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Orion

By

Charlotte Brock

I started off my time in Camp Taqqadum, 12 miles from Fallujah, in high spirits, ready to do this thing, fight this war, set up communications in the camp, go out on convoys, DO STUFF. I volunteered for the night shift, from 3 PM to 3 AM early on because it would allow me to do more during the day. I would walk the mile or so from the communications compound to the female tent alone, in the early hours of the morning, with my right hand at my hip, fingers grazing my pistol, my eyes searching both the night sky for stars and the sand at my feet for holes, steps, or barbed wire. Every night I tried to remember the names of the stars and constellations from the star-gazing handbook I had brought with me. Ursa Major was easy to find earlier in the evening, and Orion kept me company on my walk home. He was my favorite, and I came to look upon him as my personal friend.

Although exhausted by the early hours of the morning, I was exhilarated, excited, and full of hope. I was happy to be where I was, serving my country and leading Marines in a combat zone. I was where I was supposed to be, and anything could happen.

I slept only a few hours a night, between 4 AM and about 8 AM, when the sun would light up the inside of the orange tent like a pumpkin. Waking up, already in PT gear, I’d swing my legs over the side of the cot, slip my feet into shower shoes, throw my towel around my shoulders, grab my toilet kit (a gift from my mother, it looked more like a tool box), and head towards the flap of blinding whiteness at the opening of the tent. No matter how light it seemed inside the tent, it was always painfully bright outside; you could hardly make it to the next tent over without your sunglasses. I wore mine on a string around my neck, whether I was in PT gear or desert digitals. The walk to the head was a couple hundred feet, but seemed much longer because you were walking in sand as fine as powdered sugar the whole time.

My first couple months in Iraq were relatively uneventful – I do say relatively. The camp was hit by indirect fire (IDF) the first night we got to TQ and the rockets and mortars didn’t stop for more than a few weeks at a time while I was there. We didn’t have it nearly as bad as some camps, like Camp Fallujah, which got hit every day, but we received IDF often enough to make you go to bed at night wondering if you’d wake up in the morning – or if that rocket or mortar might just, randomly, land on you. One morning about three weeks into the deployment, I was about to fall asleep after staying up even later than usual – till ten A.M. I was yanked back into consciousness, into my sweaty, suddenly rigid body, into the hot tent, by a BOOM. It seemed pretty far off but I knew what it was. I had learned to differentiate incoming fire from outgoing. Outgoing was “boom.” Incoming was a rounder, fuller sound, “BOOM!”

I got up and poked my head out of the tent. Others were doing the same. Yep, it was incoming. Oh well, not much to do but try and get some sleep. Sit your butt back on the cot, rub your feet together to get the sand off, lay down, close your eyes, say a quick prayer just in case God does exist, think of going to sleep, of dreaming strange dreams, of floating off into your subconscious… BOOM!! This time louder, closer. You feel it in your whole body, the ground vibrates and the tent shakes. Your heart pounds in your chest, in your ears, adrenaline flows, painfully, through your veins. Deep breath, repeat maneuvers from first mortar attack. Attempt to go to sleep once again: you really are exhausted, your eyes are burning, and you just want to escape from this damn BOOM! world. No such luck. A third BOOM, this one deafening, angry, implacable, it makes the ground shake and turns your body to silly putty. Good thing you were lying down.

There was no sleeping after that. I couldn’t go back to the rack and lie there waiting for the fourth and final round to zero in on my tent. Weary, scared, weak, but determined not to show it, I strolled over to the Comm Compound and made sure my guys were all accounted for.

After the triple-mortar-attack day, I had a very difficult time getting to sleep. I put off going to bed, dreaded falling asleep; the sound of the mortars resonated louder than ever as I tried to turn my mind off and relax into slumber. It’s funny how you get used to it though. Although normally I am an eight-hour a night kind of gal, I went for weeks sleeping two, three, four hours a day. I didn’t really want to sleep at all. I wanted to live every moment of my life, to be aware of every sight and every sound, every person I talked with, and every breath that I took.

Things really started getting eventful about a month later. I started going to the Mortuary Affairs (MA) bunker after meeting the MA Officer-in-Charge, Mike Connelly, in the Dining Facility. He was very witty, making everybody laugh with his dry, wry, un-politically correct humor. But there was something dark and sad beneath the stand-up-comedian act. His smile was bitter and never reached his eyes. As I got to know him, he started sharing his worries with me; MA was not easy work. He struggled with the horror of it, the daily encounters with death, the tragedy of sending men home to their mothers and wives. I listened to Mike talk. I offered him my friendship and my sympathy. I opened my heart and my arms to this lonely, weary, haunted man. Soon, I offered to help him in his work. I honestly didn’t expect he would take me up on that offer, but he did. I started working at MA in my “off” time, the twelve hours a day I wasn’t on duty as a Communications Officer.

The other MA Marines and I received the bodies of U.S. Service members, as well as those of our Iraqi enemies. The MA Marines had coined the name “Fallen Angels” for the dead Americans. We tried to get ID on them, made notes on wounds and tattoos, and filled out paperwork, then sent them to Kuwait, their last stop before arriving to the U.S.

I only worked in Mortuary Affairs for a couple months. About 35 Angels. One day, out of the blue, my Company Commander, Major Danale, asked me to go for a “ride around the camp” with him. While I was trapped next to him in the pick-up truck, he announced: “Charlotte, I don’t want you going to M.A. anymore.”

“Going to the MA building?”

