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" The mannequin stands beside our driveway, facing the road. Charlotte always decked it out at Christmas Santa-style, all red and white, with a black belt and buttons and a matching fuzzy hat. In February, it wore a purple robe, strands of beads -- gold and silver with medallions on them -- around its neck. Big fake coins littered the ground. When we found out I was going overseas, Charlotte skipped the Easter costume and dressed it in camouflage. She put a green canvas backpack over its shoulders, hung a camo hat from its neck with a string, and tucked an American flag into the soldier&amp;#039;s blouse. It was too big to wave, so it drooped over the backpack like a cape.  It&amp;#039;s still there over a year later, the camo faded to the color of a dirty, overchlorinated pool, and the backpack sags and pulls the mannequin back a little, like it&amp;#039;s laughing big or trying to look at the sky. The flag mildewed; Charlotte replaced it with a little plastic one that sticks out of the backpack, the kind kids hold at parades, so small and rigid that it doesn&amp;#039;t wave, either.  Charlotte won&amp;#039;t change the uniform until something definitive happens. It&amp;#039;s a scarecrow calendar, stuck in time. Jesus. After all I heard about adjusting and readjusting, dealing with normal life again, the thing that creeps me out most is a headless mannequin that stands in our yard, looking like a soldier who lost his way. That&amp;#039;s not quite true. It does creep me out, but not as much as -- fuck. I never thought I&amp;#039;d be the guy saying this, but it&amp;#039;s true: My wife is fat now. She put on like forty pounds while I was gone.  I understand, to a point. She&amp;#039;s alone, worrying and everything, not working, little Charles doing his thing, my return anything but certain. My initial DOD assignment was for only three months -- standard for any civilian intelligence operative -- but the extensions kept coming until I was there for fifteen. Sure, some people eat when they&amp;#039;re anxious, but still. Forty pounds? Jesus Christ. People run and lift weights to curb worry, too. When they flew me back to NAS Pensacola, I walked right past her, standing in a group of people with a huge bunch of white flowers in her arms. I don&amp;#039;t know whether she was hiding behind them or if I just didn&amp;#039;t recognize her, but she had to yell my name and run after me. Chaz! Chaz! It must have killed her. On the way home from Pensacola, little Charles was asking me a bunch of questions -- about the food, if I was going to shave my beard, if I&amp;#039;d killed anybody, and on and on. I was turned around, talking with him, and I looked over and saw the seat belt cutting across my wife&amp;#039;s chest. The thought that popped into my head was that it looked like somebody trying to lasso a big water balloon. I still feel like shit for thinking that. I drank two bottles of wine that night before we had sex. She turned the light out as soon as I shut the door. I&amp;#039;m here, she said, so I could find her in the dark. Right here, Chaz. Soft, almost like she didn&amp;#039;t want me to.  We lived in Saddam&amp;#039;s compound, which had been renamed Camp Victory. The guy had seventy-eight palaces. Al Faw was on Victory, and there was another one at Camp Slayer that we called the Perfume Palace. It had a huge indoor pool where Saddam&amp;#039;s boys partied and kept their women. But they were like supermodels with rotting insides, these beautiful marble buildings, big as museums, without even adequate plumbing. When you saw the low-rent sewage systems backing up the gold-plated bathrooms where Saddam shat, claims that he could harm us with transoceanic weaponry became pretty suspect.  Local workers were allowed into the compound to dig ditches and clean stuff up. They also did some prospecting for the other side: They paced off distances, so the resistance could aim rockets and mortars at our buildings with precision from outside the walls. One morning, one of the DFACs got slammed by mortars and fourteen people died. The only things left standing were two walls, the grill, and some stray tables and chairs. Premixed eggs were burning on the grill and the Gaylord was still sucking up smoke when I got there. A sign outside was still standing, too, one we saw before every meal. The third line was stamped with lighter paint and in a slightly different font from the first two, and it wasn&amp;#039;t correctly justified. Sometimes it made me uneasy; other times it made me laugh: PROFESSIONAL.  POLITE.  PREPARED TO KILL.   