Spades

By Adam Straus

“The exit wound was obvious. I mean, the back part of her skull was just blown the fuck out. But we’ve got her on the table, we’re working on her, and no one can find the entrance wound. It was the weirdest thing, like the bullet had been fired from inside her brain. But then I rolled her over to check if she’d been shot anywhere else, you know, doing the piano feel up and down her back, and I saw it. The entrance wound, looking right up at me. It was in her ear.” Doc twisted his index finger in his own ear to demonstrate. “The Taliban must’ve stuck the barrel of the AK straight in her ear and pulled the trigger.”
LT, Staff Sergeant, and Morello nodded along. They were arrayed in a circle around a pelican case turned card table. LT and Staff Sergeant splayed out on two of the squad bay’s seventy-five bunk beds, while Morello and Doc faced one another from a folding camp stool and the floor respectively. Together, they formed First Platoon’s headquarters element: platoon commander, platoon sergeant, corpsman, and radio operator. Their differences in rank had been blurred by seven months in Helmand Province, immersed in one another’s company. I sat on my bunk two racks over, trying to re-read Ready Player One, continually distracted by their conversation. With only forty-eight hours until our flight home, this was how we counted down our final empty days of deployment in Kuwait, at Camp Arifjan.
Arifjan is purgatory in every sense of the word. It’s the gateway between deployment and homecoming, the last stop before a connecting flight to span the remaining distance between Afghanistan and America. It gets up to 120 in the summer, but the air conditioned Starbucks, KFC, and Baskin Robbins feel like patches of heaven mottling the hellish Kuwaiti desert. And there’s absolutely nothing to do. An infantry battalion exists for the sole purpose of going to war, and by the time a unit reaches Arifjan, their war is over. Nothing left to prepare for, no one to kill. No perimeter to man, no ground defense area to patrol, no fire missions to observe. So we sit around and play cards, waiting to ascend.
“What’s wild is she was still alive when she left the FOB,” Doc continued, pausing to take a sip of his Bang energy drink and stroke his scraggly deployment ‘stache. “Those GHOST surgeons were unreal, straight up 100% save rate for all the casualties who showed up still alive. Don’t know what happened to her afterwards, but she had a pulse when they MEDEVAC’d her to Kandahar.”
Left unspoken were the prospects for a 15 year-old Afghan girl with a brain injury, whose parents and younger brother had been executed by the Taliban in retaliation for her older brother’s decision to join the Afghan National Police. Would she go back to the mud hut that was now wallpapered with her family’s gray matter? Would she wander out of the hospital in Kandahar and live the rest of her life on the streets? Or had her pulse stopped in mid-air, rendering the whole discussion moot?
The men didn’t know, nor was Doc yet aware that the feeling of her mushy skull under his palpating fingers would return to him at intervals over the years, like an unwanted phantom limb. That was still to come, along with his near-monthly drunken phone calls to me retelling that story. The present was Spades, a game universally loved in the Marine Corps for its ability to obliterate hours at a time and hasten the arrival of the future, any future, to replace the present.
“We playing FDC rules or COC rules?” Morello asked.
“I don’t even know what that means, dude,” LT admitted with a laugh.
“Yeah, I don’t either,” Staff Sergeant said. "Here’s the deal: High spades are joker, joker, deuce, ace. No table talk, and that includes any bullshit winking or whatever you two homos try to pull.” Staff Sergeant gestured at Doc and Morello. “Two of clubs is the Sergeant Major, it’s plus two hundred if he walks. Five bags is minus five hundred. Whoever bids first can bump up one after the other guys go, but they can’t bump down. Am I missing anything, sir?”
“Nah. Well, all the prison rules, like Big Mo, Little Mo, Nil, Blind 6, and all that shit. Also, Big Joker pulls everyone’s high spade only if it leads,” LT said, holding up the rainbow colored joker.
“That’s COC rules,” Morello said.
“Whatever, let’s send it.”
It went like most other Spades games, the lead flowing back and forth as one team’s luck ran out and the other’s began, as one team overbid and lost their points getting set while the other underbid and lost their points bagging out. What did they talk about? Mostly how great California would be and how much Arifjan sucked and how fucking hot Kuwait was and how Twentynine Palms would be just as hot but you could get to San Diego from there and go out in Pacific Beach and go home with some 20 year-old from SDSU and finally, finally get some pussy. But they weren’t entirely ready to look forward, not yet.
“Hey sir, remember when your dumb ass almost got shot?” Staff Sergeant asked with a chuckle as he organized his hand by suit.

