
7 lbs., 8 oz by Stephanie Wobby
First runner-up in the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of Creative Nonfiction.
Final Judge: Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Crack.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Pop.
I’m in an oven, ready for roasting. Inside, there’s only enough space for me to line the seat with toilet paper, balance my M4, barrel side down at the corner opposite the urinal, and adjust my body armor to fumble with the buttons of my cargo pants. It’s another one of those hot Iraq summers, the weather rising from 100º F and eventually plateauing at 115º F. I’m slowly suffocating; the reek of the holding tank has wafted up and filled every corner of this plastic box. I squint: the white roof’s blinding, and the slats that are supposed to be there for ventilation are mere decorations.
Clack.
When you discharge a weapon long enough, the fumes from the ejection port can creep up behind your eyepro and blanket your eyes like grainy contact lenses. And when you discharge a weapon without proper ear protection, a high-pitched ringing in your ears, a phenomenon known as tinnitus, is most likely to occur. The ringing is staggering, and the unexpected, temporary deafness shakes your sense of balance. It blurs your vision and shortens your patience, causing you to shoot the last of your rounds as quickly as possible. It makes you cringe and grit your teeth and fuck up your marksmanship qualification score.
Crack.
Sebastian Junger once compared the sound of a bullet to the speed of sound.
“Bullets go much faster,” he’d said. “So, if someone shoots at you from 400 meters, 500 meters, the first
thing that happens is, you ask yourself, ‘Am I getting shot at?’”
Pop.
“Assume the prone unsupported position.”
My breathing was ragged, and I was trying to slow it down. I was laying on my stomach, my right leg
bent, my left leg straight. Sometimes, before firing, I’d pop my feet up—without the dirt, the uniform, the vest, the helmet, you’d think that I was in my family’s living room floor, watching a TV show. My M4
looked like it was resting on the magazine, but if you observed more closely, it was only slightly hovering
over the ground; most of the weight was on my right shoulder. Both of my eyes stayed open, the dominant right eye looking through the scope. I stared at the paper target propped up in front of me.
“Ready on the firing line?”
“Commence fire.”
Clack.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
My breathing’s labored. I blink back balls of sweat and dirty. I clear my throat.
Maneuvering over the toilet seat with over 30 pounds of Kevlar and plates makes me feel like an adult
trying to use a child-sized potty. There isn’t enough space to move, and the heat just makes it worse.
Not long before, I used to take off my Improved Outer Tactical Vest (IOTV) before walking into the
Porta-John, loosening the Velcro patch that kept the side fasteners in place, slipping the bulky vest over
my head, and resting it on my designated seat in the Humvee. But that took too much time, undressing
and redressing, walking that back-and-forth distance, that I quickly adapted to going to the bathroom with an increased sense of urgency.
Crack.
The first time I held a weapon, it was in basic training, where a drill sergeant assigned each of us an M16. They had long, wide, fixed stocks, and aside from the attached hardware, they remained bare and useless; they came with no magazines, no accessories, and the barrels themselves were blocked with blank-firing adaptors, colored metal squares with rings on their tips that helped blank rounds cycle through. What followed were hours of safety training and of understanding the importance (and the danger) of the rifle, of making sure you knew that you needed to point the barrel towards the side of the targets and not the other way around unless you wanted a drill sergeant to tackle you in front of your new friends.
The M16—7 pounds, 8 ounces unloaded and unslung—had turned into another appendage by graduation. We received them during our first week in our companies and we remained inseparable until it was time to sign them back in. They became normal to us; we slept with them during field problems, carried them between ruck marches and eating times, and cleaned and wiped them down regularly.
Pop.
“You go to war and think that you’re gonna be brave,” Sebastian Junger continued. “If you don’t think
that, you probably don’t go to war. And sometimes you are brave, but other times, you are not.”
Clack.
“Dude, what the fuck was that?”
Shifting positions—going from standing to prone supported to prone unsupported to kneeling—and
readjusting to stabilize my weapon continuously created pockets of space in my uniform. The guy next to me, one of our gunners, shot with gusto at the target and laughed when he noticed me animatedly wriggling my shoulders. His M4 was angled perfectly so that every fiery bullet casing leapt from the ejection port and into the space between my uniform and my bare skin. It felt like each 5.56 mm round
was branding me.