We slept in trailers that had barriers around them, two or three guys on each side. The barriers were first built around four feet high; by the time I left, they were building them up to eleven feet, because of the rocket threat. One dud skidded through three trailers and ended up in an FBI guy&amp;#039;s rack; he woke up with a rocket next to him in bed. He got some burns on his leg and arm, in addition to a lot of comments from everybody about how if the FBI guys couldn&amp;#039;t go outside the Pussy Zone, stuff would still find them one way or another. The British MI6 guys came up with that -- the &amp;quot;Pussy Zone,&amp;quot; denoting the very limited area of Baghdad where the FBI operated. Some FBI higher-up came in early on and said that his guys could go here, here, and here but definitely not there, there, there, there, and there, and kept on with the restrictions. They could only rarely go out with us when we responded to bombings in the city, when we raided suspected IED factories or performed SSEs on confirmed ones, but that didn&amp;#039;t stop them from complaining that other people weren&amp;#039;t pulling their weight. At Camp Victory, we worked out every morning in the gym, bought Crest and Speed Stick at the exchanges, we showered in hot water, ate eggs and bacon and burgers and fries in the DFACs. There was a Pizza Hut and a Burger King. We e-mailed our families and spoke to them on the phone. We fell into routines disrupted by bombings, which became routine themselves, in a way. If your rack or your desk went a while without being rattled by an explosion -- mortars felt like somebody dropping a big box nearby -- or if you weren&amp;#039;t walking around after a rain had turned the ground to brownie mix, or if you avoided the 110 degree heat for a few hours, you could&amp;#039;ve been working on any base. Then you&amp;#039;d go outside. You&amp;#039;d drive down Route Irish, peppered every hundred yards with eight-by-ten-foot filled-in craters from VBIED attacks. Every civilian vehicle on that road was a threat to puncture your formation and explode. Iraqis would look at you, some with thanks on their faces, others tight disdain. The right look at the right time could turn you sour faster than a bomb. And Saddam&amp;#039;s monuments! They made me think of black widows: beautiful and ominous at the same time.  Shortly after I got to Iraq, I was at the parade grounds in downtown Baghdad. There&amp;#039;s a monument that commemorates the war with Iran. One of the PAOs told me about the two pairs of huge swords held by giant replicas of Saddam&amp;#039;s hands, one at each end of the parade grounds: Each sword is 140 feet long and made from the metal of Iraqi soldiers&amp;#039; guns. Under the swords, Iranian soldiers&amp;#039; helmets are cemented into the ground like speed bumps, so that any vehicle entering the area has to drive over them. The PAO pointed out that there&amp;#039;s one bullet hole in each helmet. When it was dedicated, he said, Saddam rode a white horse around, impersonating some martyr. The day before Baghdad got bombed during the first Gulf war, Saddam had his soldiers march under the swords and showed it on TV as the theme from Star Wars played.  Charlotte wasn&amp;#039;t herself. I&amp;#039;d left for the Middle East married to a fiery woman, one with opinions. She took people on. That&amp;#039;s what drew me to her. Until we had little Charles, she was a local attorney. She went up against the local school board in a discrimination case after we&amp;#039;d lived in town less than a year and won. It was in all the local papers, covered in Montgomery and Birmingham and even Atlanta. People noticed. Women didn&amp;#039;t take on the old-South establishment in our town and win. They tried to convince her to run for a seat on the Baldwin County school board. She said no.  That was not the same woman who turned the lights out and whimpered from under the covers my first night back. Here, Chaz, I&amp;#039;m right here. She kept guiding my hands to the headboard, away from her, and she wouldn&amp;#039;t get on top. Even though she kept stopping me from touching her, I could feel, belly to belly, how much bigger she was. It felt weird when I was trying to kiss her, so I didn&amp;#039;t. Jesus! She wanted that moment so much, I could tell, but when it happened, she just wanted it to be over. So did I.  I saw the old Charlotte only once in a while. One afternoon, we were at the store. I&amp;#039;d grabbed some skim milk and was turning back into the aisle. A woman near Charlotte was dragging her crying daughter around by the arm, telling her to shut up. When the girl didn&amp;#039;t stop, the woman slapped her. Charlotte walked over and said to the little girl, &amp;quot;Come on, sweetheart. Let&amp;#039;s go.&amp;quot;  I stopped at the end of the aisle. The woman gave Charlotte a look like she&amp;#039;d just busted into her house. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s my daughter,&amp;quot; she said.  Charlotte smiled at the woman. &amp;quot;Oh, I know. She&amp;#039;s beautiful.&amp;quot; Charlotte looked down at the grubby little girl. &amp;quot;She looks like you,&amp;quot; she said. The woman nodded slowly, like it hadn&amp;#039;t occurred to her that this might be a trait of one&amp;#039;s own child. Charlotte said, &amp;quot;Anyway, don&amp;#039;t you think that she should come with me while you finish your shopping?&amp;quot;  I stood there watching, the cold milk in my hand, thinking the woman might chuck a can of soup at Charlotte. Instead she became calm. After a minute, she said, &amp;quot;No, she can come with me.