By Matt Eidson

The day Lance Corporal Hadley died started out like any other. Wake up, leave the wire on a show-of-force mission, patrol the streets of another Iraqi village. Same ol’ same ol’. But then Hadley stepped on an IED during the patrol and bled out. Private Martin and I tried to stop the bleeding with tourniquets on both his legs, me on the right and Martin on the left. After we got the radio working and called in the 9-line, it took about an hour before the bird showed up to medivac him. Martin swore Hadley had a pulse when we put him on the chopper. But I don’t know. He looked pretty dead to me. 

We got the call over the radio a few minutes later, one KIA. After that we continued patrolling the streets of the little Iraqi village. Business as usual. We watched our step a little closer though.

When we got back to base later it took Sergeant Bryan all of two seconds to snatch me up for a one-man working party. We pulled the MRAPS up to the Command Post and got out of the up-armored trucks and dropped our sweaty, now-bloody flak jackets and Kevlars and M16s on the ground and tried to forget everything. I’d just sat down and leaned against my propped-up flak when Sergeant Bryan came out of the Command Post.

“PFC Raymond, clean the piss tube.”

I blinked at him. “Hadley died today. Stepped on an IED.”

He folded his arms. “I know.” He raised his eyebrows. “Piss tube. Now.”

I rolled my eyes, stood up, grabbed my gear, and headed over to the latrine area for the least-desirable working party on our tiny outpost.

A piss tube is exactly what it sounds like. When we first got here we stabbed a six-foot PVC pipe into the sand at an angle so everyone could piss in it like a wall urinal. Nicer outposts have a series of them lined up side-by-side. It helped with the smell because it spread the piss out over a dozen feet or so. We only had the one, though. Just a nondescript tube sticking out of the sand with no walls or ceilings, leaving you and your fellow Marines to flop your cocks into a huge gray tube that smelled like calcified piss and dip spit. War is hell. 

I walked up to the piss tube with four jugs of bleach, took the lid off the first one, and stuck it in the tube. The jug expanded and contracted as the bleach dumped into the tube. It helped with the smell a bit, but mostly it just made the tube smell like piss and bleach. It’s probably hell on the environment too, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Marine on the outpost who gives a flying fuck about our environmental impact on Iraq. 

I stood with my hands on my hips and watched the jug empty into the tube. Even this late in the day the sun was cooking the ground, me, the outpost, everything. I took my hands off my hips to untuck my camouflage top from my pants so I could get a little airflow. As I pulled the front of my top out I caught sight of my sleeves, stained red with Hadley’s blood. My mind drifted to thoughts of my friend. 

Hadley. The guy I’d met in bootcamp, the two of us becoming inseparable. The guy who once snuck off base during a training exercise to buy us a carton of cigarettes. The guy who always hid a bottle of Beam in his pack so we could take shots during long days on the range. The guy who came home with me for Christmas and got drunk and hit on my little sister, then started crying and saying how sorry he was.

I sniffed hard and felt like I might punch a wall. Hadley just died, and Sergeant Bryan sends me, of all people, to clean the piss tube. He was always fucking with me at the worst possible moments. Like the time he made me fill sandbags right after Hammond, another Marine in our platoon, got killed. Or when he made me clean weapons right after the Lieutenant told the platoon our return-home date got pushed back a week.

I shook my head and wiped my eyes. The first jug finished dumping into the tube, so I pulled it out and tossed it to the side. I grabbed a fresh jug and uncapped it, ready to dump it into the tube next, when I heard a door slam off to my right. I looked up just in time to see Martin coming out of his plywood hooch in his bloody cammies. His face was red and his eyes were soaked. He walked a few feet away from his sleeping quarters and leaned against a different plywood building and covered his face. I watched his body convulse like a jug of bleach. Then I walked over and leaned against the building, right next to him. I didn’t say anything for a long time. Just stood there. When he turned toward me, I said the only thing that came to mind.

“Want to help me clean the piss tube?”

He looked at the tube and managed a grin. “Sure man, sure.”

For the next hour we came up with funny ways to fuck with Sergeant Bryan, like pissing in his canteens or putting a camel spider in his boot. Martin and I laughed like hyenas and forgot about Hadley for a little while. Right before we got back to work, I looked over at the Command Post and saw Sergeant Bryan leaning against the wall. My stomach dropped as I imagined him storming toward us, ordering us to get back to work. Instead he just grinned at me and turned to go back into the Command Post. It was then that I finally realized how much he loved us.