A Mortuary Affair in Iraq
By TERESA FAZIO
I never meant to be a wartime hussy. Unlike Paula Broadwell, I was not buff and beautiful; I was a shy Catholic girl from White Plains, N.Y., with a calligraphed physics diploma. As a 23-year-old Marine lieutenant just a year and a half out of R.O.T.C., my plan for a seven-month Iraq deployment included laying fiber-optic cable underground, not taking up with a comrade 12 years my senior.
I befriended him in the cavernous chow hall as he forked limp cabbage onto a plastic plate. He worked in our battalion’s mortuary affairs unit, and scraping human remains from helicopters had killed his taste for meat. When I asked if he had a family, he said, “what’s left of it.” His estranged wife cared for their 7-year-old son, who was my youngest brother’s age. Soon we e-mailed bawdy jokes over the network my wire platoon helped set up on our base in Anbar Province.
I didn’t look feminine; my hacked-off hair and wire-rim glasses let me roll from my sleeping bag into uniform. My Kevlar jacket barreled a camouflage carapace onto my 5-foot-1 frame. Even slung tight, my M-16 hung past my knees. The combined effect was less “Hurt Locker” than “Harry Potter Goes to War.”
Other female Marines were ogled and jockeyed over, but no brawny pilots glanced my way, except to ask for radio batteries. I felt homesick and craved male attention. But living up to my M.I.T. degree, I remained undateable, even surrounded by 5,000 guys in the desert. He promised he’d lay me out in a prom dress if I ever died in action. His invitation to a midnight movie surprised me, and I said yes.
After months of faking fearlessness while dodging weekly mortar attacks, and pretending my lack of sex appeal didn’t bother me, I dropped my guard upon stepping into his quiet bunker. As we picked from a binder of scratched DVDs, my desperation, terror, and loneliness ebbed. When the bootleg Jack Black comedy ended, he lifted a finger, caressed my cheek, said he found me attractive. I reminded him he was still married. But his attention intoxicated me. Especially after I watched him work.
One night I fidgeted against a wall as two Marines lugged a body-bag-laden stretcher to a workstation flanked by shelves of nitrile gloves. Blood puddled as they unzipped the bag, lifting the body of a Navy Seabee whose crewcut spiked fresh over ashen skin. He scissored open filthy cargo pockets, fishing out a startlingly clean pack of Camels. I remained grim-faced, faking dispassion in hopes of seeming strong. I thought this forged our bond into something pure.
We never had sex. But if caught, we could have been court-martialed for conduct that was “prejudicial to good order and discipline.” I feared the base rumor mill turning on us, but no one suspected a popular married officer to want a nerdy lieutenant viewed as everyone’s kid sister. So our “movie night” expanded to every night no one had died. What were a few hours of pawing, I rationalized, when you could be killed in the morning? When he returned from daylong convoys, I ignored my guilt and sneaked across our rock-strewn compound to be with him. We kissed, held each other, napped under his poncho liner. Neither of us knew when a shrill phone or hauled stretcher would wrest us from our clinch.
Weekly, I pressed him for a guarantee – that we would wind up together, that his divorce was inevitable, that he’d always love me. His reply never wavered: “I’m just trying to get through today.” Beneath the adrenaline, I convinced myself that what we shared would still hold up back home.
We feared dying daily, but staunchly ignored our morals’ death throes. My callousness shocked me; my own mother had left my dad for another man, dragging us through child-support battles in a tense, chaotic divorce. My conscience whispered I could cause his son the same pain. I kept a snapshot of my dad, grandfather and brothers as my laptop screensaver, a reminder to not shame my family. My best friend, to whom I’d confessed in scrawled letters, wrote, “I love you. Don’t screw up.”
But I screwed up. I fell for him, hard. The closer we clung to each other, the farther the war receded, until our longed-for homecoming loomed. When my platoon formed up on my last morning in Iraq, he stood, steeling himself, at a respectful distance. He didn’t want to come closer; he’d said, “I just want to be home with my kid.” I silently slung my pack into an airfield-bound truck. Death and destruction had become routine, but I’d ignored the risk of emotional massacre. I’d sacrificed my officer’s integrity, and it had not won him over.
Back on our California base, I realized I was just a tawdry cliché: the younger woman pining for a married man who will never leave his wife. Tormented, I confessed to another female officer, who revealed he had hit on her, too. I wasn’t special. I drove six hours to confront him and punched him in the face.
I beat myself up, convinced I was a terrible person. Though I never had to publicly apologize, as General Petraeus did, I was terrified of losing my reputation. Keeping the secret upped my despair. Issued M9 Berretta in hand, I contemplated suicide in the hills behind our battalion headquarters. Only the thought of my yellow Labrador snapped me out of it. When my Marine Corps contract ended, I started graduate school in New York. He and I stayed in sporadic contact for several years, until his wife found a text I’d sent. I finally revealed the affair to my mother, whose unconditional love helped me let go of shame. The empathy of friends and family, along with counseling, helped me give him up for good. I grew confident and felt loved.
No one goes to war intending to commit these personal crimes. But mired in complex stresses and heightened emotions in a spare and dangerous place, he and I sought solace from each other. The battle I fought after deployment was one for self-forgiveness. To truly come home from Iraq, I had to slash that bond, casualty of a mortuary affair.
Teresa Fazio spent four years as a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City and is writing a memoir.
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