&amp;quot; She reached out, and the daughter, quiet now, took her mom&amp;#039;s hand. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s okay. She can come with me.&amp;quot; Charlotte gave the little girl a look of encouragement and shot the mother a look, and the two of them walked away. Charlotte patted little Charles&amp;#039;s head and they went looking for the next thing.  She still had it. With people she didn&amp;#039;t know, people who didn&amp;#039;t know that fat was a recent thing, Charlotte was fine. In the car, I brought up the confrontation, and she sort of sunk down in her seat and wouldn&amp;#039;t talk about it, like she wished I hadn&amp;#039;t seen. We went on, the three of us, everything quiet but the air conditioner blasting cold air. Charlotte was pushed up against the passenger window in her big baggy gray sweat suit, looking outside, the seat belt tight and the cold air barely moving her limp hair. It was just around me, it seemed, that she carried this cloud of disappointment, like she&amp;#039;d let me down. Or me -- maybe it was me. Maybe I&amp;#039;d let her down.   It&amp;#039;s true that people frequently shit themselves when they die. The smell that floated around Baghdad drove that home. It was harsh and foul, like burning flesh and shit mixed together. Which I guess isn&amp;#039;t figurative language. A lot of trash stayed in the streets. That&amp;#039;s not to say that Baghdad&amp;#039;s a dirty city; it&amp;#039;s just a city nobody wanted to clean. Nobody seemed to know how to treat a place like that. Doctors hawked falafel, pregnant women strapped on vests lined with ball bearings and blew themselves up, and orphaned kids lived in bombed-out buildings.  There&amp;#039;s a military term: &amp;quot;end state.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s as simple as it sounds: What do you want the situation to be, exactly, after you take action somewhere? Simple in theory; complex in execution. Situation rooms incorporate talk of end states as invasions and air strikes are deliberated. Political leaders have to envision the end states resulting from every possible military move. It can&amp;#039;t be that you just want a leader dead or dethroned or held accountable for atrocities, et cetera; you&amp;#039;ve got to have a plan for the peace, too, after the tip of the spear is way inside. Put simply: Justify why you&amp;#039;re fighting. We were over there shoving the Iraqis around, and some of them resented it. But it was more than that. They hated that they needed to be shoved around. They knew themselves, their history. Mongols, who drank their horses&amp;#039; blood and made towers of victims&amp;#039; skulls on their way to burning Baghdad, became the most zealous Muslims. Sure, they built and rebuilt mosques where before they had stacked skulls, but you don&amp;#039;t lose that disposition entirely. Some people have to have an enemy. Once at a scene, some Iraqi kids were throwing rocks at a bombed U. S. Humvee. When we had control of the situation, I asked one of them what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer? American. Jesus. Before long, that kid would be throwing stuff at somebody else. They&amp;#039;d just start pushing each other around again, like they&amp;#039;d been doing forever.  Some Iraqis liked that they had fight in their blood. When I&amp;#039;d watch them watching our engineers, it was clear that they hoped we knew their history, that crazy was always close. They hated our security checks, our raids of their houses, the armored Humvees patrolling the place. At some level, they even hated the repairs we performed on their water and power systems while they watched: Nobody likes to be reminded that he&amp;#039;s powerless.  Little Charles has a favorite dinner that I make. Grilled flank steak and romaine lettuce, served with twice-baked potatoes spiked with horseradish. A normal meal, nothing really special aside from the grilled romaine being the only vegetable that little Charles will eat. I made it the night before I left for Iraq, and the three of us ate on the back deck. Charlotte lit candles and tiki torches. Little Charles drank grape juice and Charlotte and I drank red wine.  After we finished dinner, Charlotte led us around front and showed us the mannequin she&amp;#039;d dressed as a soldier. At that point, I was only going to be gone for three months, so I thought it was a sort of funny gesture, like she always was doing. Three months is no big deal, we can do this, that sort of thing. Little Charles pointed out that the uniform was different from the desert cammies I would be wearing, and we told him that he was exactly right, how smart he was, and put him to bed.  When we slept together that night, the last time before I left, Charlotte started crying right in the middle of it. I&amp;#039;d been on extended trips out of the country for work lots of times, but she&amp;#039;d never done that before. I stopped.  &amp;quot;No, no,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t. Keep going.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s wrong?