We’d flown into an old COP just west of Marjah to help advise an Afghan National Army unit that was trying to clear the district center. It was sacred ground to us: Dozens of Marines had been killed there when coalition forces first entered the city, almost ten years earlier. It felt like those ghosts were in our CH-47, whispering in our ears that one day they’d been just like us and one day we’d be just like them. After we landed, their voices faded into the distance along with the birds’ slapping rotors, leaving us alone until we either got extracted alive or joined them, whichever came first.
My first thought when we landed was: This is Marjah? From the saddle-shaped hill on which we sat, I could look out over what I’d always imagined was a city, at least by Afghan standards. But all I saw were fallow fields and mud huts, perched on irrigation canals branching off the Helmand River like birds on a power line. It’s not like people had told me we were flying into Manhattan or anything. It’s just that I’d assumed a place that loomed so large in our Marine Corps hive mind would be more than a cluster of villages dedicated to subsistence farming, connected to one another by dirt roads and unconnected to anything beyond that.
The COP, though, was exactly what I’d thought it would be: busted HESCO barriers full of dirt encircling a graded hilltop. The only structures were two platform tents surrounded by thick stacks of sandbags. The squad of Afghans who’d been manning the position slept in them. We turned one into our COC and used the other to store weapons, ammo, and chow. When we arrived, the Afghans left to join the rest of their brigade for the assault. We watched them walk down the hillside, single file with their M-16s slung on their shoulders, and disappear into a maze of compounds by the river.
I don’t remember exactly when after insert this all went down. We weren’t sleeping much, but we weren’t doing much either, so the days and nights blended together into one big nervous bored lump. I do remember that when it happened, our mortar section was getting ready to fire a terrain denial mission. That’s a fancy way of saying we were going to blow up a random hillside to scare the Taliban and remind the ANA we had their backs. Our tubes were set up in a four foot-deep pit surrounded by sandbags in between the hill’s two peaks, but you had to cross an open stretch to get there, where the rooftops of the hamlet to our south could see over the top of our HESCO barriers. The COC couldn’t hear our radio traffic, and LT was crouch-running across the COP to help unfuck whatever the problem was on our end. Because we were undermanned, Staff Sergeant was already at the mortar pit, serving as one of the fire direction center’s check plotters.

“Dude, I was just, like, confused when I heard the first round crack over my head,” LT admitted. “I knew what that sound meant from pulling pits at the rifle range, but it was so random. We weren’t even in contact or anything.”
Staff Sergeant burst out laughing. “Sir just fucking stood there like a deer or some shit. We all started yelling ‘SNIPER!’ and he just fucking looked at us. I almost ran into the open and tackled your ass.”
LT laughed, too. “You should’ve, man. The second round hit the dirt right next to my foot. That time I was like ‘oh fuck, they’re shooting at me.’”
“Yo, I swear to God you teleported after that. Took like two big-ass steps and dove into the mortar pit. Fucking faceplanted, too.”
Staff Sergeant flopped onto his rack to demonstrate LT’s flailing descent into relative safety. His burly forearms smacked against the mattress and bounced back. The men howled with laughter, including LT.
I ran my tongue across my mouth and felt the small lump of scar tissue where his elbow had accidentally split my lip open. I’d been crouching there with the rest of my section, waiting to drop rounds. Then everyone was yelling ‘SNIPER!’ and wham, my platoon commander body slammed me. It was funny, since no one got really hurt. The Afghans sent a patrol to the compound where we thought the shots came from, but they didn’t find anything.
“Look man, if you’re gonna dish it out, then we can talk about you almost getting your dick blown off,” LT countered.

