my name is naul

8/8/2019 My name is Naul

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Andrew Knox

Creative Writing – Short Story Third Draft9/25/2010

The Happy Trees Guy Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 2007:Don’t you hate that feeling, when you’re trying to be slick, but it falls flat? It

happens to me all the time. I’m stuck in a mindset where the 36 chambers collide with

the 72 virgins and make what they call in chemistry, a clusterfuck, and all I want is

someone female to talk to. The ghosts of my past all have the faces of men and keep meentertained eighty percent of the time. That last twenty is a hungry itch, a mountain to

overcome.

All the nurses here think that I’m a pervert. That I’m hitting on them; they don’t

understand the times I went through. And some people say that my past doesn’t justify

my present. Some people are usually right, but some people are still stuck in the pastwith me. That’s the majority of this ward.

I had American dreams, grand ones, and visions of candies and sugarplums thattangoed in my head every occurrence of December. Christmases haven’t been the same

since Naul left. Few things have been. Why am I trapped with identifying so stronglywith someone I knew for 16 hours? Why do these wounds still hurt when they have long

since scabbed and scarred over?

You know those people who are constantly mocked by “comedians” for having

vivid, realistic flashbacks to Vietnam? They’re real, real painful. Mine occur onlyoccasionally, but when they happen, I am encapsulated within them. I’m back on the

battlefield my intercom in my helmet plays neo-thrash-metal as muzak to keep me alert

while my commanders put me on hold. My mind slips to thoughts of sheep withelectrodes and light emitting diodes in place of wool. At moments they are red, at

moments they are green, but there are never moments where they are dark. I breathe

heavily from running in around fifty pounds of gear; it’s a hundred and ten degrees in theshade.

If my memories were olde tyme silent movies, they’d be sepia, that ugly brownish

that sounds like a bastard child of Dr. Seuss and the Happy Trees guy. Since they’revideos in my mind, my twisted little mind, they’re tinted pale green. It’s the kind of

green where if it was just a pair of sunglasses, if removed, all of God’s creation goes

purple.

My memories aren’t Vietnam-colored; they have a strong taste of Iraq, peppered

with oil of regret. The worst thing I ever did was not hang up on the recruiter that called

my house on my day off. I later figured out, in the operating room of all places, that theyare the greatest snake oil-mongers that the world has ever seen.

Democracy as a franchise. Salman Rhun, Iraq, 2005:It was the 18th of June when I was first introduced to death. A freshly deployed

greenhorn, a killing machine unaware of my potential or consequences, I wore no

sunglasses as I stood out in the sun. My gun was a blood addict like I now cravemorphine. Good times.



Andrew Knox


My two best friends in the squad, their real names inconsequential, were Smitty

and Subway. I think he was called Subway because his middle name was Jared or

something. Smitty was a man of few words, Smitty was all it said on his nametag, his

signature, it was as if he only had one name, and through some process, it had simply become Smitty. When pressured by superiors to write a full name, it could be extended

to Smitty S. Smitty, but only in emergency situations. I write in such length about Smitty

because I feel it is more respectful. Subway tends to agree, we both miss Smitty.

The three of us, and the rest of our squad, were tasked with patrolling a dusty

arterial on the edge of Salman Rhun, once a powerful authoritarian city-state as well as a piece of national history and pride. It was the friggin’ cradle of civilization; they were

the inventors of the spoon and the first culture known to use salt to preserve foods.

Like toy soldiers, but without the green tinge and badly molded faces, we walkedin rows of three, me, Subway and that silent bastard Smitty in the back row. One of the

guys in the row ahead of us, Fatman, the clown of the squad, had cracked a somewhatdecent “that’s what she said” joke, not decent enough to remain in my memory however.

We all had a good laugh, until the sand at our feet started whistling, followed by cracksof thunder from the rear. Instinct took over my rationality; I got behind an empty olive

oil vat and covered up.

The lieutenant started barking out slightly intelligible orders over the intercom.

He was ordering us to counter attack, but I was frozen behind that barrel. I looked for

comforting faces among my teammates, I saw Subway behind a stack of boxes andanother barrel across from me, an anxious smile splattered across his face. I looked for

Smitty, and looked and looked and looked and finally found him. He was in the place

where the sand had whistled, in a puddle of brownish, reddish mud. My eyes droopedand I felt nauseous, but the bullets didn’t stop coming. A hollow point sniper bullet hitSubway’s barrel and exploded in a rage unbecoming of two inches of metal. He was

sprayed with an assortment of shrapnel pieces, effectively shredding the entire left half of

his body, effectively fucking him up. A stray piece found me and said hello to my rightthigh. I took a deep breath.

But it didn’t help, I panicked, and ran towards an abandoned house; the door wasten feet behind Subway. Another sniper bullet grazed my left arm, the sniper was either

unskilled, or I was lucky. It still knocked me with enough force that I twisted about

abruptly, apparently spraining my lead ankle in the process. I stumbled silently into the

one room, dust floor shack, and collapsed, leaning on the far wall. And then I waited.

