The Seventh Mile
Graham Swanson
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| "MOSUL" Acrylic, mixed media and collage on paper, 50" X 38", 2006 |
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| Drew Matott, Deployed, 2010. Relief print on Combat Paper. |
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| Combat Arts exhibit in the Southwestern University art gallery, Sept. 14, 2013. |
The wind shook the wheat. Somewhere beyond the fields ran Highway 7. Seven miles of asphalt between the ruins and Echo Base.
Dust got kicked up into the air.
Smoke. Burning metal. She remembered the smoke from the burning metal hurt her lungs.
Metallic powder shined in the sun. She touched her face but it didn’t feel soft.
Cold. Slick.
Lena touched her eye socket and cheek. Her jaw felt hard. She touched the left half of her face. The right ear heard the mutter of a helicopter. The left heard nothing. The bone around her eye felt loose under the skin, like it had shifted out of place. She wanted to look in the mirror but couldn’t find one.
On base, many people entered. They came and went through the cafeteria, the doors of a tent, out into the 120 degree sun. However one soldier stood still looking into a black window. She asked him what he was looking at.
“Soon.” He said it like he had already watched them leave.
A helicopter looked down at the road. A puff of smoke lifted.
“Where are the route clearance teams?” Radio chatter said.
Lena took a selfie in the cab. Armored doors shut. Helmet strapped. Procedure between bone and flesh. The clipboard looked good. The Pentagon, West Point, the Washington Monument. The system was built to hold. She thought, “It’s supposed to work that way.”
Destruction littered the ground. Fallen men lay scattered. The temperature rose so high that the bodies melted to the sand. Len waded around the ruins, hauling her weapon in one arm and her torn up knapsack in the other. The camouflage was torn. Blood and sand got under her helmet and poured into her eyes under streams of sweat. Shrapnels tore a hole in her camel back.
“Permission to re-route denied.” The radio chattered.
Lena was never meant to go on this journey. But the radio on her shoulder snapped on and off. Her drone equipment lay smashed under rubble. She saw no one guarding the training camp. No sounds but the wind. Her belly quivered and she vomited on the asphalt.
“Orders are to take Highway 7 north....”
Lena coughed on the pungent scent of explosive in the air. The ground was wet under her boots. Gas dripped from damaged barrels. The open road loomed beyond the fallen gateway. Heat waves touched the sun. Flies from the road buzzed loudly.
Lena joined three soldiers who sought shade and cover behind concrete blocks. Two leaned against a jagged wall in the middle of a pyramid of rubble. One tightened bandages around their limbs. Torn up armor lay scattered on the ground soaked in blood. Their weapons lay on their laps and shoulders.
Wind scraped across the Humvee at the foot of the destruction. Its doors lay burning in the dust.
The Medic’s face was dark and red. He kept trying to re-use soiled equipment. He didn’t have his supplies. He tore off pieces of his shirt, tore the fabric into strips. Gunfire erupted in the distance.
Lena shouldered her weapon and began riffling through her supplies. She retrieved her CLS.
“Damn it!” The Medic threw the soiled strips away.
“Here,” Lena approached with the kit. It had fresh tourniquets, quickclot goz, pressure bandages, and chest seal.
“Gimme!” The Medic ripped it from her hands and sank besides the wounded men. He took his time re applying the medical sutures over the wounds. The Staff Sergeant was doused with sweat. His lips were gray. “Shit! Do you have any morphine?”
“Yes.” She provided a vial of brown fluid from her pocket.
The Medic didn’t touch it.
“Who the hell are you?” When he glanced at her and saw the fettered flesh on one side of her face.
She gathered her thoughts.
“Monroe. Drone Unit.”
“The fuck you doing off?”
“CO assigned me to escort two trainees from here to Base Echo.”
The Medic tried not to look at the open wounds. see. The heat waves of the road loomed before him.
“Not down… nevermind. We need a MEDEVAC. Do you have a satellite phone?”