I remember the day Staff Sergeant almost died because it was the first time I killed someone. Sort of. I mean, I don’t doubt the dude is dead, and I’m pretty certain I’d never killed anyone before. It’s just that I didn’t shoot him in the face or beat him to death or cut his throat anything.
Here’s how it went down: Another hot, dusty Helmand afternoon. The whole section sitting around in the mortar pit, playing Spades. Staff Sergeant telling a story about some field op he’d done in Lejeune where it rained so much the roads flooded and the trucks couldn’t get through to come pick them up. It was Friday and no one wanted to stay out for the weekend, so they hiked 15 miles back to mainside, slogging through knee-deep water the whole way, and secured for weekend liberty at like 2300.
He was just starting to talk about the party they had in the barracks that night when the radio squawked to life.
“Warchild, this is 2 Actual. Immediate suppression, PQ 034 831, over.”
Staff Sergeant snatched the radio handset from Morello. “2 Actual, Warchild. Immediate suppression, PQ 034 831. Out.” And then to us: “GETTHEFUCKINGTUBESUPTHERE’STROOPSINCONTACTLETSFUCKINGGO!”
Before LT even finished the first transmission, the mortar pit exploded with a spasm of activity. Sergeant Wilfred punched the information into the LHMBC and shouted fire commands while DiMaria adjusted our sight. Chang and I prepped our ammo, tearing off extra increments and twisting safety wires free. The other three gun teams also raced to move their bipods and bubble up their sights, all of us trying to outpace both one another and the enemy.
We were good. I’m not just saying that because everyone says that about their unit. We were fucking good. Less than 90 seconds from when we received the call for fire, the whole section was laid in on the proper deflection and elevation. I held the Nerf football-shaped round over the mouth of the tube.
“HANGING ON 2!” I screamed. We were the first gun up for that mission. Just saying.
“HANGING ON 3!” “HANGING ON 4!” “HANGING ON 1!”
Staff Sergeant gave the command. “FIRE!”
I let the round go. It slid down the tube and catapulted towards its target with a hollow thunk. Chang handed me another round and I let it go again. Thunk. And two more times. Thunk. Thunk. Four tubes shooting four 81mm mortar rounds each. All (hopefully) landing within feet of one another and killing everything within a 35 meter radius. Someone on the other end of that was due for a bad fucking day.
Staff Sergeant called over the radio to LT saying we were rounds complete. My nostrils filled with dust kicked up by the baseplates thumping into the ground with each shot. The only sound was our ragged, heavy breathing. We subconsciously synchronized our inhales and exhales, like one big bellows.
LT came by the mortar pit a few minutes later to tell us the story. A team of Green Berets who’d been out with the Afghans had gotten lit up by a few Taliban with a PKM. They called us for the immediate suppression to buy themselves enough time to break contact and escape. The GB officer in charge told LT it had been good shooting by us; we’d put basically all of our rounds straight into the target compound. He said they found one dead body and a blood trail leading out to the road.
Of course, there was no way of telling which round had killed the dead Taliban or wounded the other. And even if I’d known it had been the rounds from gun 2 that got the job done, would that mean I’d killed someone? DiMaria and Chang were on the gun team, too. And we couldn’t even see the impacts. If we were going to say we killed that dude, then did LT kill him, by passing us the fire mission? Did the GBs kill him by calling for fire? And so on.
I think the way to approach the question is to ask: If it had been murder, would I be guilty? And even then, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d be innocent, at least. And to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be. I did my job. I did it well. We saved American lives and didn’t kill any civilians in the process. Whether I killed the guy or not, if I somehow got stuck in a time warp and wound up back in Marjah, I wouldn’t hesitate to drop those rounds again.
Everyone was pretty pumped about it at the time. We were trying to be all business-like, getting the guns bubbled back up on our azimuth of fire, but we were buzzing, almost vibrating with excitement and adrenaline. Staff Sergeant said his piece about how he was proud of us, and then he went to take a leak.
He was at the COP’s piss tubes when a 107mm rocket plowed into the ground some ten meters away, leaving him with a minor concussion and showering him with urine-soaked dirt. It must’ve been the dead man’s friends’ response to our rounds. I didn’t see this part, but apparently Staff Sergeant sprinted back to the COC and burst into the tent we called an operations center, reeking of sunbaked year-old ammonia. His pants were still unbuckled and he was staggering like a drunk dude, the first sign he’d gotten his bell rung. Doc made sure he got the concussion logged so he could get VA benefits when he retired. It was still kind of funny, though.

