wealthy L T 'cause I don't see any other way you can pick up the tab for this cluster fuck!"
There was no answer on the Kai's side. She let the Colonel vent for a full minute until second by second his tone mellowed progressively and his pace slowed down.
"I understand you collared me a Christmas gift L T. Is that right?"
"Yes sir; buy two get one free sale."
"Well hell's bells then I better schedule a pick-up."
Lt. Benally didn't hear Colonel Ryan sing off on his end. She dropped the handset in her grip and blinked twice as if trying to focus on something she couldn't quite see.
"Are you okay ma'am?" Spc. Fallis asked jumping to his feet, noticing one of her pupils was as wide as a plate.
"I can't breathe," she said. "Do you have two heads?" Kai dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes without waiting for an answer.
The medic snapped into action and began removing the Lieutenant's weapons on the spot where she fell. He was through to the Velcro tabs on the body armor when she began to retch. A second medic turned Lt. Benally on her side and stepped out of range of the reborn stomach goo then helped Fallis look for injuries in a fairly spotless uniform whose only trace of blood was on the sleeves where she's wiped her nose.
"I hope she doesn't die," Pvt. Williams whispered mostly to himself.
"That would be three dead Lieutenants man. I think we are bad luck," Tariq replied.
"Shut up both of you." That was SSgt. Silas alright. He'd been made bitchier than usual by a flying brick that had turned a good half of his chest into a rainbow of red and ever more darkening purples.
Spc. Fallis began unbuttoning Lt. Benally's uniform blouse, pissed for not being able to find what was wrong. He held the uniform up against the light; still unable to see anything that could resemble an entrance would or clue him to why the other medic had begun to bag a woman who had no airway constrictions. He pulled her pants down and nearly yelled 'eureka' when he spotted the quarter sized hole that matched the half moon chunk missing from her belt. He put on a fresh pair of blue latex gloves and wiggled his finger in the open wound, hitting bone when his index finger was two knuckles in.
"There's no blood."
"If the shrapnel's hot enough going in, it cauterizes the entrance wound," Fallis replied cutting the seams of Kai's brown undershirt, ripping the fabric to get a better look of the shrapnel's possible path. He applied pressure on her hips as blood began to seep once again. His attention wavered to the blood pooled just under her skin until it faded away two inches below her right breast sans an exit wound.
"Shit. Shit. Shit." He muttered. "She's gonna have to be Medevaced right now."
He took over his partner's efforts pumping the bag attached to the valve mask over Lt. Benally's nose and mouth and listened intently while the other medic called in the evacuation and described the situation to the radio operator on the other side. He saw three soldiers; SSgt. Silas included, begin to clear a landing zone and looked back to Lieutenant Benally.
This time, he noticed the tell-tale signs of healed but extensive skin grafts over most of her torso and extending down her left thigh. He traced the largest square of transplanted skin before he covered her back up, first with the uniform and then with a wool blanket. Six minutes later, amidst the shuffle of the Medevac taking away the third Lieutenant to end up at least unwell after serving with Bravo company, the older helicopter and the soldiers who shepherded Colonel Ghazi, Rashid Sabawi and Husam Thamir Ibrahim 'Too Many Names' al-Sadun into it, went largely unnoticed.
The green and white markings on the fuselage of the fighter jets that escorted the helicopter out of Iraqi air space and later the same night over the Persian Gulf, as well as the matching patches on the airmen's flight suits would have raised more than a few eyebrows if anyone had been looking when they joined the chopper mid-flight.
And so the chapter came to an end.
Thy Author and Ze Editor