Lena ruffled through her knapsack. She knew she had one in there packed in place. She couldn’t find it. Even when it was looking her in the face, it fell out of place. She pulled pieces out. They looked like a phone. She tried different ways of putting the elements back together, but it was like the pieces didn’t belong together anymore. Like the road ahead. Every alternative configuration fell apart. She looked at the jumbled phone.
The antenna was bent. The sim card was in pieces. Then she spewed a long hair of vomit onto the sandbags.
The Medic stood up, a cyclone of sand, enveloped him, and he stomped in front of Lena. He took one look into her eyes. The pupils were different sizes. He checked her nostrils and ears. Clear liquid with traces of blood drained from them.
“You’re concussed.”
“I can still talk. I can still walk.”
“Is there any body part you can’t feel?”
Lena thought about touching her face but she didn’t want to say it. One minute it felt soft and warm. The other moment it felt like metal.
“Specialist Lena, Can you feel your limbs? Your face?”
Her mouth hung open full of chewed lip. A long strand of blonde hair broke free from the crack in her helmet.
“I’m fine. We need to find the trainees.”
He brought her over to the shade. His eyes never left the horizon where gunfire rang.
“They’re with the Captain. He went to find a Humvee and a radio.”
Lena stared away from the wreckage and into a crater. At the center white fumes rose. The wind hissed through the broken windshield of the damaged Humvee and gravel crunched. Lena listened to the gravel crunch and felt her glove stick to the concrete. She could hear her own heartbeat inside of her helmet. The gravel crunched and she coughed again on the thick smoke in her lungs. The ground tilted, and the Captain appeared. Two trainees followed him.
The Captain had a crack in his body armor and three fully equipped supply bags on his back. He counted the people at hand and noticed Lena. Strands of blonde hair hung from his helmet. His entire face was sunburned except for the spot over his eyes where goggles go.
“Anyone else?” The Captain asked.
“No. Now what?” The Medic dripped water into the mouths of the injured men.
“We wait for the trainees and wait for orders.”
“There’s no time.”
“They’re not far behind me. I had them reload the weapons.”
The two trainees appeared unscathed in the sunlight and black smoke. Both were almost children. Neither looked frightened. One had a blue scarf on his wrist. The other had a dark American Flag pin on his collar.
With everyone assembled the Captain spoke.
“We’re taking it back.”
“Orders?”
“Yeah, orders.” He said solemnly. “Get them in the Humvee.”
“Them?” The Medic nodded.
The trainees lingered behind the captain. They didn’t say a word.
“My orders,” Lena breathed heavily to speak. “are to get them to base.”
One of the trainees tried to talk to the Captain. Bakir. His English didn’t carry him very far. The Captain made out, “Chief, what the hell do we do now?”
The other did not speak at all.
The Captain knelt down by Lena.
“Do you know them? Where did they come from?”
“No. My orders came in this morning.”
“Christ.” The Captain looked over his shoulder at them. He turned to the Medic. “Where did she come from?”
“I don’t know. She tells me she’s an analyst. She had a CLS and a vial of morphine and gave them to me.”
The Captain took a look at the vial. It didn’t look like morphine. It was dark and sticky. He put it back into her knapsack and pretended not to see it.
The Captain poured some water into her eyes to clear the debris out. With the sediment out of her eyelids she could see three trucks behind the Captain’s Humvee.
“Are you gonna be able to stay conscious down that seven mile stretch of road with me?” Seven miles. The Captain said it like a number carved into stone.
“Sir, my orders are to reach Base Echo with those two men, trainees Akim and Bakir.”
“I need you to watch the road. We’re leading the convoy. Can you walk?”
Lena’s boots slid, but he helped her up and got her into the Humvee.
They put the two injured men into a truck at the back.
From her seat the road seemed endless. Yesterday the road was swarmed by people and traffic.
“I think I can hear the scorpions hump.” the Medic joked.
The asphalt bent and crackled, but sat with patience, even indifference. It waited for them. Seven miles of waiting. Its thermoplastic paint looked like the teeth of a saw. Glass crystals chipped off. Fires blazed in the hills. Burned out cars had been pushed aside.
One by one the engines started.