A few days later the ANA commander cut a deal with the Taliban to call off the operation, and we left Marjah with the same number of dudes we’d arrived with.
“Come on Sir, it only took me one rocket to get the fuck out of there.”
“107s are a lot bigger than 7.62, man.”
“Nah it just wasn’t my first time, is all.”
LT rolled his eyes. “Here we go, I’m getting boot checked literally on my way back from Afghanistan. I can’t fuckin’ win around here.”
“You can’t win this game neither, sir,” Morello chirped.
“Oh fuck off.”
The hands came and went, the cards seeming to deal themselves with no concern for who was winning and who was losing, spraying luck like a traversing machinegun. Morello and Doc swung big and missed big, moving up 100 points on a Blind Six only to lose 120 by blowing a Little Mo. LT and Staff Sergeant inched their way up the score chart, dialed into one another the way any good platoon commander and platoon sergeant should be by the end of their time together, escaping their bad hands with minimal damage and capitalizing on their good ones.
“I’m spades tight,” Staff Sergeant announced, guaranteeing his team would make their bid again.
“You serious?” Doc asked.
Staff Sergeant showed his cards around like a magician. “Get fucked.”
That put them over 500 points. Wordlessly, Morello flipped to the backside of the scrap of Rite in the Rain paper that served as their scoresheet and started a new game. Winning and losing were secondary to the larger goal of killing time. Still, the only way to actually kill the time was to play, and each man figured that if he was going to play, he might as well win. So they threw themselves into each book, despite the fact that the game’s stakes amounted to little more than a few minutes of trash talk.
And even the trash talk was unimportant. Though not quite as debased as War or Go Fish, Spades is essentially devoid of skill. Sure, counting cards would help, but anyone who’s good enough at that to make a difference wouldn’t wind up in Arifjan. You play the hand you’re dealt. If it’s good, you’re probably going to win. If it’s weak, you’re probably going to lose. The only thing that matters is understanding the rules of the game. That’s how you bid: by knowing what your cards are worth. That’s how you play: by throwing the right suit and knowing whether it’s on you to win or lose a book to meet your bid. You just follow the rules, and unless you’re a real fucking idiot, you’ll be decent enough at Spades.
The flip side of that is knowing when to break the rules. Like how reneging on a suit costs you 250 points, but that’s only if someone on the other team is paying close enough attention to catch you. Like how you can’t shoot mortars overhead of friendlies unless they’re in contact bad enough that no one gives a fuck. Situation dictates, as they say.

I nodded off for a nap around the time they started the second game, book folded open on my chest. Like everyone else, I wanted to wake up on the plane, or better yet, already home. But it can’t have been more than an hour later that Chang stepped on my chest trying to dismount the top bunk. I’d been deeply asleep, having one of those vivid dreams that’s so real you’re confused when it ends. I don’t remember what it was about, but between that and my sudden awakening, I had a strange moment outside of time, like when you get rolled by a wave underwater and can’t tell which way the surface is.
I sat up, taking a deep breath through my nose. I was a total stranger to myself. Propped up on my elbows, I looked side to side, trying to figure out where and who I was. The first thing I saw was the Spades game: Staff Sergeant’s bald head, LT’s Dracula-like cheekbones and square jaw, Morello’s slicked back hair, Doc’s ridiculous mustache. I found myself by deduction. I was the guy in First Platoon who wasn’t those guys. I was the negative space in our puzzle. Over the past seven months, between the sheer amount of time we’d spent together and the mirror-less humility of our lives on deployment, I’d probably seen the other faces in the platoon more than my own. Seeing them again, the world came back to me: The ripe smell of my unwashed sleeping bag, the knot of excitement in my stomach knowing how close we were to going home, the Spades game continuing.