&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Just keep going,&amp;quot; she said. She looked away.  I didn&amp;#039;t know what to do. Keep going? She was still crying, looking over at the wall and biting her lip. How do you make love to a crying woman? After some hesitation, I touched her chin so she turned toward me. She was gorgeous, naked right then under me. It could&amp;#039;ve been the day we got married. The day we met, even. &amp;quot;I love you, Charlotte,&amp;quot; I whispered. She smiled up at me and started to cry harder and pulled me in tight. I almost lost it myself. Later, when we were lying next to each other, I asked her again. &amp;quot;Nothing&amp;#039;s wrong, Chaz. Sometimes I just wish it could stay,&amp;quot; she said. She reached out and grabbed the air and held a tight fist. &amp;quot;Just like this, you know? Like right now.&amp;quot;  Then, I thought about how great everything was. Now, it&amp;#039;s almost like she knew something was going to change. Not too long before I left Iraq, there was a VBIED downtown. It hit a convoy of armored Suburbans transporting personnel for a private security company from Sydney. Some small-arms fire engaged and distracted them, allowing a maroon Opel, the staple Iraqi car, to tear out of nowhere and crash into the caravan and detonate. The body count was thirty-two, including the six Australians in the convoy. Our team immediately left for the scene in two up-armored Humvees. The cammies and body armor and helmets we wore made the 112 degree heat worse, but once you left the compound, you didn&amp;#039;t think about that. On Route Irish we could see the desert, yellow-brown and wavy from the heat, like the windshield of the Humvee was filled with water. We flew through traffic and crowds to get downtown. Everything cramped and bustling, potential attacks everywhere. You looked for children: If they were around, usually you were safe.  When we got to the scene, the whole area looked like a helicopter had landed in an area too small for its rotors -- everything shredded and thrown all over the place. Roofs, walls, cars, refrigerators, people: parts of them were everywhere. It actually happened in the Pussy Zone, so we had to keep clear of the FBI guys on the scene. They always wore tight royal-blue Under Armour shirts with their desert-cammy pants and were highly recognizable: Snipers thought they were as important as they acted.  I got out of the Humvee. There was a dead guy near where we pulled up. You could see his snapped ribs protruding through his skin, he&amp;#039;d hit the ground so hard, but he hadn&amp;#039;t been burned by the bomb at all. Turned out that he&amp;#039;d been standing on the balcony of his hotel room, more than 150 feet from the explosion. All he did was walk outside, and then he was flying on a supercharged blast of air to his death. Just like that.  I walked toward the crater and came about four inches from stepping on a penis. I jumped back at first, and then I looked at it for a long time. There it was, the only part of this guy that wasn&amp;#039;t blown to bits and charred. It looked neatly, almost surgically severed. I couldn&amp;#039;t believe it was just there on the ground, there for anybody to step on. I kept staring at it for the longest time. The other guys yelled at me to get over to the crater, but I just stood there, looking at that dick. I was still staring at it when a sniper hit my buddy Rowan, a British MI6 guy, who happened to be standing next to some puffy-chested FBI punk.  Everything worked just as we&amp;#039;d been trained: Most of our personnel found cover and returned fire while somebody called in additional ground support and a medevac request for Rowan. Someone grabbed a medical pack from one of the Humvees and dressed Rowan&amp;#039;s chest wound to keep his lung from collapsing. I ducked behind an Opel and lay there with my M4, firing rounds at the snipers in the hotel. The security detail eventually made it into the hotel and took care of the snipers. To avoid being taken, the one who hadn&amp;#039;t been killed jumped and fell right onto a parked car.  As we left the scene in our Humvee, the dead sniper was lying on the collapsed car roof, still clutching his assault rifle. As they tossed a sheet over him, he seemed almost alive alongside the charred, still-smoldering Aussie in the bombed Suburban -- ready to keep shooting.  Since I&amp;#039;ve been back, I&amp;#039;ve spent the early evenings on our front porch, like I used to do. I watch the mannequin out by the road as it gets dark, the little flag sticking out of its backpack. I just want it out of those worn-out cammies! I told Charlotte, but in a rare moment of spunk since I&amp;#039;d been back, she stood her ground.  &amp;quot;Until they figure out this nonsense,&amp;quot; Charlotte said, &amp;quot;and how to get out of it, the mannequin stays a soldier.&amp;quot; Her tone surprised me. She could tell. I started to say something, and she held her hand up. &amp;quot;You know I&amp;#039;m right, Chaz.