Redeployment

The narrator is with a unit that fires artillery on a group of insurgents one morning. He and the men are excited that after two months in Iraq, they performed a mission that resulted in kills. Over lunch they argue about how many insurgents they must have killed and whose guns were likely to have killed the most. A man named Jewett says, “‘I don’t feel like I killed anybody. I think I’d know if I killed somebody’” (273). He repeats this several times until the narrator leaves.

Jewett finds him and says that now he has something to tell his mom about. The narrator married a woman named Jessie a week before deploying. He doesn’t feel like he is married. Jewett leaves, and the narrator goes to an artillery rack and puts his hands on the shells. He describes the process of the team loading and firing artillery shells at the insurgents. He saw the explosions as they hit, six miles away. “God, this is why I’m glad I’m an artilleryman,” he had thought (278). The guns are now clean, and it doesn’t feel to him like they could have been used in the morning’s mission. He feels that the guns are too clean, yet