“Y’all remember Gunny Whitaker?” Morello asked.

The other three grew quiet. Gunny Whitaker had been pissing in a portashitter on the FOB we stayed at between missions. This particular portashitter was next to the motor pool. An Army unit that had just gotten back from a mounted patrol was clearing out their weapons there. Some dipshit ND’ed a Mk-19 and shot a round through the side of the portashitter, straight into Gunny Whittaker’s face. Total freak accident. If he’d been sitting down on the toilet, he would’ve been ok, maybe just a bit shook up. And this story would’ve been kind of funny, something about how the round scared the shit out of him or whatever. But Gunny Whitaker had been standing, and he paid for that with his life. He was a support guy, something in the Task Force’s comm shop, so no one in the platoon really knew him that well. But everyone was still pretty freaked out about it.
“I tell you I seen that shit?” Morello went on. “I was leaving the JOC when it happened. I heard the round go off, it sounded like someone dropped a telephone book. I stop and look around, but I don’t see smoke or nothing like you would from a rocket attack. Then I seen the Army guys carrying him by on a poleless litter. Man, his head was fucking gone. Jesus Christ. Fucking dripping shit everywhere. And his arms was dangling. Like, just hangin’ there.”
No one said anything. I wanted someone to chime in, to break the silence. I thought it was awkward, leaving that stuff floating around in the air unacknowledged. But I know now there was nothing to say. The point was just to say the thing itself, stating facts for the record in our never-ending trial, complete with faceless jurors and inscrutable judge. Eventually the conversation resumed and moved on, leaving Gunny Whitaker dead on the stretcher while they dealt another hand.

Those guys weren’t much for metaphor. I wasn’t either, however many years ago it was that I eavesdropped on their Spades game. I’m older now, though, and the more I begin to understand things, the more it takes for me to make sense of them. I’m hungry for clarity in a way 20 year-old me would’ve dismissed as unproductive and unnecessary. I guess he’d hoped I would everything in Arifjan. But I can’t help it, turning these stones over in my mind until they’re smooth like river rocks.
So here’s the image I take away from all this: A headless corpse, accidentally killed by friendly fire six months before the peace deal was signed, one of the last Americans to die in Afghanistan. I can’t quite tell you why it happened. The best I can do is explain the cycle of operations of a Mk-19 heavy machine gun. In that case, the answer is the part where the firing pin strikes the primer.
I saw it, too, by the way. I was ten feet from Morello, on my way to the rusted pile of free weights we called our gym on that FOB. He was right about the way it looked. Fucking dripping shit everywhere.
Even though I’ll never forget the day Gunny Whitaker died, I couldn’t tell you what happened the day before or the day after. We lived our deployment in sequence, but I remember it as a mosaic: Colorful memories set against a drab background of boredom. The tiles make about as much sense as a random hand of 13 cards, but if you play long enough, you’ll see the whole deck. So I skip across the tesserae, repeating to myself the one about Doc and the little girl, the one about LT almost getting shot, the one about my first kill and the one about Staff Sergeant nearly getting his dick blown off, the uneven track where we ran in Arifjan, the ketchup-flavored Arab potato chips they served in the chow hall there. And then I snap back to Gunny Whitaker. And then I’m on the plane home, burning my tongue on the reheated chicken parmesan in-flight meal. And then the lumpy marinara sauce becomes blood and skull and brain and soul. And then I’m home. And then I’m not.

****

Adam Straus graduated from Yale with a BA in Philosophy in 2017. Afterwards, he served in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Okinawa, and Twentynine Palms as a Marine Corps infantry officer. His work has appeared in Duffel Blog and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. Adam is currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers-Camden. He can be reached at adam.straus@rutgers.edu.