&amp;quot; Her voice started to falter a little, and she looked away. &amp;quot;I know you do.&amp;quot;  Late the other afternoon, hummingbirds were fighting on our porch. Hummingbirds are assholes. They bang heads as they joust for the feeder. It sounds like two walnuts colliding. After a while one flew away, and the other hovered beside the feeder, jerking in every few seconds. I stood up and walked slowly toward the little bird. It was green and shiny. It sounded like a small motor, those wings going so fast. I walked closer and put my finger out toward it, sort of like I was pointing. It didn&amp;#039;t fly away. It went in, took a little nip, and then perched on my finger for a second or two. I swear I felt its heart beating. I&amp;#039;d never had anything like that happen to me. It did it a few more times and then flew off.  I went into the bathroom. Charlotte was in the shower, and there were clothes all over the place. I didn&amp;#039;t know why I&amp;#039;d gone in there. I nudged some of the clothes on the floor with my foot. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s with all the clothes?&amp;quot; I said. The sloshing around in the shower stopped for a few seconds. &amp;quot;Sorry, honey. The washer&amp;#039;s broken.&amp;quot;  I stood still for a minute, soaking the heat in. Charlotte and I hadn&amp;#039;t slept together since that first night. I picked up a pair of shorts off the floor and tossed them into the shower.  &amp;quot;Maybe you should wash them in there,&amp;quot; I said through the fog.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s silly,&amp;quot; she said. She made a jerky sound, sort of like a laugh. I looked at the mirror. I was a blur in there. I grabbed the pile of clothes on the floor and carried them to the shower, brushed the curtain aside, and dumped the clothes right at her feet.  She swung the shorts I&amp;#039;d tossed in there at me. They cracked my face pretty good, like a rattail towel. Her skin was red from the water, and her breasts and belly hung low. It looked like a new Charlotte had been poured on top of the old one. She didn&amp;#039;t look like my wife. She didn&amp;#039;t look like anybody I knew. I ripped my shirt off and jumped in with her. I pressed the shorts into her face and she went down on her knees. She went for my belt and yanked my pants down and started in on me. I grabbed her wet hair and guided her head. I took the shampoo bottle and squeezed some out onto Charlotte&amp;#039;s hair, onto the tops of her massive breasts, and then kept squeezing so it dripped onto the pile of clothes at the bottom of the tub.  Her head was down there nodding, and I stopped it. She looked up at me. Her face didn&amp;#039;t have any angles: Her chin sort of sloped down into everything, slowly overtaking her neck. Charlotte&amp;#039;s eyes, though -- I&amp;#039;d seen that look lots of times. Ready for anything, the game-on look. I pushed her down onto the clothes and got down on my knees. Her shoulders and arms were soft. I picked up the shampoo again and started soaping her up. I ran my hands all over her. Her breasts lopped down off her chest toward her sides, and I pushed them up, let them fall back down, covered them in suds. I lathered her soft belly. She had a gut; it ramped up between her crotch and her belly button. I traced it with my fingers. I rubbed the whole area, blanketed it in suds, exploring it all. I reached under and bathed her ass and her legs and feet, her skin slick. The clothes squished under her. I ran my hands over everything, each new crevice and bump, all of it slippery and shiny. Everything was soft.  There I was in the mirror, my torso blurry and distorted, preparing to dive down into my wife. How many times had we done it standing up in front of that mirror? We would look at each other in the glass, me behind her. Her hands would leave prints.  She pulled me down. I put my arms around her, grabbed one with the other, and squeezed. She said, &amp;quot;Harder.&amp;quot; My arms still easily encircled her soft torso. I bear-hugged her. We went at it. I tasted blood -- either her teeth or the shorts she&amp;#039;d hit me with had cut my lip -- and I reared up and we kept going. She smelled like shampoo, like cinnamon, chocolate, sweat -- one after the other, each smell stronger than the last -- and I could taste them all. When we finished, we were looking right at each other, and I collapsed onto her. I rested my head on her shoulder, put my hand on a breast and my leg up over hers. The hot water still streamed onto us. We stayed like that until we both fell asleep.  After a while we both sat up, facing each other, our legs touching, the pile of clothes between us. I picked up a soaking T-shirt and massaged it a little, rubbed one part of it with another part, so the shampoo on it lathered. Charlotte did the same thing with a pair of my boxers. We finished with those and picked up some others. Something blocked the drain and the water began to rise. It was dirty and gray, and we didn&amp;#039;t say anything. We kept scrubbing and scrubbing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a2832/fiction0507/>