No one spoke. No one spoke as sand blew over the asphalt. Clouds slowly parted over the road. They drove over the gate. It squeaked and bent under the heavy tires. The road ahead waited for them.
Lena felt the vehicles roll. They left the ruins behind them. The vehicle jerked as it started. The vibrations of pain lingered as the engine spouted exhaust. A sign was riddled with bullet holes. Yesterday it was brand new.
The asphalt felt smooth. They glided down the mouth of the road. The yellow paint slowly slipped beneath the cracked windshield. The reeds swayed in a cloud of pollen. Migratory birds swam in the sky. They looked back at the wreckage of the base, and said nothing. They kept advancing.
The wheels popped. The engine rumbled. The Humvee picked up speed. The yellow track beneath them blurred into a solid line. A bump in the road shook the vehicle.
Lena looked out the window and tightened her straps. Sand blew through the fallen walls of empty buildings. The engine was louder than the entire desert. She covered her ear. The tone of the engine created a sustained, muffled hum.
The Medic at the wheel kept checking the wheat fields beyond the perimeter. The crops needed tended to. They moved in the wind, but everything else sat still. He looked out for mice but didn’t see a single one dart into the field.
“Where’s the kid selling DVDs?” He asked.
The Captain sat at the command post. He squeezed the machine gun. The other day kids were playing soccer around that field. The wheat moved. No one else did.
“Where?”
But no one responded.
The wheat blew back and forth as they passed. Every muscle in the Medic’s face swelled as he adjusted the wheel. He noticed a crack in the road. He swore he could see something sticking out. A boot.
The wheat blew back and forth as they passed the boot. Lena kept her sight forward. She saw stars come and go, but it was only 7 miles. She counted the bars painted on the road. They moved so fast that she had to take a break, but whenever she broke her concentration, she saw it. Plastic.
Trash blew across the road.
She gritted her teeth and counted the culverts but the culverts were full of trash.
The trash was blowing across the road and she saw it. She gripped the barrel of the weapon in her lap. A heap of garbage sat on the roadside. She tapped the windshield. “Garbage bags. Left shoulder.”
The Medic looked over and saw the heap. She tapped the windshield. Everyone stared at it. He slowed down and turned the wheel. Everyone stared at it as they passed. Even after it disappeared, no one relaxed. When it vanished behind the windows they kept their eyes strained tight.
The Captain above knocked on the roof. Villagers watched them leave from their windows. A child pointed at the convoy. Clouds of dust enveloped the trucks behind them. The highway stretched without end before them. The wheat bent towards the road.
The trainees didn’t seem to notice. They spoke quietly to each other. Lena almost asked them what they needed to discuss. The captain knocked on the roof. The trainees didn’t listen, they kept whispering.
“Goat. Right shoulder.”
The Medic took to the center of the road. A dead goat lay on the side of the road under a wagon. The trainees whispered and fumbled with something in their pocket and the goat lay under the wagon. The trainees seemed not to notice until the vehicle swerved and the goat was gone.
“What?” The Medic muttered.
Bakir placed his hand from his lip to his chest and began pressing his pockets and pulling at his belt. It was 120 degrees out in the middle of the day. He reached for the door switch. Akim scolded him. Lena and the Medic looked back.
“Don’t touch the fucking door!”
Bakir got nervous and smiled. He held out a pack of cigarettes.
“What’s happening down there?” The Captain barked.
“The trainee wanted a cigarrette.” Lena said.
The Medic sneered. The flesh around his eye turned rummy. He was still slick with the blood of others. He tried to get a good look but he couldn’t even find dirt on their security uniforms. The patches on their arms looked pristine. Too clean for anyone who survived that morning. The road rumbled.
The Medic looked back ahead. The road floated over the horizon and stretched like a black river. Seven miles should not feel this long.
Lena watched the road pour from the shimmer of the desert. Craters pocked the asphalt. The Humvee rumbled over them. She counted telephone poles. She didn’t remember why, but she knew that she’d seen seven of them before. Another culvert appeared beneath the road. Dogs trailed behind the convoy.
Someone spray painted on a concrete wall GO HOME AMERICANS!
