“That’s the only one I have,” I told her as I showed her a two-inch long, faded scar on my left side. “The insurgents didn’t even give it to me. There was a bunch of shit lying around the motor pool when I got drunk and fell on a sharp piece of metal. I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, so I tried to take care of it myself. It got pretty infected, and I ended up in the infirmary anyway. It was the only official reprimand I ever received while I was serving. I think my captain called it ‘for being a dumbass.’”
I laughed and shook my head.
“The guys who captured me—they didn’t want to leave any permanent marks—hardly ever even hit me in the face.”
“What happened when the leader arrived?”
“Classic interrogation,” I replied. “He was a decent-sized guy with a shitload of facial hair and a nasty attitude. I never did hear his name, and he wasn’t someone well-known enough that I’d seen his picture before. He shoved my head in a bucket of water until I nearly drowned, then shoved my face into the sand. Then he had the rest of them beat on me for a while, claim they already knew the answers to the questions they were asking me, then start kicking me. He tore off my fingernails and seemed to have a pretty good time doing it.”
Lia gasped, but I didn’t stop.
“They’d ask questions; I wouldn’t give them anything, and then they’d start all over again. He yelled a lot, but he never could get anything out of me. After a few days, they tossed a burlap sack over my head and loaded me into a truck again. I tried to count so I could get an idea of how far we were going, but I didn’t really know where we started from, so it wasn’t very helpful. Still, I figure we drove about three hours. Once we stopped, I was pulled into a shed where they just made me kneel on concrete while they spoke in Arabic. I didn’t catch much of it—just got the idea they were setting something up. There were a lot of scraping sounds, like they were moving things around.”
“When they took the bag off, I could see two other guys tied up like me. They had cameras and shit set up all around us, and there were Afghani soldiers standing all over the place with assault rifles pointed at us.”
I turned my eyes to Lia to see how she was taking it all. She had moved to a sitting position on the bed and was watching me with her hands in her lap.
“I figured that was it, you know?” I said as I looked at her. “I thought they were just going to execute us and be done with it.”
“That’s where the video came from,” Lia said.
“That’s the one,” I confirmed. “It got a lot of YouTube hits before it was taken down, I hear.”
I collected my thoughts for a minute before going on.
“You’ve watched it, so you know a lot of what happened next. They wanted us to say how well we were being treated, which made me laugh, and then they wanted us to say that the US president was wrong to have troops in the Middle East and that we agreed they should all be removed—the usual shit. The journalist guy—he just kept crying and screaming that he didn’t know anything. The other one, though—I knew him.”
“Who was he?” Lia asked when I stopped talking for a minute.
“He was another Marine—a private who had just been deployed a few months before. I’d seen him around a few times, but he wasn’t a sniper, so I didn’t know him too well. He was part of the infantry group who would have joined us if we had spotted the enemy first. He kept telling them to fuck off until they bashed his head with the butt of one of their rifles. He was unconscious during the filming.”
“What was his name?” Lia asked.
“Classified,” I responded automatically. The last thing I wanted to think about was the freckle-faced private who had ultimately been our demise. I still thought he went down way too easy when they hit him and wondered if he had been conscious though it all. Regardless, if he hadn’t cracked, my unit might have made it through. I might never have been captured.
She blinked a couple of times but didn’t ask again.
“When we wouldn’t cooperate, they went with Plan B. T
hey started rolling the cameras and told the world that we were invading their country unlawfully and all that bullshit. They said they were going to execute one of us as a spy, and I told them to kill me, but they didn’t. They took out the civilian dude just to make some fucking point. I was bagged and loaded back into the truck and taken somewhere else—I don’t know where. It took a lot longer than it had taken us to get to where they did the filming. I’d counted maybe four hours before I ended up falling asleep.”
“Once we got there, it was pretty obvious the place was a fairly permanent site. There were decently constructed buildings hidden in the rocks and not just soldiers there, but women and children, too. I was dumped in a small room in the dark for a while, maybe just for the night—I’m not sure—and then they started all over again. Mostly they deprived me of any food and water, trying to break me down. I wasn’t too interested in dying of dehydration, but I figured at that point, I wasn’t going to make it anyway.”
I looked over at the clock on the nightstand and realized I had been talking for more than an hour and a half already. I still hadn’t even gotten to the good shit—the shit that was likely going to make her turn and run.
“Give me a minute,” I said. I stood up and walked out the door, not even bothering to put on a shirt or anything. Luckily, the dude at the front desk was willing to sell me a few of his cigarettes, so I didn’t have to go far.
“Don’t smoke in the room,” he called out as I walked away.
Whatever.
I lit up with a pack of matches displaying the motel’s name on the front and walked into the room where Lia was still sitting on the bed.
“You smoke?” She seemed taken aback.
“Not usually,” I replied. I grabbed one of the plastic cups from the bathroom to use as an ashtray and put a little water in the bottom of it, then took my spot on the windowsill and went on.
“Once they figured out all their abuse wasn’t going to work on me, they tried just letting me rot for days at a time in-”