Crack.
I keep my left arm out to keep my weapon from falling over. My other hand grips the front collar of my
vest, the fingers slightly grazing over my patrol cap. It’s folded over my issued ballistic sunglasses and
plastic-knuckled gloves and tucked it in the space between my uniform and the IOTV.
I stare at the grooves, the plastic handle, the faded stainless steel ‘mirror’ before standing, pulling my
pants up, rebuttoning them, and unlocking the door. As soon as I step outside, the barrage of rocks stops, a momentary pause while they waited for the next person to take my place.
And then, as soon as the small window by the handle of the door fans from the green VACANT sign to the red OCCUPIED sign, they refill their palms with small stones and fling them towards the solitary bright blue box amidst a sea of matte brown trucks and dirty white concrete blast walls.
Pop.
It had always been customary for people to name their rifles. I don’t know where this practice started, but this idea had been ingrained in us long before we received our first weapons. They’ve been named after loved ones, and sometimes you could hear someone calling their gun affectionately as if it were a real person. A great deal of them have outlasted relationships.
My first M16 was with me for two months. The second M16, for another two, and then an M4 for
eighteen. When I left my final unit, I also left behind an M4 and an M9, both of which I had for over four
years.
Clack.
It was night time when we flew from Fort Riley, Kansas to Bangor, Maine. We caught a flight from there
to Germany, then to Al-Asad. Finally, we took a military aircraft to the heart of Baghdad.
By then, I had upgraded to a lighter rifle and could have recited the safety brief in place of the safety
officer. My new M4 was equipped with a scope, replacing the iron sights that easily bent and required
meticulous adjusting. Instead, all I had to do was turn it on and aim the bright red laser at the target.
Crack.
I can disassemble, reassemble, do a weapons functions check and a malfunction drill on the M9, M4,
M16, and the M240B. There are soldier competitions that base your score on how quickly you can take
them apart and put them back together, how well you know the parts or the size of the bullets that they
can carry.
The handguards on both the M4 and the M16 are always the worst to take off; they feel like those Chinese finger traps: the more you tried to take them off, the more they stuck to the barrel. But that was part of the disassembly, so if you couldn’t do it, you couldn’t move forward in the competition.
You’re taught to be gentle with the weapon. For example, the bolt carrier group in both of the rifles are
composed of small pins that could cause a malfunction were they to get lost or damaged, namely the
extractor pin in the bolt. But sometimes, it requires strength to put things back together. The M240B’s
barrel is easily detachable—it comes off like butter—but the talent lies within the reassembly. When you
put it back, you have to slam it down several times with the handle. You can’t be scared.
Pop.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington directed and starred in Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers
assigned to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Restrepo got its name from the combat medic, PVT Juan “Doc” Restrepo, who was killed during a firefight.
Clack.
We had flown into Iraq with our weapons across our laps. Like basic training, we had to be accountable
for them at all times, and when they weren’t slung across our shoulders or wedged between our legs
during a mission, they were secured somewhere else. Not only did our dependence on them become
amplified, but our schedules revolved around them, too: our year-long stay in Baghdad meant a cycle of
new weapons qualifications, missions, and, with the daily sandstorms, constant weapons maintenance.
Crack.
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington release Restrepo on June 25, 2010.
The beginning of the documentary pans to a group of guys hanging out in a train and joking around with
each other. And then, it fades into a composition of white letters against a black backdrop:
IN MAY 2007, THE MEN OF SECOND PLATOON,
BATTLE COMPANY, BEGAN A 15 MONTH DEPLOYMENT IN THE
KORENGAL VALLEY OF EASTERN AFGHANISTAN.
The next thing you see is the rear passenger’s perspective of a gunner looking through binoculars, the
bright blue sky behind him. The same group of guys in the beginning are now shown maneuvering over a hilly area. And then—
Pop, pop, pop.
I was a medic in the Army. Most of the time, people with my job were assigned a rifle and/or a pistol, but that was based on the unit’s inventory. Unlike the infantrymen that I was assigned to, I didn’t have to learn how to qualify on anything else. But, when we arrived in Iraq, we all became paranoid. Our truck was blown up on our second mission. I started teaching everyone how to give intraosseous infusions in place of intravenous infusions in case all extremities have been amputated and there were no good veins. I showed them how to analyze my aid bag: Hextend, a plasma volume expander, helped with blood loss; combat gauze contained kaolin, which aided in quicker hemorrhage control; and tampons were the best instruments for bullet wounds because of their abilities to expand once exposed to liquids.