Someone else tagged over it with an Iraqi flag.
Then the Mahdi emblem printed over that.
Layered with U.S.A
Layered with a caricature of W. and bombs.
Finally a simple message over the compacted artwork. IQ 1- SA 0.
Akim looked at a device in his hands as they passed. He checked it again when no one was looking.
The heat waves beat down on the vehicle. To the medic the road seemed to bend and loop around. He saw a shadow in the middle of the road. A shadow gathering sand and debris from the wind. A shadow with four long limbs.
The Medic opened the window but he still wasn't sure. It looked real to him. A body. Sprawled out across the asphalt face down. It lifted its arm, its head, and walked into the wheat. He slowed down.
“What are you doing?” The Captain pounded the roof. “Keep driving!”
“Did I really?” he thought.
“Hit the bricks!”
The Medic asked Lena. “Did you see that?”
“I think it was a Soccer score.”
Lena held her gun against her chest as she felt the vehicle slow down. The road looked clear.
“Footbul,” Akim said.
The trainees in the back began to touch their faces and cross their arms. They stopped talking but looked at each other. Lena kept looking from the road back to them then back to the road. The trainees stared at the paint. Bakir pointed ahead. The blue fabric peeked from his sleeve.
A dark spectre stood beside the road with a gun. They drove and the sunlight shifted. Lena gripped the handle of her weapon tight. The light shifted from the surface. The finger of Lena’s glove stuck to the trigger. It was just a broken water pump.
Akim let it pass the vehicle without taking his eyes from the road.
A lone rock lay on the road. They each watched it, their brows constricted like chains, and their hearts leapt as if stepping on a wire when they crossed it. Lena looked back, but it was gone.
They were half way there. Half of the Seventh Mile.
The Captain scanned the road obsessively. Something was wrong. Nothing the Route Clearing Team reported to him came true. As they drove they saw more cars pushed into the ditches, burned to husks, with another body on the road. He tried not to look.
Akim looked bothered by something. Concern overwhelmed him, and he checked the device again. Bakir asked him,
“Is something bothering you?”
They passed a crack in the road with a boot sticking out.
“The route doesn’t usually take this long.” Sweat dripped down his forehead.
They crossed the heap of garbage next. Akim checked the device. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Bakir stared off at some homes in the distance.
“Trash, left shoulder.” The same trash. Lena tapped the windshield.
Yesterday this road was full of people and cars. Kids were playing soccer over there. The road was a river. The horizon floated on top. The Medic drove through the village. This time there was no one in sight except for dogs and vultures.
Then they came across the water pump. Except now it was no longer broken. They smelled the copper and splashed through a puddle of dark fluid. Lena looked back, and saw vultures drinking from it.
The road vibrated under Lena’s boots.
Then they came to the wall. The graffiti has been blasted clean and the concrete had been welded with steel from a crashed helicopter. Gun fire got louder and louder.
Explosions rattled the rooftops in the distance.
Bakir kept looking at the smoke rising from the roofs of the houses.
When the captain saw the dead body again he slid down the command post.
“Should be 3 more miles now.”
“Left shoulder!” Lena pointed to the Culvert.
The road ahead simmered like black glass. Lena felt a chill in her heart, it was the same number of telephone poles between the trash and the wall. But the number of culverts had changed. She heard a voice coming from the engine. Akim tapped a device but it didn’t seem to tell him anything.
The Medic. “There’s nothing in that one.”
“There’s one in a culvert.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“No, it's in a culvert.” A culvert she had already seen. Lena almost remembered.
She counted seven telephone poles. Seven culverts. But that culvert wasn’t there before.
The culvert came back in pieces. The smell. The concrete throat of it. The dark water. She tightened her hands but grasped nothing. She thought, “Maybe no one actually knows”.
The wind shakes the wheat before the burning machines. Demons of wind tore the pylons free.
“Goat, right side.” The Captain tapped the roof.
Now a dozen goats lay slaughtered in the wagon. More than before.
The Medic swerved.
They saw one angry man watching them cross.
“There it is, you’ve got to change routes.”