“Working there. I don’t want you there when they have to work.”

“For how long?”

“Let’s say a month.”

Silence. I blinked back tears. A month was forever. There could be Angels coming in tonight. I needed to be there. “Why, Sir?” I had to ask.

“I’m worried about you. Other people are. Chief Warrant Officer Connelly told me he was worried about you too.”

I swallowed my tears and my impulse to keep arguing, to protest, to tell him he was being unfair and giving me an unnecessary and inappropriate order. Staring at the dusty brown road ahead, he muttered, “I want you to go the Mental Health guys too. Just to get checked out.”

So now I was crazy. I was a weak officer, a woman who had cried in front of him and therefore must be having problems coping with deployment, with the war, with Mortuary Affairs. I fixed my gaze on the bleak, flat, treeless landscape and seethed in silence.

As soon as I could get away from the Comm site, I headed straight to the MA bunker, where Mike not only worked but lived. In a rage, I walked into his living quarters and glared at him. I could hardly get the words out.

“How could you tell Major Danale you’re worried about me? How could you do that to me? What is he talking about, what is he worried about, are you worried? Or do you just want me out because I’m taking attention off of you, because I’m better at it than you, because you couldn’t have written the MA SOP without me and you know it!” I was crying by now. “Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you talk to me, why did you go to my boss? How could you do that to me?”

Mike, a shade whiter than his usual pallor, put his face in his hands and in a shaky, whispery voice told me: “I am worried about you. Look at you.” I was a mess at the moment, to be sure. But an hour ago? I had shed some pounds, but wasn’t that from all the walking in the 120 degree heat? I probably looked tired, but wasn’t I supposed to, being a Marine in a combat zone and all? I had started smoking again, after five years, but don’t many Marines smoke on deployments? Look at me? What about me?

“This is because of you!” I wiped tears and snot from my face. “I’m not upset about MA, I mean yeah, it’s hard, but I was dealing with it fine, I was doing fine, I was fine. But now I guess I wasn’t fine, since other people are worried about me. What is that supposed to mean? What have I been doing? Have I been acting crazy without even knowing about it? Why couldn’t you have just talked to me? I would have stopped coming if you wanted me to. This is your place, I am here because you want me to be, if you tell me to go, I have to go. Why didn’t you just talk to me?” Tears were streaming down my face again, my nose was running, I was blubbering.

Jim explained that he hadn’t gone to my boss; Major Danale had come to him and asked how I was doing. He had answered frankly that he was worried about how I was holding up.

The conversation with Mike was over. I stumbled out into the hellish heat and blinding light, not knowing where to turn. I was lost. I had no idea how much MA had meant to me until it was taken away. I was devastated. I had kept a pretty good handle on things until then, I thought. I had been “dealing.” MA was the direction my life had taken; it made me feel like I was doing something right, something good, something worthy. I wasn’t bad at my regular job as a Communications Officer, standing a 12-hour watch, seven days a week, in the Systems Control center, but I wasn’t great at it either, and I sure didn’t have any passion for it. Sitting in the Systems Control Center, waiting for a phone call or an email telling me comm had gone down, I felt so static, so far from the fight. If I didn’t show up for work, nothing would happen, except that I’d get in trouble. The Staff NCOs could stand the watch just as well without me there. MA though… MA was different. MA was a world in which nothing mattered but the body lying on the table. In MA, the constant anxiety of dealing with the tangle of relationships I was in - Mike wasn’t the only man I had grown close to - the pressure I felt coming down on me from all sides as a woman in this 95% male camp, none of this mattered. I wasn’t important, the Angels were. I was there only for them.

And now this was being taken away. What would my life mean anymore? And why? Because they were “worried” about me? My male chauvinist of a boss, who never set a foot in the MA bunker himself, didn’t want me in there anymore? What right did he have to tell me what to do in my off-duty time, as long as I wasn’t doing anything illegal? And Mike, who had cried in my arms numerous times, who had lost so much weight and become so pale that he looked half dead himself, how could he turn around and accuse me of not coping well? Mike, whose hands I had held and shoulders I had massaged, whom I had listened to for hours talk about his nightmares and his feelings of depression and helplessness, whom I had watched moaning, fighting and crying in his sleep as I sat by his bed, who was he to tell me he was worried about me? I was doing a whole lot better than him! It was a bad joke that I should be the one pulled out of MA. I knew why though: I was a woman, I couldn’t be expected to deal with this kind of thing. I wasn’t strong enough, and the incontrovertible proof of it was that I had cried: once when trying to talk to my CO about being treated unfairly by Marines in the company; once at a church service, the first I had attended in months; and now, here, in Mike’s room.

From that day until the end of my first OIF deployment I no longer lived; I simply survived. I hung onto every shred of hope I could find, because my life seemed to get worse every day. When I walked my lonely walk through the desert at night I barely looked at the ground anymore. I was already low; tripping and falling meant nothing. Instead I kept my eyes on Orion, and begged him not to leave me alone.

Charlotte M. Brock is a Marine Officer. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, of a French mother and American father, she was raised in Jamaica, South Korea, the Cape Verde Islands, Washington, D.C., France, Mexico, and West Africa. Charlotte attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Peace, War and Defense in May 2002. During college, she participated in Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps upon graduation. She was stationed in Camp Pendleton, California, and deployed twice: with the 1st Force Service Support Group in 2004 and with Multi-National Corps-Iraq in 2005. She is currently stationed at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina.

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