The sounds of destruction continued outside, accompanied by the constant beat of

my racing heart. There were intermittent shouts, but they signified nothing but clausesand addendums to the contract of war. My vocal cords seized, I was unable to make any

noise short of a half choke, half yelp. Subway’s screams of pain and a desire for help fell

only on my ears until Fatman, in a daring, Rambo-esque move, came and scooped himup, taking him, I presume, back to funky town with a brief detour to candy mountain. My



Andrew Knox


memories of this event either elude me, or have been replaced with absurd visions of unicorns and liopleurodons. The hours passed and the sun started to fade, the battle

turned against the ‘good guys’. It was at this moment that I saw an extraordinary sight.

It was me, and the rest of the squad, done in Arab style, our counterparts, at least.They were moving forward, while my friend moved back. No one on either side had seen

my quest for refuge, I was nearly safe. Our counterparts calmly stood in the city street,

waiting for something to happen, waiting in an identical stance to myself eight hours prior. They didn’t see me; thank God, or whoever deals in those things.

Locusts started to chirp, even though they were miles away, claiming farmland, itwas a calm, soothing lullaby; I thought that it was over.

Operation: Fisticuffs. Salman Rhun, Iraq, 2005:But then, the helicopters came, and they came in firing. The formation of

terrorists scattered like my squad did hours earlier, too slowly. The fountains in the sanderupted unlike before, and brought with them plumes of smoke. When the bullets hit,

they knocked you down before they released their full force. I heard a sound there thatnow follows me and is on every speaker I pass. It was a sound manufactured from

helicopter rotors, bullets, screams, breaking bones, chalkboards scratching and birds

going into seizures.

While I was busy watching with my ears, a frightened terrorist ran into my house

and we caught each other off guard. My reflexes were quicker and of the three shots Ifired, one hit the middle of his shin, one hit his shoulder and he lost grip of his gun, the

last shot went between his legs and left a hole in the wall. He pivoted and slammed into

the wall behind him, injuring himself further.

Before the thought to shoot again even crosses my mind, he pleads for me to not

kill him in an out of place, but perfect, educated British accent. And then the story

began.

My name is Naul, and I’m an alcoholic. Salman Rhun, Iraq, 2005:

I felt, for some odd reason, like extending our relationship to something beyondnemesis versus nemesis. And even though he would eventually meet his end at the hands

of my team, I thought that I owed him something for the bullet wounds.

Naul Merkert was born to Saule and Jennifer Merkert, on November 3rd

, 1982, inAmsterdam. He had an average upbringing, and excellent education and no dedication to

any religion by the time he was accepted to Oxford University, coming into the fall 2001

school year as a freshman. At Oxford, he was exposed to a completely new ideology andoutlook on life. He saw a seminar and slide show on the injustices committed by the

American hand of influence in the Middle East. Though he came fixated on the intent

that he would just be analyzing and dissecting propaganda, he left with a mission: spreadnews of these injustices.



Andrew Knox


The tipping point was when he saw a photo of a Palestinian family being evicted

from a one room hut in a crowded refugee camp. He recognized the people in the photo

as his extended family on his father’s side, the ones he hadn’t seen anywhere else but

photographs, but they were family nonetheless. At the beginning of his senior year, hedropped out and used book and tuition money to buy a one way ticket to Baghdad. He

had an insurgency to find.

Due to a phone call from the Oxford office, he was quickly shanghaied away to a

remote training facility where he underwent daily exercise and indoctrination. It was

before sunrise when he started and near midnight when he ended. At the time, he was aloyal soldier, dedicated to stopping the American foreign policy, even if he was a bit too

atheistic in his approach.

The next three years dulled his loyalty, however, and all he wished Allah would

deliver was a one way ticket back to Europe.

By the time of Operation: Fisticuffs, he was thinking of backpacking to Croatiaand starving to death in the mountains. Although this was mainly a surreal escape

fantasy, at least he had dreams.

With Great Power Comes… Something. Salman Rhun, Iraq, 2005:

It has just come to my attention that I’ve probably spent way too much timesetting the setting, so here’s the ABC one two threes of what happened:

The first thing we discussed was soccer, I thought it was a girl’s sport, he thought

otherwise. The next thing we discussed was that we would abstain from talking politics.

The night got old and the sun started to rise, we discussed inane things that

currently slip my mind. We both twitched occasionally due to the pain building up from

us trying to ignore it. My head was getting heavy and my eyes were getting heavier, Iwas trained to stay up for long periods of time, but not accustomed to it. I began to fall

asleep and he was inclined to allow me to.

I dreamt of electric sheep, and I hear hammering sound and felt the mass of a ton

of grapes crushing me awake. They later called it Operation: Flying Pussyfoot. My eyes

spun around the room and I caught glimpses of broken jugs, soldiers I didn’t know,

Naul’s body and a mouse trying to figure out where in the room was a safe place to hide.My eyes stopped spinning and instead returned to the electric sheep. I still heard noises,

shouts, and people confirming to other people that they had found what they were

looking for.

I woke up in a padded, white walled room, about 37 days later. These aren’t good

times. Why am I trapped with identifying so strongly with someone I knew for 16 hours?Why do these wounds still hurt when they have long since scabbed and scarred over?

my name is naul

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