“Captain? Specialist Lena wants to change routes.”
“No way, we gotta keep this thing moving, orders from the top.”
The Captain looked at the village as they came through again. He knew they should’ve reached the base by then. Each house was engulfed in flame. When they came across the wall, they found huge cracks in the pavement. They drove over nails and broken glass.
“There! It’s there!” Lena cried.
A helicopter echoed in the distance. From the helicopter, the convoy on the road was a small trail of blinking lights. Seven miles of blinking lights.
The eighth culvert.
“Captain, we need to change routes!” Lena called on the Captain.
“Negative. We are to take Highway 7.”
The culvert appeared from the shadows and ripples.
The Captain began firing the machine gun. The Medic tried to turn the wheel. Lena held on tight. Bakir tried to ask what the matter was, and Akim just calmly looked at the red coordinates. The vehicle jerked and it was up in the air. Before it touched the ground a cloud of dust and smoke enveloped them.
Flares and sirens shot across the sky.
Lena was in the wheat, limping away from the wreckage. Now with broken ribs, she coughed blood. But the gates to Echo Base stood before her. She tried to run but it made the bleeding worse and she slowed back down to a limp.
Lena walked through the gate. No one was around. She entered the main hall where so many people had been when she first landed here. It smelled the same. It had the same American flags up. The same strange soldier stood there at the end. He stood there looking. Looking into the black window.
Lena dragged her leg. She could barely lift it now. She took her helmet off, her blood soaked hair was matted and meshed with sand. She had a bloody nose and her top row of teeth were red. She breathed heavily , groaning, pulling herself up to the strange soldier.
Lena looked into the black window. The same window as before. Now she could see inside. She saw a flowing road rippling with gold. Seven miles long. She reached to touch it. Her glove touched the glass, and she saw the end of the road. A reflection of the warriors behind a bloody hand print.
Lena felt her own face. The left half was metal. The bone had been replaced with wires and plates. The heart monitor beeped. The strange soldier now stood before her with a clipboard under his arm and a white coat over his shoulders.
Lena made it home after multiple surgeries. The surgeons rebuilt the left side of her face in pieces. First the jaw, pinned together with titanium plates. Then the cheekbone, lifted and held in place with screws so small they disappeared into the bone.
Her eye socket had collapsed in the blast. They reconstructed the orbit with a thin metal mesh, shaping it carefully so the eye would sit level again. Surgery followed surgery. Plates along the mandible. A scaffold under the cheek. Titanium where bone used to be.
Nerves had to be traced and freed from scar tissue. Muscles stitched back where they belonged so she could chew, speak, and close her mouth again. Skin grafts came later. Tissue taken from her leg and layered over the rebuilt bone until the face held together.
Months of operations left a quiet architecture under her skin of screws, plates, and mesh doing the work bone once did. The hearing never returned in her left ear. The blast had torn something delicate inside it, something no surgeon could rebuild.
When the surgeries were finished, the doctors told her she was lucky. Her jaw worked. Her eye remained. She could speak again. But the paperwork said the same thing every time: not fit for deployment.
Lena signed the papers they handed her and returned back home to Iowa. She never felt comfortable in the corn fields. She worked on her car, put money aside for a farm of her own someday, and discovered Anime. She went out into the great wilderness, and camped beside a lakeside mountain. She waited for the others. Sometimes she’d awake at night screaming.
Sometimes she’d drive her car down a gravel road and stop. The gravel crunched under her wheels. She saw a garbage bag. For a moment she thought the road had followed her home. She stepped out of the car and lifted the bag from the moist ground.
Mice ran out from the bottom. They scurried into the corn. She went in after them, followed by the voice of unanswered questions. The institutions that once protected her were nowhere to be found in the open plain. The quiet machinery of government and corporation fell null. Their own agendas are indifferent to the needs of the people. All she had was herself, and even that felt fragile in a world designed to grind the inherent trust of people to dust.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-art-of-documenting-war/
https://www.dalewilliamsart.com/IraqWar.html
https://creativetimereports.org/2013/11/04/the-veteran-artist-caught-between-creativity-and-therapy/
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