Billy Summers

Clay Briggs – Pill – was a Corpsman 1st Class. He worked on everyone who needed working on, but he was Hot Nine from top to toe. He was small and wiry. Thinning hair, beaky nose, little rimless glasses that he was always polishing. He had a peace sign on the front of his helmet and for a week or so, before the CO made him take it off, a sticker on the back that said NEVER MIND THE MILK, GOT PUSSY?

Panic attacks were common as Phantom Fury went on (and on, and on). Marines were supposed to be immune from things like that, but of course weren’t. Guys would start rasping for breath, doubling over, sometimes falling down. Most were good little jarheads who wouldn’t admit to being scared so they said it was the smoke and dust, because those things were constant. Pill would agree with them – just the dust, just the smoke – and wet a washcloth to put over their faces. ‘Breathe through that,’ he’d say. ‘It’ll clear the crap out and you’ll be able to breathe fine.’

He had cures for other things, too. Some were bullshit and some were not, but they all worked at least some of the time: thumping wens and swellings with the side of a book to make them disappear (he called it the Bible cure), pinching your nose shut and singing Ahhhh for hiccups and coughing fits, breathing Vicks VapoRub steam to stop up bloody noses, a silver dollar rubbed on eyelids to cure keratitis.

‘Most of this shit is pure hill-country folk medicine I learned from my grammaw,’ he told me once. ‘I use what works, but mostly it works because I tell ’em it works.’ Then he asked me how my tooth was, because I had one in back that had been giving me trouble.

I said it hurt like blue fuck.

‘Well, I can take care of that, my brother,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a rattlesnake rattle in my pack. Bought it on eBay. You go on and stick it between your cheek and gums back there, suck on it awhile, and your tooth is going to quiet right down.’

I told him I would pass and he said that was good, because the rattle was way at the bottom of his pack, and he’d have to dump all his shit out to get it. If it was even still there, that was. All these years later I wonder if it would have worked. I eventually had that tooth pulled.

Pill’s most amazing cure – that I saw, anyway – was in August of ’04. It was the slack time between Operation Vigilant Resolve in April and Phantom Fury, the big one, in November. During those months, the American politicians had their own panic attack. Instead of letting us go in full-bore, they decided to give the Iraqi police and military one more chance to clean out the muj themselves and restore order. The big Iraqi politicians said it would work, but they were all in Baghdad. In Fallujah, a lot of the police and military were muj.

During that period, we mostly stayed out of the city. For six weeks in June and July we weren’t even there, we were in Ramadi, which was relatively quiet. Our job, when we did go into Fallujah, was to win ‘hearts and minds.’ This meant our translators – our terps – made nice on our behalf with the mullahs and community leaders instead of bawling ‘Come out, you pig-fuckers’ through loudspeakers as we drove rapidly through the streets, always expecting to get shot at or blown up or RPGd. We gave out candy and toys and Superman comic books to the kids, along with fliers for them to take home, talking about all the services the government could provide and the insurgency couldn’t. The kids ate the candy, traded the comics, and threw away the fliers.

During Phantom Fury we stayed in what came to be known as Lalafallujah (after Lollapalooza) for days at a time, sleeping when we could on rooftops with overwatch on the four main corners of the compass, keeping an eye out for muj creeping up on other rooftops, ready to do damage and inflict hurt. It was like the death of a thousand cuts. We took in hundreds of RPGs and other weaponry, but the hajis never seemed to run out.

During that summer, though, our patrols were almost like a 9-to-5 job. On days when we went in to win ‘hearts and minds,’ we’d leave when the sun was up and head back to base before it got dark. Even with the fighting in a lull, you didn’t want to be in Lalafallujah after dark.

One day when we were coming back we saw Mitsubishi Eagle station wagon overturned on the side of the road, still smoking. The front end was blown off, the driver’s door was open, and there was blood on what was left of the windshield.

‘Fuck me, that’s the lieutenant colonel’s ride,’ Big Klew said.

There was a CSH tent set up at the base – the Combat Surgical Hospital. Without sides, it was actually more of a pavilion with a couple of big fans set up at either end. It was over a hundred degrees that day. About like usual, in other words. We could hear Jamieson screaming.