“Just in case something happens to me,” I used to say.
And in response, all of my gunners decided that it was time for me to know what to do with their other
weapons: their shotguns, their machine guns, their extra barrels, their belts of ammunition.
“Just in case something happens to us.”
Clack.
Death in the battlefield is romanticized, but it’s almost always more than dying in battle. It’s not even
about patriotism, really. By the time you place yourself in a situation where you’re flying into war, the
idea of dying for your country is glazed over by the fact that you’re a 19-year-old, surrounded by other
19-year-olds, who, despite all of your different political beliefs, now have to protect and save each other.
So, it’s that. It’s the camaraderie, the relationships fostered by nights in pup tents, baby wipe ‘baths’, 24-
hour shifts. It’s the people you gain and hope not to lose to an explosion or a mortar attack or an ambush.
It’s staying up all night and going through the motions: hemorrhaging, airway, breathing, circulation,
body assessment. It’s the list of allergies and medical histories you keep in your pocket: he has a
penicillin allergy; he has a family history of diabetes; he has markedly poor hearing; he’s been blown up
several times before. It’s running through the 9-Line MEDEVAC and wondering how you would be able
to stomach the possibility of triaging these men, of prioritizing them over each other based on their
injuries, of saying, with absolute certainty, who deserves medical attention first.
It’s about the people that you’re with, and the anxiety that robs you of your voice when you hear panic
over your convoy’s internal communications. How you’re hoping that, if anything were to happen, you
would be able to summon the strength to pull your 300-lb. gunner from his platform and towards safety, that the muscle memory from the drill you’ve practiced many times before would take over. That you don’t freeze.
Just, please. Don’t freeze.
Pop.
We arrived at our Combat Housing Units in Victory Base Camp around November 2010, and we watched Restrepo like it was a religion.
There were smoke breaks in between the filmed firefights, there was a collective adrenaline rush, and
there were declarations.
“I will fucking die for any one of you,” someone said.
Crack.
Our platoon sergeant decided to create an obstacle course that required us to switch between different
weapons that ranged in size and difficulty.
“This is how you fire while you walk, and this is how you change your magazine without having to stop.
Your enemy won’t care that you’ve spent all of your rounds; the key is to keep going. Explain SPORTS.”
“Slap the magazine, pull the charging handle, observe the ejection port, release the charging handle, tap
the forward assist, and shoot, Sergeant.”
“Correct. Now, try it out.”
Clack.
The Porta-John was marked with some dirt from the rocks. This practice started during one of our
missions. We were all waiting by the trucks to leave the base. We were at Old Mod—or was it Taji? Or
the parking lot in the Victory Base Complex? —when someone broke off from the group because he had
to go to the bathroom. Another person, for some reason, started pelting the Porta-John with rocks. And
maybe, because it was the first time that we all had nothing better to do with our time, we all just
followed suit, rocking the plastic box, mocking and mimicking the cursing voice inside.
The first time they did it to me, it sounded like a torrential hail of bullets. I remember freezing, and then
pulling myself together and unlatching the door, my heart racing. I was annoyed about the poor timing—how coincidental was it that a fire fight broke out in the middle of my bathroom break? And when I
stepped out, weapon first, they laughed, clapped me on my shoulders, and commended me on how
quickly I got ready.
Stephanie Cuepo Wobby is a Philippine-born, California-grown combat veteran pursuing her B.A. in English at the University of Vermont.
Detailed, beautiful writing. Thank you – for your writing and service, not necessarily in that order.
Hi Lyra, I appreciate you taking the time to read my piece and leaving your kind comment. Thank you!
Beautiful piece, Stephanie! I wish you well as you leave for NYC.
Your language may accurately describe how at least some soldiers talk.
But the story is compellingly written.
My dad (incidentally) was a World War II
combat veteran who lost a leg during that war.
Well written-touches on the inexplicable bond that forms between soldiers in combat.
I’m a Vietnam veteran and am struck by how little the role of the medic has changed over fifty years-what has changed is the almost miraculous stuff you carry in your aid bag.