Of all of us, only Lanier pierced the cage of the Iron Maiden. It was a few weeks into the deployment when a low-riding pickup emerged out of the desert. Lanier and I were crouched in a guardpost, scanning our sector of fire, when the pickup materialized in the sand. Perhaps it was the surprise of witnessing something new, or perhaps I was slow to transition from the imagined to the real. Either way, my brain struggled to comprehend what was happening—to make sense of the report of the rifle fire, or of the rounds impacting in the Hesco. But Lanier had no such difficulty. He just opened up on the machine gun. Within seconds it was over, the two of us half-deaf, sitting silently in the metallic tang of the afterburn. When they towed the pickup in we could see a rifleman in the bed, motionless and contorted and still gripping his Kalashnikov. He was missing half his face. Lanier and I both stared off into the desert, neither of us much speaking. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t even fired my weapon.
That night in the chow hall, Lanier had a kind of stunned look to him. I watched him hold out his hands, turning them back to front, as if expecting to find something there. “Wow,” he said. I just picked at my food. After a while Dejung joined us, ambling sideways between the tables almost as if he were drunk. “Bitch,” he said as he punched my shoulder. Then he shot Lanier a deranged grin. “Hell yeah, killer.” I was surprised to see Lanier return the grin with a kind of dead-eyed smile I’d never seen from him before. I gave some lame excuse, returned my tray, and wandered out into the dimming light, replaying in my mind the moment the pickup emerged in the sands. Later that night, the company formed up and the captain awarded Lanier a medal, pinning it to his chest while he stood there looking dazed. A few marines asked me if it was true—that Lanier had got a head shot with the machine gun. Already something had shifted in the social order. When the captain had gone, Dejung called us closer together, and we watched as he drove the prongs of the gold, hexagonal medal through Lanier’s uniform and into his skin, a ritual I had long heard of but never witnessed. A faint trace of blood seeped through his cammies. “Give him one,” Dejung told us, and the company let out a raucous yell. “Now shake the man’s hand.” We arranged ourselves into a snaking line, the whole tent orbiting about Lanier. Perhaps it would have been easier to swallow if Lanier had in any way acknowledged the adulation. As it was, he seemed not even to notice. He just stood there at Dejung’s side, silent and disinterested, utterly dutiful in following Dejung’s lead. I was embarrassed to admit to myself how sour the moment felt. Even after the marines had returned to their racks, the bitterness remained, and as I stared up at my dog tags, I thought about the truck and the machine gun, the medal and the blood ritual. I didn’t get much sleep at all. Judging from the extending and contracting springs above me, Lanier didn’t get much sleep either.
It felt like we’d been cloistered within the Iron Maiden for months when the gambling began, but looking back on it, I think it must have been fairly early in the deployment, shortly after Lanier and the pickup. We were all of us still adjusting to the rhythms and routines of life on the fob. It’s painful now to remember how I felt in those first few weeks—the sense of inadequacy that descended after hesitating in the face of fire. It was jarring that Lanier had exercised the decisiveness I now knew I lacked. This self-criticism infected me. It seemed impossible that the other marines didn’t now see in me an inexcusable deficiency, and I began to seek out evidence of such judgment in their words and deeds, as if in self-identifying their loathing I could somehow preempt it—an unhealthy habit of which I have never truly rid myself. Such analyses became something of a fixation. I obsessed over small observations—Lanier’s newfound habit of taking his meals with Dejung, or the manner in which marines gave him a wide berth, as if unworthy of standing in his presence. It was during these early and discontented days that I instructed a team of special operations marines to exit their vehicle so I could search the cab. I remember noticing a pallet in the back of the vehicle, stocked with empty ammo cans, and I remember the way the driver casually waved me over to the window. He had a long, carefully trimmed beard, which extended several inches below his chin, and a series of tally marks tattooed on his forearm, just above the wrist. Maybe he read the inadequacy in my face; maybe he heard it in my voice. For in a calm and exceedingly quiet tone, so quiet I had to lean in to hear, he said: “I could cut your balls off and no one would give two shits.” I waved them through the gate.