The Bridge

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. The man on the bridge. That cursed bridge. I’d put him out of my mind for years. Lately, I’ve been seeing his face again when I try to get to sleep. The image haunted my dreams for years. Now, he’s just a face I see sometimes when I close my eyes. 

He wasn’t the first or the last dead body I saw over there. Or was he? It all blurs now, just like the almost two decades since that stupid bridge. Some nights, when I close my eyes, I see his. They’re wide open, and so is his mouth. It’s as if he’s screaming. There’s a famous painting of a screaming man on a bridge from the late 1800s. It’s called “The Scream” by a Norwegian artist named Edvard Munch.  It was also in a commercial for the 1998 Pontiac Sunfire. You probably saw it there first. I did. His face always reminded me of that. 

I have dissected that night a million ways. The what-ifs that never did still rattle in my brain. We were stopped on a high bridge right outside of Bagdad. Or was it Tikrit? Maybe it was Ramadi or Fallujah.  Hell, Bagdad seems right.  I’ll go with that. It was my first mission as a part of first platoon and my first mission riding shotgun in an up-armored M915 tractor-trailer. I cradled my M249 Squad Automatic Machine Gun (aka the SAW) between my legs, barrel pointed to the floor. There was no way I could shoulder that weapon in such a tight space. So dumb!

It was right before or right after Christmas. The holiday season in a land far from home. This may lend to some of my disdain for holidays, but I digress. I’d been in-country since late August, running missions as a .50 Cal machine gunner on an old M998 Humvee. Someone at Big Army said they weren’t safe anymore. So, instead of giving us a better ride, they dissolved my Gun truck platoon.  Even though the vehicles weren’t safe, I felt protected and like a protector. Now, that sense of security was stripped away.   

I did find it suspicious that our blast protection was sandbags in the floor and hillbilly bolt-on scrap metal that stopped at the top of the door. Thankfully, the gun turret had a couple of pieces of steel to give me a false sense of security. When I was standing behind the gun, there was nothing but thin aluminum and fiberglass “protecting” me from my thighs to mid-torso. Hooah. Army strong… or something. That mission made me feel strong. Now, I felt like a cog in a machine that didn’t matter. 

So, there I am. I’m sitting in our stalled convoy waiting for someone to fix their truck or cinch down a shifted load of God knows what, and I see him. He’s just lying there. His white man dress was flapping in the wind. His limbs were walking stick straight, mouth agape. Right outside my window. Like trash on the side of the highway. He was just discarded waste on a bridge, somewhere outside Bagdad, or wherever. Doornail dead. 

I keyed the hand mic. “Hey, uh, does anyone see this… there’s uh… there’s a dead body ten meters from my vehicle… over,” I admit my voice was a little panicked and contained a few profane words I’ll spare you from. My radio discipline may have been lacking at the moment. It felt urgent. I was scared.  We were in a very vulnerable spot. It felt like an ambush waiting to happen. This felt like a trap. 

The new hotshot active-duty gun truck crew—my replacements—raced up to our position. They hopped out of their shiny new M1114 Humvee with state-of-the-art armor and weapons and moved toward the body. Their interpreter wasted no time and aggressively picked up the rigor-mortised body with zero care for improvised explosives. The terp just jerked that stiff corpse up and checked for wires haphazardly. He dropped the body back in the dust and gave us the all-clear. 

Damn. His face never changed, locked in an eternal scream. Did we—aka the good guys—kill him?  Did some terrorist just execute him like a dog and leave him as a message to others? I guess I’ll never know. I think that’s the part that bothers me. Not the brutality of it all, just the mystery of it. I often imagine the man. Neither friend nor foe. Enemy nor ally. He was just some dude who was born in the wrong place at the wrong time in the middle of a global war. I wonder what he did or didn’t do to leave him littering a busy highway bridge.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this foray into the mind of an overthinker. This errant note hasn’t resolved for me in all these years. This article neither has a happy nor profound ending. There isn’t a lesson here other than war creates so many damn ambiguous emotions. It’s just one of the many foggy things from a war-torn country I’ve yet to leave in that dirt. I guess writing this down gets it off my mind briefly. That tiny transference of imagery from me to you will likely allow me to think about it less. So, thank you…and uh… sorry.  

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on November 7, 2024.

Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Bethania, North Carolina. His work has appeared in Dead Reckoning Collective, The Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, and other outlets, and he directed Hammer Down, a documentary about his 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom with Alpha Battery 5-113th of the North Carolina Army National Guard. For The Havok Journal, he often writes essays and reflections about war memory, veteran life, the outdoors, and everyday experience. You can find his books, collected works, and social media at www.stanlakecreates.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.