Redeployment

The narrator details an incident in which he helps take down a house of hostile insurgents. He describes the orders each man is given and the responsibilities each man has—knocking down doors and securing each room while watching and protecting the man next to him. They kill several enemies who fire on them and secure the house. Corporal Sweet is shot in the thigh and receives treatment for the blood loss and to prevent him from going into shock.

Downstairs, two men who were being held and tortured are still alive. One of their captors fires at the soldiers, and Dyer shoots him in the face, which takes off his jaw but does not kill him. A man named Moore grabs the man Dyer shot and is prepared to beat him, but the narrator stops him. The two imprisoned men are “tied to a chair in front of a video camera on a tripod. They’re beat to hell and there’s a nice pool of blood on the floor” (19). The al-Qaeda fighters have laced their ankles to the chairs with barbed wire, and it’s difficult to get them free of the chairs. The narrator can tell that something is wrong with their feet, so he gives orders to bring them to their treatment center.