A Mortuary Affair in Iraq

A Mortuary Affair in Iraq
New York Times
By TERESA FAZIO
April 25, 2013

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.”
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