Roadside Device

Back to Part II, Bereavement

"It was a roadside device," Morrison explained dully to his wife. He stepped through the door and put his body between us, shielding her from my explosive negroid potential. I stepped back, opening my pale palms.

"Your son was a brave man, ma'am," I offered. And yet, obviously how much time could the kid have had for bravery when ten pounds of military explosives blasted the front wheel through the windshield into his lap. Jeremy Morrison had been killed instantly, the small refrigerated stepvan he'd been assigned to drive whirling to the left and bursting into a ball of diesel fire.

My shoulders slumped. It all seems so useless to me. Feed people, don't fight them, that's my motto. There's no excuse for this kind of thing to keep happening.

"Liar!" Morrison barked suddenly, his racist bluster now withered by pain. "I just talked to Jerry on his cell phone. He was fine. He said they were working in a secured area, a milk run, he called it." I couldn't help feeling a little pride in my company, LSA--we do work fast once we get the notification. "I believe we did telephone earlier," I said modestly.

Mrs. Morrison shuddered. "The company called us this morning, Dad." She was crying. "I was afraid to tell you. I'm so sorry." I guess in a way she reminded me of my own mother, except for not being black, or at least the way I was raised up to expect a mother to act. It hurt to see her obvious anguish. You couldn't blame the lady for being unwilling to face the truth.

"We're extremely sorry for the mixup, sir." I apologized. I had to admit, it looked bad to have a civillian contractor in an ice-cream truck get fragged by the insurgency. Hopefully the press wouldn't get hold of the story. On the other hand, if it had worked they would have been all over the pictures of our food service operator handing out sno-cones to the children of Saddam Hussein's desert home town. There's really no justice in War.

What would it have been like to be Jerry Morrison, growing up in this old, poor Witchita neighborhood? This was probably exactly the sort of American neighborhood in which Good Humor trucks roamed musically through childhood and sixty-five cents meant the orange bar with the frozen vanilla core.

And what kind of enemy is it that would exploit the death of innocent kids whose only desire is for free ice-cream? Is this loss of innocence finally to be the cost of our freedom? The image of a child's fingers against the red sands, clutching blindly for a melting popsicle. Crank it up. That he may not have died in vain.

"I hear he was a really great kid," I said, my voice husky. It's true, whoever I'm talking to I guess in some way I'm always trying to fill their emptiness, that's part of it.